As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m looking at some of the election forecast data to try to figure out how things are going for Biden (and by extension Trump) in the battleground states.
The ABC News 538 site has downgraded its probability of a Biden victory from 51% to 49% (with Trump going from 49% to 51%), which is essentially no change. The Silver Bulletin, which has been predicting roughly 2-to-1 odds of a loss for Biden, is actually showing a slight improvement in Biden’s chances, from 28.0% to 29.0% (Trump’s 71.4% to 70.6%).[1] This is something of a fluke, because I didn’t post anything when Biden’s chances peaked a couple of days ago. He’s actually on a bit of a downward trajectory at the moment.
The path-to-270 chart now looks like this:
Although Biden has lost ground in the Nebraska 2nd, Maine, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Arizona, he has actually improved his chances of winning in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia. I have three guesses why that might be:
- The timing of the polls. States that have not had recent high-quality polls are still not reflecting Biden’s debate performance.
- Biden’s age was priced in. Voters knew he was old before the debate, so the debate added no new information.
- Voters aren’t paying attention. Lots of things have a bigger effect on the quality of their lives than the election. The debate is just another piece of political background noise that they are ignoring. They’ll start paying attention closer to the election.
I suspect that the current results are dominated by the first and last of these concerns.
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