More Trump Deterioration

Another four weeks or so has gone by since I posted so it seems like it is time for another update. Once we are hot and heavy in the depths of 2024, there will probably be more frequent updates. For now, every four weeks seems sufficent. It may even be too frequent. State level polling is still relatively sparse, and changes to the various metrics we track here come slowly.

In the last four weeks there have been 28 new data points added to Election Graphs. There were 13 polls for Biden vs DeSantis (GAx2, NVx2, AZ, VA, CO, NM, MN, PA, TN, TX, WI), 12 polls for Biden vs Trump (GAx2, NVx2, AZ, VA, CO, NM, MN, TN, TX, WI), 2 polls for Biden vs Pence (AZ, GA), and 1 poll for Kennedy vs DeSantis (PA).

If you want updates on each and every poll as it comes out, as well as daily summaries of the status for the best polled matchup (currently Biden vs Trump), follow Election Graphs on Mastodon.

Let's start again with the "spectrum of close states" for Biden vs Trump.

Last time on 2023-04-24 it looked like this:

And now on 2023-05-21:

So here are the changes:

  • Colorado: Biden by 7.5% -> Biden by 6.8% (Trump +0.7%)
  • Virginia: Biden 5.4% -> Biden by 5.6% (Biden +0.2%)
  • Texas: Trump by 6.5% -> Trump by 6.0% (Biden +0.5%)
  • Wisconsin: Trump by 0.7% -> Trump by 0.2% (Biden +0.5%)
  • Minnesota: Biden by 6.0% -> Biden by 6.9% (Biden +0.9%)
  • Georgia: Trump by 3.3% -> Trump by 0.7% (Biden +2.6%)
  • Nevada: Trump by 4.3% -> Biden by 0.4% (Biden +4.7%)

6 out of 7 of the close states with changes moved toward Biden.

Now out of these, only one jumped categories in our categorization view: Nevada.

Here on Election Graphs, we usually use a five poll average (to understand when there are exceptions, read the FAQ). You can see that what happened here is that what looks like an outlier leaning toward Trump was replaced in the "last five polls" by an outlier that leans toward Biden, thus moving the average significantly toward Biden. But this leaves us JUST BARELY on the Biden side of the fence. The next poll in Nevada could easily flip the state back to the red side. Or it could show that this was no outlier, but a harbinger of a new trend. Too soon to tell.

Also relevant, based on the historical performance of Election Graphs averages since 2008, the 0.4% Democratic lead here still only translates into a 41.1% chance of a Biden win in the state. More often than not since 2008, when Democrats have led a state with this small an Election Graphs average, the Republican has actually ended up winning.

But this does still flip Nevada to Biden's side on the Categorization view, and this plus the movement on all the other states improve Biden's odds on the two probabilistic views. Here are the overall summaries as of now:

Lets look at some comparisons with last time:

Biden Win Odds:

  • 2023-03-25: Between 17.8% and 25.8%
  • 2023-04-24: Between 24.9% and 32.3%
  • 2023-05-21: Between 34.9% and 35.9%

Here are the two odds charts representing the extremes of how correlated the states might be:

The win odds show Trump continues to have an advantage. But it has been slipping away since November, and while Trump having approximately a 2/3rds chance of winning is decently better than a coin toss, it is very much still in the range where either side has a reasonable shot, and anything could happen.

Categorization Trump Best / Expected / Biden Best:

  • 2023-03-25: Trump+96 / Trump+18 / Biden+162
  • 2023-04-24: Trump+96 / Trump+18 / Biden+162
  • 2023-05-21: Trump+96 / Trump+6 / Biden+162

Here is the trend chart for the categorization view:

There has been no change since four weeks ago to the inventory of states where the margin is less than 5%, which the categorization view imagines as being able to potentially go either way, so the two best cases remain the same. Nevada flipping to Biden moves Trump's "expected" case here from winning by 18, to winning by 6. But the huge range between the best cases shows this is anybody's game.

Tipping Point:

  • 2023-03-25: Trump by 0.7% in Wisconsin
  • 2023-04-24: Trump by 0.5% in North Carolina
  • 2023-05-21: Trump by 0.2% in Wisconsin

So like the others, the tipping point (the margin in the state that puts the winning candidate over the top) shows Trump's lead continuing to deteriorate.

OK, with the comparisons with four weeks ago done, let me introduce something I added to the site since my update four weeks ago. Namely comparisons with 4 and 8 years ago. Here is one of the two new charts:

This compares the "expected case" of the categorization view from this cycle, to where the final two candidates were in 2016 and 2020 the same number of days before election.

