Nate Silver's Blog, page 33

Even In The Middle Of A Pandemic, The 2020 Election Has Always Been About Trump

In the final preelection installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew takes a final look at the data, reflects on the stories that defined the 2020 campaign, and shares their guide for what to follow on election night.

Politics Podcast: Final Reflections On The 2020 Campaign Before Election Day

By Galen Druke, Perry Bacon Jr., Clare Malone and Nate Silver, Galen Druke, Perry Bacon Jr., Clare Malone and Nate Silver, Galen Druke, Perry Bacon Jr., Clare Malone and Nate Silver and Galen Druke, Perry Bacon Jr., Clare Malone and Nate Silver












 












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Election Day is just a few hours away. In the final preelection installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew takes a final look at the data, reflects on the stories that defined the 2020 campaign and offers a guide for what to follow on election night.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes , the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen .

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes . Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

I’m Here To Remind You That Trump Can Still Win

It’s tempting to write this story in the form of narrative fiction: “On a frigid early December morning in Washington, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that disputed mail ballots in Pennsylvania—” You know, that kind of thing. But given the stakes in this election, I think it’s important to be prosaic and sober-minded instead.

So let’s state a few basic facts: The reasons that President Trump’s chances in our forecast are about 10 percent and not zero:

As in 2016, Trump could potentially benefit from the Electoral College. Projected margins in the tipping-point states are considerably tighter than the margins in the national popular vote.
More specifically, Joe Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania — the most likely tipping-point state, according to our forecast — is solid but not spectacular: about 5 points in our polling average.
Without Pennsylvania, Biden does have some paths to victory, but there’s no one alternative state he can feel especially secure about.
While a lot of theories about why Trump can win (e.g., those about “shy” Trump voters) are probably wrong, systematic polling errors do occur, and it’s hard to predict them ahead of time or to anticipate the reasons in advance.
There is some chance that Trump could “win” illegitimately. To a large extent, these scenarios are beyond the scope of our forecast.
There’s also some chance of a recount (about 4 percent) or an Electoral College tie (around 0.5 percent), according to our forecast.

Before we proceed further, a short philosophical note. I hate it when people use phrases — to be fair, we often use phrases like these ourselves! — such as “Nate Silver is giving Biden a 90 percent chance” or “FiveThirtyEight still gives Trump a 10 percent chance.” We aren’t giving anybody anything. Instead, as former FiveThirtyEight politics host Jody Avrigan puts it, what we’re doing is “mapping uncertainty.” In other words, if Biden leads by about 9 points in national polls, 8 points in Wisconsin, 5 points in Pennsylvania, 2 points in Florida, etc., how does that translate into a probability of victory? That’s what our model is trying to figure out.

And indeed — although nobody needs any reminders of this after 2016 — Trump can win. All the election models are bullish on Biden, but they are united in that a Trump win is still plausible despite his seemingly steep deficit in polls.

A huge part of why our model and others’ think Trump can still win is the Electoral College. Trump has only a 3 percent chance of winning the popular vote in our model. Other models put his chances at less than 1 percent. It’s very likely that Democrats will win the popular vote for the seventh time in the last eight elections.

But while a roughly 8-point deficit in the popular vote is hard to overcome — as of this writing, at 7:30 p.m. ET on Sunday, our model forecasts Biden to win the popular vote by 7.8 percentage points — a 5-point gap is a lot easier to close. And that’s our current forecast in Pennsylvania: Biden wins by 4.7 points. Note the roughly 3-point gap between the popular vote and the outcome in Pennsylvania, the most likely tipping-point state. That’s similar to 2016, when Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by around 2 points but lost the tipping-point state, Wisconsin, by just a little under 1 point.

Or if you want a more sophisticated version of this, we can look at how often Biden is projected to win the Electoral College from various potential margins in the popular vote:1

Biden needs a popular vote cushion

Probability of winning the Electoral College based on various popular vote outcomes, according to the FiveThirtyEight presidential forecast as of Nov. 1

Popular vote margin
Trump
Biden
269-269 tie




Biden 6 to 7

>99%



Biden 5 to 6
3
97



Biden 4 to 5
10
89
2


Biden 3 to 4
30
67
3


Biden 2 to 3
57
41
2


Biden 1 to 2
75
23
2


TIE to Biden 1
89
10
1


TIE to Trump 1
98
2



Trump 1 to 2
>99

If Biden wins the popular vote by 2 to 3 percentage points, the Electoral College is roughly a toss-up. But if Biden wins the popular vote by less than 2 points, Trump is a fairly heavy favorite to win the election. Even popular vote margins of up to 6 points are not entirely safe for Biden if his votes are distributed in exactly the wrong way. So you can see why an 8- or 9-point lead in the popular vote shouldn’t make Biden feel that secure; despite being a landslide margin, it’s also only a few points removed from the inflection point where the Electoral College starts to become competitive.

