42 Days Out: The Home Stretch

It has only been 14 days since my last post. The 42 days we have left is only 6 weeks. It is time to do these posts more often. So here we go.

Last time our summary line was "a toss up situation, but one where Harris had the momentum".

This time I'd say "a toss up situation, where Harris has a slight edge, but the race is pretty static".

If a summary is all you want, there you go. If you want to dig in to more of the changes since last time, keep going.

As we have before, I'll start by seeing how the spectrum of states has changed since last time.

On 2024-09-10 things looked like this:

And as now of 2024-09-25:

Last time there were 144 electoral votes in the "weak" categories where things could very reasonably go either way. Now there are only 131 electoral votes in that category, but that is still huge.

Narrowed from the states with a margin under 5%, to just those under 2%, there are STILL 84 electoral votes that are too close to call. 78 if you remove Iowa (which has only had one Harris vs Trump poll and is likely redder than is indicated here).

And the tipping point state is right in the middle of those close states.

This is all just to say that this race remains "too close to call".  Every single one of the models on Election Graphs show both a Harris win and a Trump win to be reasonably possible.

OK, now how have the states moved since last time?

Movement toward Trump:

  • Maine-CD2 (1 EV): Trump by 1.4% -> Trump by 4.5% (Trump+3.1%)
  • North Carolina (16 EV): Harris by 0.5% -> Trump by 0.8% (Trump+1.3%)
  • Maine-All (2 EV): Harris by 10.6% -> Harris by 9.3% (Trump+1.3%)
  • Minnesota (10 EV): Harris by 6.6% -> Harris by 5.8% (Trump+0.8%)
  • Iowa (6 EV): Trump by 0.6% -> Trump by 1.3% (Trump+0.7%)
  • New Mexico (5 EV): Harris by 8.0% -> Harris by 7.9% (Trump+0.1%)
  • Arizona (11 EV): Trump by 1.1% -> Trump by 1.2% (Trump+0.1%)

No Movement:

  • Nebraska-CD2 (1 EV): Harris by 4.3%

Movement toward Harris:

  • Georgia (16 EV): Trump by 1.2% -> Trump by 1.0% (Harris+0.2%)
  • Colorado (10 EV): Harris by 9.5% -> Harris by 9.8% (Harris+0.3%)
  • Wisconsin (10 EV): Harris by 1.4% -> Harris by 1.7% (Harris+0.3%)
  • Pennsylvania (19 EV): Harris by 0.2% -> Harris by 0.5% (Harris+0.3%)
  • Ohio (17 EV): Trump by 9.8% -> Trump by 9.4% (Harris+0.4%)
  • Florida (30 EV): Trump by 4.2% -> Trump by 3.7% (Harris+0.5%)
  • Michigan (15 EV): Harris by 1.9% -> Harris by 2.8% (Harris+0.9%)
  • Texas (40 EV): Trump by 6.8% -> Trump by 5.9% (Harris+0.9%)
  • Nevada (6 EV): Harris by 0.4% -> Harris by 1.5% (Harris+1.1%)
  • New Hampshire (4 EV): Harris by 6.1% -> Harris by 7.4% (Harris+1.3%)
  • Virginia (13 EV): Harris by 4.3% -> Harris by 7.0% (Harris+2.7%)

More have moved toward Harris (11) than toward Trump (7).

But the one state that flipped sides was North Carolina, which moved from Harris to Trump.

And the tipping point only moved by 0.1% (from Harris by 0.4% in Nevada, to Harris by 0.5% in Pennsylvania).

All this together means that while there has been lots of churn, the overall picture hasn't changed that much in the last two weeks.

Here are the charts for the tipping point state and the three states on either side. This corresponds to the "seven swing states" that get talked about most often these days.

Every single one of these seven states shows the same high level pattern. A rapid move toward Harris after she became the nominee, but then they just essentially bounce around within a range.

Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Pennsylvania have all MOSTLY stayed on the Harris side of the center line, with only brief ventures onto the Trump side.

North Carolina, Georgia, and Arizona are the opposite, staying MOSTLY on the Trump side of the center line, with only brief ventures onto the Harris side.

If the current leader in each of these states win, then you end up with a narrow Harris win. (Harris 276 to Trump 262)

All of these states are close states though. They are all close enough that both outcomes are reasonably probable.

We're talking about the "underdog" in one of these states having a 30% to 40% chance of winning, even in the ones of these states with the largest margins.

Looking at the tipping point (the margin in the state that would put the winner over the top) you can see this closeness in another way:

Basically, ever since late July, the tipping point has just bounced around between the tie line and a 2% Harris lead (with a couple very brief forays outside that zone).

Harris has been behind where Clinton was 8 years previously except for a couple very brief moments, and has NEVER been even close to where Biden was 4 years ago.

Even taking the high end of this range for Harris, a 2% lead can easily disappear in a few days with the wrong news cycle, and of course we have seen polling errors larger than that.

  • 2008: Obama's  tipping point was 3.45% better than predicted by EG.
  • 2012: Obama's tipping point was 0.89% better than predicted by EG.
  • 2016: Trump's tipping point was 2.36% better than predicted by EG.
  • 2020: Biden's tipping point was 1.41% worse than predicted by EG.

The EG tipping point underestimated the Democrat in 2008 and 2012.

The EG tipping point underestimated the Republican in 2016 and 2020.

Which will happen this time?

You can easily come up with a lot of reasons to think this time polls are underestimating Harris. Poll performance in 2022 and special elections and referenda since then. A potential enthusiasm gap. Pollsters overcompensating for errors in 2016 and 2020. Etc.

But you can also come up with reasons polls may still be underestimating Republicans. Trump supporters still don't trust or respond to pollsters, just as they didn't in 2016 or 2020. Or pollsters just aren't properly modeling turnout and are underestimating turnout of Trump demographics. Etc.

Honestly, my gut is that polls may be underestimating Harris this time. But that is nothing more than a gut feeling, and could easily be wrong.

We know there will be polling error. There is always polling error. It is inevitable. There are fundamental limits to polling techniques.

If one candidate is winning convincingly, it doesn't matter. The difference between a candidate winning by 12% or by 14% is a difference not many people care about. Either way the candidate wins.

But if that is a difference between one candidate winning by 1% or the other candidate winning by 1%, it makes a huge difference.

So, we're once again just saying the race is too close to call, but in a different way. Lets try to quantify that:

Right now looking at my two probabilistic models that account for the amount of time left before the election (one that assumes the polling errors in the states will be independent, and one that assumes the polling error will be the same everywhere) you get Harris's chance of winning ranging from 53.6% (uniform swing) to 68.8% (independent states).

I don't know where within this range reality is, but my gut is that it is closer to uniform swing simply because the same big pollsters are polling all the close states, and thus any methodological issues they have will likely be similar across all those states.

So with this, Harris is favored a little bit at the moment, but not a lot. Even taking the high end of this range, 70/30 odds give a non-trivial chance for Trump to win.

In 2016 this site did not have probabilistic models yet, but the average of all the sites I could find that gave election odds averaged out to a 14% chance of a Trump win, and Trump won. We're looking at odds for Trump that are more than double his chances in 2016.

But looking at the "if the election was today" numbers gives an important additional caveat to that:

If we had the exact same polling on Election Day as we do today, Harris's range of chances drops to 39.4% to 41.9%.

So rather than being too close to call with a Harris advantage, it would be too close to call with a Trump advantage.

This is quite simply because on average from 2008 to 2020, the polling error  between the final Election Graphs averages and the actual election results underestimated the Republican by about 1.3% in the close states. And right now Harris's tipping point lead is only 0.5%.

I give her better odds given 42 days left until the election essentially because there is still plenty of time to improve those numbers.

(More precisely, on average from 2008 to 2020, the Democrat being ahead by this much 6 weeks out from the election was a bit more correlated with an eventual victory than having a lead like this on Election Day is.)

The detailed math is more complicated of course, but given the history of polling errors from 2008 to 2020 that I've used to build the Election Graphs probabilistic models, to have a better than 50/50 chance of winning in my models when we get to Election Day, Harris will need to be ahead on the tipping point metric by more than 1.3% when we get there.

If either the Democratic Convention or the Harris vs Trump debate had any impact, it was small and short lived. Any ups and downs in August and September may in fact just be based on which pollsters were in the field in any given week rather than actual changes in public opinion.

If you smooth things out, the race has actually been pretty static since Harris's initial surge.

Right now things are a tossup with a slight Harris edge.

If Harris wants to keep it that way though, she needs to improve her poll numbers a bit more in the next six weeks.

If she wants to actually be more confident of a win, she has to improve them quite a bit, not just a little bit.

