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I find it odd that U.S. election forecasters continue to discuss the 2020 cycle as if all the usual assumptions will hold. Maybe they will, but between the pandemic and the GOP's cutthroat approach to retaining power, I think there's much more uncertainty than usual.
How will voting actually happen? What will the economy look like in six months? How will the extraordinary circumstances shape who votes and for whom? Way more uncertainty on all of these major factors than at any other point in my 50-year lifetime.
I get that these forecasters still have column inches to fill, and there are strong incentives to use the tools at hand. Still, I would hope to see more pieces devoted to consideration of unusual scenarios, and many more caveats in the pieces that do use the usual models.
To be fair, some are at least adding the caveats. In today's piece for @UpshotNYT, for example, @Nate_Cohn touches on several major sources of unusual uncertainty: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/13/upshot/polling-2020-biden-trump.html
Still, as someone who's studied democratization around the world for decades, I think the biggest blind spot continues to be the risk of election manipulation by the GOP. Not fixing the election, but nudging it.
In the U.S. system, modest tweaks to voting rules and procedures in key states can have outsized effects, especially in close elections. So the added uncertainty is much higher than it would be in a parliamentary system, or a system with national popular vote for president.
I also get that mainstream publications have strong incentives to avoid running pieces that speculate about election manipulation. But these are extraordinary times, and it would be great to see more open discussion of these scenarios. /end (for now)
