Of the various ways of representing the state of the presidential horse race, I think I like best the above "winding tail to victory," from FiveThirtyEight. A few observations:
1. The state that intersects the 270 electoral vote line is referred to as the "tipping point" state. According to the FiveThirtyEight model, Biden's likeliest route to a narrow victory would be to win Pennsylvania and all the states down the tail from it, while Trump's likeliest path would be to win Pennsylvania and all the states farther up the tail. At the site itself, you can click anywhere on the tail and get taken to a page full of metrics relating to the selected state, including the model's calculation of the win percentage for each candidate. Right now (Thursday afternoon), the model thinks Biden has an 86 percent chance of winning Pennsylvania and an 89 percent chance of winning the election.
2. The color of a tail segment, red or blue, indicates which candidate the model thinks is more likely to win, and the shade is for degree of confidence or, if you prefer, predicted margin. The small difference between Biden's chance in Pennsylvania (86%) and his chance of winning the election (89%) should be attributed to the pale blue states farther up the tail from Pennsylvania. That is, should Trump win Pennsylvania, it's plausible that Biden's substitute tipping point state could be Florida, or North Carolina, or Georgia—or, as I mentioned yesterday, Arizona plus Nebraska's second congressional district (which is represented on the tail by the tiny unlabeled segment between Arizona and Pennsylvania). For Trump, plausible substitutes aren't in sight. A weakness of the graphic is perhaps that it doesn't allow you to judge whether, for example, Nevada could be a substitute tipping point state for Trump. But the answer is that the states up to the 270 line, including Pennsylvania but excepting Nevada, would get Biden across (he'd have 272 electoral votes). Pennsylvania is indispensable for Trump. That's why court filings indicate he's very concerned they might count too many mailed ballots in the keystone state, as well as in Wisconsin, though he seems oblivious to the same issue as it relates to California's practice.
By the way, regarding those GOP lawsuits: it seems to me that mailing a ballot postmarked on or before election day (if that's what the rules allow), which then arrives after election day, should be regarded as the equivalent of being in line at the polling place at the poll closing time. Of course you should be allowed to vote! Of course your ballot should be counted! It's shocking that this is controversial and tells you all you need to know about Team Trump, though of course there's oceans more.
3. With just a little clicking, FiveThirtyEight allows you to gauge what I'll call "the electoral college effect." The model projects Biden to win the popular vote by 8 points but Pennsylvania, the tipping point state, by only 5 points. The electoral college effect is therefore R +3—because, if there was a uniform shift toward Trump of 5 points, he'd still trail by 3 but the forecast would project him to win Pennsylvania and the electoral college. It happens that this is just about exactly where the electoral college effect stood in 2016, when Clinton lost Wisconsin, that election's tipping point state, by 0.8 percent but won the popular vote by 2.1 percent. To win the electoral college, she would have needed to win the national vote by 2.9 percent.
The Rs already have the electoral college in their corner. Must they suppress the vote, too?
4. Speaking of the electoral college, the winding tail suggests that, while around 150 million Americans will vote in the election, the range of possible outcomes extends from Trump eking out another victory to Biden winning more than 400 electoral votes, and where we end up on that spectrum will be determined by just a fraction of 1 million ballots cast in only the most lightly shaded states.
5. The same details indicating the wide range of possible outcomes, from Trump victory to Biden landslide, make me wonder whether the electoral college might be thinking about switching teams. It favors two things in a candidate. One is an ability to win a lot of small states. Since their electoral votes have fewer actual voters behind them, small states are over represented in the electoral college count, just as they are in the deliberations of the US Senate. That's a good deal for Republicans, because states with small populations tend to be rural in character, and rural people tend to prefer the Republicans, so it's Republican voters who are punching above their weight and there's no reason to suspect this is going to change anytime soon.
But the other thing the electoral college favors is an efficient distribution of votes. It's nice to win small states, by a little or a lot, but it's really nice to win big states by a little. You get full credit! If you look at the above picture, the dark red states at the Trump end of the tail are almost all quite small, but the dark blue ones include California, New York, and Illinois. No efficiency! Many hundreds of thousands of your voters don't help you win a single additional electoral vote and meanwhile, in Florida, you lose 29 electoral votes and the election by a few thousand ballots. It's this factor, which for years has favored Republicans, that might be changing. Look at the pale blue states and, for good measure, one that's pale red, Texas. They're all big states, all are projected to be narrowly decided, and, if the forecast is correct, Biden will win most of them. Much more efficiency!
Except for Ohio, these states are all within the Sun Belt and growing. As they've grown, they've gone from dark red to pink and now, perhaps, light blue. If this trend doesn't reverse—and the cases of Colorado and Virginia suggest that it won't—then Republicans are either going to have to try to appeal to people who don't have the soul of Kansans or else risk a continuing series of blue traffic jams in the tipping point area.
Maybe they're counting on all the judges Trump has appointed to figure something out for them!
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