If she slips any, or even just holds steady, when we get to Election Day it will be a toss up with Trump slightly favored.

So… bottom line, we're still in a "too close to call" situation, and absent something big happening, it is quite likely we still will be in six weeks.

Of course, "something big" sometimes happens. Both 2016 and 2020 had points in the last 100 days where the tipping point moved in one direction or the other by more than 4% in just a week or two.

A 4% move in either direction would massively change what the race looks like. A candidate leading by 4% in the tipping point would be strongly favored. An upset wouldn't be impossible, but would be much more of a surprise.

Things SEEM more sticky this time around, but you never know when those "big events" may happen.

There are new polls almost every day at this point. Sometimes there are days with LOTS of new polls.

I try to get the new polls included in the site quickly whenever they come out. I've just booked time off from the day job for the last two weeks before the election just to keep up with the inevitable deluge of polls at the end.

So don't wait for these blog posts. Check out electiongraphs.com regularly in between posts too. And follow us on Mastodon.

Lets close things out with the current map:

41.8 days until polls close in the first states on election night.

Stay tuned!

56 Days Out: Before the Second Debate

It has been 23 days since my last post.

At that time, things had moved from "Trump is heavily favored, but it is still possible for Harris to catch up" when Biden first dropped out, to a toss up situation, but one where Harris had the momentum.

Lets see how the polls have moved since then.

The bottom line for those who don't want to read further, is that while lots of states have moved in Harris's direction, some critical ones have moved toward Trump as well, and so on balance, it is still a toss up.

Now more details for those who want them.

Here's where the close states were back on 2024-08-18:

And now as of 2024-09-10:

The first thing to note is just the massive volume of really close states.

There are a full 144 electoral votes where the margin is under 5%. We have seen multiple examples of states with margins under 5% go to the other candidate in previous elections. Any of these states are legitimately "close" and the candidate that is behind has a non-trivial chance of winning the state.

When this site does "best cases" for both candidates based on just trusting the polls, we consider the possibility that all 144 of these electoral votes could go to one of the candidates. That gives this massive range of possibilities:

Even if you narrow this and only look at places with margins under 2%, you still have 100 electoral votes in play.

Well, Iowa is in here because there have been no polls at all there so we are looking at previous elections to generate the average, and it is probably actually redder than it appears. Take it out and there are still 94 electoral votes in play, and the election could very easily go either way.

So lets compare the before and after on those states and how things changed in the last 23 days:

Movement toward Trump:

  • Ohio (17 EV): Trump by 7.1% -> Trump by 9.8% (Trump+2.7%)
  • New Mexico (5 EV): Harris by 10.3% -> Harris by 8.0% (Trump+2.3%)
  • Arizona (11 EV): Harris by 0.8% -> Trump by 1.1% (Trump+1.9%)
  • Wisconsin (10 EV): Harris by 3.2% -> Harris by 1.4% (Trump+1.8%)
  • Pennsylvania (19 EV): Harris by 1.9% -> Harris by 0.2% (Trump+1.7%)
  • Maine-CD2 (1 EV): Trump by 0.2% -> Trump by 1.4% (Trump+1.2%)

No Movement:

  • Iowa (4 EV): Trump by 0.6%

Movement toward Harris:

  • Georgia (16 EV): Trump by 1.6% -> Trump by 1.2% (Harris+0.4%)
  • Michigan (15 EV): Harris by 1.5% -> Harris by 1.9% (Harris+0.4%)
  • Minnesota (10 EV): Harris by 6.2% -> Harris by 6.6% (Harris+0.4%)
  • Nevada (6 EV): Trump by 0.7% -> Harris by 0.4% (Harris+1.1%)
  • Virginia (13 EV): Harris by 3.2% -> Harris by 4.3% (Harris+1.1%)
  • Texas (40 EV): Trump by 8.2% -> Trump by 6.8% (Harris+1.4%)
  • Florida (30 EV): Trump by 6.0% -> Trump by 4.2% (Harris+1.8%)
  • North Carolina (16 EV): Trump by 1.5% -> Harris by 0.5% (Harris+2.0%)
  • New Hampshire (4 EV): Harris by 3.0% -> Harris by 6.1% (Harris+3.1%)
  • Colorado (10 EV): Harris by 5.6% -> Harris by 9.5% (Harris+3.9%)
  • Nebraska-CD2 (1 EV): Trump by 4.7% -> Harris by 4.3% (Harris+9.0%)

So we have a mixed bag. More states moved toward Harris than moved toward Trump, but some of those states that have moved toward Trump are important.

Here are the charts of the tipping point state at the moment (Nevada) and the two states on either side (ignoring Iowa since there have been no polls there). Really, all of the states under 5% are battleground states, but these five states are currently the center of that battleground, and the ones the race is pivoting around at the moment:

The thing to note is that in all of these key states when looking at the trend (rather than just comparing to the last blog post) it seems like Harris peaked, followed by movement back toward Trump.

As of now, in North Carolina and Arizona a move back toward Harris has started. But things look pretty flat lately in Nevada and Pennsylvania. And it looks like things may still be trending toward Trump in Wisconsin.

All of these are incredibly close states. So to see how this looks in terms of the overall impact on the national race, lets look at the tipping point, which is the margin in the state that would put the winner over the edge:

There have been ups and downs along the way as polls in various close states have jittered, but the high level trend is that Harris peaked at a 1.8% lead in the tipping point, but has since lost ground, and at the moment is at a 0.4% lead in the tipping point.

This is an incredibly narrow lead. Let me add in the comparison lines for 2016 and 2020:

Although there was a moment like it looked like it might happen, so far Harris has never been doing better than Clinton was doing the same number of days before the election, let alone Biden.

So the fact that Harris is narrowly ahead, should not give Democrats a whole lot of confidence. Right now this race is on a knife's edge.

But we can quantify this. Lets look at my probabilistic models for a moment.

First the charts that try to take into account how much time is left before the election, by comparing how far off Election Graphs poll averages at this same amount of time before the election were to the actual election results in 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020.

  

I have two models based on the extremes of how correlated the polling errors in the states are. To explain this a bit more:

The Independent States model says that it is perfectly reasonable to think that Harris might do a lot better than expected in Florida at the same time that she does a lot worse than expected in Virginia. The error in one state tells you nothing about the errors in other states.

Meanwhile, the Uniform Swing model says, no, if the polls have been underestimating Trump in one state, they are probably underestimating him everywhere. So you basically only have to worry about the nationwide bias in the polling averages.

The actual truth is somewhere in between, but I don't know where. So I present both models and the range of possibilities they represent.

First thing I'll note, since last time the chances of a 269-269 tie have plummeted. On August 18th I had that as 1.8% to 10.8% depending on the model. I now have the chance of a tie as between 0.0% and 1.6%. Which is probably for the best. A tied electoral college would be a very chaotic scenario.

Since ties would most likely go to Trump given how those are resolved, let's look at Harris odds.

Last time Harris's win chances were between 49.8% and 52.9%. Despite the move toward Trump in the tipping point, this has now increased to between 60.1% and 73.5%.

Why?

Um, I'm honestly not entirely sure. It might take a deep dive into the data that I don't have time to do to really understand fully, but here are three possibilities:

  • There is less time left before the election for things to change, so even though the lead is smaller, it is more likely to stick.
  • The specific configuration of exactly how far ahead in each state each candidate is means that even though her tipping point is less, there are a lot more "paths to victory" for Harris than before, and the path for Trump is narrower.
  • Quite simply historically Democrats being slightly up in early September has correlated with them doing well in November more than being slightly up at the end of October does.

One interesting thing though, is that things look very different in the "if the election was now" view that I have been mostly ignoring since I introduced the models that take into account the remaining time:

Here Harris's odds are only 34.5% to 40.7%. This is much lower.

Explaining this is easier. Basically, on average for the last four election cycles the FINAL Election Graphs averages in close states have underestimated the Republican a bit. So in states where the Democrat has a lead, but a very narrow lead there at the very end, the models still give the Republican a very good chance of wining. In a 50/50 situation the Republican is favored a bit.

Now, we won't know until after Election Day if the poll averages once again underestimate the Republican, or if this time they underestimate the Democrat.

But IF polls are underestimating the Republican again, the difference between the "if the election was now" and "with 56 days left" models essentially means that if Harris still had these same numbers on Election Day, Trump would be favored, but right now she still has plenty of time to improve the situation further, so her odds right now are higher. To feel good about the election, Harris needs to further improve her numbers as Election Day approaches. Where she is right now isn't "good enough".