Biden’s position would simply be a whole lot safer if one of two things were true: If either the polling in Pennsylvania were like that in Wisconsin and Michigan, where he has a larger lead … or if another state such as Florida were also polling more like Pennsylvania to give Biden a clear Plan B. But neither of those things are true. The gap between Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and Michigan has actually grown in the waning days of the election. And no state has emerged out of the pack of Arizona, North Carolina, Florida and Georgia to be Biden’s clear Plan B (Biden is forecasted to win each state by between 1 and 3 points). Arizona is probably Biden’s best bet in this group, but winning it would also require him to win either Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District or Maine’s 2nd Congressional District to break a 269-269 Electoral College tie; he’s favored in both districts but they aren’t sure things.

Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania is narrow

Forecasted vote share margins for Biden, according to the FiveThirtyEight presidential forecast as of Nov. 1

State
margin




New Mexico
12.8


Virginia
12.1


Colorado
12.0


Maine
11.9


New Hampshire
10.4


Minnesota
9.0


Michigan
8.2


Wisconsin
7.7


Nevada
5.9


Pennsylvania
4.8


Arizona
2.9


Florida
2.1


North Carolina
1.9


Georgia
0.8


Ohio
-0.0


Texas
-1.8


Iowa
-1.9

Moreover, because polling errors are somewhat correlated from state to state, if Biden loses Pennsylvania, he would no longer be a favorite in states such as Florida and Georgia — where he’s narrowly ahead now — because it would be a sign that Trump had outperformed his polls again. Of course, this only goes so far: In 2016, Trump massively outperformed his polls in the Midwest, but there wasn’t much of a polling error in Arizona. Still, losing Pennsylvania would take Biden from favorite to underdog.

Pennsylvania will tell us a lot

Biden’s chances of winning if he wins or loses Pennsylvania, according to the FiveThirtyEight presidential forecast as of Nov. 1

Biden’s chances of winning


State
If he wins Pennsylvania…
If he loses Pennsylvania…




Minnesota
>99%
76%


Michigan
>99
73


Wisconsin
98
66


Maine
95
63


Nevada
92
57


New Hampshire
95
53


Arizona
76
38


Florida
74
27


Georgia
63
23


North Carolina
74
18


Texas
41
10


Iowa
43
6


Ohio
58
4

You’ll notice that I’ve mostly been focusing here on the whats and not the hows or the whys. In other words, I’m describing what combinations of states could plausibly produce winning maps for Trump given the possibility of a polling error, but not describing why such a polling error might occur.

To some extent, that’s on purpose. If pollsters knew what the source of a polling error might be, they’d presumably try to fix it. Many pollsters are weighting by education now, something many didn’t do in 2016, and that was a big source of error that year. Another big source of error in 2016 was the large number of undecided voters, who broke toward Trump in the Midwest. To some extent, that one isn’t on the pollsters, since polls aren’t really supposed to try to predict the vote of people who say they’re undecided. Nonetheless, that’s much less of an issue this year, because there are far fewer undecided voters.

There are, however, some new potential sources of error this year. One of them is the huge growth in people who are voting early or by mail. It’s not only that more people are using these methods, but also that — unlike in the past, when they were relatively bipartisan — Democrats are far more likely to vote by mail than Republicans. Republicans are much more likely to vote in person on Election Day, conversely, while early in-person voting falls somewhere in between.

One issue for pollsters here could be the rate of ballot spoilage. Because of processing delays, some mail ballots won’t be received by states’ deadlines. And voters might not complete the instructions correctly, as we’ve already seen in Pennsylvania with the issue of “naked ballots”, that is, voters forgetting to enclose their ballot in its extra, secrecy envelope.

So imagine, for instance, that in a certain state, the vote is divided evenly at 50-50 in a poll between Biden and Trump. But two-thirds of Biden voters are voting by mail, whereas two-thirds of Trump’s supporters are voting in person, and the rate of mail ballot spoilage is 3 percent. That would be enough for Trump to win 50.8 to 49.2, meaning that you had a polling error of 1 or 2 points.

However, there are several mitigating factors here. First, 3 percent is probably on the high side for mail ballot rejection rates; other estimates hover at closer to 1 percent, although the number could be higher this year with so many first-time mail voters. Second, some ballots are also spoiled during in-person voting because of errors with voting technologies (think about hanging chads, for instance). Third, there is considerable evidence that Democrats mailed in their ballots early, which could put them less at risk of spoilage. According to the United States Elections Project, the party registration on mail ballots received so far favors Democrats by 24 percentage points. But for mail ballots requested but not yet received — those that might trickle in late — the partisan gap is just 11 points in Democrats’ favor. Polls find that Democrats are also more likely to drop off their ballots at drop boxes, which reduces the risk a ballot is rejected.

