Nate Silver's Blog, page 36
October 9, 2020
The Politics Podcast Answers Your Questions About The Forecast
In this episode of Model Talk, Nate Silver and Galen Druke discuss the latest movements in our 2020 election forecasts and answer some listener questions.
Politics Podcast: How The Model Is Responding To Biden’s Double-Digit Lead In The Polls
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Joe Biden’s lead over President Trump in the presidential race grew to double digits in our national polling average on Friday. In this episode of “Model Talk” on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Nate Silver talks to Galen Druke about why Trump’s national position has worsened, how it compares with his polls in key battleground states and what the forecasts of the House and Senate look like. They also answer listener questions.
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.
October 8, 2020
Does Trump Need The Next Debate?
UPDATE (Oct. 8, 2020, 12:45 p.m.): President Trump has now agreed to participate in an in-person presidential debate on Oct. 22, an idea that the Biden campaign had initially proposed after Trump said he would not participate in the virtual debate scheduled for Oct. 15. The third presidential debate will take place Oct. 29, according to Trump’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien.
Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.
sarah (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): On Thursday, the Commission on Presidential Debates announced that next week’s presidential debate would be held virtually. President Trump, however, has said that he isn’t going to waste his time with a virtual debate, promising instead to hold a rally.
Trump is down 9.8 points in national polls and is steadily losing ground each day in our forecast to Biden, as we inch ever closer to the election. Refusing then to participate in the debate when he could use it as an opportunity to mount a comeback against former vice president Joe Biden is a curious choice. Doesn’t Trump need the debates to mount a comeback?
Let’s talk Trump’s case for — and the case against — needing the debates.
OK, what’s the case for him needing them?
geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst): He needs something. #analysis
But seriously, the debates are among the few, regularly scheduled major moments in the fall campaign, so they do present an opportunity to shake things up, even if they’re not certain to do so.
natesilver (Nate Silver, editor in chief): To a first approximation, I agree with that, although it’s overstated. Our research on primary debates suggested that a debate is equivalent to something like six to 10 days of normal campaigning and news, in terms of how much they move the polls. So it’s as if Trump is taking a week off the clock in an election in which he trails by 10 points.
With that said, maybe this ups the importance of the third debate — if there is one.
geoffrey.skelley: But we also can’t know given Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis whetherif Trump is really up for a two-hour debate right now, so perhaps he’s avoiding something that could be even more damaging.
sarah: One thing we talked about a lot going into the first presidential debate, is how much that first debate (more than the others) can really shake things up, but as former FiveThirtyEighter Harry Enten has also written, the second debate is not necessarily a game changer, and there’s no reason to believe that the person who didn’t do well in the first debate rebounds in the second.
Isn’t it possible then, that Trump, holding his own rally in which he doesn’t have to play by any moderator rules, isn’t necessarily a terrible move?
nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): The problem is that he’s been holding campaign rallies all year long, and they haven’t helped him overtake Biden in the polls.
The days when cable news would air his rallies nationally are over. Maybe they get some nice local earned media, but that simply isn’t gonna measure up to a debate, as Nate mentioned.
geoffrey.skelley: It depends on the coverage. If it’s “Trump hasn’t recovered from COVID-19 and it’s irresponsible to be holding rallies,” I can’t imagine that helps him when 60 percent of the country said Trump was wrong to say we shouldn’t be afraid of COVID-19, and two-thirds said if he’d taken the coronavirus more seriously, he probably wouldn’t have gotten sick.
natesilver: Yeah, Trump is a fairly bad debater to begin with and it’s fairly likely that he would still be experiencing physical or mental ailments by next week thanks to his COVID-19 diagnosis. So the CPD gives him an excuse to pull out rather than him looking like a 
The Vice Presidential Debate Was Civil. But Did It Shake Up The Race?
In this episode of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew reacts to the first and only vice presidential debate.
October 7, 2020
Trump Has Three Big Problems Heading Toward Election Day
President Trump has fallen further behind Joe Biden in the polls. According to FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver, Trump has three main problems holding him back.
2020 House Forecast
P
S
H
Find a race
FiveThirtyEight
UPDATED 1 HOUR AGO
Democrats are clearly favored to win the House
Each party’s seat count in scenarios where it wins the House in our Deluxe model’s 40,000 simulations. Higher bars represent more common outcomes.
Average: 236.7
Majority
Majority
221 D
253 D
80% ofoutcomes fallin this range
80% ofoutcomes fallin this range
Morelikely
255
255
235
235
220
220
240
240
260
260
280
280
300
300
320
320
Democrats have an 80% chance of holding between 221 and 253 seats.
