11/3/20 (Predawn Hours): The blogger can’t sleep. Worried. Trump might be reelected. Awful.
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Many paths for Joe Biden.
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As mentioned, Sunday, we said there was no way that Trump could win the popular vote. And don’t be an idiot. He didn’t win it four years ago.
The problem – if you fear Trump as a threat to democracy, as I do, as his former Secretary of Defense does, and if you think he’s a “fucking moron” as his former Secretary of State once said – the problem is in the Electoral College. There Donald could dance a narrow path to victory.
I even went so far in the midnight hours as to check predictions for battleground states in 2016, and compare them with predictions from final polls now.
As the sun rose on Election Day, polls showed Trump doing a little worse, compared to the last election, in 48 of 50 states. That includes all the battleground states he has to win if he hopes to have four more years to come up with the greatest healthcare plan anyone has never seen.
Feel free to peruse the numbers below. In the first column we have the final polling averages for 2016, showing how much of a lead each candidate supposedly held. The second number reflects the actual margin of victory. The next column shows polling averages at RCP this morning.
The final state averages four years ago were wrong in only four of fourteen battleground states.
2016 polling average/actual result 2020 polling average
Florida Trump +0.2/+1.2 Biden +0.9
Georgia Trump +4.8/+5.1 Trump +1.0
Arizona Trump +4.0/+3.5 Biden +0.9
New Hampshire Clinton +0.6/+0.3 Biden +9.6
Virginia Clinton +5.0/+5.4 Biden +11.5
Maine 1 Clinton +4.5/+2.9 Biden +20.5**
Colorado Clinton +2.9/+4.9 Biden +9.5
North Carolina Trump +1.0/+3/7 Trump +0.2
Michigan Clinton +3.4/Trump +0.3 Biden +4.2
Pennsylvania Clinton +1.9/Trump +0.7 Biden +1.2
New Mexico Clinton +5.0/+8.3 Biden +13.0
Nevada Trump +0.8/Clinton +2.4 Biden +2.2
Ohio Trump +3.5/+8.1 Trump +1.4
Iowa Trump +3.0/+9.5 Trump +1.4
Maine 2 Trump +0.5/+10.4 Biden +2.8**
Wisconsin Clinton +6.5/Trump +0/7 Biden +6.7
Minnesota N/A Biden +4.3
Nebraska 2 N/A Biden +3.0
Texas N/A Trump +1.2
If you prefer Joe Biden to the oaf in the Oval Office, take heart. Several states and districts which were “battlegrounds” in 2016 appear out of reach for Trump now. Virginia, Colorado, New Hampshire, and Maine 1 are examples.
Also take heart knowing that almost a hundred million Americans have already cast ballots. Until a week ago, Biden had an eight-point lead, nationally, in an average of all polls. This morning that lead had shrunk to 6.7 points, but with Democrats also holding a 6.8 point lead in the generic ballot (which party do voters hope will control the next Congress). In other words, there appears to be no evidence that a “great red wave” is coming, as the president predicts.
Lightning could turn American democracy into charred ruins.
Nevertheless, if you love Trump as much as you love shouting randomly, “Lock him up!” or “Lock her up!” or “Lock Mr. Potato Head up!” you have hope. Four years ago, pollsters were off by wide margins in Ohio, Iowa, Wisconsin, and Maine 2. It could be lightning will strike twice.
The good news – if you are hoping the country can find a vaccine against Donald Trump – would be current battleground numbers. Biden is leading in 10 of the 14 states. He’s leading in Maine 1, Maine 2, and Nebraska 2, and he’s behind no more than 1.4 points in any of the five states where Trump is supposed to be ahead.
Looking at numbers for 2020, I had to use a different website, FiveThirtyEight, to get a breakdown on numbers for Maine 1 and Maine 2. Maine, as a whole, is expected to go for Biden by 13 points. Under the split electoral vote system, that will give Biden two electoral votes for the state’s senators, and one for each district he wins. In Nebraska, Biden is expected to lose by 9.7 points.
