Election update 8/9/24: The sun belt opens up

 So, after my emergency election update on 7/30, things slowed down considerably and we haven't had a ton of movement since. It's like there was a massive wave of polls as all pollsters desperately decided to poll for Harris, and then they dropped off about 2 weeks after the drop out. This week has been relatively quiet on the polling front, although the momentum has been still moving in a slow and steady direction, at least on the presidential level.

Presidential level

So, the interesting thing about this prediction is PA is no longer the key battleground state. Georgia and Arizona are now more competitive for the democrats than PA is. Not that PA isn't in play. With PA's election odds, we tied Biden's peak over the past year or so. With GA and AZ now being even less red, they now brought us up to a 35.4% chance of winning. Trump is still at a 64.6% chance, and still favored to win, but I can't lie, I don't dislike those odds, after everything I've seen this year. Even North Carolina and Nevada are in play now. Harris is now winning the popular vote. Things are on the up and up for us. Now, we're not winning outright, and I don't know where things will settle before our momentum runs out of steam, but we're at least competitive now. If we overperform by say 2 points, we win. And that's not outside of the realm of possibility. I mean, it has a 35% chance of happening. 

The electoral map is now 251-287 Trump, where yes, Trump is still winning, but he's winning by the lowest margin yet. If we get PA, it's 270, gg no re. if we get GA and AZ, it's 278. If we get all 3, we're at 297. So, we're improving and within striking distance of winning here. It won't take much for us to just tip everything over the way Trump ironically did to Clinton in 2016. Heck, we now have better odds as a Trump like overperformance, than Trump did in 2016. Remember, in 2016, PA was at 1.9% (32% chance of flipping), Michigan was at 3.4% (20% chance of flipping), and Wisconsin was at 6.5% (5% chance of flipping). So yeah. It can happen. We're competitive. We're not favored to win, but we at least have a reasonable and realistic chance of winning.

Now, I will spare you the 5 way data. I'm started to develop the same issues I had with Biden with it. Too few data points and the data seems erratic and doesn't make sense. Still, that favors Harris even more and we're literally at 50-50 there with Wisconsin being the deciding state. Yeah.

But before I move on, I want to show you guys the trend line. 

The top is my normal probability chart. I've decided to combine the Biden/Harris lines as we no longer need to keep them separate, Harris is the nominee. And you can very easily tell with the end of that chart what's going on here. Biden's debate performance imploded us, and Harris made us take off like a rocket ship. Yeah, I was wrong about Harris being less electable. It's what the data said at the time, but now, yeah, we're in good shape.

I also added a second trend line for the electoral vote count. Less impressive as I thought it would be, but we can see a similar trend, it bottomed out at its worst point under Biden and when Harris took over, we're now in the best position we've been all year.

I really want to emphasize this point. 

WE ARE IN THE BEST POSITION WE'VE BEEN ALL YEAR!

Hopefully the momentum keeps going. We still need more if we're gonna actually BEAT Trump. But we're getting there.

Senate

 

Sadly, the senate is not as optimistic. Montana, NO!!!!! I mean, we're really in a tough position. We're mostly defending states that are also competitive battleground states in the presidential, but we only get up to 49 holding them. We need Montana to get 50. And our odds of doing so just dropped to 19% due to a new poll. The senate is essential. We need the senate to pass progressive legislation. Harris's administration is gonna be a wet fart if we don't take the senate. As of now, we only have a 9.7% chance of winning the senate outright. We have a 80.9% chance of losing it outright, and the remaining 9.4% is that of a tie. That's not good odds. We really need to work on Montana there. Overall prediction remains at 49-51R.

Conclusion

Anyway, that's my election forecast. Things are better at the presidential level, with us actually having a shot at winning this thing. Things are worse on the senate level, particularly due to us slipping in the polling in Montana. But we still have 3 months. We at least have a shot. I'm not dooming like I was. We're in okay shape at least.