In 7 in 100 scenarios, Republicans win control
In 93 in 100 scenarios, Democrats win control
This is our overview of the race to control the House, but if you want to see a specific race, check out the search bar in the top left.
2020 ELECTION COVERAGE
What We Actually Know About the President’s Health
By FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast
How The Two-Party System Obscures The Complexity Of Black Americans’ Politics
By Hakeem Jefferson and Alan Yan
There are three versions of our congressional forecasts, and this year we’re defaulting to the Deluxe 
October 6, 2020
The Economy Was Trump’s One Remaining Advantage. Now He Might Have Blown It.
President Trump was already in a deep electoral hole following the first debate, but one remaining bright spot for him was the economy. So calling on Republican leaders to end talks with Democrats on another stimulus package — as Trump did on Tuesday — would seem like a bad move for the president, and, in fact, it did send the stock market tumbling.
True, U.S. GDP fell at an annualized rate of 31.7 percent in the second quarter, the largest ever quarterly decline. But Trump’s approval ratings on the economy had remained relatively solid despite this: 51 percent of voters approve of his economic handling and 47 percent disapprove of it, according to the Real Clear Politics average. The economy has also been one of the few issues on which polls regularly find that voters prefer Trump to Joe Biden.
How to explain this seeming disconnect? Well, Trump can actually make some decent arguments to voters about the economy that are grounded in the data. For instance, the economy was pretty good during his first three years in office. And the rebound has been pretty swift. The Atlanta Federal Reserve’s “nowcast” estimates that GDP grew by a 35.3 percent annualized rate in the third quarter, which ended on Sept. 30. That still leaves the economy in worse shape than before the pandemic,1 but not that much worse.
Trump had also been able to patch a lot of holes in the economy with the series of stimulus packages passed by Congress earlier this year, which injected trillions of dollars into the economy in the form of direct cash payments, expanded unemployment benefits and protections for businesses. Indeed, one of the economic indicators that has historically been among the most reliable predictors of the election — disposable income — sharply increased amid the pandemic because of the stimulus benefits, although it has since fallen as those benefits have lapsed:
The FiveThirtyEight economic index, an element of our presidential forecast, is pretty consistent, too, with Trump’s decent approval ratings on the economy, in part because of that growth in disposable income. Here’s what it said as of Tuesday morning, and as you can see in the table below, three of the six categories we use — income, inflation and the stock market — were actually slightly positive for Trump. That partly makes up for exceptionally poor jobs numbers, and fairly poor pandemic-driven numbers on manufacturing and consumer spending. (The values in our economic index are z-scores, or the number of standard deviations above or below the mean in each category, based on past and projected economic data in the two years in the runup to the election with recent quarters weighted much more heavily.)
The economic news wasn’t all that bad
FiveThirtyEight’s economic Index as of 8 a.m. Eastern on Oct. 6, 2020
Category
Indicator
Z-Score
Income
Real disposable personal income
+0.57
Inflation
Consumer price index
+0.64
Jobs
Nonfarm payrolls
-2.39
Manufacturing
Industrial production
-1.34
Spending
Personal consumption expenditures
-1.11
Stock Market
S&P 500
+0.79
Combined
Average of all six indicators
-0.47
The values in our economic index are z-scores, or the number of standard deviations above or below the mean in each category, based on past and projected economic data in the two years in the runup to the election with recent quarters weighted much more heavily.
And, overall, if we average the six categories together, the economic index is only about half a standard deviation below average. In a time of high polarization and since Trump is an elected incumbent — elected incumbents usually win reelection — this isn’t that bad. In fact, the “fundamentals” part of our model actually predicted an almost 50/50 split in the popular vote based on recent values of the economic index.
Clearly the economic index doesn’t capture all that is going on in the country, though — especially since Trump is 8 or 9 points behind in national polls. But stay with me for a moment. We can use the index to get some rough idea of how much the stimulus funding earlier in the year might have helped Trump.
Suppose, for instance, that absent any stimulus, the disposable income component of our index had a z-score of -2.39, which was as bad as the jobs component. If that were the case, Trump would then have been favored to lose the popular vote by 3 points based on the index, instead of it being tied. So maybe instead of being 8 or 9 points down in polls — given how poorly voters think he’s handled COVID-19 and everything else — he might have been 11 or 12 points behind instead.