At best, then, he can grab one electoral vote in Nebraska.
The “good news” if you are a MAGA-hat-wearing fan of the Orange God, is that you can squint at the numbers and see how narrow Biden’s lead is in many battleground states. You can pray that Mr. Trump can pull another electoral rabbit out of the ballot box.
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One optimistic view - UVA prediction: Biden wins. |
Four years ago, Trump piled up 304 electoral votes, beating Mrs. Clinton by 77. First, we adjust for several faithless electoral voters and make the final count 306 for Trump, 232 for Clinton, based on states they carried.
Then we look at the final polls and substitute Biden now for Clinton then. If the 2020 polls are correct:
Wisconsin goes blue.
Trump 296 Biden 242
Michigan goes blue.
Trump 280 Biden 258
Nebraska 2 goes blue.
Trump 279 Biden 259
Pennsylvania goes blue.
Trump 259 Biden 279
BIDEN WINS: GOODBYE PRESIDENT TWITTER THUMBS!
If Florida, Arizona, and Maine 2 all go blue,
Trump 218 Biden 320
There are all kinds of possibilities, based on final polling averages, that allow for a Biden victory.
There’s even a nail-biter scenario, where Joe loses Pennsylvania and still wins. If he holds all the states Clinton won four years ago, takes back Michigan and Wisconsin, and wins Arizona and either Maine 2 or Nebraska 2:
Trump 268 Biden 270
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The nightmare scenario.
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There are many pathways, according to final polls, that lead to Trump’s demise. There are some that end in ignominious rout.
For example: Texas goes blue, and the Republican Party implodes, like the Know Nothings in 1856.
Yet, there is (for me, and a majority of Americans) one nightmare scenario. That is, the polls are off just enough for Trump to hang on, to limp into a second term, despite his bone spurs.
In this scenario, he easily wins most of the states he won four years ago. In Wyoming and West Virginia, he’s likely to pile up at least twenty point leads.
Suppose:
He staves off a loss in Florida, an outcome that is entirely plausible.
He holds off a late Biden surge in Georgia.
The polls are wrong in Arizona. He squeezes out a win there and in North Carolina.
Texas stays red.
Pennsylvania then becomes the key. If he hangs on and wins the Keystone State:
TRUMP WINS A SECOND TERM!
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HOW LIKELY is this outcome, or some similar permutation? I keep searching for some verifiable truth.
Here’s the situation this morning, according to the website 270toWin.
Biden is expected to capture at least 290 electoral votes, with 85 more in five states and Maine 2, too close to call.
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270toWin has Biden winning 290 electoral votes. (Tan states too close to call.) |
In parenthesis (see list below), I have provided the difference, according to 270toWin, between Trump’s expected percentage of the vote this time around, compared to his actual percentage in 2016).
Here, too, I can see reason to worry.
“There’s two people I think Putin pays.”
Trump’s percentages aren’t expected to differ greatly; and that means he could win once again. But he is expected to increase his percentage of the popular vote in only one state that he carried in 2016. That would be Utah. That’s mainly because an independent, Evan McMullen, captured 21% of the vote after bolting the Republican Party.
McMullen ran, as a principled conservative, because in the summer of 2016, he sat through a meeting of top Republicans in the U.S. House of Representatives. During that gathering, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy famously said, “There’s two people I think Putin pays. [Rep. Dana] Rohrabacher and Trump.”
McMullen was not amused.
Eventually, he released a tape of the meeting. McCarthy, not knowing a tape existed, first denied having said what he said.
Once the tape was out, he said his comments – which he said he never made – were meant in jest.
(Did I mention I think Trump is a threat to democracy?)
In all other cases, the number after each state shows the decline in Trump’s support in the last four years. According to 270toWin (I used yesterday’s numbers; and I’m too lazy to check again), Biden leads in the states colored blue and the president has only narrow leads in the states colored red.
