Okay, so this time I waited for a Tuesday to update my predictions. Last time I released my stuff on Monday only for a ton of new polls to come in from the weekend and invalidate much of what I said. So I waited for Tuesday this time. Looking at polling averages I'm glad I did because something similar happened.
In the grand scheme of things, did things fundamentally change in the past few weeks? Not really, especially not for the presidential race. But a lot did change in the nuance. A few things I'll mention outright:
Minnesota is going to be removed from the model. It's up 9.4% right now which safely puts it in the Biden camp, outside of my generous margin of error. I'll also include South Carolina, which I took interest in due to the Senate race there. While polling isn't great there, and it is a pretty hard leaner for Trump, my best estimation based on the two newest polls have it at Trump +8, which is just low enough for me to include it. I don't expect it to turn blue, but if I'm counting most states up to the +8/9 category in either direction, I should include this.
That said, let's look at the data:
General election: Biden +6.1%
4 way: Biden +6.3%
Biden is slightly down compared to where he was nationally, but still commands a good lead. Keep in mind anything over 3 and he can likely keep the electoral college. Last time I tried correcting for a potential spoiler effect with my odds, as last time around there was a 1 point discrepancy between the two averages, but observing the trends further, I'm inclined to believe this is just a statistically insignificant anomaly and the numbers are functionally the same in practice. That said, it doesn't look like there's much of a spoiler effect going on. If it exists, it's so small it's negligible. Something the anti third party people should know if they don't already (stop expecting us to vote for Biden, cough).
Anyway, let's look at what's going on at the state level:
| States | Winner/ Margin | Z | % Biden Win | % Trump Win | Electoral Votes if Biden Wins | Electoral Votes if Trump Wins |
| New Hampshire | Biden +6.7% | -1.68 | 95% | 5% | 226 | 316 |
| Nebraska CD2 | Biden +6.5% | -1.63 | 95% | 5% | 227 | 312 |
| Pennsylvania | Biden +5.7% | -1.43 | 92% | 8% | 247 | 311 |
| Wisconsin | Biden +5.5% | -1.38 | 92% | 8% | 257 | 291 |
| Nevada | Biden +5.3% | -1.33 | 91% | 9% | 263 | 281 |
| Michigan | Biden +5.2% | -1.30 | 90% | 10% | 279 | 275 |
| Maine CD2 | Biden +4.0% | -1.00 | 84% | 16% | 280 | 259 |
| Ohio | Biden +3.3% | -0.83 | 80% | 20% | 298 | 258 |
| Arizona | Biden +2.8% | -0.70 | 76% | 24% | 309 | 240 |
| Florida | Biden +1.1% | -0.28 | 61% | 39% | 338 | 229 |
| North Carolina | Biden +0.5% | -0.13 | 55% | 45% | 353 | 200 |
| Iowa | Tie +0.0% | 0 | 50% | 50% | 359 | 185 |
| Georgia | Trump +1.2% | +0.30 | 38% | 62% | 375 | 179 |
| Texas | Trump +3.2% | +0.80 | 21% | 79% | 413 | 163 |
| Missouri | Trump +8.0% | +2.00 | 2% | 98% | 423 | 125 |
| South Carolina | Trump +8.0% | +2.00 | 2% | 98% | 432 | 115 |
Okay, so despite the popular vote share declining, the statistics have evened out in a way in which I now estimate Biden has a 90% chance of winning the presidency, with Trump only having a 10% chance. This is the best electoral map I could come up with. I left Iowa blank as it literally has a 50% chance of going either way, but as it stands, Biden wins either 353 or 359 electoral votes and Trump wins 179 or 185. This is a crushing, 2008 style defeat for Trump.
However, I would discourage people from getting too comfortable. Remember, Wisconsin was up 6.5% in 2016 on election day with a 94% chance of going for Hillary. It still went Trump. A lot of the rust belt swing states are in the 5-6% range, which should imply that they're relatively safe, as this is effectively Biden's firewall, but that blue wall can crumble like it did in 2016. Don't get complacent. It looks good for Biden but if that goes again, it's all over and Trump can win again. I know Wisconsin has been shifting to be more red. It was up almost 7 points but dropped to 5.5 recently. On the flip side Pennsylvania and Michigan have gotten more blue. Arizona is a bit more red but that's not too surprising as Arizona being +5 for Biden seemed very strange to me in the first place. I finally got Nebraska data from another site and yeah, that looks dismal for Trump too. Trump can still theoretically win the election, but he would need to gain more than 5 points across the board to do so based on current data. That's very unlikely. It's also possible, given statistical uncertainty among these states, that we could end up with a tie even of Trump goes +5. A few scenarios of this could be this or this. What are the odds of these maps coming up? Probably less than 1%, but after discussing the issue on a forum a couple of weeks ago I realized, looking at my previous prediction, if PA went red but Michigan stayed blue and everything else followed my trend up to those states as predicted, we could have seen a 269-269 split. I wouldn't worry about this too much, but it's a nightmare scenario worth mentioning. If that happens it could seriously screw with the legitimacy of our democracy, especially given the loudmouth's threats of refusing to leave and claiming it's rigged if things don't go his way. However, unless a random 5 point swing in Trump's direction happens in the next month, I doubt that things will go that way. Also, due to COVID, people are voting NOW so I doubt there will be massive swings from the polls as are.
Now, onto the senate forecast:
| States | Winner/ Margin | Z | % Dem Win | % GOP Win | Senate Seats if Democrat Wins | Senate Seats if Republican Wins |
| Maine | Gideon +6.5% | -1.63 | 95% | 5% | 47 | 54 |
| North Carolina | Cunningham +6.0% | -1.50 | 93% | 7% | 48 | 53 |
| Arizona | Kelly +5.2% | -1.30 | 90% | 10% | 49 | 52 |
| Michigan | Peters +3.8% | -0.95 | 83% | 17% | 50 | 51 |
| Iowa | Greenfield +2.6% | -0.65 | 74% | 26% | 51 | 50 |
| South Carolina | Graham 0.5% | +0.13 | 45% | 55% | 52 | 49 |
| Montana | Daines 1.6% | +0.40 | 34% | 66% | 53 | 48 |
| Georgia | Perdue +2.8% | +0.70 | 24% | 76% | 54 | 47 |
Ouch. The GOP took a hard tumble here, with the race going hard in the democrats' favor. The strangest thing is the South Carolina seat. I previously had him up 8 points, but that was old polling. Looking at the 2 most recent polls he only has a 0.5% advantage on average, which is almost a coin flip. I guess telling people to quote him on something he said 4 years ago when he contradicts himself in a very predictable way isn't going well for him. To inject my opinion, I say good riddance if he goes.
To go back to what this data means, it looks like it's going to be very easy for democrats to get a hold of 4-5 senate seats, with a possibility of them getting a 6th here. They need 4 for an effective tie in the senate, which, given Biden is likely going to win, means democratic party control. The odds of the democrats winning the senate outright with at least 5 seats is around 74%. The odds of the GOP holding onto 5 seats and maintaining control on the other hand is 17%. The odds of an effective tie is 9% in my model.
Things are looking very good for democrats right now, and not very good for the GOP.
I'm also not doing further house forecasts, but if I had to guess, the democrats have an insanely good chance of maintaining control and the GOP's odds are abysmal.
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