And there we have it. Lets close it out with the current map:

As I type this, there have been about a dozen new state level polls since I started this blog post. They would have changed some of the data here a bit, but I have to make a cutoff somewhere when I make one of these posts, and as we approach the election, the number of polls per day is increasing dramatically. So things change every day. Multiple times a day in fact.

So don't wait for these blog posts. Check out electiongraphs.com regularly in between posts. Or follow us on Mastodon.

For now though, the Harris vs Trump debate starts in less than an hour, and I'm going to be watching it. We'll see in a week or two if it makes any difference. Debates usually don't. But the last one sure did!

56.0 days until the polls in the first states start closing on Election Day.

It will be a wild ride!

79 Days Out: Harris Surges to a Tie

It has been 21 days since my last post, but it has been an eventful 21 days.

The last post was about a week after Biden dropped out. There had only been a small number of Harris vs Trump polls that reflected the reality of Harris actually being the nominee rather than just a hypothetical replacement.

At that point polls already showed Harris doing noticeably better against Trump than Biden had been doing.

Three weeks later polls have continued to move dramatically toward Harris.

In fact Harris has taken the lead in the electoral college if you just take the poll averages at face value.

If you look at the probabilistic views that use information about how far off Election Graphs averages were from actual election results from 2004 to 2020, Harris is now over 50% to win in one of my four models. Specifically she's ahead in the one of the four I think best represents reality.

All of the Election Graphs views now show a very close race. This is by no means a "Harris is definitely winning" scenario. But things have shifted very quickly from a "Trump is heavily favored, but it is still possible for Biden to catch up" situation a month ago, to a true toss up situation, and one where Harris has the momentum.

Now, let's get into some details:

There's the new map to start with. Lots more blue than there was three weeks ago.

But let's hit some graphs.

This is the tipping point, the margin in the state that would put the winning candidate over the top in the Electoral College. When Biden dropped out, he was behind by 5.0% to Trump in this metric. (That includes straggler Biden vs Trump polls that were released after he dropped out.)

Harris started behind by only 2.9%. It took longer for us to know it, because polls are released with a lag, but it now seems that within 4 days, Harris had already erased that 2.9% lead by Trump and the tipping point was now in her favor.

Since then the movement toward Harris has been slower, and there was a short time where the tipping point moved back toward Trump for a few days due to a few polls in Pennsylvania, but that quickly reversed and Harris has continued to strengthen, with the tipping point now being 1.1% (in between MI and AZ).

Let's look more specifically at the states.

Here were the close states as of my post on 2024-07-28:

And here they are as of 2024-08-18:

There are still a bunch of states with one or more pair of parentheses, indicating there are still not five actual Harris vs Trump 2024 polls, and the poll average is augmented by previous election results, but we have good data in a lot more states than we did.

Here are the movements in the last three weeks:

Movement toward Trump:

  • Ohio (17 EV): Trump by 4.3% -> Trump by 7.1% (Trump+2.8%)
  • Maine-CD2 (1 EV): Harris by 1.6% -> Trump by 0.2% (Trump+1.8%)
  • Florida (30 EV): Trump by 4.3% -> Trump by 6.0% (Trump+1.7%)
  • New Hampshire (4 EV): Harris by 3.4% -> Harris by 3.0% (Trump+0.4%)

No Movement:

  • Nebraska-CD2 (1 EV): Trump by 4.7%
  • Iowa (4 EV): Trump by 0.6%
  • Virginia (13 EV): Harris by 3.2%
  • Colorado (10 EV): Harris by 5.6%

Movement toward Harris:

  • Minnesota (10 EV): Harris by 5.5% -> Harris by 6.2% (Harris+0.7%)
  • New Mexico (5 EV): Harris by 8.7% -> Harris by 10.3% (Harris+1.6%)
  • Texas (40 EV): Trump by 10.1% -> Trump by 8.2% (Harris+1.9%)
  • North Carolina (16 EV): Trump by 4.2% -> Trump by 1.5% (Harris+2.7%)
  • Georgia (16 EV): Trump by 4.5% -> Trump by 1.6% (Harris+2.9%)
  • Michigan (15 EV): Trump by 1.6% -> Harris by 1.5% (Harris+3.1%)
  • Pennsylvania (19 EV): Trump by 1.3% -> Harris by 1.9% (Harris+3.2%)
  • Wisconsin (10 EV): Trump by 0.2% -> Harris by 3.2% (Harris+3.4%)
  • Nevada (6 EV): Trump by 6.1% -> Trump by 0.7% (Harris+5.4%)
  • Arizona (11 EV): Trump by 5.8% -> Harris by 0.8% (Harris+6.6%)

The four states with no movement are states where there have been no new polls since the last update. In some of the cases there are no Harris vs Trump polls at all, so these are just averages of elections from 2008 to 2020.

In others, there are a handful of Harris vs Trump polls, but they are all from before Biden dropped out. In either case, we really need new polling.

In the four cases where Trump increased, ALL of them were where actual Harris vs Trump polling was replacing old election results in the average, reflecting that these places are more Republican than they had been in 2008 and 2012 for instance.

So these movements are less about measuring something that really changed in the last 3 weeks, and more about just getting enough data to understand the current situation.

As the most dramatic example, let's look at Florida:

The red line for the polling average was moving toward Trump until very recently. But this is because the new polls were replacing old elections in the average that were very close, as well as a couple of really good Harris results in 2021 and 2022.

But if you look just at the new polls in July and August, you can see them clearly trending toward Harris. With the last couple of polls, the average is now moving that direction again too.

The average still doesn't show Harris as particularly competitive in Florida. EG gives her an 8.2% chance of winning the state given this average this long before the election.

But even here, there does seem to be a trend toward Harris, with the most recent polls indicating a close race.

This kind of thing was happening in all of the areas moving toward Trump, including the one that flipped from blue to red:

We just had our first 2024 Harris vs Trump poll in Maine's 2nd Congressional District.

Before that our average had Harris up by 1.6%. Democrats had won ME-CD2 in 2004, 2008, and 2012. But Republicans won in 2016 and 2020. On average, these come out to a small Democratic lead. But the trend has been toward the Republicans.

So as a real 2024 poll replaces the 2004 results in the average, this moves toward Trump, and flips to the red side of the line. The new poll's two results average to Trump up by only 3% though, which is a lot less than Trump's 10.3% and 7.4% wins in 2016 and 2020 respectively.

Let's quickly look at all other jurisdictions crossing the center line:

All of these mirror the initial tipping point chart I showed, with an initial rapid movement toward Harris right after Biden dropped out, which has slowed down since then but has not yet stopped.

So yes. Harris has made lots of progress in a few weeks.

Now let's talk about how close things still are, looking at this in a bunch of different ways.

First up, the categorization view. This just looks at all the states where the margin is less than 5%, and shows the range of results that can happen if all those states end up going to one side or another.

In the end, 5% is a pretty small margin. With the right poll errors, or the right news events that change the race, a 5% margin can disappear pretty quickly.

Considering all of these electoral votes as "could go either way" you can get results from Trump by 122 EV all the way to Harris by 114 EV. Quite simply, even though the middle line, where each candidate wins all the states where they lead the polls, gives you a 22 EV Harris win, either candidate can still easily win.

Of course, "every state with a margin under 5% could go either way" is an oversimplification. Let's look at how this comes out in my probabilistic views that take into account how long there is before the election.

(I'm only going to look at the two that take into account the amount of time left before the election, ignoring the "if the election was now" ones.)

Basically, these look at the Election Graphs averages in 2008 to 2020 at the same amount of time before the election at various margins, then compares to how often those averages ended up picking the winner, and uses that information to run simulations of the electoral college given the current polling.

Since on average from 2008 to 2020, the Election Graphs poll averages have underestimated the Republican in close states, this effectively means that when states are tied, we still give the Republican a small advantage. For our probabilities to be showing a 50/50 situation, the Democrat has to be ahead by a little bit.

Which is where we are today.

One of these simulations assumes the eventual poll errors in each state are completely independent, the other assumes the poll error is uniform across all states. Obviously the reality is somewhere in between. My guess is closer to the uniform swing side of these ranges, but let's look at the full range between these two models.

On the day Biden dropped out, Harris's chances were between 7.4% and 18.1%.

As of this post, this has increased to being between 49.8% and 52.9%.

Huge improvement from where things were before… to now being essentially a coin toss.

But wait, what is that white bit?

Well, that is the chances for a 269-269 tie, which would throw the election into the House of Representatives, where the NEW House would decide the President, but voting by state delegations, which even if Democrats retake the House would probably still be Republican dominated. So ties would most likely end up going to Trump. But only after a lot of additional drama.

