At the end here, our model defaults to a very "polls-only" forecast. So here's our version of a "no tossups" map based on final polling average in each state. Very unlikely that all of these turn out right as NC, ME-2, GA, OH, IA, TX all within 2 points.
If Biden beats his forecast by 3 points nationally, here's the map you wind up with instead, with OH, IA and TX flipping blue.
Trump beating his polls by 3 points results in a tenuous win for Biden, on the other hand. This is a winning map for Biden—he has the cushion to withstand a 2016-style polling error—but might be tough for Democrats to hold the Senate and this race could take a long time to call.
There's nothing intrinsic that would prevent there from being a larger polling error than 2016, which is why Trump has some chances of winning outright. But there are also a fair number of close Biden wins. An 89% chance of winning ≠ an 89% chance of a landslide victory.
I do think it's vital to keep the context of the election in mind, though. Trump didn't win the last election by much, against a highly unpopular opponent, and most people think things are going really badly in the US. Not hard to see why he's losing.
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You could debate the order. I think WI is actually the most certain since I don't see many ways for Trump to gain votes there. The same probably holds for NV although *in theory* it's possible late-arriving mail votes could be red if R's waited longer to send in their ballots.
AZ is the only one of the four that's been *called* by anyone, including the AP, which is usually pretty cautious, but some AZ-focused data folks think that was too aggressive.
There's a LOT of vote left to count in MI and I haven't spent too much time looking at it myself, but it *seems* like it's mostly mail votes from blue counties which you'd think would be quite good for Biden.
I believe it's the city of Green Bay, specifically, that's unreported. I think both election day vote *and* absentees in Green Bay are uncounted, and that the rest of the country is in. Green Bay went narrowly to Clinton in 2016.
So I don't think there's much upside for Trump in Brown County. If it's *all* Green Bay, those ballots should be slightly blue. If it's only Green Bay absentees, they should be quite blue. (I think it's all of Green Bay, not just the absentees.)
The reason I'm using terms like "believe" and "think" is because I'm trying to infer from this rather confusing note on the Brown Co. website, plus one very brief conversation I had.
I believe they don't have the Kenosha absentees counted, either, which netted like 10k for Biden.
Did DDHQ get its hands on the Milwaukee absentees? Or is this something different? All night long there hasn't been a whole lot of clarity on exactly how many uncounted votes there have been in Milwaukee County, so I really don't know.
If there's a shift in focus here, it's that we're sort of going from "make inferences about MI/WI/PA based on results from other states" to "it's close enough to the end to actually try to count the votes there." This is especially so in WI, which is faster to count than MI/PA.
You'd *infer* that Biden was in pretty good shape in WI based on his winning MN plus his large leads in pre-election polls. But it's not quite exactly what's out there beyond a lot of Milwaukee absentees, which should make the race much closer but may or may not put Biden ahead.
There are also absentee ballots left to be counted in Kenosha, apparently. The WI absentees are likely to be very blue, so a few unreported absentees here and there in non-Milwaukee cities could make a fairly big difference.
One thing that does seem clear in the Election Day numbers is that the GOP vote came out early but the vote is becoming less Republican (and more indie) over the course of the day.
e.g. in Broward County (the rare FL county where Democrats are winning the Election Day vote)
From 7am to 1030am, the vote was D38/R34/I28 (D +4)
From 1030 to 1230pm, it was D39/R31/I31 (D +8)
From 1230 to 3pm, it was D37/R26/I37 (D +11)
From 3pm to 4pm, Broward was D41/R26/I33 (D +15). So this gap keeps growing.
So... this is a special morning for our forecast in that there's now no more time until the election. (The model treats Election Day and Election Eve as equivalent to one another.) This has a couple of minor effects.
1. The forecast is now totally polls-based; there's no longer any prior for economics/incumbency. The weight assigned to this prior had been declining anyway so that it was close to zero, but now it's actually zero.
2. One type of uncertainty—"drift", or how much polls change between the present day and the election—is also now gone. Of course, there's still the chance that polls could be *wrong*. But there's no longer time for polls to change (though a few more will straggle in today.)