Still about reality checks, considering that its still about GOTV and 3 November. Note that RCP is now showing a slight lead for Trump of +0.6% in some swing states, comparing 2020 and 2016.

Things are different now especially with the candidates and pandemic constraints, but there are always potential bad signs which should be considered GOTV incentives as election day approaches and 8 million have already voted.

There remain outliers still predicting a Trump victory. The July analysis below reminds us how stable the Biden lead has been.

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To illustrate how different 2020 is from 2016, our awesome BI politics fellow @omaseddiq created this super cool color-coded chart (my fave!) comparing Trump vs. Clinton's final 2016 RCP polling averages and Trump vs. Biden's RCP averages as of today https://t.co/Z3nL5ysWon pic.twitter.com/00xaAdWUBR— Grace Panetta (@grace_panetta) July 20, 2020

This 538 analysis reminds us how stable the Biden lead has been

This analysis by a professor at Stony Brook reminds us how there are outliers who somehow don’t adjust their assumptions, but still remain viable for those RWNJs in the media who need to hope for more questionable criteria. 

Political scientist Helmut Norpoth fields media calls every week seeking comment on the upcoming presidential election. Why the interest? In 2016, he was one of a handful of experts who correctly predicted the outcome of the U.S. Presidential election.

Norpoth, a professor in Stony Brook’s Department of Political Science, has enjoyed notable success forecasting elections based on his Primary Model, a statistical representation of U.S. presidential races based on data going back more than a century.

In 2020, his model once again projects a Trump victory, giving the incumbent President a 90-percent chance of being re-elected in a landslide — a controversial call that runs contrary to current polls.

One model change Norpoth has made for the upcoming election has been to focus on the Electoral College.

{…]

“Now I predict straight to the Electoral College,” he said. “I’ve never done that before, but I made an adjustment because of the mismatch we had in 2016, and I’m prepared to see Trump lose the popular vote again. So this prediction is entirely about the electoral votes.”

Norpoth said that while he manages not to get emotionally connected to these projections, the reactions to his projections sometimes do take an emotional toll.

“I get a lot of reactions, and I get a lot of mail,” he said. “Some of the comments are unprintable. I do get backlash, and I get it from people whose opinions I value, people who are friends. And I can tell that some people find it difficult. So there is an emotional part that goes on.”

But at the core, said Norpoth, it’s just math.

“Everybody thinks Trump is going to go down in flames, and here I am predicting with almost total certainty that he’s going to win,” he concluded. “It seems crazy. But it’s not.”

news.stonybrook.edu/…

The PRIMARY MODEL gives President Donald Trump a 91% chance of winning the 2020 presidential election, with Democrat Joe Biden having just a 9% chance. Trump would get 362 electoral votes, Biden 176.  This forecast is unconditional and final; hence not subject to any updating. It was first posted March 2, 2020, on Twitter.  

In 2016, when polls, pundits and forecasters were all predicting a certain victory for Hillary Clinton, the PRIMARY MODEL was practically alone in predicting Donald Trump’s victory. It did so as early as March 7 that year, putting his chance of winning at 87%.  http://primarymodel.com/2016-forecast-full.

It is a statistical model that relies on presidential primaries and, in addition, on an election cycle as predictors of the vote in the general election. This year the model has been calibrated to predict the Electoral College vote.  

primarymodel.com