What does a Trump+3 map even look like in the electoral college?

[cherry mandarin]

Both crosstabs and 2022 results suggest a big part of the story is your option (1): collapse margins in Safe D states. At the moment the conventional wisdom seems to be that New York and the Pacific coast states will all trend significantly Republican, but that statewide victories will remain outside of Republicans' reach.

Agreed—it'll mostly be Option #1, with a great degree of help from #2 and #4 as a potential wild card (albeit quite difficult to foresee at this stage). The main battlegrounds have, on average, trended about 3 or 4 points to the left since 2020 if recent polling is to be believed, practically erasing the supposed R EC edge. On the other hand, a bunch of large, urban, and highly populated states (CA, NY, IL, TX, FL) have seen sizable rightward trends in each case. That'll make the EC very competitive, even in a scenario where Trump's winning the NPV by roughly a couple of points.

if Biden were to do one or two points better in New York and California, which is easily possible—even in a worst-case scenario.

WHAT?

We have posters here who are predicting Hochul-like margins for Biden in NY, and the CA margin getting more than halved (from 2020, mind you). How could Biden possibly improve in either of those states, especially in his worst-case scenario?

Texas has to be closer to 58-38 too.

I can definitely envision a world where Trump runs up the score in TX and eventually ends up carrying it by a double-digit margin, but 20 points is simply implausible. In your post, you listed a half-dozen safe blue bastions—and sure, a disproportionate chunk of Trump's NPV lead would be coming from those. You and Johnson are both forgetting, however, that the bulk of it will actually come from the (admittedly much smaller) R swings in the other forty-odd states. Let's say perhaps a quarter of those are actually slight D swings, while another quarter consists of states with negligible swings. That still leaves us with approximately twenty states where Trump will build on his 2020 performance. Put together, that yields a substantially greater return than any of CA, TX, or NY can do on their own.

[cherry mandarin]

Those five states combined for a raw-vote margin of +10,345,643. A 2024 Republican pickup of the popular vote, along with the presidency, will probably cut those margins down by at least 60 percent.

I don't think it's especially practical to expect a healthy majority of Trump's margin gain to come from just 5 states alone, unless you have reason to believe those particular areas will somehow produce monster R swings while other places remain the same or even shift slightly to the left.

[cherry mandarin]

I think the aim of the exercise was to somehow find a way for Trump to win the PV by 3, while still losing the EC anyway.

I think it's totally reasonable to expect the EC gap to favour Biden over Trump this time around, since many groups have shifted to make the latter's winning coalition less "vote-efficient". However, it still feels like a stretch (at best) to see how Trump can fail to make it to 270 if he's carrying the NPV by 3, as that would require the tipping-point to trend at least 6.8 points to the left in just four years.