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I wish there was more explicit acknowledgment that one of the most persuasive rationales for continued distancing/lockdowns is indeed to buy time for technological improvements. Not just vaccines but also therapeutics, rapid tests, greater scientific understanding.
Without those technological improvements, then either lockdowns just *postpone* the inevitable (since no matter how diligent your lockdown, cases will start increasing again one you relax it) *or* you're basically arguing for indefinite lockdowns.
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
At the end of the day, it's only July, there are a lot of unprecedented events happening, polling is more accurate than its critics think but probably *not* as accurate as it was in say 2004-2012—and if we wind up in a photo finish, Trump likely wins b/c of the Electoral College.
So while Biden has a robust polling lead now, and a number of other things going for him, it's a little early to be all that confident about what is going to happen.
I think part of it, too, is the pandemic warps people's sense of time (it certainly warps mine). November feels weirdly soon if you don't have the usual milestones and rhythms to ground yourself. But in political time, the final 99 days of the campaign are often an eternity.
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
Basically, the additional uncertainty introduced into an election forecast by COVID-19 falls into two buckets:

1) It means there's a lot of *news* and economic volatility.

2) It could screw with the mechanics of voting, vote-counting or polling in unpredictable ways.
Bucket 1) is easy enough to handle empirically. You can look at whether election cycles with lots of major news developments tend to be associated with more polling volatility and/or polling error, and indeed they do, although note the usual issues with small sample sizes.
Bucket 2) is a lot trickier, I think, since there are no real solid precedents for COVID. (Maybe something like Hurricane Sandy, but that only affected a couple of states.) But there have been too many issues IMO with voting in these late-stage primaries to ignore it.
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
As an FYI, there have been a fairly high number of polls with partisan sponsors in the presidential race this year. (Usually these are more common in races for Congress.) We DO include these polls in our averages, which is a change from the past, but with an adjustment.
Namely, we use a stricter house effects adjustment; the model assumes that these polls are biased until proven otherwise. And it weights them less.

However, for boring technical reasons, the model wasn't catching all the partisan polls and adjusting them like it was supposed to.
So as an FYI, we fixed that tonight, which slightly changed the averages in some states. Also, here is our newly-updated polls policy, which explains what is considered a partisan poll. fivethirtyeight.com/features/polls…
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