Thread by @lxeagle17

We've updated the model made by @Thorongil16 and I with the Monmouth poll.

Our forecast is at D+6.7, with an 84% chance of Democrats winning, making our rating Likely Democratic. You can view the county margins at striderforecasts.com. 🧵[1/]

The Monmouth poll is absolutely not a good one for Democrats. Let's not dance around it. Even if you take the educational splits and weight it with our screen, which is 52% college-educated, you get a D+2 margin. This is not good.

What's going on, though?

From every poll, we see that Biden voters choose McAuliffe while Trump voters choose Youngkin, with little middle ground. But independents have taken an 18 point swing *in a month* in this poll. They were McAuliffe +9 last month, Youngkin +9 this month.

There are two explanations for this...either Monmouth is oversampling Republicans, or Independents who disapprove of Biden are taking their anger out on McAuliffe after not being too enthusiastic about Youngkin earlier. Which one is it? I'd bet on the former. You could disagree.

What makes me think it's the former is that Monmouth is saying white non-college voters have swung against Democrats by 24 points in a year and independents swung by 18 in a month. That doesn't line up with the data we have from other races and other polls in the slightest.

So either Monmouth's caught something nobody else has (plausible) or they're oversampling Republicans and thus inducing panic in an electorate again (also plausible, see 2017 for this).

Again, I lean towards the oversampling side. You could credibly disagree.

But again, we do know Republicans seem a bit more enthusiastic about this race in general from most polls, and that's something to not discount either. So the question is how much that enthusiasm edge matters. I think it matters less as the race gets nationalized, but...

None of us are really that great at this. I'm not stupid enough to say that I know what's going on here intimately. All I know is that if Monmouth ends up being right here, it'd probably run counter to the face of a fair bit of available data we have, which shows a stable race.

BTW: we've remade our county PVI screen (which has nothing to do with the topline prediction) to account for the lack of split-ticketing we're seeing. This solves the "why do you guys seem so high on McAuliffe in southside?" issue @ECaliberSeven and @ChazNuttycombe pointed out.