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Our forecast is up!!!

It gives Joe Biden a 71% chance of winning and Donald Trump a 29% chance.

projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-…
Coincidentally, these are the exact same odds as in our final forecast in 2016!!!

(Clinton 71%, Trump 29%)

As was also the case in 2016, our model gives Trump a MUCH higher chance than other statistical models.
Here's my summation of why the model thinks Trump still has decent chances, despite his current poll deficit.

Longer thread later once I'm more awake/more people are awake.

But for now go check out the VERY cool graphics and art by our team!

fivethirtyeight.com/features/its-w…
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
Not really much sign that the national polls are tightening, with Biden now back up +8.4, though I think you could argue that the recent round of state polls have been a bit better for Trump. projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/presiden…
We've also run our forecast retroactively back to June. If you squint, It's shown a *very* modest improvement in Trump's chances over that period. But that's mostly because economic indicators have looked better lately, not the polls.

projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-…
Note that **if** he holds his current lead, Biden's win probability will begin to increase in our forecast with the passage of time. But that will be a very gradual effect at first and then might get more noticeable as of say mid-late September.
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
I think the incentives toward accuracy are pretty decent. It's easy to compare polls to one another and also to compare them against the actual result. And pollsters make a lot of claims about their accuracy when soliciting new business. Plus there's professional pride, etc.
You do encounter issues that also occur elsewhere in political media. For many outlets, most of the audience will consist of political partisans. Even for these outlets, though, polling is sometimes an avenue they use to bolster their claims of unbiasedness and objectivity.
For example, whatever else you think about Fox News, their polls are both very good and quite unbiased (if anything they've had a tiny D bias in recent elections). projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratin…
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Nate Silver
@NateSilver538
Something else to keep in mind is that presidential elections tend to tighten down the stretch run. So an 8-point Biden lead today would translate into around a 6-point popular vote victory on Election Day, on average.
Of course, you can use a prior other than zero based on the economy or incumbency or what not if you want. Given recent improvement in economic data + high polarization, the prior our model will use is currently something like Biden +2, which is not so different than zero.
But the empirically-driven intuitions that (1) elections tend to be close in a highly polarized era and (2) Trump will tend to win most of the close elections because of the Electoral College, are things that should keep people from being too overconfident about Biden's chances.
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