I get all of my political analysis from websites called joeisdone

Dems still have a few hundred k early vote lead between postals/early voting

Obv the state could go either way still especially because it has a Republican governor etc in the event it's close and shenanigans happen, but unless Biden loses PA or MI plus all the other swing states it doesn't matter

If you're going to look at that same site in the all early votes tab incl postals it shows Dems have about a 350k advantage so far; whether that holds up on election day or not will come down to whether Dem voters turn out in South Florida etc

Florida could definitely go either way still, Trump needs it to have a chance, if Biden wins it it's over

If I see Trump within the margin of error in PA or MI in polling averages i'll be a bit worried but until then I see no reason to expect Biden to lose barring a polling error many times the size of the 2016 one

Yes.

538 had Clinton at 63% to win last time. This time they have Biden at 88%.

The corresponding numbers for Trump are 37% and 12%.

I have no idea about NYtimes because it's paywalled.

BTW I agree that most polls are trash in terms of the headline numbers. You really need to find the useful data in the PDFs that usually come with them.

Nevada was a bellwether state until last time when it wasn't.

Obviously states whose characteristics make them swing states are going to be "bellwethers" while they retain those characteristics (the same for counties) and will stop being bellwethers when those characteristics (or the characteristics of a swing state) change. If those 10 counties have different profiles in terms of donations compared to most other places then they probably aren't bellwethers any more.

Would you like to state your guess for how many of those bellwether counties will vote the same way as the presidential election this time?

Interestingly, the Germans prefer bellwether animals to help them decide their sports bets, which of course they are correct at predicting sports results until they aren't:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Octopus
https://www.trtworld.com/sport/meet-...n-russia-18232
https://qz.com/1322387/world-cup-201...eaten-already/

It doesn't and Hilary lost.

About the rally numbers - literally any former president would get more than 200 people come to a free public speech for pure curiosity value. If Obama has only 200 then it must be down to something else - i.e. it being restricted to 200 due to coronavirus. Or do you think Obama is such a weak draw that there are only 200 people interested in hearing him?

If Trump (or any president) was speaking in my home town I'd definitely go and check it out. Bring the kids too and show them something to remember.

Here in Slovakia I actually met and got introduced to the foreign minister, who had previously been prime minister for 8 years. I still didn't recommend people vote for his party afterwards.

https://targetearly.targetsmart.com

Did anyone point out this website? I don't know how I found it to be honest.
Anyone mentioned Iowa? According to them, Biden has a nice 8 point early lead.
Looks like PA is a lock for Biden, according to the early numbers. But Wisconsin and Michigan a very close. I can see Trump overtaking the lead on Nov.3.
Who knows.

Lektor; Bass, you guys ex Pats like Swoop?
Pretty impressive your knowledge of U.S. Politics.

IMO it is not especially useful. Their model is not really designed for a year like this when there is incredible polarization between voting methods. They are probably massaging their numbers closer in the states that actually release data on party registration, while keeping numbers in tact in MI/WI which don't release data.

There is pretty strong evidence that democrats are showing up in large numbers basically everywhere in early/mail in voting, and that republicans intend to show up on election day. So trying to read who is ahead from current early vote numbers is foolish and trying to figure it out from modeled gibberish is even worse.

trump up to 8c in california! WhErE iS HuNtEr?

I have been using it pretty heavily to date.

Have to remember too that a lot of the in-person voting crowd still to come is likely to favor Trump, so Biden needs significant leads in early voting.

Iowa at 45.8% in and Biden 350k votes to 288k Trump votes sounds nice, but Trump making up that 62k ground sounds rather easy. Iowa was basically the only state according to my knowledge who played high school baseball last spring and stayed largely open. There haven't had the spikes recently other states have had.

I saw something the other day (could have been here, don't recall) that the largest contention point among voters is Trump's handling of COVID. The swing votes going against Trump are largely people who do not think he has handled it well.

Covid is the reason why Trump will lose. It's all about Covid19.
Otherwise, he would have been cruising to an easy win.

Edit: covid didn't kill Trump physically, but it killed him politically.

Yeah me too. But difference between a normal president (or former president) speech and a Trump #MAGA rally is quite... stark. These are not speeches, these are basically religious conventions. GOP officials claiming 20+% attendees are democrats is just such an obvious lie idk why they even bother

i think biden ships the popular vote pretty easily without covid. not really his or hillary's fault the deplorables line up in the right (basket) of states

browsing the data on electproject and this data point from north carolina seemed important:



25% of those who voted by mail this year didn't vote in 2016. that's a lot of new voters.