In addition, there’s something to be said for the idea that it’s worthwhile to lock in a vote. If someone has already voted, they’re 100 percent likely to vote (and 98 or 99 percent likely to have their vote counted, depending on the rate of ballot spoilage). What about someone who says they’re planning to vote on Election Day but hasn’t done so yet? They’re certainly not 100 percent likely to vote. Something could come up on Election Day — they get stuck late at work, they blow out a tire, they feel sick, they don’t bother because they think their candidate is losing. Indeed, even some of the people that pollsters deem to be the most likely voters don’t wind up voting. If 2 percent of mail voters have their votes rejected, but 5 percent of “likely” Election Day voters don’t wind up voting, then polls could underestimate Democrats.

Wait, wasn’t this supposed to be a post about how Trump could beat his polls? Well, the point is just that mail voting creates additional uncertainty this year, and it’s easy to imagine how that could help out Trump or Biden.

Another potential source of anxiety for pollsters is the Hispanic vote. Polls show Trump having made significant gains relative to 2016 with Hispanic voters — and to a lesser extent with Black voters, especially Black men. This is not enough to offset gains that Biden has made with white voters, however, including white voters both with and without a college degree.

But are these changes real? Both white voters and Hispanic voters without a college degree can be hard groups to reach on the phone. It can also be hard to get a representative sample — if, for example, you don’t get enough Cuban American voters in Florida, or if you aren’t reaching enough Hispanic Americans who primarily speak Spanish. Hispanic voters and white voters without a college degree can also work somewhat at cross-purposes to one another when you’re weighting a poll, because while white voters without a college degree are more Republican than whites with a college degree, the opposite is true for Hispanics.

Overall, I don’t particularly think there is any reason to distrust the polls here. If anything, polls have tended to underestimate Democratic support in recent elections in states such as Nevada that had a large number of Hispanic voters. Still, suppose that Trump’s growth in Hispanic support is real, while Biden’s gains among white voters without a college degree are not, for whatever reason. That could lead to a rough night for Biden: The lack of white non-college support could cost him Pennsylvania, while a mediocre performance among Hispanics could keep Arizona and Florida in Trump’s column. Maybe Biden would eke out a win in Georgia or North Carolina, but that’s a much narrower path then he’d planned on.

And what about those “shy” Trump voters? There’s no particularly good evidence that Trump voters are likely to conceal their intentions to pollsters. Nor — if we want to expand the sample size a bit — is there any reason to believe that nationalist or right-wing parties tend to beat their polls in other countries.

Conversely, there is quite a bit of evidence that most of Biden’s polling gains relative to Clinton come from vote-switchers, rather than from an expectation of higher Democratic turnout. If a respondent tells a pollster that they voted for Trump in 2016 but will be voting for Biden this year — and there aren’t a lot of those people, but a few make a big difference — it’s hard to consider them a “shy” Trump voter.

Still, the theory isn’t completely crazy. Social desirability bias — not wanting to provide an answer you think the person on the other side of the line won’t like — has been a problem in some other polling contexts. The point is that even if you mostly aren’t worried about “shy” Trump voters — or think it’s equally likely that there are “shy” Biden voters! — that’s different than being 100 percent sure that the theory isn’t true. And if we’re trying to account for how 10 percent chances happen, we have to accept that sometimes it’s because our assumptions are wrong.

Finally, there are the factors our model doesn’t try to account for, such as the many, many things we’re tracking on our election administration blog: attempts to disqualify various groups of ballots, voter intimidation, polling-place irregularities, and so forth. Plus, there’s a good chance that Trump will try to declare a premature victory.

It isn’t terribly easy to sort out the heat from the light here. But it may sometimes be worth putting magnitudes on things. Problems at one polling place are not going to have nearly as much of an impact as a Republican attempt to throw out 120,000 ballots cast in Texas’s Harris County, for instance. Yet, as much of an affront to democracy as that would be, even that would still only amount to around 1 percent of the vote in one state. Let’s up the ante: What about Republican legislatures trying to send alternative slates of electors to the Electoral College? Now, that could have a really big impact, although it’s not clear how likely it is.

It’s also worth recognizing that there is another side to this, too. There is — long overdue in my view — far more attention paid to voter suppression and voter disenfranchisement than there used to be. (We’ve certainly made a big effort to put far more resources into those stories at FiveThirtyEight.)

But … is it actually harder now to vote than it has been in the past? It depends on the state, but in most states, the answer is no. According to the Brennan Center’s annual reports, recent years have seen more efforts to expand voting rights than to restrict them. And the COVID-19 pandemic has brought about an expansion of voting options, some temporary and some permanent. If it’s still too hard to vote for disadvantaged groups — but it’s easier than it used to be — that could lead to a net increase in turnout for Democrats relative to past elections. The FiveThirtyEight model does try to account for changes to voting laws in each state; that’s part of the reason why it’s relatively bearish on Biden in Texas, for example, which has some of the strictest laws in the country.