Right now the states are lined up such that if Harris wins every state she leads EXCEPT Arizona (where she lead by only 0.8% at the moment) then you end up with that 269-269 tie.

Right now, Election Graphs gives odds for that between 1.8% and 10.8%. Still an unlikely scenario, but a pretty big chance for an outcome that would be chaotic at best.

Contingent elections for President have only happened twice in US history. That would be the 1800 and 1824 elections. (For 1836 there was a contingent election for Vice President only.) If this were to happen, it would be the first time in 200 years.

These odds would essentially go away if either Maine's 2nd or Nebraska's 2nd end up on the blue side of the line. We discussed ME-CD2 above. There have been zero Harris vs Trump polls for NE-CD2 yet. It went Republican in 2004, 2012, and 2016. But the Democrat won in 2008 and 2020. On average over the last 5 cycles, it is R+4.7%. But in 2020 it was D+6.5%.

We really need more polls in ME-CD2 and NE-CD2. This is the kind of close year where they could be the difference between having a clear winner, and having a 269-269 tie that throws the election into the House.

Back to the tipping point for one last view on the "lots of movement toward Harris, but Democrats should not be feeling confident yet" theme:

Right now, for the first time since Biden dropped out, Harris is doing better than… where Clinton was when she had worst polling she ever had.

Just barely.

And of course we all know Clinton ended up losing.

Harris is still running behind where Clinton usually was in 2016, and even further behind where Biden usually was in 2020.

This may still change. The DNC is about to start. We have Trump's sentencing for the NY case on the calendar soon after that. And debates coming up that may end up favoring Harris. Or the poll errors could underestimate the Democrat this year, after a couple of cycles of underestimating the Republican.

So Harris has plenty of opportunity to pull further ahead.

But things could go the other way too.

Trump's campaign may eventually figure out ways to effectively attack Harris. They may get their stride back after, as JD Vance said, being "sucker punched" by the shift from Biden to Harris. Or there may be news events that reflect badly on the Biden/Harris administration. Or Harris may make some mistakes that cost her, or be hit by some currently unknown October surprise scandal.

You never know.

We really are in coin toss territory right now.

Every day is going to matter.

So pay attention.

78.9 days until the first polls close on election night 2024.

100 Days Out: Whole New Race

Well, it has only been 22 days since my last post, but everything has changed.

That post was after the Biden vs Trump debate, but too soon for there to be a real signal in the state level polls reflecting any reaction to that. Then you had the assassination attempt on Trump. Then the Republican National Convention. Then Biden dropped out. Then it almost instantly it became clear that Harris would become the new Democratic nominee.

We'll dive into what things initially look like for Harris in just a minute, but first, a quick look at how Biden vs Trump went in the time until he dropped out, using the tipping point as our main proxy metric:

You can see the vertical "event lines" for the debate, the assassination attempt, the start of the Republican Convention, and Biden dropping out. These events are all smushed pretty closely together in time, but you can see some pretty clear directional changes.

Just a week or so before the debate, Biden had been in his best position since early October. That had started to slip a little before the debate, but then after the debate, Biden immediately collapsed to the second worst spot he has ever been in, second only to a very brief time in January.

Over the first half of the year he had been slowly whittling away at Trump's lead. National polls once again had the race as a dead heat. Progress was being made in the swing states.

Following the debate, that was all erased practically overnight.

After about a week though, Biden started reclaiming some of that lost ground. He had a long way to go to get back to where he had been prior to the debate, but things were going in the right direction for him again.

Then the assassination attempt on Trump happened, followed by the Republican National Convention in close succession, and Biden's numbers started to fall again.

And that is when he dropped out.

Here is where his spectrum of the even remotely close states stands as of July 28th, after the last set of polls that were in the field before he dropped out:

So what about Harris?

Well, first of all, before the debate there hadn't been a Harris vs Trump state level poll since May. And there hadn't been that many. After the debate  some new ones started trickling in. And of course after Biden dropped out and Harris became the presumptive nominee there have been quite a few.

But still not really enough yet.

Here is the spectrum of the even remotely close states as of July 28th:

See all those parentheses around the averages? That is how I annotate cases where we don't actually have five 2024 Harris vs Trump polls yet, so I am backfilling with actual election results from previous elections.

So for instance, if there are two pairs of parentheses it means that there are three actual 2024 polls, but I also included the 2020 and 2016 election results in that state to fill out the average.

This is because before you have actual polls, you have to start somewhere to judge where the state is, and I use the last five presidential elections.

Sometimes where states have changed rapidly over those years that can be a bit misleading until you get real polls. For instance, you can see above that there have been no Harris vs Trump polls at all yet in Iowa.

Over the last five elections, Iowa went Democratic twice (2008 and 2012) and Republican three times (2004, 2016, and 2020). Averaged out you get a 0.6% Republican lead in Iowa. But 2016 and 2020 were Republican wins by over 8%. And the polling average for Biden vs Trump had stood at an 11.2% Biden lead.

We clearly need actual Harris vs Trump polling in Iowa, because it is not reasonable to expect that Iowa is actually as close as it looks based on the "last five elections" starting point. It most likely is more Trumpy than that. Probably not that far off from the Biden vs Trump number.

At the moment only Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada have an average based only on 2024 data, and some of that data is from before Biden dropped out.

We have absolutely nothing on New Mexico, Colorado, Maine's 2nd, Iowa, or Nebraska's 2nd. (Or for almost all of the "not remotely close" states either, but they don't really matter much.)

The rest of the close states are in between.

This is rapidly filling in though. At the time Biden dropped out we only had Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Georgia with full five poll averages. In the last week three additional states achieved that milestone.

OK. With all of that said, given the data we do have, what can we say about where Harris vs Trump stands?

First up, looking ONLY at the states where the average is based completely on Harris vs Trump polls instead of pulling in old elections, lets see how Harris is doing compared to Biden based on the two snapshots above.

Harris improves on Biden in these states:

  • Pennsylvania:
    • Trump led Biden by 5.4%
    • Trump leads Harris by 1.3% (4.1% Harris gain)
  • Michigan:
    • Trump led Biden by 3.0%
    • Trump leads Harris by 1.6% (1.4% Harris gain)
  • Wisconsin:
    • Trump led Biden by 1.0%
    • Trump leads Harris by 0.2% (0.8% Harris gain)
  • Arizona:
    • Trump led Biden by 6.1%
    • Trump leads Harris by 5.8% (0.3% Harris gain)

No change in this state:

  • Georgia:
    • Trump led Biden by 4.5%
    • Trump leads Harris by 4.5% (No change)

Biden was doing better than Harris in this state:

  • Nevada:
    • Trump led Biden by 4.6%
    • Trump leads Harris by 6.1% (1.5% Harris deficit)

Based on these, it looks like so far swapping Harris for Biden has been good for Democratic prospects, at least in these states where we have good data.

Harris is still behind Trump, but there seems to be an enthusiasm that was not there before, and things have started moving toward Harris, at least for the moment.

Lets look at some of the national trends over time:

This is the "expected case" chart showing both Biden vs Trump and Harris vs Trump where you just give each candidate every state where they are leading in the poll average, regardless of how small that lead is.

Biden and Harris currently lose by exactly the same amount.

You get 312 electoral votes for Trump, 226 for Harris, giving Trump an 86 electoral vote margin.

The Biden line is much more jiggly because there were lots and lots of polls. The Harris line was more stable, simply because there were very few polls of that combination, and even less that impacted the tipping point state.

But what we do see is that up until the point Biden dropped out, new polling was slowly giving us a picture where the Harris situation looked more and more like the Biden situation.

This was most likely not real changes in public opinion, but rather polls slowly giving us the real situation rather than our baseline inferred from previous elections.

But switching views from the expected case to the tipping point, you can see that changed immediately once Harris was no longer a hypothetical, but instead was a real candidate.

Instead of the tipping point getting worse to converge with Biden's number, Harris's situation relative to Trump was improving with almost every new poll.

Harris is still behind, but seems to have some momentum.

We don't see that in the "expected case" at this point, because while Harris has improved over Biden's numbers, no states have crossed the center line yet.

Looking at our two "odds taking into account the amount of time left" models, this looks like this:

These two models vary from one extreme to another on how much the poll errors in one state are predictive of the poll errors in other states.

Right now assuming independent states, we give Harris a 7.5% chance of winning. If we assume a uniform swing instead, we get a 27.0% chance of a Harris win.

I don't try to model exactly where in that range things will end up, but my gut feel is the "truth" is closer to the uniform swing side than the independent states side, basically because for the most part the same big pollsters are covering all the swing states, and so if there is a systematic bias in their errors, it is likely to impact all the states that matter in roughly the same way.