The expected change in Trump’s vote totals this time around:
Utah (+6)
Idaho (no change)
Louisiana (–1), Mississippi (–1), Arkansas (–1)
Alaska (–2), Pennsylvania (–2), Arizona (–2), Georgia (–2)
Tennessee (–3), Texas (–3), Ohio (–3), and Iowa (–3), Michigan (–3), North Carolina (–3)
Alabama (–4), Kansas (–4), North Dakota (–4), Florida (–4), Wisconsin (–4),
Missouri (–5), Kentucky (–5), South Carolina (–5)
Montana (–6), Wyoming (–6), Nebraska (–6), Oklahoma (–6), Indiana (–6)
Maine 2 (–8)
South Dakota (–9)
West Virginia (–12).
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I CAN’T FIND a tally for Nebraska 2 from 2016, but I did find some interesting vote counts by counties.
Every four years, some fool posts a map of the U.S. with all the counties that voted Republican in red, and all the counties that voted Democratic in blue. What you see is a sea of red and islands of blue.
If we elected presidents based on number of cows, most cornfields, or flattest land, that map would prove some useful point.
In Nebraska, in 2016, McPherson County cast a total of 257 votes for Donald J. Trump, the least of any county in the state. Yet McPherson was still “Trump Country.” There just aren’t that many people. Hillary Clinton and Gary Johnson tied for second, with fourteen votes each.
Jill Stein, of the Green Party, got one.
As an avid bicycle rider, I realized when checking Nebraska vote totals from four years ago, that I could pedal across the state, from Burt County on the Missouri River to Banner County, on the border with Wyoming, and never pass through an area that voted blue or even had many voters.
According to an estimate from 2014, Banner County has a population of 764 souls, spread across 746 square miles. By comparison, Douglas County, less than half McPherson’s size, and a county that would not be on my hypothetical route, voted for Hillary Clinton, giving her 113,798 votes.
If I did do that ride, I might stop and say hello to the folks in Harrisburg, the Banner County Seat (pop. 100), because when I’ve ridden across the USA before, I love to talk to locals about life where they live.
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BICYCLING ASIDE, I can imagine a second Trump term. We could see another 50,000 tweets. It would mean four more years of severe damage to the environment – and increasing danger to the free press. We would see all sorts of creative abuse of the U.S. Constitution. Trump would continue as he has. Only he’d be worse. He would assault the dignity of any opponents, appeal to the racist underbelly in society, and push his proto-fascist, kleptocratic view of how he thinks government should be run.
And don’t blame me if wins.
I tried to warn you.
Do I think Biden is going to win? I do. I predict he will; but I’m still more than a little alarmed.
I do a final check of the FiveThirtyEight polls. In 2012, Nate Silver, who runs that site, correctly predicted all 50 states.
(In 2016, he missed badly, on the same states all the other prognosticators and pundits missed.)
Silver weights polls based on several factors which RCP ignores. His numbers run a little better in Biden’s favor. He has Biden +2.5 in Florida. Biden is +4.7 in Pennsylvania, +7.9 in Michigan, and +8.4 in Wisconsin.
He gives Biden a +1.8 lead in North Carolina, as well.
His most eye-popping numbers may come from Georgia, where he has Biden +1.2; and Texas, where he shows Trump with a similar +1.1 lead. If Texas goes blue, Sen. Ted Cruz is going to wish he had spent the last four years calling Trump a “sniveling coward,” which in 2016, he did.
Otherwise, Silver’s figures vary little, compared to RCP or 270toWin, in any battleground states.
He does have Biden at +8.4 in the national vote.
BIDEN SHOULD WIN.
Trump could.