So when I say that there are certain things outside the scope of the model — well, the truth is a little bit messier than that. One reason that we make relatively conservative assumptions, such as by using fat-tailed distributions, is to account for “unknown unknowns.”

Here’s what it seems safe to say, though. In an election that is very close, a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court is likely to side with Trump. Our model shows a 4 percent chance of an election that winds up with one or more decisive states within 0.5 percentage points, close enough to trigger a recount. If you want to round up Trump’s odds slightly by assuming he wins the lion’s share of those 4 percent of cases, plus most of the 0.5 percent of the time that the election ends up in an Electoral College tie, I wouldn’t strenuously object to that. Mostly, though, I’d just be worried about the meltdown that could occur if a recount or a tie comes up. The odds are against it, but the stakes are awfully high.

We Can’t Believe We Have To Say This, But You Win An Election By Being Ahead When All The Votes Are Counted

Many pollsters released their final polls of the 2020 election over the weekend. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew analyzes what the recent data tells us about the state of the race in its final days.

Politics Podcast: What The Deluge Of Final Polls Can Tell Us

By Galen Druke, Nate Silver, Clare Malone and Perry Bacon Jr., Galen Druke, Nate Silver, Clare Malone and Perry Bacon Jr., Galen Druke, Nate Silver, Clare Malone and Perry Bacon Jr. and Galen Druke, Nate Silver, Clare Malone and Perry Bacon Jr.












 












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Many pollsters released their final polls of the 2020 election over the weekend, including a Des Moines Register poll that showed President Trump leading by 7 points in Iowa and a set of New York Times polls that showed Joe Biden ahead in four key swing states. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew analyzes what the recent data tells us about the state of the race in its final days. They also discuss the Trump campaign’s efforts to undermine the legitimacy of a potential Biden win by suggesting that the partial ballot counts available on election night should determine the winner, rather than waiting for all votes to be counted in the days or weeks after Nov. 3.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes , the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen .

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes . Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Trump Can Still Win, But The Polls Would Have To Be Off By Way More Than In 2016

To borrow from Cook Political Report’s Dave Wasserman, “I’ve seen enough.”

No, I don’t know who’s going to win the election. According to our forecast, President Trump still has a chance at a second term: a 10 percent chance, to be more specific.

But — even though we’ll still get a ton of polls on Sunday and Monday — I’ve seen enough based on the polls we got earlier this week to know that things aren’t likely to change all that much in our forecast between now and just after midnight on Tuesday, when we’ll freeze it.

There just hasn’t been any real sign that the race is tightening. If anything, Joe Biden’s margins are expanding slightly in the Upper Midwest. And there isn’t any particular reason to expect the race to tighten when more than 90 million people have already voted and the most important news story — that the United States just set a record for the number of COVID-19 cases in a day — is a negative one for Trump.

In fact, in many states, such as North Carolina, we’ve gotten what are likely to be the final polls of the state from most of the major polling firms. The one important exception is Pennsylvania, which some high-quality pollsters seem to have kept as the last state they’re planning to poll. And those polls could matter quite a bit. Pennsylvania is the most likely tipping-point state (it delivers the 270th electoral vote around 37 percent of the time in our forecast), so any deviation from Biden’s current 5.1-point lead in the polls there — say, if Biden climbs to a 6-point lead or falls to a 4-point lead — could make a fairly big difference in our forecast.

But what we’ve seen so far in Pennsylvania doesn’t suggest much movement in the polls. We’ve gotten two live-caller polls since the debate: A Muhlenberg College poll published this morning had Biden up by 5 points, closely matching our average in the state. And a Quinnipiac University poll had Biden ahead by 7, which is not quite as good for Biden as it might seem — Quinnipiac has generally had friendly results for him this cycle and their previous poll of the state had him up by 7 as well.

And if nothing changes at all in the polls, Biden’s chances of winning will nonetheless increase slightly by Tuesday morning in our forecast. That’s for two reasons:

Trump is still receiving a tiny boost in our forecast based on economic conditions and incumbency, currently amounting to an 0.2-percentage-point shift. But this will fall to 0 percent by Election Day.
Uncertainty in the forecast will also be slightly reduced when we actually make it to Election Day.

That said, Biden’s current lead of 8 to 9 points nationally is quite large given our highly polarized political environment, so maybe a few of the remaining undecided voters will drift to Trump. Don’t be surprised if Biden drops to 86 percent — or jumps to 94 percent — in our final forecast.

But I don’t think that Biden and Trump are likely to escape the current zone that they’re in. Here’s what I mean by that: I think of election forecast odds as basically falling within the following four zones.

The Gray Area.
The Normal-Polling-Error Zone.
The Zone of Plausibility.
The Outer Reaches.

The Gray Area is the closest zone, when it’s actually hard to tell who’s ahead, and different methods of averaging the polls or modeling out the results might give you different answers. The race isn’t in that zone this year: Biden is unambiguously ahead in the polls.