What we see is that Trump is running significantly stronger now than he was either in 2020 when he lost to Biden, or in 2016 when he beat Clinton.

There is a lot of talk among Democrats of how in a Biden vs Trump rematch they "won in 2020 and know how to win again". I would simply caution that this is not 2020. Trump is polling better than he was then, and Biden is polling worse.

Trump may be doing worse in my models now than he was in November, but he is still doing better than he EVER did here on Election Graphs in either the 2016 or 2020 cycles. Election Graphs never had Trump in the lead in either of those election cycles.

I have him ahead right now.

Trump should not be underestimated.

I'm still not spending much time on any combination besides Biden vs Trump, because that is still the only combination with enough state level polling to be able to feel confident about the national picture.

Biden vs DeSantis is getting close though, and we have a view where you can compare candidate combinations. On that view you can see that in the last few weeks for the first time since 2021 DeSantis looks like he fares better against Biden than Trump does in the Independent States Probabilistic View.

But the data for everything other than Biden vs Trump is still sparse.

Biden vs Trump has 15 states with 5 or more 2024 polls, including ALL the close states, meaning that we have poll averages that do not rely on "filling out" the average with old election results.

By comparison Biden vs DeSantis only has 5 or more polls in Georgia, Arizona, and Florida. Three states. That's it. So treat that combination with a big grain of salt until there is more polling.

If you want to look at that matchup yourself anyway, here is the Biden vs DeSantis summary.

As for ANY other combination besides Biden vs Trump and Biden vs DeSantis, there is so little data it is not worth looking at, unless you are specifically curious about the handful of states that polled a specific combination, rather than trying to get any insights about the national picture.

But you can explore all the combinations you want on the 2024 Electoral College page, and see some charts I haven't highlighted on the blog yet, as well as being able to click through to individual states to see individual polls in each state for each combination, etc. I encourage you to explore.

In the mean time, I'll close with the updated national map:

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

Slow Trump Weakening

It has been been just over four weeks since my last blog post.

Since then on a state level there have been 6 Biden vs Trump polls (NC, IA, PAx2, AZ, MI) along with 5 Biden vs DeSantis polls (NC, IA, PA, AZ, MI), and 1 Biden vs Pence poll (NC). If you want updates on each and every poll as it comes out, as well as daily summaries, follow Election Graphs on Mastodon. Right now the polling volume is still pretty low. It will accelerate as the election gets closer. Eventually there will be tons of new polls every single day. But not for a long while yet.

Honestly the situation isn't all that different than it was four weeks ago. There has been some movement toward Biden, but not a really dramatic change. Just Trump slowly getting a bit weaker. But it has been four weeks, so it seems worth looking at things again.

Let's start by looking at how the "spectrum of close states" has changed:

2023-03-25

2023-04-24

What changes do we see?

  • Michigan: Biden by 2.4% -> Biden by 2.2% (Trump+0.2%)
  • Pennsylvania: Biden by 1.6% -> Biden by 1.8% (Biden+0.2%)
  • North Carolina: Trump by 1.9% -> Trump by 0.5% (Biden+1.4%)
  • Arizona: Trump by 4.1% -> Trump by 1.8% (Biden+2.3%)
  • Iowa: Trump by 11.0% -> Trump by 10.0% (Biden+1.0%)

So 4 out of 5 states with Biden vs Trump polls moved toward Biden.

None of these changed the picture in my categorization view, but  this does adjust the probabilistic views a bit. Here is the new overall status summary:

Since ties would almost certainly end up going for Trump in the end once it got thrown to the House voting by state delegation, rather than confuse things by having to add those up, I'll look at the odds for Biden:

  • 2023-03-25: Biden win odds between 17.8% and 25.8%
  • 2023-04-24: Biden win odds between 24.9% and 32.3%

As always, these are "if the election was held today", which it isn't. This still shows Biden as an underdog in this matchup. But doing better than a month ago.

The odds charts:

As usual, the Independent States chart is more dynamic, but these represent extremes, and the "truth" is somewhere in between. And both views still show Trump peaking right around the 2022 midterms, and slowly deteriorating ever since.

Some of that downward movement is after his indictment in NY, but there was even more before that. So at this point you can't really say that event was an inflection point. The already in progress decline just continued.

Oh, and I didn't mention Biden vs DeSantis, or any other combination other than the 2020 rematch, because that is still the only combination with enough state level polling to be able to feel confident about the national picture. Biden vs DeSantis is getting there. But isn't there yet. If you want to look at that combination yourself, here is the Biden vs DeSantis summary.