And that probably isn’t going far enough, since the stimulus package likely also helped with other categories such as manufacturing and consumer spending. Judging by the reaction of investors after talks broke off on Tuesday, it also helped keep the stock market happy. So suppose instead that five of the six indicators in our index — everything other than inflation — had a z-score as bad as the jobs component (-2.39). Under that scenario, Trump would have been expected to lose by 8 points based on the economic index and incumbency. Throw his other problems into the mix and we’d potentially be talking about a mid-double-digit loss.
That’s certainly not to imply that the collapse of further stimulus spending will cause a further 3-point or 8-point shift in the polls away from Trump. The news comes pretty close to the election (in our model, only 11 percent of the forecast is now based on the economy and incumbency, and this will fall to 0 percent by Election Day), the stimulus wasn’t necessarily likely to pass anyway, and the failure of further stimulus funding doesn’t entirely erase the fact that people and businesses did get some help in the spring.
But it’s still a hard move to comprehend, especially at a time when the president’s numbers were already declining — mildly in some polls, and sharply so in others. And the way Trump went about it makes matters worse for him, politically. Up until this point, House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi had faced at least a little bit of a risk: Though the stimulus might have helped Trump, she could have been partly blamed if talks collapsed. But now, Trump’s tweets make it clear that he was the one who pulled out of the talks.
Further stimulus spending was also really popular. Voters surveyed in the New York Times/Siena College national poll in late September favored a $2 trillion stimulus package by a 72-23 margin.
The possibility that the race would tighten in the stretch run because of economic improvement was one of the things helping Trump most in our model. Trump’s Electoral College chances were at 17 percent in our forecast as of Tuesday afternoon — his lowest figure of the year — but still a lot better than zero. The economic index was responsible for part of that 17 percent, however. Now, though, with voters possibly encountering news of layoffs instead of renewed growth, Trump may have undermined his best comeback strategy.
October 5, 2020
Biden Has Made Some Modest Gains After The Debate
There’s been so much news going on that I nearly forgot about the existence of a Supreme Court vacancy when participating in a virtual conference this morning. And in some ways, the news makes life hard for us polling analysts. We have had, in rapid succession: the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a series of threats by President Trump in which he refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power, the announcement of Trump’s intention to nominate Amy Coney Barrett to replace Ginsburg, the release of substantial information about the president’s tax returns by the New York Times, the first presidential debate, the news of Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis and subsequent hospitalization — along with a cluster of other cases at the White House — and now his plans to leave Walter Reed Medical Center later today.
With that said, the debate provides a clear enough line in the sand — with many pollsters planning releases just prior to or just after the debate — that it’s worth doing a before-and-after comparison of the polls.1 One way to discern this is via our national polling average, where Biden’s lead has inched up to 8.1 points from 7.1 points before the debate:
Another way to see this is by comparing post-debate polls to the last, pre-debate version of both national polls and polls of the same states by the same polling firms. That’s what I’ve done in the table below, covering the 11 national polls and 11 state polls that have been released since the debate. And on average, Biden gained 1.5 percentage points from the pre-debate to the post-debate versions of these polls.
Biden’s gained some ground since the debate
Change in Joe Biden’s margin in each pollster’s post-debate poll compared to their latest, pre-debate version, at the state and national level
Pre-debate poll
Post-debate poll
Pollster
End date
Biden lead or deficit
end date
Biden lead or deficit
Diff.
AZ
NYT/Siena
9/15
+9.0
10/3
+8.0
-1.0
FL
NYT/Siena
6/18
+6.0
10/1
+5.0
-1.0
GA
Landmark Communications
8/31
-7.0
9/30
+2.0
+9.0
MI
Public Policy Polling
8/29
+4.0
10/1
+6.0
+2.0
MO
Remington
9/17
-8.0
10/1
-5.0
+3.0
NH
Emerson College
11/26/19
+4.0
10/2
+8.0
+4.0
OH
Trafalgar Group
10/3
-4.0
OH
YouGov
7/24
-1.0
10/2
+0.0
+1.0
PA
YouGov
9/21
+4.0
10/2
+7.0
+3.0
PA
NYT/Siena
9/27
+9.0
10/2
+7.0
-2.0
US
YouGov
9/23
+5.0
10/3
+8.0
+3.0
US
YouGov
9/23
+5.0
10/2
+8.0
+3.0
US
NBC/WSJ
9/16
+8.0
10/1
+14.0
+6.0
US
John Zogby Strategies
8/29
+4.5
10/2
+2.0
-2.5
US
IBD/TIPP
9/19
+6.0
10/1
+3.0
-3.0
US
HarrisX
9/25
+5.0
10/1
+7.0
+2.0
US
Data for Progress
9/15
+11.0
10/1
+10.0
-1.0
US
Ipsos
9/29
+9.0
10/1
+9.0
+0.0
US
Ipsos
9/29
+9.0
10/3
+10.0
+1.0
US
Change Research
9/20
+9.0
9/30
+13.0
+4.0
US
Morning Consult
9/29
+8.0
10/4
+9.0
+1.0
Trafalgar Group has not previously polled Ohio, so no comparison is available. For the John Zogby Strategies polls, versions with and without third-party candidates are averaged together. The previous NYT/Siena poll in Florida and the Emerson College poll in New Hampshire was conducted among registered voters, while the post-debate polls were conducted among likely voters.