On the uniform swing model, Harris went from about an 18% chance at the moment Biden dropped out, to 27% now. The post-dropout polling has been moving in her direction quickly.

So far anyway.

As I write this, we are only one week into the Harris campaign. The movement in her tipping point is only 1.3%, and there are still lots of states without good post-Biden polling. So this trend may be a short term pop. Or it may be the start of a long term trend.

It is quite simply too soon to tell.

Right now there is a lot of excitement about Harris, and the "mood" of the race seems to have changed dramatically on the Democratic side. From demoralized grim resignation to gut it out and try the best they could, to actual excitement, enthusiasm, and hope.

Does that translate into lasting changes in the polling situation?

As usual, we just have to wait and see.

In the mean time, to close out, here is the new map as it looks at the moment:

100.0 days until polls start to close on Election Day.

Hold on tight.

2024-07-30 01:27 UTC: Correction to the above. For Biden vs Trump Pennsylvania should have been a Trump 5.2% lead, not a Trump 5.4% lead. There was a data entry error that caused the discrepancy. Apologies. Does not change the analysis though.

2024-07-30 02:15 UTC: After this post was live, some additional polls for Biden were released covering July 1st to July 8th. This only changed the average in Nevada, which moved from Trump by 4.6% to Trump by 5.5%. Since Nevada was the tipping point state, this also moved the Tipping point from Trump by 4.6% in NV to Trump by 5.0% in NC. This also means that with these new numbers, if Biden won ALL the states where the margin was under 5%, he would still be losing 267 electoral votes to Trump's 271.

122 Days Out: Mid-Summer Update

It has been 40 days since my last post.

The last post was right before Trump's conviction in his New York trial. We are now a little more than a week after the first debate, and a little more than a week before the start of the Republican National Convention. So it is a good time for another check in.

We will do the usual run down of what has changed since last time in a moment, but first, an announcement of a new feature on Election Graphs.

To quote the new item on my FAQ:

Initially this site only did the two sets of probabilistic views based on the FINAL Election Graphs averages vs the actual election results. This is essentially "if the election was today", or alternately "if the polls don't change at all between now and the election". But of course until we get to Election Day, the election is not today, and polls change a lot over time. There are lots of ups and downs over the course of an election season, as the candidates campaign, and news events change the course of the news.

As of July 2024, I have added "Accounting For Time Left" views of both the Independent States and Uniform Swing models. Basically, at any given date, instead of comparing the final election graphs average to the actual election results, I use the Election Graphs averages the same number of days before the election instead. The methodology for computing the odds and doing the simulation is otherwise identical. But now it is based on how far off the poll averages were X days before the election.

…

Anyway, this means Election Graphs now has views that are no longer just "if the election was today". These two views do take into account how much things may change before the election. They of course are still based on assuming that the current cycle shows similar patterns for how far off poll results are from election results in the past few elections. Which may or may not end up being true. But using the past as a model for the future is the best I can do.

It took a lot of work to add this. I took a week off from my day job to build all of it out. So please take a look at the revamped national summary and the revised state detail pages and poke around and explore. Lots of good stuff there. Feedback is welcome! Email me at feedback@electiongraphs.com. Or you can find Election Graphs on Mastodon at @ElectionGraphs@newsie.social.

I'm sure folks want to know the bottom line on those new models, so here it is:

Uniform Swing Odds accounting for 122 days left:

  • Biden: 22.0% — Tie: 0.0% — Trump: 78.0%

Independent States Odds accounting for 122 days left:

  • Biden: 2.6% — Tie: 0.2% — Trump: 97.2%

By comparison, the "if the election was today" view has Biden at 11.2% for Uniform Swing and 0.2% for Independent States.

The truth is somewhere between Uniform Swing and Independent States, but there are a number of reasons to think if pollsters are making a specific mistake in one state, they will make the same mistake in many states, so the truth is probably closer to the Uniform Swing model than the Independent States model.

OK, with that out of the way, a quick TL;DR on the overall state of the race.:

  • Things have generally been slowly moving in Biden's direction since Trump peaked in December, although there have been lots of short term ups and downs along the way.
  • Specifically, things had been moving toward Biden DURING Trump's NY Trial.
  • But since the verdict, things have once again been moving back toward Trump.
  • There are only a handful of post-debate state level polls at this point, so it is too soon to have a definitive signal on what if any impact that will have, and with the Republican National Convention coming soon, it may end up being hard to isolate the impact of the two events.
  • Given all the talk of non-Biden alternatives, it is natural to wonder how matchups other than Biden vs Trump are looking, but state level polling for other Democrats vs Trump is sparse, and most of what does exist is old. So until or unless there is a wave of new polling, there is nothing definitive that can be said about those matchups. If you want to look at Harris vs Trump anyway though, here it is.
  • As has been true since October, Trump remains favored. He is leading, and far outperforming his polling in both 2016 and 2020.
  • There is still time for things to change. The new Uniform Swing accounting for 122 days left view gives Biden a 22.0% chance of pulling out a win. But Trump is clearly the frontrunner, and Biden is clearly behind at the moment.

And the current map:

OK, now time for details. Most if not all of you can leave now. The rest of this is for poll geeks only. 🙂

Lets start by just looking at how state averages in any of the even remotely close states (margin under 10%) have moved since the last blog post.

Here is where things were on May 28th:

And here is what that spectrum looks like on July 6th:

Checking out all the deltas:

Net movement toward Trump:

  • New Jersey (14 EV): Biden by 12.5% -> Biden by 8.7% (Trump+3.8%)
  • Arizona (11 EV): Trump by 3.7% -> Trump by 6.7% (Trump+3.0%)
  • New Mexico (5 EV): Biden by 6.7% -> Biden by 4.3% (Trump+2.4%)
  • Maine-All (2 EV): Biden by 3.5% -> Biden by 1.3% (Trump+2.2%)
  • Iowa (6 EV): Trump by 9.5% -> Trump by 11.4% (Trump+1.9%)
  • Virginia (13 EV): Biden by 2.6% -> Biden by 0.9% (Trump+1.7%)
  • New Hampshire (4 EV): Biden by 3.5% -> Biden by 2.2% (Trump+1.3%)
  • Wisconsin (10 EV): Biden by 0.7% -> Trump by 0.6% (Trump+1.3%)
  • New York (28 EV): Biden by 10.8% -> Biden by 9.7% (Trump+1.1%)
  • Pennsylvania (19 EV): Trump by 1.7% -> Trump by 2.5% (Trump+0.8%)
  • Minnesota (10 EV): Biden by 2.3% -> Biden by 1.8% (Trump+0.5%)
  • North Carolina (16 EV): Trump by 4.7% -> Trump by 5.2% (Trump+0.5%)
  • Georgia (16 EV): Trump by 5.3% -> Trump by 5.4% (Trump+0.1%)

No net movement:

  • Washington (12 EV): Biden by 9.3%
  • Colorado (10 EV): Biden by 6.8%
  • Maine-CD2 (1 EV): Trump by 8.6%

Net movement toward Biden:

  • Michigan (15 EV): Trump by 1.1% -> Trump by 0.9% (Biden+0.2%)
  • Nebraska-CD2 (1 EV): Trump by 0.9% -> Trump by 0.2% (Biden+0.7%)
  • Florida (30 EV): Trump by 9.1% -> Trump by 7.6% (Biden+1.5%)
  • Texas (40 EV): Trump by 10.0% -> Trump by 8.5% (Biden+1.5%)
  • Ohio (17 EV): Trump by 10.5% -> Trump by 9.0% (Biden+1.5%)
  • Nevada (6 EV): Trump by 6.3% -> Trump by 4.7% (Biden+1.6%)

So mixed, but most of the movement has been toward Trump in the last 40 days, including the only state to cross the center line (Wisconsin).

Wisconsin is and has been RIGHT next to that center line for awhile now:

One key to note here is that Biden's margin in several states where he used to have more substantial leads are becoming more tenuous. A prime example of this would be Virginia:

And Minnesota:

These are states that Biden may not have expected to have to seriously defend. But they are both very much in play at this point. Trump's best case now includes winning not just these two, but also Maine, New Hampshire, and even New Mexico. All states that a few months ago seemed out of reach, but which are now all close enough to be fought for.

There are so many charts and stats now on the national summary page that I'm not about to go through all of them. Please go there and explore. But here are the others I think are worth highlighting.

First up, I often tell people that if they were to look at only one thing on the site, they should look at the tipping point graph. So here that is. Specifically, here is the version that includes 2016 and 2020 for comparison:

Bottom line here is that Biden has improved significantly since his worst point in December, but the more recent trend has been going in the opposite direction again, and perhaps even more significantly, Trump is running 6.4% ahead of where he was at the same point in 2020, and a full 6.9% ahead of where he was in 2016 at this time.