ADDENDUM: SENATE RACES
ELECTION DAY: No knowing for sure how Americans will vote. I would argue, having looked at as many polls as I can that the Republicans are going to see at least these three U.S. senators sent home for good:
Sen. Cory Gardner (Colorado)
In a state that used to be purple, until climate change wreaked havoc and the forests started to burn, Gardner had a hill to climb from the start. The challenger, John Hickenlooper, is at +8.5 in this race.
Sen. Martha McSally (Arizona)
Mark Kelly, the challenger has a steady lead in all the polls, +5.7 points going into Election Day.
This may also be a harbinger that Arizona is, in fact, going to go blue for Biden, which would get him a long way closer to the White House.
Sen. Susan Collins (Maine)
Maine has trended strongly blue this year. Collins’ weak attempts to stand up to Trump haven’t helped. She’s likely to do better than the president in her state but polls indicate she’s going to lose. If we average out eight taken in September and October, Sara Gideon, the Democratic challenger, has an average lead of +5.5 points.
The fourth pick-up necessary could be Cal Cunningham sending Sen. Thom Tillis to the showers in North Carolina. Cunningham seems to be holding on to a 2-3 point lead in all recent polling (+2.6 on average). That lead comes despite the fact Cunningham was caught text messaging his mistress during the campaign.
Another good sign? The Democratic incumbent in Michigan, Sen. Gary Peters, seems set to hold off a solid Republican challenger. In the final RCP polling average, he has a +5.4 lead. If that mirrors the Biden-Trump breakdown in the presidential vote, we should take Michigan back.
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THAT’S THE GOOD NEWS; but we’re going to lose Sen. Doug Jones in Alabama, where former Auburn football coach Tommy Tuberville has an 11.5 point lead. We’re still okay, if we have a net gain of only three, and Biden wins, because the vice president breaks tie votes in the U.S. Senate, and with 48 Democrats and a pair of independents, Milksop Mitch and his 49 Cowardly Dwarfs would find themselves unable to block everything a President Biden would try to do.
Such as: Make Puerto Rico a state!
There’s plenty of potential for Democrats elsewhere. Sen. Joni Ernst (Iowa) may hold on in the end.
The final RCP average shows here with a slim +1.4 lead.
Two races in Georgia hold promise for Team Blue. Sen. David Perdue is in a battle to hold off his challenger, Jon Ossoff, in a race that is extremely close. RCP has the Democrat up +0.7.
The second race involves two serious Republicans and one Democrat, Rev. Raphael Warnock. If no candidate gains 50% or more of the vote, a second election, with the top two candidates will be held in January. At best, the Republicans know one of their two champions will be sent packing tonight. They just have to hope Democrats don’t pile into the voting booths, turn Georgia blue, and put Warnock over the 50 percent threshold he needs.
Three other Republicans, Sen. Steve Daines (Montana), Sen. Lindsey Graham (South Carolina), and Roger Marshall, running for a Kansas seat left open by a retirement, are also facing serious challenges. But this blogger wouldn’t want to bet $1,000 dollars on any of the three losing today.
In an average of five polls since September, Sen Graham has a +2.0 lead. Sen. Daines stands at +2.4.
At RCP, they don’t even show polls in the Kansas race. Kansas rarely votes for anyone on the ballot with a “D” after his or her name. In this election, however, Barbara Bollier, the Democrat is a former Republican. Still, the website FiveThirtyEight gives Marshall a 74% chance to win.
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A CHECK of the website FiveThirtyEight, which lists even more polls, presents a slightly better picture for the Republican senate candidate in Kansas and a closer race in Montana, with the Democratic challenger in striking distance. Polling in all other races conforms with polling done by RealClear Politics.
So: we have:
o 4 Republican senators likely to be unseated.
o 1 Republican incumbent trailing in the polls.
o 4 Republican incumbents with slim leads.
o 1 Democratic senator doomed.
o 1 Democratic incumbent with a lead, but not an insurmountable one.
Again, Democrats need a net gain of three seats, if Biden wins office, in order to take Senate control.
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