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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">https://projects.economist.com/us-2020-f...
MI (16 EVs)
PA (20)
WI (10)
FL (29)
AZ (11)
NC (15)
A short thread: https://projects.economist.com/us-2020-forecast/president">https://projects.economist.com/us-2020-f...
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& #39;re still a long way away, but that& #39;s roughly where things are headed.
But on the other hand (and especially because of Trump& #39;s relative electoral college advantage), it actually wouldn& #39;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& #39;d be in a position where even a smaller-than-average polling error in Trump& #39;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& #39;t a thread about #TIGHTENING or to spark Dem panic, etc; I just want to emphasize that an 85% chance isn& #39;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%