Trump is blowing away his numbers from the previous cycles. And he just barely lost in 2020, and he won in 2016.

Here is the "envelope of the possible" given the idea that any state with a margin under 5% could go either way:

A Biden win is in the envelope, but just barely. He has to win all the states where he is ahead, but then also pull in Nebraska-CD2, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Of the states in my "weak" categories, he can only afford to lose Nevada. He has to almost run the table.

As they have been since the beginning, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, with an assist from Nebraska-CD2, are part of almost any conceivable Biden win scenarios. These are "must win" for Biden, and he is currently behind in all of them.

For a Biden win, one of four things has to happen:

  • Biden has to gain a lot of support that so far has not been evident
  • Trump has to lose a lot of support that he has held on to so far
  • The "undecideds" end up disproportionally falling to Biden in the end
  • The polling proves to be massively wrong (overestimating Trump and underestimating Biden this time)

Or some combination of the four.

OK, since I added all of this new probabilistic information in the last couple of weeks, I need to highlight something probabilistic too. There is a lot there though. So which view is the "best" to look at?

I am now showing four separate probabilistic models. Both "if the election was today" and "accounting for the time left", but then also both "independent states" and "uniform swing".

On the first choice, I think it is obvious "accounting for time left" is better. If it wasn't, I probably wouldn't have spent the time to add it.

Ever since I introduced the probabilistic views I have had to explain away "yes, but this is as of right now, things have time to change" every time I talked about this. Now it has something quantitive in terms of modeling "OK, but how much are things likely to actually change?"

It acknowledges that if you have a very small lead, the chances of things changing enough to make a difference are bigger than if you have a very large lead. It also knows that the closer we get to the election, the less the chance of something substantially different happening.

Having said that, we have to bring out that old cliche: "Past performance is not indicative of future results".

These models specifically are based on looking at how the EG polling averages have differed from the actual election results at various numbers of days before the election in 2008, 2012, 2016, and 2020. So fundamentally, if something radically different happens in 2024 than in the aggregate of those cycles, then the models may be off. And I may be "overfitting" to what happened in those cycles as well.

But absent a magic crystal ball, that's the best I can do for the moment, and it is clearly better than not accounting for the time left at all. "If the election was today" gives a good idea of just how much work the candidate who is behind needs to do to change their fate, but if we want an idea of what is actually likely to happen, taking into account the amount of time left just makes sense.

Now, on the second choice. I alluded to this earlier, but fundamentally the question here is, does the direction and magnitude of the poll average error in one state predict in any way the error in another state, or are they unrelated? The reality is that a lot of the same pollsters are active in many of the states, especially in the swing states. And I think a lot of these pollsters are also making similar assumptions about the electorate.

So I think the "uniform swing" model, where the errors in the states are perfectly correlated, is closer than than the "independent states" model where they are completely independent.

So lets look at the odds based on the Uniform Swing model, taking into account the amount of time left:

Before October, it was basically a coin toss. Since then Trump has been favored, but the amount has varied.

For a few weeks from about mid-May to mid-June, Trump was down to a chance of winning of between 55% and 60%, which was the worst he had been since October.

Since then though he has moved to once again being near his highs, now up to a 78% chance of winning.

And we still haven't fully baked in people's reactions to Biden's debate performance or the subsequent massive media maelstrom questioning if he should even stay in the race. And the Republican National Convention will be starting before too long, which generally gives a boost to the Republican candidate for awhile.

So it is quite likely that things will continue to move toward Trump for a bit before a Biden recovery is possible.

You never know though, news happens, campaigns happen. And tomorrow's narrative may be different than today's.

And of course if the Democrats do change candidates, then everything changes and we'll need new polling to see where things stand.

With that, it's time to close.

122.0 days until polls start to close on Election Day 2024.

Stay tuned.

 

162 Days Out: As Summer Starts

It has been about 65 days since my last post about the general election. Oops. I've been intending to put these out more often as the election approaches, but haven't quite managed that.

In any case, the last post was shortly after both candidates clinched their nominations and Biden had a widely praised State of the Union speech.

Almost immediately after that  blog post, Biden had a run of really good polls, and things started moving in his direction. Then Trump had a run of good polls, and things started moving back again. Then more recently, Biden had another good run with things moving back toward him.

In other words, lots of ups and downs. And to be honest, it is unclear how much of that is driven by ACTUAL movement in people's voting intention, vs how much is just noise in the polls, including a handful of prominent outliers that moved some critical state averages around.

If you look at the net change since that last post though, most metrics have moved toward Biden, although Trump is still leading, and is still significantly outpacing his polling performance in both 2016 and 2020.

If you just wanted a high level summary of where things are, you can stop now. The rest is going to be digging into more specifics.

Here we go.

This is the overall summary. Keep in mind, everything here is based on CURRENT poll averages as of May 27th. It is essentially "If the election was today" or alternatively "if nothing changes between now and Election Day". But we know things will change.

I've started some work on adding probabilistic models that take into account the amount of time left before the election, but I've got a lot of work left before those are ready to share any results. In the meantime, just always keep in mind, that things can change dramatically in a few weeks, let alone a few months. Campaigns matter, and news events change opinions.

Having said that, if the election was today, Trump would be strongly favored. Biden would have to be hoping for the polls to be significantly underestimating the Democrat this time, rather than underestimating the Republican as has been the case the last two cycles.

As of now, the map looks like this.

Since last time only one state has crossed the center line. That would be Wisconsin moving from Weak Trump to Weak Biden.

But as we have done the last few updates, lets look at how all of the even remotely close states (any with margins under 10%) have moved since last time.

Here is where things were on March 23rd:

And here they are as of May 28th:

So lets check out all the deltas:

Net movement toward Trump:

  • Washington (12 EV): Biden by 13.7% -> Biden by 9.3% (Trump+4.4%)
  • New Hampshire (4 EV): Biden by 7.6% -> Biden by 3.5% (Trump+4.1%)
  • Texas (40 EV): Trump by 7.3% -> Trump by 10.0% (Trump+2.7%)
  • New Mexico (5 EV): Biden by 9.3% -> Biden by 6.7% (Trump+2.6%)
  • Maine-All (2 EV): Biden by 5.7% -> Biden by 3.5% (Trump+2.2%)
  • Virginia (13 EV): Biden by 4.5% -> Biden by 2.6% (Trump+1.9%)
  • Alaska (3 EV): Trump by 9.4% -> Trump by 11.2% (Trump+1.8%)
  • Minnesota (10 EV): Biden by 3.9% -> Biden by 2.3% (Trump+1.6%)
  • Nevada (6 EV): Trump by 5.2% -> Trump by 6.3% (Trump+1.1%)
  • Florida (30 EV): Trump by 8.7% -> Trump by 9.1% (Trump+0.4%)

No net movement:

  • Georgia (16 EV): Trump by 5.3%
  • Maine-CD2 (1 EV): Trump by 8.6%

Net movement toward Biden:

  • Colorado (10 EV): Biden by 6.6% -> Biden by 6.8% (Biden+0.2%)
  • Pennsylvania (19 EV): Trump by 2.6% -> Trump by 1.7% (Biden +0.9%)
  • Arizona (11 EV): Trump by 5.0% -> Trump by 3.7% (Biden+1.3%)
  • Iowa (6 EV): Trump by 11.1% -> Trump by 9.5% (Biden+1.6%)
  • North Carolina (16 EV): Trump by 7.2% -> Trump by 4.7% (Biden+2.5%)
  • Michigan (15 EV): Trump by 4.5% -> Trump by 1.1% (Biden+3.4%)
  • Wisconsin (10 EV): Trump by 3.0% -> Biden by 0.7% (Biden+3.7%)
  • Nebraska-CD2 (1 EV): Trump by 4.7% -> Trump by 0.9% (Biden+3.8%)

Now, more of these actually moved toward Trump than toward Biden, so why do I say that overall things have been good for Biden since the last update?

Well, it is because of WHICH states moved toward Biden. Specifically, the key battleground states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania have all moved in Biden's direction, as well as Nebraska-CD2 (which would be key in some scenarios).  Arizona and North Carolina also potentially make a big difference if Biden can actually make them competitive.

It is not great for Biden that New Hampshire, Virginia, and Minnesota are as close as they are. He needs to win those. But pretty much all Biden winning scenarios require keeping Wisconsin on his side of the line now that he has it back there, and pulling Michigan and Pennsylvania over as well.

So the fact that those states have moved in his direction is key in terms of how this race is evolving.