The Normal-Polling-Error Zone is a place we talked about in 2016, when we told you that Trump was only a normal-sized polling error away from beating Hillary Clinton. What did that mean? It meant that if polls were off by about the amount they’ve been off in past elections — by around 3 points, on average — and the error favored Trump, then he’d probably win the Electoral College. And that’s basically what happened, although the polling was worse in some states than others.

In probability terms, I think of the Normal-Polling-Error Zone as extending from the favorite having anything from around a 60 percent chance up to around an 84 percent chance of winning. That amounts to an error of no more than one standard deviation.1 Or to put it another way, it’s a zone where polling errors big enough for the underdog to win are going to occur quite routinely without anything particularly special having to happen. Polling is a challenging business, and while polls get the outcome right more often than not, nailing every election to within a point or two is hard.

The Zone of Plausibility. This is where we are this year. I think of the Zone of Plausibility as extending out to reflect an error of up to two standard deviations — so, it’s a race where the favorite has somewhere from an 84 percent to 98 percent chance of winning. You wouldn’t consider the underdog winning in an election like this to be a routine occurrence. But, well, it’s plausible, and it isn’t that hard to find precedents for it.

The polls were off by more than 7 points in 1980, for instance, underestimating Ronald Reagan’s margin of victory. (That would likely be enough for Trump to win in an election where he trails in the most likely tipping-point state, Pennsylvania, by 5 points.) Harry Truman beat the final Gallup poll in 1948 by 9 points in an upset victory. And the polls missed by 5 points in 1996, underestimating Bob Dole.

The @FiveThirtyEight nat'l polling average with 3 days until E-Day:

2020: Biden+8.6
2016: Clinton+3.9
2012: Obama+0.3
2008: Obama+6.7
2004: Bush+2.3
2000: Bush+3.6
1996: Clinton+13.8
1992: Clinton+7.6
1988: Bush+10.1
1984: Reagan+17.7
1980: Reagan+2.2
1976: Carter+0.03

— Nathaniel Rakich (@baseballot) October 31, 2020

Now, we can debate exactly how applicable those precedents are today. There’s much more polling this year than in 1980 or in 1996. And in 1948, it wasn’t “the polling” that was off since there was just one polling firm, Gallup — maybe if there had been a Quinnipiac poll or something back then, it would correctly have forecasted Truman’s victory.

The point, though, again, is that a Trump win is plausible. And all the other models I’ve seen have Trump within the Zone of Plausibility too, although the Economist’s model, which has his chances at 4 percent, is pushing it a bit.

At the same time, though, a 2016-style polling error wouldn’t be enough for Trump to win. In the chart below — taking a page from The Upshot, which has also been doing this — I’ve taken our final polling averages in 2016 and shown how they compared to the actual results. And then I’ve shown what the results would be based on this year’s polling average if the polls were exactly as wrong as in 2016 in exactly the same states.

What if polls are as wrong as 2016? Biden still wins

State polling averages for Clinton pre-election and her final margin in that state. Current state polling averages for Biden, and what the margin would be if the 2016 errors were repeated

Democrats’ polling lead or deficit



Clinton 2016
Biden 2020


State
Polling Average
Final Margin
Polling Average
With the 2016 error …




Arizona
-2.3
-3.5
+3.1
+1.9


Colorado
+3.8
+4.9
+13.8
+14.9


Florida
+0.5
-1.2
+2.1
+0.4


Georgia
-4.0
-5.1
+1.6
+0.5


Iowa
-3.4
-9.4
+0.1
-5.9


Maine
+6.9
-3.0
+13.8
+3.9


ME-2
-0.4
-10.3
+2.6
-7.3


Michigan
+4.0
-0.2
+8.8
+4.6


Minnesota
+5.9
+1.5
+8.9
+4.5


NE-2
-0.7
-2.2
+6.2
+4.7


Nevada
+0.7
+2.4
+5.8
+7.5


New Hampshire
+3.4
+0.4
+11.1
+8.1


New Mexico
+5.3
+8.2
+11.0
+13.9


North Carolina
+0.7
-3.7
+2.4
-2.0


Ohio
-2.0
-8.1
-0.9
-7.0


Pennsylvania
+3.7
-0.7
+5.1
+0.7


Texas
-8.5
-9.0
-1.0
-1.5


Virginia
+5.4
+5.3
+11.4
+11.3


Wisconsin
+5.4
-0.8
+8.6
+2.4

Source: Polls

Takeaway? Joe Biden would win. In fact, he’d win 335 electoral votes, including those in Florida, Georgia and Arizona. A lot of these wins would be close — he’d win by around 2 points in Arizona and Wisconsin, by and less than 1 point in Florida, Georgia and Pennsylvania, so he’d have to sweat a bit, but he’d win.