In some cases, the pre-debate poll was conducted months before the debate. But even if we only focus on the polls that released results at some point in September, the top line is similar: Biden’s gain is 1.4 percentage points, on average. And for what it’s worth, a swing of 1 or 2 points toward Biden is consistent with the effects that first debates have had for challengers in the past — although we should note that sometimes a debate bounce fades after a couple of weeks.
These averages, of course, conceal a lot of variation within individual polls; depending on which poll you look at, Biden’s national lead is as large as 14 points (in the most recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll) or as small as 2 points (in a John Zogby Strategies poll). I’ll admit to finding the NBC/WSJ poll intriguing, as it’s the only live-caller national poll we have since the debate, and NBC/WSJ polls tend to stick pretty close to our polling averages. Still, averaging the polls is the right strategy in the long run.
Because so many polls have recently been released, you’re going to have a few eccentricities. Remember, an 800-person poll nominally has a 3.5-point margin of error. However, that margin pertains only to one candidate’s vote share; in a two-candidate race, the margin of error on the difference between the candidates will be roughly twice that then, or 7 points in this case. That means, if Biden is truly ahead by 8 points, it should be fairly routine to get everything from a 15-point Biden lead to a 1-point lead. And keep in mind that with a confidence interval of 95 percent, the margin of error only covers 95 percent of polls; 1 in 20 polls should fall outside that range. (At least in theory; in practice, pollsters are often reluctant to publish polls that appear to be large outliers.)
It’s harder to tell, though, what effect the president’s COVID-19 diagnosis may have had on the race. YouGov conducted polls right before and after the news and found Biden ahead by 8 points in both. Morning Consult shows Biden having gained 1 point over the past few days. And Ipsos had Biden ahead by 10 points in a poll conducted after the news of Trump’s diagnosis broke, compared to Biden’s 9-point advantage in a poll conducted after the debate but before the president’s diagnosis. The John Zogby Strategies poll that showed Biden ahead by only 2 points nationally was also conducted after the COVID-19 news, although that’s not a pollster I’d give a lot of credence to.
The series of state polls by the New York Times and Siena College are also worth mentioning here, since they’re the only live-caller polls in the mix apart from the NBC/WSJ one — and since they were conducted partly after Trump’s COVID-19 diagnosis. And these contain strong results for Biden, showing him with leads of 8 points in Arizona, 7 points in Pennsylvania and 5 points in Florida– above his polling averages in each state. However, they’re still smaller leads than what previous NYT/Siena polls of those states found — Biden led by 9 points in their Arizona poll in September, for instance.
This raises an interesting question: Should you focus more on how a poll compares to a pollster’s previous poll or how it compares to other polls in that state? There isn’t really a right answer here, it’s a mix of both. But to explain how our model views this, in the case of the September Arizona poll, a 9-point lead had been a particularly strong result for Biden to the point of being a mild outlier. So the most recent NYT/Siena poll counted as a good result for him on balance, as it confirmed he has a clear lead there now, and he gained ground in our Arizona polling average.
Finally, keep in mind that the reason it’s still so hard to understand the effects of the president’s COVID-19 diagnosis is because it is an evolving story. It’s not just his prognosis, which can vary from day to day under the coronavirus, but also the news about the cluster of cases at the White House and the lack of reliable information about his condition. So if the public wasn’t initially sympathetic to Trump — and they mostly weren’t, in part because a large majority of the public thinks Trump didn’t take appropriate precautions — everything we’ve learned since then probably isn’t going to make public sentiment better for him.
With all that said, the situation remains unpredictable. This year, of course, unpredictable news events haven’t always had a large effect on the polls.
October 2, 2020
Trump Tested Positive For COVID-19. Now What?
In this episode of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the team reacts to the news that President Trump tested positive for COVID-19.
Emergency Politics Podcast: Trump Tests Positive For COVID-19
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President Trump announced early Friday morning that he and first lady Melania Trump had tested positive for COVID-19. In this emergency edition of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, science writer Maggie Koerth joins the crew to discuss what’s possible going forward.
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.
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