How would you have predicted the 2020 election in 2019 if...

[Chips]

A time traveling genie came to you and told you that voter turnout was the highest since 1900 and that the winner received over 80 million votes without telling you the identity of what happened to make voter turnout so high, the Democratic nominee or whether Trump won re-election or not.

I would've assumed either Trump did something so heinous that it caused millions more people to turnout just to vote him out of office and that the Democrat won in a virtual landslide.



Or, The economy had greatly risen in 2020 and the Democratic nominee was highly unremarkable or controversial, causing voters to break for Trump in a virtual landslide of his own.

[Skill and Chance]

Eh... turnout is generally lower when everyone expects a landslide.  This would sound like a narrow Dem win even back then, but not as narrow in the EC as IRL.

[Pres Mike]

I would assume either Biden or Beto won the 413 map

[MATTROSE94]

I probably would have predicted either Donald Trump winning with the 350 map against Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders winning with the 413 Authoritarian NUT map against Donald Trump.

[Sir Mohamed]

Still close to the actual prediction:

[Agonized-Statism]

I would have guessed that things went the way of 2008: the economy went into recession and Trump started a very unpopular war with Iran in late 2019.


President Donald Trump (R-FL) / Vice President Mike Pence (R-IN)
Senator Bernie Sanders (D-VT) / Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) ✓

[Pres Mike]

I assumed a Democrat won 413 electoral votes.

Turnout was 34% in 2014. 50% in 2018

I assumed it went from 55% to 65-70

[Schiff for Senate]

I would've assumed either Trump did something so heinous that it caused millions more people to turnout just to vote him out of office and that the Democrat won in a virtual landslide.

AK would go Democratic before MO and IN for sure, and probably KS too (it voted to the left of MO and IN in real life in 2020 and is trending rapidly leftwards). MO, KS, IN and AK when compared to each other would be more appropriate for 2008 (when IN actually did go blue and MO came much, much closer than KS and AK did) than it would for 2020.