Meanwhile, although there are a lot of uncertainties this year that our model tries to account for — for instance, whether pollsters are correctly blending the early vote with the Election Day vote — there are also other things that could make a big polling error less likely. For instance, the polls have been very stable so far in the race, and the large number of people who have already voted makes a last-minute shift even less likely. There are also few undecided voters: Joe Biden is polling at above 50 percent in all states that Clinton won except Nevada, plus he clears that line Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania (albeit just barely; he’s at 50.1 percent there) and Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District. Those are enough to give him 273 electoral votes.

What’s beyond the Zone of Plausibility? Well, there are The Outer Reaches. But you don’t want to visit. It’s a cold, barren place, full of esoteric debates about whether probability distributions should have fat tails (ours do!) and how much you can distinguish, say, a 1-in-100 probability from a 1-in-1,000 one when you have only 15 or 20 elections in your sample to work from.

But we’re not in the Outer Reaches, and we’re very unlikely to wind up there before Tuesday. A Trump win remains plausible. And note that, with his 10 percent chance, our model is specifically referring to a legitimate win; we do not account for what we call “extraconstitutional shenanigans,” by Trump or anyone else, such as trying to prevent mail ballots from being counted.

Still, Trump isn’t in as strong a position as he was in 2016. As you can see in the table above, he’s polling worse than he was against Clinton in every single battleground state. Polls can be wrong — indeed, the whole point of our probabilistic forecast is to tell you the chances of that — but they’re more likely to be wrong when a candidate’s lead is narrower. As of right now, Biden’s lead is large enough that Trump’s chances of winning are 10 percent, considerably lower than the 35 percent chance he had at this point in 2016.

What Are The Chances We’ll Know The Next President On Election Night?

FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver discusses the race in Pennsylvania, when we’ll know the outcome of the general election, and the chances that the Supreme Court will need to step in to determine the winner of the presidency.

Why Trump Has A Better Chance Of Winning Pennsylvania Than Wisconsin Or Michigan

In this installment of Model Talk, editor-in-chief Nate Silver and Galen Druke discuss how the latest polling has shifted in some of the key battleground states and whether there is reason to believe that “shy Trump voters” could give the president an upset win.

Politics Podcast: There Just Isn’t Good Evidence That ‘Shy’ Trump Voters Exist

By Galen Druke and Nate Silver and Galen Druke and Nate Silver












 












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This is the final(!) preelection installment of Model Talk on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast. Galen Druke talks to editor-in-chief Nate Silver about the latest polling shifts in key battleground states and whether there is any reason to believe that “shy Trump voters” will deliver an upset win for the president on Election Day. (The evidence suggests there isn’t.)

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes , the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen .

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We Have A Lot Of New Polls, But There’s Little Sign Of The Presidential Race Tightening

After a surprisingly sluggish weekend for polling, the floodgates have opened, with a mix of high-quality polls, low-quality polls and pretty much everything in between. And although there are some outliers in both directions, they tell a fairly consistent story, overall: A steady race nationally, perhaps with some gains for Joe Biden in the Midwest.

Let’s dive right in. Following our rules from my colleague Geoffrey Skelley’s post earlier this week, we’re going to look at every poll where at least half of the survey took place after last week’s debate, with a comparison to the most recent pre-debate survey by the same firm. If the pollster hasn’t surveyed a state before, we’ll make the comparison based on what the FiveThirtyEight polling average said in that state as of the night of the debate (Oct. 22) instead.

As an aside, I set a cutoff for polls as of 7 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday. (More will probably have filtered into the averages by the time that you’re reading this.) We’ll rotate through the four major regions of the country — the South, the West, the Midwest and the Northeast. But first, here are the post-debate national polls:

National polls since the final debate

Polls conducted entirely (or mostly) after the Oct. 22 debate compared to the last poll from the same pollster

Biden lead



Pollster
Now
Before
change




US
Change Research
+8.0
+10.0
-2.0


US
CNN/SSRS
+12.0
+16.0
-4.0


US
Economist/YouGov
+11.0
+9.0
+2.0


US
Global Marketing Reserch Services
+14.0
+16.0
-2.0


US
Hart Research/Public Opinion Strategies
+11.0
+9.0
+2.0


US
IBD/TIPP
+5.0
+5.0
+0.0


US
J.L. Parnters
+14.0
+10.0
+4.0


US
Leger
+8.0
+9.0
-1.0


US
Morning Consult
+9.0
+9.0
+0.0


US
Qriously
+10.0
+12.0
-2.0


US
Rasmussen Reports
-1.0
+3.0
-4.0


US
Redfield & Wilton Strategies
+10.0
+11.0
-1.0


US
Reuters/Ipsos
+10.0
+8.0
+2.0


US
RMG Research
+7.0
+8.0
-1.0


US
SurveyMonkey
+4.0
+6.0
-2.0


US
Yahoo News/YouGov
+12.0
+11.0
+1.0


US
Average
+9.0
+9.5
-0.5

Source: polls

On average, Biden leads by 9 percentage points using a simple average of post-debate national polls, which matches his 9-point lead in our fancy-schmancy official FiveThirtyEight national average.

