I never did respond to this when you first made the point:
The Trump factor is budgeted in by using actual votes cast for Trump in the analysis versus what would have been mid-February polling figures at the time the OP was written.
Going by your post yesterday, I assume you don’t find reasonable Assumptions #3, #5, and #6 from the OP – that, nationally and in several battleground states, Trump support (as a percentage of votes cast) will diminish slightly compared to 2020 while Biden’s support will remain stable.
EDIT: Actually, I did reply to your post #3 with my post #5 above. Yikes! They say the memory is the second thing to go …
In revisiting the OP from time to time, something I wonder about is that – being that Trump is coming from behind regarding his 2020 vote percentages – where is his increase in support sufficient to overcome Biden supposed to be coming from?
One common answer in the media over the past two months or so is from traditionally Democratic-voting groups such as African-American and Latin-American voters. @Love_Rhombus addressed this directly through a recent post in another P&E thread.
Yes, the link therein is an MSNBC opinion piece. But it’s a professional, well-cited opinion piece – no mere hack job. And IMHO the points made are more intuitively sensible than the media narrative it’s countering:
A new report from the Pew Research Center pokes a hole in the oft-repeated claim that a historic racial realignment is occurring within American politics, with nonwhite voters learning to love the GOP and Donald Trump.
In recent years — days, even — there’s been a seemingly endless deluge of news stories hyping up this purported realignment as fact. Trump and his allies have been touting similar claims as well (which seems like all the more reason to question them).
But you needn’t just take my word for it. Pew’s analysis of registered voters — based on hundreds of thousands of interviews conducted from 1994 through last summer — showed that while Democrats may have lost some support among nonwhite voters, any seismic shift in party identification is largely a figment of the media’s imagination.
On April 27, 2020, the RealClearPolitics polling average had Biden ahead of Trump by 6.3 percent.
On April 27, 2024, the RealClearPolitics polling average has Trump ahead of Biden by 0.3 percent.
So Biden is running 6.6 percent behind where he was four years ago.
This is better for Biden than it was for most of last year, but if the GOP advantages in the electoral college, and in polling vs. election day results, are similar to those in 2016 and 2020, Joe is still on track to losing. Maybe skew factors will be better for the Democrats this time, but they could as easily be worse.
Many smart people think Biden will win, and I hope they are correct.
Two days ago, Emmanuel Macron, a smart person who presumably has smart experts on the U.S.A. advising him, gave a two hour “Europe can die” speech in which he proposed doubling the EU budget. President Macron said that:
Note what comes first in the response triad – power.
Sounds to me like what smart European leaders would be doing if they agreed with me that the anti-NATO candidate for POTUS is consistently ahead less than five months before voting begins (early voting starts in three states on September 20).
Interesting. It makes sense that they would be preparing for the worst, as should we all. My educated guess is that, if the election were held today, Trump would have about a 60% chance of winning; but my November forecast now, given likely trends and events in coming months, is that Biden has about a 60% chance of winning.
Macron and others – ALL of us – should and would prepare for the worst as long as Trump’s chances stay above around 20%. 1 out of 5 is big, and 1 out of 4 is HUGE, as we all earned the hard way in 2016.
Even if Biden’s chances of winning were 60%, nobody should feel good about that in the least.
That’s like someone having a ten-chamber revolver, putting 4 bullets into it, spinning the cylinder around a few times and then pointing the gun at you and pulling the trigger…Nope.
In fact, Hillary had 70-90% odds of winning eight years ago, and we know how that turned out.
Fivethirtyeight.com created a playground in which they not only showed what would be the results for a number of ifs: low turnout, older voters shifting left. etc., but even better, it allows you to see to results of shifting five demographics - age, education, sex, income, and race - as much as you please.
Here’s what I am seeing in the battlegrounds - MI, PA, WI are our best states right now, and in the 538 averages they are close and competitive. There are polls in each of these three states showing us ahead in recent weeks. Winning these three gets us to 269 Electoral College votes. As I wrote on Tuesday I am very optimistic that the extremism of the GOP in AZ and NC is giving us real opportunities in both states to win and make serious down-ballot gains. Nevada is always close, and we have work to do in Georgia. The campaign continues to monitor what’s happening in Florida, as Rs there will soon have to defend a newly implemented 6 week abortion ban, something that is currently polling in the lows 20s - a level of unpopularity on something that matters that is not often seen in politics.
Everything I read points to a scenario within the same boring ranges.
The extreme worst case is that yutes and disenchanted minorities stay home, Trump flips four battleground states and sneaks in while narrowly losing the popular vote.
The positive end is that fatigue, familiarity and demographic attrition - which my esteemed opponents here on this issue have failed to dissuade me - destroys Trump’s chances and results in a wave of women voters giving Biden a 10 million vote majority, holding all of the battleground states and flipping North Carolina in the process.
Yes, not very creative and I hate that we have a system that places so much emphasis on “battleground states.”