Biden is still behind. Here is the chart showing the range of Electoral college possibilities just taking the polls at face value and assuming anywhere with a margin less than 5% could go either way:

Biden is doing a bit better than he has, but Trump still has a very strong position here. To win here Biden has to keep every state he leads in the polls, plus win Nebraska-CD2, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

How hard is that? This is where the tipping point chart comes in. It shows the margin in the state that puts the winner over the top:

As you can see, Trump's lead is the smallest it has been since mid-October. But that is due to a recent spike toward Biden that only came in from the last week or so of new polls (covering times from a little earlier than that).

Will it last? The movements toward Biden in January and March did NOT last. After a few weeks, the trend reversed and headed back in Trump's direction. The magnitude of this change does seem to be larger. But as usual only time will tell.

In the mean time, while Biden is doing a bit better than before, a comparison with 2016 and 2020 puts things in perspective:

And here is that same comparison, but with the electoral college margin instead of the tipping point:

Trump is still WAY ahead of where he was in both 2016 and 2020. And of course he won in 2016, and in 2020 Biden just barely won. In both of those years polls underestimated Trump. If they are underestimating him again, he is positioned for a very substantial win. (If the election was today.) Of course this time the polls may be underestimating Biden. We won't really know until the votes are counted.

A race with a tipping point less than 5% (in either direction) is a competitive race. And we still have about 160 days. A lot can and will happen.

Next up, lets look at the two statistical models I do looking at how far off the EG poll average was from the final results in 2008-2020, and using that to estimate ranges for this time. One of these assumes the errors in all the states are completely independent from each other, the other assumes all the states will have the same error. The truth will of course be somewhere in between.

Now, repeating myself, these are both "if the election was today". Which it is not. I'm working on adding models that take the time left into account, but they are not ready yet.

In any case, with both of these views, the center line really hasn't moved much since at least December. We do see Biden's best case improving a bit recently though. So has Trump's though.

Here is what these look like in terms of chances of winning. Again, and I really just can't say this enough, these are not taking into account how much things may change in the remaining time.

Biden's recent improvement shows up on the Uniform swing model, but still isn't making much of a difference on the Independent states model. Imagine the real scenario to be somewhere in between.

But looking at these I really want those models that take into account the amount of time left. I'm working on it! I may have to take some time off in June to just knock that out. 🙂

And that is that. I'll try not to go 60+ days before the next update, but it is what it is. Day job. Family. Other responsibilities. Sometimes this just ends up delayed. Sorry!

But the site itself is updated pretty promptly whenever new polls come out. Almost always within 24 hours, sometimes a lot less.

So please bookmark and explore the site itself regularly, and also follow ElectionGraphs on Mastodon for daily summaries and posts whenever new polls come out.

Coming up next: A verdict in Trump's NY trial, and the first Biden vs Trump debate. Will either of those change anything? I guess we will find out.

161.9 days until polls start to close.

227 Days Out: Now With Presumptive Nominees

It has been about 66 days since my last post about the general election polls.

That was right before the Republican Iowa Caucus kicked off the delegate chasing season.

Earlier this month both Trump and Biden clinched their nominations.

So now is a good time to start getting back to looking at the general election.

The one sentence TLDR:

  • In order to win, Biden has got to fix his issues in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, then pull in at least one more place, but there is still plenty of time to do that.

The slightly longer TLDR:

  • Looking at the state by state polls, Trump is still doing very well, and Biden is not.
  • Ignoring the ups and downs in between, overall state by state polls have continued to move toward Trump over the past two months. It is possible Trump is near his ceiling, but there has not been a sustained movement back toward Biden yet.
  • No states crossed the center line over the last two months though, so the electoral college picture still looks pretty similar to how it did last time.
  • Trump is still polling FAR better than he did at the comparable time in either 2016 or 2020.
  • This all comes down to the fact Trump is leading in the poll averages for Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan. To win, Biden needs to win all three of these states, plus at least one more electoral vote from somewhere else, or get surprise wins elsewhere to make up for losing one of those.
  • The leads in all three of these states are small enough (under 5%), and the number of undecideds high enough, that this situation could change very quickly as people start paying attention.
  • My "probabilistic views" have Trump at between 96.6% to 99.8% to win depending on how correlated the states are, but it is critical to remember this is conditional on:
    • "Polls don't change at all between now and November" (and we all know they will change a lot), and
    • "The difference between final EG averages and actual election results is similar in 2024 to what we saw from 2008-2020" (which basically means the averages tend to UNDERESTIMATE the Republican by 1.3% percent in the close states, but there are at least some indications polling may be underestimating the Democrat this time).

In other words, and I added a bunch of disclaimers on the site about this, everything here represents a snapshot of NOW. Interpreting the data on this site as a true prediction of November would be a mistake. Things don't become truly predictive until VERY close to the election. There can be large movements in the scale of weeks.

Instead, the right way to think about the information here is as a gauge of how much work candidates have to do, and where they have to do that work.

Right now that translates into "In order to win, Biden has got to fix his issues in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, then pull in at least one more place."

I do have some ideas but how to model a probability that actually takes into account how the averages may evolve in the time remaining before the election, but I honestly doubt I will have time to execute on that for the 2024 cycle. Maybe for 2028.

OK, now all the specific charts and graphs for those who want to dig in. You should of course also feel free to just explore all the data on the site yourself.

I'm going to restructure how I do these update posts a little bit. As we get closer to the election, I'm going to need to put them out more often, which means I need to make them easier for me to do. Which means more "here is the snapshot from the site" with a little less narrative.

This is the overall summary of all the main stats. Keep in mind all the disclaimers I gave at the top of this post. All three views show Trump heavily favored based on current polling, with a Biden win just barely in the range of possibility. It would be a major upset, and representative of huge polling errors if it looked like this in November and Biden won.

But as I said, and will emphasize once again, we have a long way until the election yet, and things can change quickly.

That's a lot of red. Of course land area doesn't correspond to either population or number of electoral votes. (And Alaska doesn't represent its true area anyway.) But this still gives you an at a glance view. There are only a small number of states with light pastels indicating a really close race at the moment. As usual, the battle will only be in a handful of states.

Looking at the numbers for the subset of the states that are even remotely in contention (margin less than 10%), including how they have changed since last time:

As of January 15th:

As of March 23rd:

Net movement toward Trump:

  • Maine-CD2 (1 EV): Trump by 2.4% -> Trump by 8.6% (Trump+6.2%)
  • Wisconsin (10 EV): Trump by 0.0% -> Trump by 3.0% (Trump+3.0%)
  • Maine-All (2 EV): Biden by 7.8% -> Biden by 5.7% (Trump+2.1%)
  • Pennsylvania (19 EV): Trump by 0.6% -> Trump by 2.6% (Trump+2.0%)
  • Texas (40 EV): Trump by 5.4% -> Trump by 7.3% (Trump+1.9%)
  • Ohio (17 EV): Trump by 9.2% -> Trump by 10.8% (Trump+1.6%)
  • Nevada (6 EV): Trump by 3.8% -> Trump by 5.2% (Trump+1.4%)
  • Colorado (10 EV): Biden by 7.7% -> Biden by 6.6% (Trump+1.1%)
  • Iowa (6 EV): Biden by 10.0% -> Biden by 11.1% (Trump+1.1%)
  • North Carolina (16 EV): Trump by 6.2% -> Trump by 7.2% (Trump+1.0%)
  • Michigan (15 EV): Trump by 4.0% -> Trump by 4.5% (Trump+0.5%)
  • Minnesota (10 EV): Biden by 4.3% -> Biden by 3.9% (Trump+0.4%)
  • New Hampshire (4 EV): Biden by 8.0% -> Biden by 7.6% (Trump+0.4%)

No net movement:

  • New Mexico (5 EV): Biden by 9.3%
  • Nebraska-CD2 (1 EV): Trump by 4.7%
  • Florida (30 EV): Trump by 8.7%

Net movement toward Biden:

  • Virginia (13 EV): Biden by 4.2% -> Biden by 4.5% (Biden+0.3%)
  • Arizona (11 EV): Trump by 5.8% -> Trump by 5.0% (Biden+0.8%)
  • Georgia (16 EV): Trump by 6.7% -> Trump by 5.3% (Biden+1.4%)
  • Alaska (3 EV): Trump by 10.8% -> Trump by 9.4% (Biden+1.4%)

No states crossed the center line at all, so the electoral college picture is very similar to what it was two months ago, but Trump has gotten stronger in states he already was ahead in, and Biden has gotten weaker in states where he was ahead.

There are four exceptions listed above, so there are a few places where Biden has improved, but everywhere else, including the key battleground states, Trump has improved.

