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Trump can afford to lose 36 electoral votes from his 2016 total and still hold on to the White House. But Biden currently leads in polls of all 6 of the closest Trump states from 2016:
MI (16 EVs)
PA (20)
WI (10)
FL (29)
AZ (11)
NC (15)
A short thread: https://projects.economist.com/us-2020-forecast/president
MI (16 EVs)
PA (20)
WI (10)
FL (29)
AZ (11)
NC (15)
A short thread: https://projects.economist.com/us-2020-forecast/president
On the one hand, Biden is clearly in a good position. If the polls look like they do today on election day, our model will give him close to a 92% chance of winning the election. We're still a long way away, but that's roughly where things are headed.
But on the other hand (and especially because of Trump's relative electoral college advantage), it actually wouldn't take much to nudge the race closer to 60/40 or even 50/50. A streak of good polls in FL or PA would get him much of the way to a tied race.
If Biden falls to a 4 or 5 point lead nationally, we'd be in a position where even a smaller-than-average polling error in Trump's direction would give him the electoral college majority. A 4pt margin on election day would translate roughly to the odds that we gave Clinton.
(And we all know how that turned out last time.)
This isn't a thread about #TIGHTENING or to spark Dem panic, etc; I just want to emphasize that an 85% chance isn't 100. And actually, given the position of 0.85 on the distribution, an 85/15 chance is actually more prone to covering huge ground toward 50/50 than 100/0.
This is to say that a 1.5 standard-deviation shift downward on a normal distribution is a 34-point reduction in probability, from 84% to 50%. In contrast, 1.5 steps up only shifts probabilities by half as much — a 16pt change to 99.9%