It’s a bit of a weird mix of polls, though, with more quantity than quality. The only two fully live-caller national polls in here are from CNN and CNBC/Hart Research/Public Opinion Strategies, which show Biden leading by 12 points and 11 points, respectively. On the one hand, the trendlines aren’t so bad for Trump in those live-caller polls. He trailed by 16 points in CNN’s previous national poll and by 9 points in the past Hart Research/Public Opinion Strategies poll (or by 11 if you prefer to compare it to the prior NBC/Wall Street Journal national poll, which uses the same polling team).

On the other hand, the higher-quality national polls are showing worse results for Trump than the lower-quality polls, which is rarely a good sign. More highly rated online firms — such as YouGov, Morning Consult and Ipsos — show Trump trailing by margins ranging from 9 to 12 points.

At least some of the fluctuations in our national polling average seem to reflect shifts in the ratio of high-quality and low-quality surveys. This can go through cycles, and recently the higher-quality firms have mostly been concentrating on state polling. Most of them will release their final national polls soon, though, and it wouldn’t be surprising if, following CNN and CNBC’s example, a few more of them show double-digit leads for Biden.

Something else to note: Although there’s been a slight decline in Biden’s national polls since the debate, a majority of state polls show his position improving. To be more precise, Biden has gained 0.7 percentage points in the average state poll since the debate, while he’s lost 0.5 points in the average national poll. That brings the national and state polls into better alignment after a period where national polls suggested that Biden led by 10 to 11 points but state polls were more consistent with a lead of about 9 points instead.

Let’s start our review of the regions with the South, where there’s been a lot of polling over the past couple of days:

Polls of Southern states since the final debate

Polls conducted entirely (or mostly) after the Oct. 22 debate compared to the last poll from the same pollster

Biden lead



Pollster
Now
Before
change




FL
Florida Atlantic
+2.0
+4.0
-2.0


FL
Reuters/Ipsos
+1.5
+4.5
-3.0


FL
Susquehanna Polling & Research
-5.0
+4.0
-9.0


GA
Civiqs
+5.0
+3.0
+2.0


GA
Monmouth University
+3.0
-3.5
+6.5


MS
Civiqs*
-14.0
-15.0
+1.0


NC
Gravis Marketing
+3.0
-3.0
+6.0


NC
Harper Polling
+1.0
-1.0
+2.0


NC
Public Policy Polling
+4.0
+4.0
+0.0


NC
Reuters/Ipsos
+1.0
+2.5
-1.5


NC
RMG Research
+1.0
+2.0
-1.0


NC
SurveyUSA
+0.0
+5.0
-5.0


SC
East Carolina University
-8.0
-12.0
+4.0


SC
Starboard Communications*
-7.0
-7.0
+0.0


TX
Data for Progress
+1.0
+1.0
+0.0


TX
NYT Upshot/Siena
-4.0
-3.0
-1.0



Average
-1.0
-0.9
-0.1

* The firm had not previously polled the state and the change is based on the FiveThirtyEight average as of the Oct. 22 debate.

Source: polls

It’s hard to tell a coherent story here because every state in the region seems to be marching to its own fight song. Biden’s gotten some great numbers in Georgia since the debate, but he’s had some terrible ones in Florida. North Carolina is somewhere in between, with polls variously suggesting that he’s gaining or losing ground.

Do I buy that there are these microfluctations between neighboring states? I’m not sure that I do, particularly since you have a different mix of pollsters from state to state. Florida and Georgia could use one or two more high-quality polls.

For the time being, though, Biden’s small lead in our Georgia polling average (+1.4) nearly equals his lead in Florida (also +1.4) and North Carolina (+2.1). That means Georgia needs to be taken seriously as a plausible — if unlikely — tipping-point state. It’s going to be the focus of a lot of resource expenditures over the final few days of the campaign, especially since it also has two competitive Senate races. Texas is a step or two away from the rest of the Southern group, meanwhile, as Trump leads in our polling average by 1.8 points there.

Next up on our whirlwind tour of America … the West:

Polls of Western states since the final debate

Polls conducted entirely (or mostly) after the Oct. 22 debate compared to the last poll from the same pollster

Biden lead



Pollster
Now
Before
change




AZ
Gravis Marketing
+4.0
+2.0
+2.0


AZ
Ipsos
+1.0
+3.5
-2.5


AZ
Justice Collaborative Institute*
+6.0
+4.0
+2.0


AZ
OH Predictive Insights
+3.0
+3.5
-0.5


AZ
Patinkin Research Strategies*
+7.0
+4.0
+3.0


MT
Public Policy Polling
-2.0
-6.0
+4.0


NV
NYT/Siena College
+6.0
+6.0
+0.0



Average
+3.6
+2.4
+1.1

* The firm had not previously polled the state and the change is based on the FiveThirtyEight average as of the Oct. 22 debate.