Sticking to the categorization view for now, so just taking the poll averages at face value and seeing who leads where, and counting any state where the margin is less than 5% as "in play" we see the chart above.

Basically, the trend from October to December was more and more states moving to a Trump lead margin of more than 5%, putting those states out of reach for Biden as far as this view is concerned, along with a few states where Biden had been ahead by more than 5% dropping to a smaller Biden lead, putting them in reach for Trump.

The range between the Biden best case and the Trump best case narrowed from 250 EV down to 150 EV. Just a lot fewer electoral votes in play, while the "expected" case moved from Biden by 14 to Trump by 88 showing that most of this was movement away from Biden.

Those trends were all about the end of 2023 though.

So far in 2024, there has been limited movement between the categories. A little jittering here and there as various states have crossed category boundaries (often temporarily) but no big lasting directional moves. Most of the changes we looked at earlier on a state by state basis stayed within the broad categories. Thus Trump is stronger when you look at individual states, but the overall electoral college picture hasn't changed too much.

The other way of looking at this, before bringing in the probabilistic models, is what I call the "tipping point". This is the margin in the state that puts the winning candidate over the edge of you order the states by margin. (Or the average of the margins in the two states in the middle if the states are ordered in such a way that there could be a 269-269 tie.)

Basically, this is like looking at a popular vote margin, but adjusted for the structure of the electoral college. In this view you can also see the Biden collapse starting in October, but the time since the new year shows a bit more back and forth, with a bit of improvement for Biden in January, followed by a trend back toward Trump again in February. Then just some jiggling around in March, with no clear trend.

The tipping point shows us that at the moment Biden needs almost a 5% swing to take the lead again in the categorization view. That is a lot, but not out of the question, especially since polls are still showing significantly more than that 5% in all the close states still answering with 3P candidates or "undecided" when asked about the general election.

Now that both candidates have clinched their nominations, the closer we get to November, the smaller that "neither" category should get. Both 3P and "undecided" tend to collapse as elections approach. And how those people end up splitting between, Trump, Biden, sticking with their 3P, or just not voting will probably end up being the deciding factor in the election, more so than Biden or Trump supporters actually changing their minds and flipping to the other side.

These two are the same as the previous two charts, but with the added context of 2016 and 2020.

For Biden supporters, these should be the scariest charts on my site. They show just how much better Trump is doing in polling so far this cycle than he did in either 2016 or 2020.

He was always behind in the polling in both those cycles. He won in 2016. He came close in 2020. The fact that he has been outperforming both of those years consistently, and has been straight up ahead most of the time should be very concerning.

For all the reasons I gave at the beginning of the post, there are lots of reasons to think the situation might be very volatile, and that Trump may be near his ceiling. But the Biden folks would surely feel a lot better if the polling started looking more like 2020, or ideally better than 2020 for them. The fact that they instead look considerably worse than 2016 has to be worrying.

You either have a real situation where Biden is behind and has to make up a lot of ground, or polls are massively underestimating the Democrat this time around, unlike the last two cycles, where they underestimated the Republican.

These views show the range of possibilities for the electoral college margin in the two probabilistic models. These look at the odds in each state, based on assuming the distribution of the difference between the final election graphs average and the actual election results looks similar to the aggregate deltas from 2008 to 2020, then I do automated Monte Carlo simulations to see what the overall general election looks like based on all those state results.

The "Independent States" one assumes no relation in how far off the actuals are from the averages in one state compared to the other. The "Uniform Swing" one assumes that that delta will be the same in every state. Both of these are extremes. The "truth" is somewhere in between.

The darker the band, the more likely a result in that range. You can easily see that right now all the dark colors are in the "Trump wins" part of both graphs, with only lighter colors stretching over to the "Biden wins" part of the graphs.

These two graphs translate the green margin bands into straight up "chance of winning".

I'll say again, because this is very important, this is:

  • Assuming polls look the same on Election Day that they do right now. (Alternately formulated as "if the election was today".)
  • Assuming final poll averages in the close states differ from the actual elections results in a way similar to the aggregate errors in 2008 to 2020. (Alternately formulated as "polls underestimate the Republican again".)

Both of those are big assumptions.

So you shouldn't really read this as "Trump has a 96.6% to 99.8% chance of winning."

Instead read it as "Trump is ahead in all the critical states right now, Biden has a lot of work to do if he is going to catch up and win."

Of course, it might not be Biden doing work, it could also be Trump doing things that hurt himself. You never know. But things have to happen to move things in the Biden direction. If things stay how they are, Trump is heavily favored.

And there we are. That's it for today. Hopefully I don't let it go another 66 days before posting a summary. But I make no promises. I have a lot of things going on and sometimes it is hard to make time to do these posts.

But the site itself is updated pretty promptly whenever new polls come out. Almost always within 24 hours, sometimes a lot less. Right now there are almost always multiple new state level polls every week. By the time we get to September, there will be multiple polls almost every single day. The last three weeks before the election, I'll probably take vacation days off of my day job just to keep up with the deluge of new polls every day. 🙂

So please bookmark and explore the site itself regularly, and also follow ElectionGraphs on Mastodon for daily summaries and posts whenever new polls come out.

227.1 days until polls start to close

Hold on tight.

Delegates: BOTH Trump and Biden Clinch their Nominations

Welp, I expected Trump to clinch tonight, but that Biden would have to wait a week.

But Tuesday morning Green Papers updated their site to note that both Delaware and Florida had canceled their Democratic primaries and given all their delegates to Biden.

That was enough to put Biden close enough to clinch tonight too.

Since my update Sunday for the Republicans and my update Thursday for the Democrats, there have been results in a bunch of states, and some minor adjustments in others. There are still more results pending for tonight. Democrats Abroad, and the Republican caucus in Hawaii.

But I'm not going to wait for them. Here are the net delegate changes since my Sunday post:

  • Biden +484 delegates
  • Trump +137 delegates
  • Haley +3 delegates

And with that, we have presumptive nominees in both parties. The only way this changes is if one or both candidates drop out or become incapacitated or whatever before the conventions.

If that happens, I'll be back with more delegate blog posts. Otherwise, I'll continue to update the delegate totals on the website until the end of the primary season, but won't be posting anything here.

When you effectively have two incumbents, turns out the delegate races are pretty boring. Usually you have at something interesting to follow in at least one of the two parties.

Anyway, here are the important graphs and charts, one last time.

Democrats:

Republicans:

And that's it.

I am way overdue for a general election polling update. I'll get to it as soon as I can.

In the meantime, here are the countdowns until the conventions, one more time:

124.8 days until the Republican National Convention

159.8 days until the Democratic National Convention

 

Republican Delegates after American Samoa plus Cleanup

OK. American Samoa had a Republican caucus.

There were 110 votes total.

Trump got all of them.

So 9 more delegates for Trump.

Also, just some clean up on delegate totals as Super Tuesday delegate estimates continued to jiggle around a little.

The net changes from those adjustments compared to my last update were:

Trump lost 3 delegates. (Trump lost 9 in Texas that went back to TBD, gained 3 in Virginia,  and gained 3 in Minnesota.)

Haley lost 11 delegates. (Haley picked up 1 additional delegate in Minnesota, but then lost all 12 Minnesota delegates she had earned, because in Minnesota the rules say that once candidates drop out their delegates immediately become unbound.)

OK, so here are the important charts and graphs. As usual, click through for more.

Next up on Tuesday, both parties have Georgia, Mississippi, and Washington. The Republicans also have Hawaii. The Democrats also have Democrats Abroad and the Northern Marianas.

Unless something massively unexpected happens, Trump will go over the top and clinch the nomination once those results are in.

Biden will have to wait until a week later since the Democratic schedule takes longer to get to the 50% of delegates mark.

127.2 days until the Republican National Convention

162.2 days until the Democratic National Convention

Democratic Delegates with Hawaii, plus Super Tuesday Cleanup

Welp, first off, Hawaii had a Democratic caucus yesterday.

There may still be some adjustments, but for the moment it looks like 15 more delegates for Biden, and 7 uncommitted that we keep as TBD.

Second, Utah had a Republican caucus on Super Tuesday, but The Green Papers didn't have results until after I did my Super Tuesday summary post.

But we have those results now, and Trump got all 40 delegates from Utah.

So with those updates in, lets look at where everything is right now.

Democrats first:

And now the Republicans:

And that is it for now.

Next up, American Samoa for the Republicans on Friday.

Then a bunch of states on the 12th, and Trump should clinch his nomination.

Biden will have to wait a little longer, until the 19th.

130.1 days until the Republican National Convention

165.1 days until the Democratic National Convention