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Well, he's right in the sense that there's close to a 50% chance of a swing in either direction (blunders, dirt, health issues, polling errors, etc). However,
by awb 6y ago
Well, he's right in the sense that there's close to a 50% chance of a swing in either direction (blunders, dirt, health issues, polling errors, etc).
However, when one candidate is up 8+% (even months out) against an incumbent with 4 years of net negative approval ratings, to call that a toss up is like saying the frontrunner is substantially more likely to blunder than the underdog.
As Silver points out however, a Trump win is just as likely as the largest Democratic landslide victory in modern history. The polls could move either way, but the only way they move enough for Trump to win is a larger than 2016 polling error in his favor in all 7 battleground states, which doesn't sound like a 50% chance at all.
- cameldrv 6y agoTo say Biden is up by 8 points is missing a lot of microstructure. In every state Trump needs except PA, he’s within about 2 points. In PA, the critical state, he’s down by about 4.5 points, but Biden’s lead has been diminishing rapidly in the past two weeks. These polls also rely on a turnout model. There’s no way to calibrate these models for a pandemic election where some people may be more scared to vote than others. I give Biden the edge but it’s nowhere near 90/10.
- rurban 6y agoI don't know where you got your numbers from. I got them from Tanenbaums site https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2020/Pres/Graphs/all.html https://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2020/Pres/Graphs/all.html and this shows that Trump would win all swing states and thus the election, if there was not the surprising swing in Texas from Rep to Dem lately, which broke Trump. You cannot really trust Tanenbaums summary as heavy Dem fanboy, which was wrong last time and is wrong this time, but the raw polling numbers are showing a clear picture. Early votes missed the Hunter Biden scandal, and Texas was champion in early votes.