Want to know who's going to win the presidential election in November? Well, no one knows. The calculation is complicated by Trump's project, self-confessed, of thwarting mail-in voting, with the evident twin goals of changing the election outcome or, failing that, creating uncertainty about it. Maybe he'd have a better chance of pulling this off if he were not so transparent. Deviance has been defined down so far that the president's announcement of his intention to cheat is greeted by 8 tweets, 3 newspaper editorials, and zero legal consequences—but some rumors of possible congressional inquiries and the altered plans of possibly millions of voters. I know I now intend to bring my ballot to the election office's drop box. Skip the mail altogether.
Meanwhile, Nate Silver is on the case of who is most likely to win, assuming the election is plausibly "fair." He kicked off his 538 Blog's 2020 election forecast with an article, published Wednesday, divulging that his model currently gives Biden a 71% chance of winning. (Since Wednesday, the figure has risen to 72%.) The bad news is that this means Trump's chance of winning is on a level with a "pretty good hitter" getting a knock in his next at-bat. It's also sobering to read that, on Election Eve 2016, the 538 forecast pegged Trump's chance of winning at . . . 29%. As the headline over Silver's article says, it's way too early to count out Trump.
Reading on, it's somewhat encouraging to see that if Silver lies to his model, telling it that the election is tomorrow instead of in 11 weeks, Biden's chances go from the low-70s to the low-90s. The 72% figure, in other words, is to some degree just an acknowledgment that things could change. I'm not sure what could change though. There is a joke on Liberal Twitter about how Trump's most recent dumbfuckery, whatever it is, will certainly seal his fate. "As COVID deaths surpass 150,000, Trump tells Axios, 'It is what it is': he's toast!" "Trump tweets that election should be delayed, he's toast!" "Trump suggests we should inject ourselves with bleach and shine flashlights up our arses to kill the coronavirus, he's toast!"
When Trump was going to "run on the economy," his approval rating was 44%. The economy is now in shambles and his approval rating is 42%.
Have I ever mentioned that I disapprove of the Electoral College? It is another factor contributing to the low-seeming 72% figure. On Wednesday, when the 538 model gave Biden a 71% chance of winning, it put his chance of getting more votes at 81%. There was, then, about a 1-in-10 chance of Trump repeating his trick of winning in the Electoral College despite losing the national vote. The probability of the reverse event—Biden wins the election even though more Americans vote for Trump—is, according to Silver's model, about 1-in-750. We are often told that the founding fathers, in their wisdom, created the Electoral College, thereby compelling presidential candidates to "broaden their appeal" in order to win a majority of votes within many states. You can see how well the theory is working. Who thinks Trump has been knocking himself out, trying to broaden his appeal? His whole plan has always been to win again with 40-some percent. If not for the Electoral College, narrowcasting to Caucasian owners of all-terrain vehicles in the Upper Midwest would be a poor strategy.
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