Source: Polls

This is a decent set of polls for Biden, including in Arizona, where Biden’s lead has oscillated between 3 and 5 points in our polling average for most of the year. It’s in the lower-to-mid part of that range now, at 3.5 points in our official polling average, although the raw average of post-debate Arizona polls is slightly better for him at +4.2.

I realize this might seem like splitting hairs, but Arizona is an important state for Biden, insofar as it’s probably his best backup option if he loses Pennsylvania. (If Biden loses Pennsylvania but wins Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin, he’d also need to find one more electoral vote somewhere to break a 269-269 Electoral College tie, but he’d probably get that in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, where he’s favored.)

In a world where Arizona is polling at Biden +5, it’s really almost as though he has a Plan A1 (Pennsylvania) and Plan A2 (Arizona plus NE-2). That would make his map more robust. In a world where Arizona is Biden +2 or Biden +3, conversely, it doesn’t really stand out from his other backup options, such as North Carolina and Florida, so it would be as though Biden has one Plan A (Pennsylvania) and a bunch of Plan Cs.

Now to the Midwest:

Polls of Midwestern states since the final debate

Polls conducted entirely (or mostly) after the Oct. 22 debate compared to the last poll from the same pollster

Biden lead



Pollster
Now
Before
change




IA
RABA Research
+4.0
+2.0
+2.0


MI
ABC News/Washington Post*
+7.0
+8.0
-1.0


MI
Glengariff Group
+8.0
+9.0
-1.0


MI
Gravis Marketing
+13.0
+9.0
+4.0


MI
NYT Upshot/Siena
+8.0
+8.0
+0.0


MI
Reuters/Ipsos
+9.5
+8.0
+1.5


MN
Gravis Marketing
+14.0
+16.0
-2.0


WI
ABC News/Washington Post
+17.0
+6.0
+11.0


WI
Gravis Marketing
+11.0
+8.0
+3.0


WI
Marquette Law School
+5.0
+5.0
+0.0



Average
+9.6
+7.9
+1.7

* The firm had not previously polled the state and the change is based on the FiveThirtyEight average as of the Oct. 22 debate.

Source: polls

FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich covered this region this morning, so I’ll be brief here. This is the one part of the country where you can’t really say the race is steady; instead, this has been a strong set of polling for Biden, and he’s gained an average of 1.7 points in surveys in this region versus the pre-debate polls.

No, Trump probably doesn’t trail in Wisconsin by 17 points, as he does in the ABC News/Washington Post poll. (Good pollsters publish their outliers instead of sitting on them, and sometimes they turn out not to be outliers at all.) But average the ABC News poll with the three other post-debate polls of Wisconsin, and Biden is still ahead by 10.5 points there.

Biden’s polling gains may reflect that the COVID-19 outbreak in the Upper Midwest is bad right now, especially in Wisconsin. There is some evidence that the polls tend to shift against Trump following spikes in COVID-19 cases in a state, potentially a foreboding indicator for Trump as COVID-19 cases are also now rising sharply in many other states.

Finally, to the Northeast:

Polls of Northeastern states since the final debate

Polls conducted entirely (or mostly) after the Oct. 22 debate compared to the last poll from the same pollster

Biden lead



Pollster
Now
Before
change




ME
Colby College
+13.0
+11.0
+2.0


PA
Civiqs
+7.0
+6.0
+1.0


PA
Gravis Marketing
+7.0
+3.0
+4.0


PA
InsiderAdvantage
-3.0
+3.0
-6.0


PA
Reuters/Ipsos
+5.0
+4.0
+1.0



Average
+5.8
+5.4
+0.4

Source: polls

By the Northeast, as you can see from the chart above, I really just mean … Pennsylvania, plus one stray poll of Maine. This region has been underpolled. There haven’t been any live-caller polls of Pennsylvania since the debate, and the online and IVR polls show highly disparate results there. New Hampshire has had no post-debate polling at all, meanwhile.

We go back and forth here at FiveThirtyEight about whether Pennsylvania counts as part of the Northeast or the Midwest. I’ve usually been a proponent of the theory that for political purposes, Pennsylvania behaves like a Midwestern state. There are some important geographic, demographic and cultural differences between Pennsylvania and the Upper Midwest, however, and this year, the polling in Pennsylvania hasn’t tracked the numbers in Wisconsin and Michigan that well. Pennsylvania is also not currently experiencing as bad of a COVID-19 outbreak as those other states. So it may be less correlated with them than usual.

But one way or another, the final round of high-quality, live-caller polls in Pennsylvania is likely to make a big difference to our model. Pennsylvania is by far the most likely tipping-point state. If Biden gets up to, say, a 6- or 7-point lead there, he’ll be in a much safer position overall in the Electoral College than if he gets knocked down to a 4-point lead here instead. More polling of the Keystone State is surely to come soon.