Not much else to say for the moment. So lets end with the new map:

561.8 days until polls start to close on Election 2024.

Here We Are: Narrow Trump Lead Over Biden

Since the last post a week ago where I laid out how things stood using just the last five presidential election results as a starting point, I've gone ahead and ingested all 214 state level presidential data points that are already out there into Election Graphs .

The main thing this tells me? Yes, it is still "super early" to look at 2024 match ups. All kinds of things will change between now and November 2024. But even last year in 2022 there was a lot going on in the polling. So maybe start earlier for the 2028 cycle. 🙂

Let me start with how things look now, then go back to how things seemed to evolve over the last year.

I will be looking specifically at the Biden vs Trump matchup.

That is by far the most polled matchup, and the only one with enough polling to even remotely be able to claim there is a good picture of what all the close states look like. Second is Biden vs DeSantis, but that lags FAR behind in polling volume. You might be able to see a few things by carefully looking at select states where there is polling, but it is hard to get a meaningful national picture. Beyond those two, other matchups only have a smattering of isolated polls, to the point it isn't even useful to look at them at all until or unless there is a lot more polling.

So where does Biden vs Trump stand right now?

Here come the map, the summary stats, and the spectrum of the closest states:

Bottom line, as of March 25th 2023, the state by state polling shows Trump with an advantage.

In terms of the straight up categorization view it is a slight advantage. Only one state (Wisconsin) needs to flip to put Biden in the lead, and Trump leads there by only 0.7% in my average.

Look more carefully at Wisconsin, and you'll see that the 5 poll average contains 4 actual 2024 polls but still includes the 2020 result (Dem+0.6%), one of the 4 polls looks like it may be an outlier to the Republican side, showing a full 10% Trump lead where all the others show a close race.

So this Trump lead looks pretty tenuous.

At the moment though, our two probabilistic views show this translating into pretty good odds for Trump. 72.2% chance of winning with the Uniform Swing view, and up to 80.6% with the Independent States view. The "true" odds are somewhere between these two depending on how strongly polling errors end up correlating between states.

Why is this the case if the straight up polling gives us a very slight Trump lead?

Mainly because of what I outlined in my January post about the math behind how I calculate those probabilities. To summarize, looking at all the final Election Graphs averages from 2008 to 2020 in aggregate as they compared to the actual election results, for the Democratic candidate to have more than a 50/50 shot at winning, being ahead in the polls is not good enough. They have to have more than a 1.2% lead.

So some of those states where Biden is showing a 1%-4% lead are really pretty uncertain, where some of the states Trump is leading by the same margin are more safe than they seem.

Well, at least that is what you get by averaging out the poll errors covering the last four presidential election cycles. As covered in that previous post, each of those four cycles actually looked pretty different in terms of how the errors played out. We have no idea what the 2024 errors will look like. But starting with the range of errors over the last few cycles and the variability between those cycles is as good a guess as we have.

Also, everything on Election Graphs is "if the election was today". The election is not today, and lots and lots will happen between now and then. EG does not provide a forecast. We show how things look right now.

With the status above, you would say that team Biden needs to work hard at shoring up Pennsylvania, Michigan, and New Hampshire where he barely leads, and start pushing hard on the barely red states like Wisconsin. And not to take for granted Georgia, Arizona, and Nevada, which even though Biden won them in 2020, right now are looking red. And Florida may not be as far out of reach as it seems, so maybe don't ignore it.

Looking from the opposite direction, Trump should be playing some defense in those barely red states because they could easily slip away if he doesn't, and he should be going hard after Pennsylvania and Michigan. Etc.

Some of this is all pretty obvious. We have most of the same "swing states" that we have had for the last few election cycles. And both candidates will end up concentrating their efforts there and pretty much ignoring the rest of the country. Because that is how races look under an electoral college system.

Now, let's look at how things have evolved over the last year. you can see a variety of different views of this evolution on the 2024 Electoral College page. For now though, I'll look at the Electoral College Margin chart for the Probabilistic Independent States view. It is one of the two extremes I show for the probabilistic views, specifically one that assumes the polling errors between states are completely independent, which to be clear, we know they are not. But this view is the most dynamic in terms of how it changes with new polls, so is nice for showing how the overall race trends over time:

First just an explanation of the graph. The vertical axis is the Trump minus Biden margin in the electoral college. So if it is positive, that means Trump wins, if it is negative that means Biden wins. The dark green line is the median result in Monte Carlo simulations based on the state averages and the probabilities we described in January. The three bands of color are the ranges of outcomes in the 1σ (68.27%), 2σ (95.45%), and 3σ (99.73%) bands. So, roughly, the closer to the center line of this you are, the more likely that outcome, and as the green gets lighter, the less likely that outcome.

