Poll watching, as usual these days. Cook Political Report moves Texas from "lean Trump" to "tossup." Biden appears to be very competitive in Georgia and continues to hold, at least in the polls, a small lead in Florida. Ditto for North Carolina and Arizona. Trump desperately needs all five of these states and, if the polls are right, he'd be fortunate if in the end two fell into his column.
If the polls are right.
The FiveThirtyEight blog has this addictive gizmo that allows you to make combinations of states either blue or red, and then see what effect your choices have on the model's estimate of the odds one or the other candidate ultimately wins. For example, the forecast currently gives Biden an 88 percent chance of winning. If, however, you tell it that Arizona goes for Trump, Biden's win percentage dips precipitously—to 68 percent. But suppose that, Trump having won Arizona, Biden nevertheless prevails in Georgia: according to the FiveThirtyEight model, there is then a 95 percent chance Trump loses, and it rises past 99 percent if Biden also wins North Carolina. I have proven today that a person can play all afternoon with this tool.
I've tended to obsess most over the Sun Belt "battlegrounds" since this coming Tuesday evening it's likely the networks will be able to call most of them for either Biden or Trump. It's the hotly contested northern tier states that tend to have rules prohibiting the processing of mailed ballots until election day, or just before, with the result that their outcomes won't be known till Wednesday at the earliest. (The New York Times has, here, a table showing when results from each of the fifty states might be expected.) Thus it is the Sun Belt states that could knock Trump out in the first round, which is of course what I'm hoping for.
If Biden wins Florida, FiveThirtyEight's tool says the cake is baked. Dave Wasserman, of Cook Political Report, reports that he's going to be watching in particular Sumter County in Florida. This is a mid sized county just to the north and west of Orlando best known, probably, as the home of The Villages, one of the largest retirement communities in the county. The average age in Sumter County is 69, and in 2016 Trump carried it by 68 to 29 percent while prevailing statewide by 1.2 percent. Biden, however, has been polling much better with affluent retirees than Clinton did, and you might have seen that The Villages has been the site of some arguably comical confrontations between Trump and Biden supporters participating in dueling golf cart parades. Florida reports its early votes first and most of Sumter County's retirees vote early by mail. Wasserman thinks Trump, if he is to have a chance of holding Florida, needs twice as many votes as Biden out of Sumter County. We'll probably know quite early in the evening whether he got it.
Suppose Trump survives the election night count in the southern part of the country. Biden's polling leads in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are wider, and if he has won any of the contested Sun Belt states he's not likely to need all three. Wisconsin and Michigan, in particular, are looking like longshots for Trump, which brings up a scenario that perhaps only sounds outlandish. Biden's best state in the Sun Belt appears to be Arizona. Let's say he wins there, loses every other contested race in the warm weather states, holds all the Clinton states, and adds Wisconsin and Michigan. That would leave him with 269 electoral votes, one less than is needed to win. You might think that it would then all come down to Pennsylvania, where Biden's polling edge is smaller than in Wisconsin and Michigan. But there's another way for Biden to get one more electoral vote. Nebraska is one of two states—the other is Maine—that awards its electoral votes not in winner-take-all fashion but, rather, by congressional district. And Biden's chances in the state's second congressional district, centered on the city of Omaha, might be even better than they are in Pennsylvania. This explains, I think, Trump's rally in frigid Omaha the other night, which resulted in hospitalizations for several attendees when the buses that were to bring them back to their cars after the event didn't show up. Add hypothermia to the list of health hazards associated with rallying for Trump.
Maybe it won't be close.
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