It's On
When I was a teenager, my mom asked her then mother-in-law if she’d survive my relentless antics. Margaret Ann replied, “Oh you’ll survive. You won’t look like much, but you’ll survive.” I’ve thought about this exchange a lot this last week. We’ll survive but what will we look like on January 20th, 2021?
If we win the presidency and the senate and keep the house, which we should, it’ll be time to work like hell to make systemic changes. I’m not ready to talk about the alternative.
START OF THE SEASON
The election is finally upon us. Both in-person early voting and/or mail-in ballot returns have started in states across the country. In person turnout is historic in Virginia, as are the mail-in ballot returns. The last day of the election, otherwise known as election day, is less than 6 weeks away, though it may still take days after to count all the ballots.
To borrow a phrase from Dan Pfeiffer, Trump is a losing loser who is losing and he and the people close to him will likely be prosecuted as soon as he is out of office. The intolerable shame of losing, combined with likely prosecution and his fear of whoever it is he owes $300+ million makes him desperate. Which is really scary.
POLLS
A little good news, the polls are still very good for Biden and very bad for Trump, just like they have been since June. So good that according to RealClearPolitics, Biden is leading in all of the designated swing states. The graph below shows the RCP summary of the national polling average, swing states polling averages, and the difference between the 2016 polls and the 2020 polls.
Wow! Originally I had a whole section on Georgia, Iowa, Ohio, and Texas not being identified as swing states. I thought it was weird and argued they should be included in the set. As I was editing, I went to check a number on RCP and they updated the list to include them. What do they look like?
Nate Silver from FiveThirtyEight also tweeted out a good illustration of just how big a battlefield Trump is trying to defend.
WHAT NOW?
Vote. Write postcards asking other people to vote. Make calls. Volunteer as a poll worker. Give money if you can. Giving money directly to candidates and organizations fighting in the courts to protect the vote right now is particularly helpful. Below is the link to one of the legal organizations and three senate candidates that are doing much better than conventional wisdom thought they would.
Democracy Docket
MJ Hegar - Texas
Jaime Harrison - S. Carolina
Mike Epsy - Mississippi
MAPS
The map below tracks the FiveThirtyEight state averages as of this afternoon: < 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 Trump.
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/