Given Biden is up 8 nationally, the only way you can come up w/ a prediction for the election that doesn’t have him favored ~80%+ of the time is to ignore polls or to analyze them incorrectly. Maybe they’ll be wrong, but they’ve been pretty accurate in the past & are a good bet.
Our forecast is maybe even a bit NICE to Trump right now, given that the model thinks Biden will lose ground b/t now and Nov and constrains the possible outcomes to a reasonable range for the polarized era. If we just use polls, his win % could be 90%+.
projects.economist.com/us-2020-foreca…
projects.economist.com/us-2020-foreca…
Polls in 2016 showed that a modest polling error in Trump’s favor could result in his winning the electoral college. That’s what happened! Now, polls show that you’d need a polling error bigger than those in 80-90% of past elections!
Open up an R window and type “pnorm(0.03,0.08,0.05,lower.tail=TRUE)” and you’ll have a simple prediction for how likely Biden is to beat the margin in the national vote he needs to win in the electoral college, conditional on past polling errors at ED+150. thecrosstab.com/2017/01/03/his…
I am getting very tired of this objection. We have no empirical reason to believe that massive nationwide voter suppression (really only a concern in a few marginal states, if that) means that all the polls and models are wrong. No data to back that up.
(Just like we have no evidence that hacking, Putin, etc etc is what caused polls to miss in 2016—because that’s not what happened!)
Biden is polling ahead of where Clinton was in our forecast at this point in 2016 in literally every swing state
The point of our forecast is NOT to argue that polls are going to be right and x + y are going to happen, but to tell you what happens if polls are WRONG and how likely that it based on (a) history & (b) today’s uncertainty. Today that says Biden is a 87% bet. That could change!