Yeah wow that seems big, nice find. For reference, these were the NC 2016 results:

Trump 2,362,631
Biden 2,189,316

and current stats from github by party registration:

Dems 1,281,301
Republicans 952,136
No registration 924,243

So 776,536 new voters and counting is a pretty dramatic number, and on a hunch I find it hard to believe this wouldn't be good news for Biden.

FWIW, I didn't vote yet. I was afraid to send in my mail ballot because of all the rhetoric by Trump. Which is stupid because I live in Massachusetts. When I went to early vote on Saturday, the line was a block long and I left because I had errands to run. I can guarantee that many Democrats are still going to vote on Nov.3. It won't only be Republicans.

Agreed. I should have specified Trump would have cruised to an electoral win.

If Biden loses Michigan, Wisconsin, Arizona and Florida but wins NC and PA, we'll be at a 269 tie. Oh man, this is going to be interesting.

I'm English. Chuck Bass is Finnish.

If anything I'd say the reverse. Not knowing all the details of American politics helps me focus on the important information needed to make bets.

Obviously relative to the UK I'm an ex-pat so it's a bit different, but I thought in our last election it was really obvious how it was going to go down from 1000 miles away, whereas people who were actually there could only see the one part of the puzzle they happened to be sitting on.

This election btw is very similar to the 2019 UK election in that the previous election was very finely balanced. In an election like that one you only really need to know the direction of the flow of voters to know which way it's going to go (whereas otherwise you would need to know the magnitude). In UK 2019 it was really hard to describe someone in that election who hadn't voted Labour in 2017 but was going to in 2019, and really easy to describe someone who hadn't voted Conservative in 2017 but was going to in 2019. That was also confirmed by opinions polls that broke out the data by previous vote.

For that reason I'm less interested than most people ITT in headline polling figures. Just as the pollsters throw out all the data on people who didn't pick-up, are non-citzens etc. because it's just noise, and they only publish the 2000 or so people who are actually going to vote - in this election you can also open up the PDFs and throw out all the data from people who are going to vote the same way as last time - how many of them got polled from either side is just an artefact of randomness/ the sampling method. The interesting data is that from the couple of hundred people who changed their mind, and there seem to be consistently twice as many Trump-to-Biden voters in that group as Clinton-to-Trump voters. Biden has a similar lead among new voters too. A 2-1 lead, even over a sample of 200 is 4 SDs from the mean if they are supposed to be level pegging.

I think Biden more likely wins AZ than NC, but, if you think this country is chaotic enough, then just wait until an electoral tie happens...

More like this:

Of course there's the occasional incident here and there. But to my knowledge, so far things seem to be going smoothly. I have confidence in America. The founding fathers were geniuses. They factored into their model the future Trumps of the world

If never lived in Germany, I would have been a very different person now.
I kept seeing people with deformed limbs. I was like, " wtf is this? " I never saw that groing up in America. It was polio mostly, along with some deformities because of pregnant mothers receiving untested medication. Not all people in Europe were lucky enough to be born in America and get vaccinated.
If it wasn't from vaccines, diseases like measles, malaria, smallpox would be rampant. Without vaccination, modern life as we know it would not be possible. But people growing up here are not necessarily stupid, they're just too spoiled. Just too ignorant. That's why they see a boat parade in California and think California is turning red. That's not even funny. This person should be out in prison. It should be a crime to be so f!kin stupid.
I say, lets have a population swap.

I am not talking about 10 counties who were bellwethers last cycle and aren't now. I am talking 400+ past and present bellwether counties, of which 89% are donating more for Trump. Now we can argue that a number of them will get it wrong fine, but you'd need over 200+ counties to get it wrong this time around. That seems more unlikely than 8 pollsters who love Hillary and have TDS.

Now please spend all of 2 minutes looking at the last couple Obama events he had for Biden this week. It looked... sad. No one was there, even in the Philadelphia one where they are sending him out to rally the black vote. In Miami, there were more counter protestors than people at OBAMA's rally. He even had to mention them because they were honking their trucks while he spoke.

~30% of the US population loves Trump. No one denies that is a lot of people. They donate, attend rallies, and are passionate supporters of the president. Unfortunately, 30% isn't enough to win an election on its own.

I’m sorry where did you get that number from 30%? Let’s just assume for a second that it’s 40% ish for both R/D. It’s 95%+ party approval for Trump.

0.95 * 45 is not 30%.

By the way that’s assuming there isn’t a Trump silent voter or independent support for him.

whb, who had the biggest inauguration crowds, Obama or Trump?

Who was embarrassed, he had to lie about the crowd size, Obama or Trump?

Is the earth flat or round?