538 model & poll tracker thread

[Kuumo]

Hell, imagine if that's Biden's map - Michigan + Georgia

So long Rust Belt, hello Sun Belt!

It would even work without GA or MI if he wins NC, although he'd have zero room for error with faithless electors.

That would be horrible for the senate unless trends aren't real for Tina Smith, Gary Peters, and Jeanne Shaheen. I would think that the electors would stick with Biden because if one of them voted for someone else, they would receive numerous death threats. Imagine if this happened:

The final election results look like this.

President
Biden/Harris: 270 EV
Trump/Pence: 268 EV

Senate
Democrats: 50 (+3)
Republicans: 50 (-3)
(Republicans win GA-special)


And then when the electoral college votes, we get this:
Biden/Harris: 269 EV
Trump/Pence: 268 EV
Other/Other: 1 EV

The House delegations elect Trump president and the Senate deadlocks 50-50. Pence tries to cast a tie-breaking vote, which is challenged by Democrats in the courts. When it reaches the Supreme Court, the ruling is in favor of Pence, who is then re-elected vice president by the Senate and his own tie-breaking vote. Mitch McConnell is then re-elected Majority Leader by the Senate.

One crazy Biden-state elector changes the outcome of the election from a Democratic trifecta to four more years of Trump/Pence and at least two more years of Majority Leader McConnell.

[Kuumo]

If we keep getting similar polls for the next two months, Trump will get up to a 50% chance of winning on election day, and Nate Silver won't have to worry about getting the election wrong regardless of who wins.

[Kuumo]

This could be the weirdest I've come across yet:

Biden/Harris 419 EV
Trump/Pence 119 EV

Titanium R Oregon strikes again!

[Kuumo]

I don't agree with his assessment. We've had 58 Presidential elections which is nowhere near enough to know how weird things could get if you could run this election 40,000 different ways. Heck just look at 2016 where a single sate Utah is about 20% less Republican than it should be given how the other states went.

UT is the most cherrypicked example to underline this point. Third party candidates were uniquely strong in 2016 in comparison to other election cycles and that an independent conservative from UT whose whole campaign was basically about winning UT would perform quite well there should be factored in, even with no polling (and far as I remember, it was actually?). Such circumstances are simply non-existent to that degree this year.

Or what would be a logical explanation of OR going red with SD going blue, apart from that state correlations are way to low?

State correlations are a big reason why Trump won in 2016. The Presidential election in each state doesn’t happen in a vacuum. I remember an article on FiveThirtyEight about two months before the 2016 election that said Hillary would have around a 97% chance of winning the election with zero correlation between states, but that her chances were more like 75% at the time due to correlation between potential polling errors in demographically similar states. Trump overperformed his polling average in most Midwestern states because demographically similar states tend to have similar results. Utah had a strange result compared to other states because no other states come close to its majority Mormon electorate. The new model would do well to heed FiveThirtyEight’s advice from four years ago.