“In his recent encyclical Pope Francis warns us against this phony populism that appeals to the ‘basest and most selfish’ instincts. Then he says this: ‘Politics is something more noble than posturing, marketing, and media spin. These sow nothing but division, conflict, and a bleak cynicism.’ For those who seek to lead, ‘we do well to ask ourselves: why I am doing this? What is my real aim?’
“Pope Francis has asked questions that anyone who seeks to lead this great nation should answer. And my answer is this: To unite this nation. To heal this nation. The Bible tells us that there is a time to break down, and a time to build up. And a time to heal. This is that time.”
Joe Biden, speaking in Georgia yesterday.
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Today’s numbers:
Polling Averages
FiveThirtyEight: Biden +8.5 (change to Trump)
The Upshot: Biden +9.0 (no change)
Real Clear Politics: Biden +7.1 (change to Trump)
Note that Rasmussen (C+) has released several polls in the past week showing Trump leading (most recently by one point) and IBD/TIPP (A/B) has the race narrowing to about Biden +5. All other pollsters are showing double-digit or close to double-digit leads for Biden. The Upshot continues to have Biden averaging +9.
Forecasts
FiveThirtyEight (probabilities of winning EC): Biden 88%, Trump 12% (change to Biden)
The Economist (probabilities of winning EC): Biden 96%, Trump 4% (change to Biden)
The Upshot (probable EV totals): Biden 357 EVs, Trump 181 EVs (no change)
As you can see, while the polling averages tighten, the polling model forecasts show movement towards Biden. This is likely because we are six days out from the election, more people have already voted than voted for either major party candidate in 2016, the polling averages for Biden are still big margins, state polling shows Biden winning more than 270 electoral votes, and other fundamentals that forecasters use are not favoring the incumbent.
Total Early Votes: 73,002,204 (+11.7M since Monday)
Mail Ballots: 48,343,738 (+7.5M since Monday)
In-Person Votes: 24,658,466 (+4.2M since Monday)
It looks like I was too cautious in my estimate that early voting would slow down in the final week. It has, in fact, picked up so far this week. At the current rate, just over 90 million people will have voted when early voting ends in many states on Saturday (although mail-in voting will still come in through November 3rd).
Why am I not worrying? Well, I am a little…
By all rational measures, if this election is held fairly – even if only fairly by American standards – Biden will easily win the presidency next Tuesday, the Democrats will win the Senate and expand their majority in the House, and the Democrats will make significant gains in state houses across the country. But that’s a big if. We have an incumbent president who is so narcissistic that he would be happy to watch the nation burn and the Republic crumble rather than lose an election. We have a Senate led by perhaps the most power-hungry person in American political history who would rather make sure the Supreme Court is controlled by right wing pro-corporate ideologues in order to, among other things, take away our health care and throw out our votes even if it means destroying the judiciary’s legitimacy. And a significant number of white people in this country simply do not care – they want to watch the world burn, or at least want to watch other people suffer. There are “militias” which are nothing but angry, entitled white men who get off on being cruel – and the police don’t seem to care as long as they are targeting liberals and black and brown folks. How can we have a fair election in this environment?
Well, we can and we likely will have one this year. There are more of us than there are of them and if we show it by everyone turning out and voting, we can prevail.
Rational worries (and why they don’t really worry me)
Unprecedented election fraud
It may seem like it’s a new thing because of how openly Trump talks about suppressing the vote, but voter suppression has been with us forever. The GOP has made its entire voting “rights” platform for the past 40 years one of making it difficult for people to vote. Despite what right wing flaks and many pundits say, Trump is really dumb about politics. His telegraphing of how he plans to mess with the election has only served to energize Democratic voters and get them to turn out early, hand deliver mail-in ballots, and work even harder to get out the vote. Those are all remedies for voter suppression. There is no guarantee that they will work enough to elect Biden, but for all of his corrupt disruption of the Postal Service designed to interfere with mail-in votes all he has done is make sure folks hand in their ballots or vote even earlier through the mail. For all of his lunatic ranting about voter fraud with mail-in ballots, all he has done is make sure his base doesn’t vote by mail – even though Republicans have long voted by mail in greater numbers than Democrats. No one has been a more effective get out the vote machine for the Democrats this year than Trump himself.
