No, it hasn’t. That’s good. It’s mainly thanks to recent upticks in Georgia and Iowa (also happen to be important senate races, and where Biden is visiting over the next couple of days). Unfortunately, he’s down a bit in North Carolina (and Florida), and merely holding steady in Arizona — otherwise, I’m pretty sure the overall model would have hit 90% by now.
Stop the presses! What I just wrote is true, but the main reason for the rise to 89% is a +17, high-quality poll in Wisconsin
Wow. This is a pretty crazy poll in the opposite direction of the Trafalgar/IA ones. I get that one would like to see variation in the polls (that shows they aren’t just copying each other) but I’m struggling to remember a state-level race with a polls that say EVEN and +17. That’s just a huge gap.
Some wonky internal numbers: “Biden leads by 61-37 percent among likely voters age 65 and older in Wisconsin –a group Trump won by 1 point in 2016.” and “Among Michigan likely voters who report having voted in 2016, 47 percent say they supported Trump, 47 percent Clinton. In Wisconsin, the division was very similar in September, 45-47percent; now, 50 percent say they supported Clinton, 43 percent Trump. Disillusion with Trump may have motivated some to shift their 2016 recall; this has occurred mostly in the Chiwaukee suburbs, where, as noted, 2020 vote preferences also have moved toward Biden. Regardless, adjusting the sample to reflect the actual 2016 outcome still leaves Biden with a double-digit lead.”
Clearly they happened to grab a pretty anti-Trump sample this time, but if their sample says they were 50-42 Clinton in 2016 (when the actual vote was basically tied) you can probably knock a good 7 or 8 points off the margin. And if Biden is really winning older voters by >20 points Trump can kiss FL goodbye.
That said, +7 or so sounds about right for WI right now, and maybe the same in MI. If those hold, there open up some paths where PA can be lost and Biden can still win.
I think the final Marquette U Law poll is expected soon for WI (in fact, that is what I guessed the poll was that JKellyMap referenced – but it is the ABC news/Wash Post poll)
Brian
I don’t see why you’re so confident that voting in person on election day has a far lower chance of being suppressed or disenfranchised than mail-in voting. While it’s certainly true that there are a lot of shenanigans going on with mail-in voting, there’s also significant efforts to disrupt in-person voting. Aside from the usual risks of things like all-day lines (which can easily cost a poor person a job or two), in some places there are going to be armed citizens doing pro-Trump intimidation as well as police (as already happened in Miami), and I would not be surprised to see games played with closing precincts inappropriately. The problem with ‘voting day’ voting is that if you decide that increasingly agitated armed groups are too dangerous, at that point you don’t have a ‘mail in’ option, you either go through it or you don’t vote.
I actually found absentee easier. The paperwork was minimal, and being able to go online and look up information while voting made it easier to do the non-partisan races that I’m not really familiar with.
The Wisconsin poll is such a weird one that analyzing it is the 538 lead column. They point out:
- It’s a highest-possible rated pollster,
- Bizarre though it is, polls in adjacent states have shown very Biden-happy news lately, especially i Iowa and Michigan, and
- COVID-19 is out of control in those places, which is bad for Trump.
I mean, I cannot see how Trump wins while losing WI, IA and MI, especially when you consider that spills over into places like PA. Trump would have no other room for error - he’d have to win PA, AZ, NC, and FL.
Lol. I’m glad I wasn’t the only one with a “what the hell?” reaction.
I think it does emphasize an important point that maybe isn’t getting enough emphasis. In 2016 the poll averages were off in Clinton’s favor (i.e. Trump over-performed the averages in most battleground states). But there is no particular reason to assume they won’t be off in the other direction this year. It’s entirely possible that the Trump-leaning polls are the wrong ones and the Biden +17 ones are the right ones (well, probably not that, but in that direction).
Top five states in rolling average of cases per day per million.
| Rank | State | Cases | WoW |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | North Dakota | 1024.29 | +0.79% |
| 2 | South Dakota | 1012.98 | +22.57% |
| 3 | Montana | 702.14 | +17.20% |
| 4 | Wisconsin | 682.80 | +20.94% |
| 5 | Wyoming | 562.78 | +45.97% |
Marquette U Law Poll is out, +5/+4 for Wisconsin, which is hard to reconcile with the ABC News/Wash Post +17, as both are quality polls.
Brian
Grifters hate competition.
Rats.
ABC/WaPo has an A+ rating on 538, while Marquette has an A/B rating. A/B is fine, but it’s not an A+. More significantly, fivethirtyeight doesn’t see the ABC/WAPO poll results as misleading.
I’m not getting my hopes up, but I’m not inclined to dismiss the ABC/WaPo poll simply because another, lower-rated poll says otherwise.
Save your worries for Pennsylvania – Trump is twice as likely (14% vs 7%) to win there vs. WI according to 538.
It’s not hard to reconcile at all. One of them is an outlier. The +/-3% typical margin is usually a 95% confidence interval. You should expect 5% of polls conducted fairly to be way off base.
States to watch in the early part of the evening:
Florida - polls close at 8pm eastern. Officials are allowed to process early-arriving mail ballots starting weeks before the election. So results should be coming in fairly fast for these early ballots. 538 has Florida at 62% probability of Biden win.
North Carolina - Early votes and mail votes will be reported first, starting at 7:30 eastern. (these are projected to favor Biden). In person votes will be reported later (these are projected to favor Trump) 538 Has North Carolina at 64% probability of Biden win.
If Biden wins these two early states, I really don’t see any path for Trump to win over 270 EV’s
sidebar question: is the US still on daylight savings time? Are those times EST or EDT?
We are now, but we won’t be by Tuesday. We go off DST early on Sunday morning.
Thanks. I’m on CST year-round, and I knew the change was coming up.
Since 2007 (when Congress changed the law), the U.S. ends DST on the first Sunday in November – it used to end on the final Sunday in October.
If they’re using the public records of which primaries I voted in to determine the party affiliation of my Michigan ballot that I just verified was received, they’re going to think I’m a Republican. Hell, I’m about 50% sure that’s the reason I get a ton of Republican literature and basically no Democrat literature. The other 50% chance is that I once spent about 15 minutes on the phone wasting the time of someone from the NRA when I was lying in bed while the power was out. I would normally ascribe a lower percentage chance to this but I seem to be targeted with second amendment argument ads. Of course, it could be both.
To be clear, I’ve never voted for a Republican in a general election (to my knowledge), and never plan on it unless they seriously change their ways or someone like Kwame Kilpatrick somehow gets nominated for a state-wide elected position. I vote in their primaries to help out the few sane Republicans left, like the MI lieutenant governor that created a very specific program for people with specific problems that likely helped me, who was running against a Trumpist 2 years ago in the gubernatorial primary. I would have still voted for Whitmer in the general even if he ended up winning the primary (which he didn’t).