At the far left of the chart the ranges shown are just representing the "last five elections" average I posted about last week. Over the course of 2021 and 2022 the averages in the close states slowly filled in with real 2024 polls, pushing the old elections out of the average. As such, it is hard to tell how much of the "movement" seen above prior to 2023 is actually driven by changes in public opinion versus just the averages filling out. By late 2022 though, most of the close states had five or more actual 2024 polls, and we can start to interpret movement as actual changes in the status of the race.

Ignore the jagged ups and down at small scale, and at a very broad level this tells a story of either Biden weakening and Trump strengthening over the course of 2022, OR just the polling catching up to that position after showing a bluer version of things by starting with the 2004 to 2020 averages. Either way though, the trend toward Trump peaked toward the end of 2022. In fact the peak occurs very close to the 2020 midterms in November.

For the moment anyway, that seems to be the moment where things started to go the other way directionally, and started heading in Biden's direction.

To be clear though, Biden is still behind. All three of the views provided by Election Graphs show Trump in the lead at the moment. But more narrowly than he was right before the midterms.

At the moment things point to another close nail biter of a race, just like 2016 and 2020. The picture we see right now shows a race that could very easily go either way if the election was today, let alone allowing for all the things that could happen over the course of more than a year and a half.

Biden hasn't even officially announced his candidacy yet. We don't know if Trump will be indicted, and if he is, if that will help him or hurt him. We don't know if others like DeSantis will officially run, and how they will do. And who knows, one or both of the front runners could end up having health issues that impact their ability to run. You never know. Plus all the normal back and forth of national and international events.

We have a long way to go.

Specifically, we have 591.0 days until the first polls start to close on Election Day 2024.

Keep checking back here for updates on how things evolve!

Oh, and if you want to see all the notifications for new polls as they get entered, and the status changes those trigger, as well as daily summary stats of the overall situation, follow Election Graphs on Mastodon too: @ElectionGraphs@newsie.social.

[Edit 2023-03-25 23:42 – Slight wording change.]

2024 Begins: Five Election Average

Welp, here is the big moment. I have just opened up the 2024 Electoral College section of the site. No actual 2024 polls are reflected yet. That will come over the next few days.

It may still be 598.2 days until polls start closing on the Election 2024 cycle, but believe it or not there have already been quite a few state level 2024 polls. I'll start getting those into the system shortly.

But first, Election Graphs has always used an average of the last five election results as the "baseline" when polls aren't available in a state. So the traditional "so it begins" marker for Election Graphs has been the electoral map using the average of the last five elections for all 50 states, DC, and the ME/NE congressional districts.

So here we go…

Some folks might argue that a better baseline would just be the 2020 results. After all, five elections means averaging out the results from 2004 to 2020. The world of 2004 does not really resemble the world of 2024. That was almost 20 years ago!

There is definitely a point to that. But we're basically just looking for a starting baseline here.

All the states that are remotely close will get real 2024 polls relatively quickly, certainly before we really get into the thick of the 2024 campaigns. So we will get a sense of if states that have seemed to be trending in one direction or the other over those 20 years will continue that trend, or revert to the mean a bit.

Meanwhile, the states that have booked 20 straight years of massive wins for one party or the other may get polled less and take longer to fill out with real 2024 polls, but they are also much less likely to end up being competitive. It would take an upheaval of almost unimaginable proportions for Wyoming and Oklahoma to turn blue, or for DC and Hawaii to turn red.

Based on the five election average, the "battleground" as we start this cycle is made up of all the usual suspects:

These are all the states (and ME/NE congressional districts) where the five election average gives a margin of less than 10% for the leading party.

Immediate standouts are Arizona and Georgia, which over five elections, still are tinted pretty strongly red. One of the questions new polling will answer is if the Democratic wins in these states in 2020 were flukes, or if these should truly be closer to the center of the block above as true swing states for 2024.

Similarly, in the five election average Ohio and Florida are red but not by a lot. They look like they could be in contention. Democrats won both states in two of the last five elections. But in both 2016 and 2020 Ohio actually turned out much redder. And Florida seems to be on a trend toward the red as well, although not quite as dramatically as Ohio in 2020. Will these states go even further red? Or go back to being swingy states? Iowa is in the same boat. Just smaller.

Election Graphs shows you charts for individual states. Just as an example, here is Florida since 1980.

We usually won't look at that much history as actual 2024 polls start to come in. But you can see the individual election results, and how the five election average has evolved over time.

