Cognitive Dissonance
While it hasn’t been a wild week in the polls, it has been in politics. It is a clear example of the cognitive dissonance we are all living with, simultaneously winning the presidential election and losing our democratic norms. Biden has such a strong position 48 days out from election day that in pre-Trump days the news cycle would be dominated by speculation about cabinet positions in the new administration. Instead, the current occupant of the White House (I can’t bring myself to call him our president) is repeatedly saying the election is rigged and his allies are calling for civil unrest. Trump’s panic indicates they know they can’t win, even with the extreme voter suppression already underway. I don’t take much comfort in knowing they know more than half the country wants them out. My fear is what exactly Trump will be willing to do to keep from losing.
I am convinced that the only thing we can do right now is vote. And get our friends and neighbors to vote. We have to win by an overwhelming margin to have a chance to begin to mend the country.
STABLE RACE
As of this evening, FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average has Biden up by 6.9 pts, and he hasn’t been below that mark since the first week of June. RealClearPolitics national average history is almost identical. If Biden wins by ~ 7 pts nationally, more than twice Clinton’s margin, it will be a decisive and clear victory. Yeah, Florida is going to exhaust us all, but Biden can win without Florida. In fact, he could lose all the toss up states plus Florida, Arizona, and North Carolina and still win. Map below.
UNSTABLE TRUMP
The unstable man in the White House is calling the election fraudulent seven weeks before election day and repeatedly saying the only way he loses is if the election is rigged. Amplifying the message is White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany telling Fox News that if the results are not known on election night it means the election is rigged. And Marvel Comic villain Roger Stone taking it further and calling for federal marshals to interfere with Cook County’s election and arrest reporters and high profile democrats. Truly unimaginably dangerous babble and if it were happening in another country, we’d shake our heads in sympathy and concern.
GOOD NEWS
Team Trump is still broke and the schadenfreude in the Yates house is high! Below is a breakout of TV buys from both campaigns and you can see where the money runs out. In other good news, people are already voting. Mail in ballots are starting to be returned to county election offices, mostly in North Carolina as of tonight. The U.S. Elections Project has set up a great site tracking mail-in ballots requested and returned. As of tonight 58,851 ballots have been returned - 56.0% are from registered Democrats and 14.9% are from registered Republicans, with the rest coming from
Independents or states that don’t require party registration. Additionally, the site tracks ballot requests by party in states with party registration and an astounding 7,770,902 more ballots have been request by Democrats than Republicans. No wonder the Republicans want to destroy the mail system. The fact that the Post Master General, DeJoy, owns millions in stock in USPS competitors, is just proof he’s truly a member of Trump’s band of grifters.
I mentioned Biden’s strength in the recent polls and FiveThirtyEight has put out a nifty graph showing how he’s solidified his position in a lot of swing states. Florida is the exception. If you want to understand how Nate Silver’s team calculates the odds of a candidate winning a state, check it out here.
Florida, oh Florida. It was the state with the most polling drama this week. Apparently Florida’s Hispanic/Latinx population is getting slammed with crazytown ads from the right, and Biden’s number went wonky in a few recent polls. In one from Florida Atlantic University Trump was leading Biden by 6 pts with this demographic. The Biden campaign has taken notice and responded by hiring local specialist, buying targeted media, and having the VP himself campaign on the ground. Again, Biden can lose Florida and still win, but they are likely to have their votes counted and reported on Election Day and a win there could decrease the likelihood of chaos.
MAPS
The map below tracks the FiveThirtyEight state averages as of this morning: < 2% in brown, 2% - 4.9% in pink or light blue, 5% - 9.9% in red or blue, and > 10% in dark red or dark blue. The map remains horrific for the Trump gang.
And another map that looks like the first but is based on a different model. This one comes from the Niskanen Center and their negative partisanship construct pioneered by the delightful Rachel Bitecofer. The basic premise is that the U.S. is so divided that negative partisanship is a primary driver of voter turnout. Bitecofer gained recognition for her accurate prediction of the number of seats Democrats would take in 2018.
TOOLS
FiveThirtyEight’s election poll averages. The best source for daily poll updates, broken out by national and state.
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/national/
The Financial Times presidential election tool. I really like the layout and they pull from Real Clear Politics poll averages, which lean more republican, helping me to avoid confirmation bias.
https://ig.ft.com/us-election-2020/
Real Clear Politics includes pollsters that FiveThirty Eight considers too republican partisan and excludes from its model, but still worth looking at.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2020/president/us/general_election_trump_vs_biden-6247.html
270 to Win has an easy interface to build maps and it is where I plug in information I pull from the other sites.
https://www.270towin.com/