One small casualty of this election: the RealClearPolitics average. It's never been perfect, but I've cited it in the past as a simple no-questions-asked average. Unfortunately, that's not possible anymore.
RCP's averages this cycle just haven't been a fair average of the polling that's out there. Instead, cut offs are fairly deliberately set to show better results for Trump.
Trump may win in the end, but that won't vindicate RCP.
If Trump wins the polls were really, really wrong. I'll certainly be nothing but honest about that fact.
But you don't get that impression from RCP, since they're not fairly reflecting the polls.
Just go down the list of each RCP average this morning, and ask 'are the cutoff dates consistent?' and 'who would benefit if the cutoff date was a day earlier.'
The answers are 'no' and Biden.
This has been true for a while now, but they really took it up a couple of notches over the weekend. And unfortunately it's enough that I won't be using the site anymore for citing polling averages.
I'm sympathetic to the challenges they face in deciding what polls to include. And I think their rules are modestly more coherent than folks give credit. But the cutoffs right now serve one purpose. Anyone comparing say US v PA avg can tell what it is
Unbeknownst to you, I've been up for a while and I've had my coffee. I think I'm all caught up on where we stand. We'll have an article on the state of play in a bit.
The big picture: no change in where we stand since last night. Biden still on track in PA; GA tallies were in line with our expectations and Biden may still have the tiny edge in GA--though there are a few too many conflicting reports this AM for me be certain about what's out
Biden is still a very narrow favored in the view of the needle, with no meaningful change since last night. Honestly, I'm more curious about any reporting errors (which could go either way) than the needle's estimates, with the race so close
Another factor is the needle thinks the remaining Election Day vote in Fulton and DeKalb is especially Democratic--more so than the Election Day vote that's been counted so far, presumably bc it's in majority black precincts. That seems easy enough to check
Basically, Democrats rushed their mail ballots in this year. That meant the mail requests that hadn't been returned, heading into the weekend, were quite Republican. This was clear well in advanced
But...
--in general mail ballots have been decent for Biden--even Republican ones.
--the late mail ballots may also be quite young
--it's possible that these Republicans just voted in person, and we don't know it yet
This is a pretty good set of news for Democrats in Nevada. It's not going to be called when the margin is this narrow, but you can pencil it in the Biden column for the purpose of gaming out where we're going from here
We have less concrete data on what's out in Mi than PA, but there are many reasons to think Biden probably catches up, whether it's the trendline/what we know about their count, or what we see in neighboring states and high % counted MI counties
The PA situation is obviously far from completion, but we do know there are at least 1.4 mlilion outstanding absentee ballots and so far they're 78-21 Biden. That's enough for him to catch up if it keeps up.
We have some good news for Democrats in North Carolina, where a reporting error by Randolph County is padding Trump by about 30k in our estimate there.
They reported both in person (abs one-stop) and absentee mail together, but the needle's still expecting 45k early votes
That's worth a net-30k votes for Biden, which would not be enough to get him into the lead. But it does help him a bit. We're looking for other errors
We also have a similar case in Rockingham County, which is worth another net-10k to Biden--still leaving him quite a bit short.
In the other direction, Orange County (heavily Dem) may have a bug on our end in expecting more IPEV there--but that's not so clear to me
So let's talk about our needles. Florida was easy, as you can see. What about NC and GA?
At the moment we've got Trump favored in Georgia by 4 and North Carolina by about a point.
If you look at the results by method, you can see why: the eday vote is great for Trump and that's what's left in NC, in particular nytimes.com/interactive/20…
There are a few things I pause at right now, though.
One is that all three states are in the same model. We control for state and voting method. Does the flood of results in Florida bias us a bit in NC/GA, especially in Latino areas? I think that's at least possible in GA burbs