We don’t have one election, we have 51. In order for any mischief to result in a change of outcome the election has to be close. And much closer than you might be imagining. If the margin of a race is one percent in a state with five million votes, that’s a 50,000 vote margin. You are never going to make up that many votes in a recount. Even in 2016, the number of marginal votes in Michigan was about 10,000, which was a 0.3 percent lead for Trump. And it was still not close enough for a recount to make a difference. If you are thinking about Florida in 2000, you must remember that the margin was just 537 votes. Also, in recounts both sides can pick up or lose votes. If a recount had found another 1,000 people voted in Florida in 2000, for example, Gore would have had to have won 538 of those votes to change the election outcome. But Bush could just have easily won 464 votes and the outcome would remain the same. Of course, recounts are not only about finding new votes that were not counted. But finding even 538 miscounted votes is no easy task.
Judicial misadventure
The federal courts have very limited authority to get involved in election disputes. Sore losers cannot just demand the courts declare them the winners. Even in Gore v Bush the issue was about the equal protection of voters in the recount. The Gore camp made a bad strategic decision in not asking for a recount of the entire state. It certainly was arguable that some Floridian voters were being treated differently than others by the way the recount was conducted. That isn’t to say the case was decided correctly – there was a lot of bullshit in the majority opinion – but the differential treatment of counties in the recount was at least arguably a justiciable question for the federal courts. Think about this: in order for the Supreme Court to issue a ruling that in effect handed the election to Bush three things had to happen. (1) Florida’s electoral votes had to make the difference in the outcome of the entire election. (2) The popular vote in Florida had to be as razor thin as one can imagine. (3) The recount had to be conducted in a way that treated votes differently depending on what county the voters resided in. If Gore had just won New Hampshire, nothing that happened in Florida would have mattered. Something else could happen this year, but this specific scenario is likely to never happen again in our lifetimes.* Biden can lose Florida and Pennsylvania this year and still win the election. Trump cannot lose either of those states and win. So, for this to work in Trump’s favor he is likely going to have to have a repeat of Florida 2000 happen in several states.
Irrational worries
Uncertainty of outcome despite the evidence
If you follow politics closely or work on campaigns regularly, the last week or two of any campaign is nerve-wracking. And it doesn’t matter how close the election is or whether it appears to be a blow-out. No matter how hard you’ve worked, no matter how much data and personal experience you have with the electorate, you still never know the outcome until it’s over. I remember on Election Day in 1988 hearing from Dukakis campaign workers that Texas was looking like it was going Democratic. It didn’t; the Duke lost the state by 700,000 votes. In 2012, the Romney campaign was ready to shoot off fireworks over Boston Harbor to celebrate his victory. Instead Obama won 332 electoral votes. The 2012 result was no surprise to me, but even so part of me was still nervous until the returns came in. So, yes, I am nervous about this election. More so this year because of the stakes. But the cause of my nerves is in not knowing the actual outcome until it is over. The polling has been as good for Biden as he could have ever expected. But, as they say, the only poll that matters in on Election Day.
What if the polls are wrong?
The polls will be wrong. That’s because they are not true population counts. They are based on samples of the population and can only estimate what the true population count is from those samples. There are so many variables and ways for error to creep into the estimates that it is a testament to how good many pollsters are that they get as close as they do time and time again. The polling error in 2016 was no greater than any normal polling error. It mattered because the race was so close in so many states and so many people made their decision in the last week of the campaign. That is as unusual as Florida 2000. But the polling error in 2016 is not even the biggest error of the past decade. The error was bigger in 2012. No one remembers that because the error was in Romney’s favor, Obama was still favored to win by the final weekend, and Romney lost the election.
I’ll finish with another Biden quote from Georgia yesterday.
“You know, there aren’t a lot of pundits who would have guessed four years ago that a Democratic candidate for president in 2020 would be campaigning in Georgia on the final week of the election or that we’d have such competitive Senate races in Georgia. But we do because something’s happening here in Georgia and across America. We win Georgia, we win everything.”
— Joe Biden, quoted by NBC News.
As I “go to press” with this newsletter, the cautious Cook Political Report has moved Texas from Lean Republican to Toss-Up. Both Biden and Harris will be campaigning in the Lone Star State over the next few days.
* Of course, it could happen this year, but only if Biden and Trump win/lose states that no one thinks they will and Florida’s 29 electoral votes against decides the election. With the information we have right now, that scenario is so unlikely to happen it is not worth discussing further.