OK, so what does all this mean in terms of who has the advantage as we start this. Well, we are dealing with a five election average, and Democrats have won three of those five elections, so you would expect them to start with a little advantage given how we defined the starting line, and you would be right:

This shows my traditional "Categorization View" which just takes the averages at face value and gives an expected view where every state falls with the average, and best cases for each party assuming they win all of the "weak" states (where the margin is under 5%).

And what do we have? Democrats with a very narrow lead, with the range of outcomes based on the close states falling one way or the other including victories by both parties.

Also above are the two probabilistic views representing the extremes of how correlated poll errors are between states (completely independent to completely in lock step). These are based on looking at how far off the FINAL Election Graphs averages were from the actual election results from 2008 to 2020. See my last blog post for details.

Anyway, both of these also show a close race with a slight Democratic lead that could easily go either way, with Democratic win odds somewhere between 55.6% and 73.3%. Which leaves Republican win odds between 26.7% and 42.1%. Odds of a 269/269 tie are somewhere under 2.3%.

Keep in mind that Election Graphs does a "nowcast". That's "if the election was held today", which obviously it isn't. And we don't even have real 2024 polls in there yet. So this is even less of an actual prediction for 2024. This is just a starting point. A default look at the playing field before the game actually starts.

I'll be catching up with the actual state level 2024 polls we have over the next few days.

So here we go… Election Graphs 2024 has begun!

598.2 days until polls start to close.

Buckle up.

[Edited 2023-03-19 17:53 to correct the number of days until the election as of the time of the post, which I'd made a math error on.]

[Edited 2023-03-20 01:03 to uncorrect the number of days until the election, because I was actually right the first time, plus to correct the numbers in the probabilistic numbers, because I found an error there as well. Specifically, the Monte Carlo simulation was still using the 2020 electoral college distribution which because of the census was changed for 2024. Fixed now.]

[Edited 2023-03-21 05:55 UTC to correct a typo in the last note above.]

Prepping the Math Stuff for 2024

OK, in my last post I mentioned that the next thing to do was:

Finish up the calculations to use all four elections from 2008 to 2020 as the baseline "how well did Election Graphs averages do compared to the final results" data I use to try to generate odds from the polling averages and do a blog post about that.

So I guess it is time to do that.

OK, actually, it is way past time for that. I had hoped to have all this done by midterms, but I ended up spending most of the time I would have spent on that helping to do things like put out campaign signs for my wife's campaign. She won. Other things took up my time too. Anyway. I was delayed. But lets get this done…

Let's start with a simple scatterplot showing every state (and the DC and ME/NE congressional districts) from 2008 when I started doing this through to the 2020 results. Each data point will have the FINAL Election Graphs average on the X axis, and the ACTUAL election results on the Y axis:

As you would hope, these are nicely correlated at this scale. If EG's averages were always exactly right, every point would be along the black diagonal line. Of course, polls don't work like that, and even poll averages don't work like that. There is a vertical spread due to the inherent randomness of polling. A pretty wide spread actually.

But also if you look carefully, you can see that on the right side of the graph there are more points above the line, and on the left there are more points below the line. This means that there is also some bias here. Specifically a bias where the Election Graphs polling average tends to UNDERSTATE the magnitude of the winner's margin.

Let's do a transformation on the graph to try to look into the patterns a bit more deeply though:

That just looks like a messy colored blob initially. But what did I do here? I just transformed things by subtracting out the diagonal. Instead of looking at the actual election results vs the Election Graphs final margin, I look at the Delta… how far off the election results were from the Election Graphs final margin, vs the Election Graphs final margin. So, for instance, if on the top graph we had a point where the EG average was a 10% Republican lead, but the actual result was that the Republican won by 15%, that would show up as x=10%, y=5%.

OK, but can we say anything at all about this blob? Is this just two things that show no useful relationship at all?

Well, in this post from 2019 I actually looked at this before. So let me just quote a bit from there:

Before going further, let's talk a bit about what this chart shows, and how to interpret it. Here are some shapes this distribution could have taken:

Pattern A would indicate the errors did not favor either Republicans or Democrats, and the amount of error we should expect did not change depending on who was leading in the poll average or how much.

Pattern B would show that Republicans consistently beat the poll averages… so the poll averages showed Democrats doing better than they really were, and the error didn't change substantially based on who was ahead or by how much.

Pattern C would show the opposite, that Democrats consistently beat the poll averages, or the poll averages were biased toward the Republicans. The error once again didn't depend on who was ahead or by how much.

Pattern D shows no systematic bias in the poll averages toward either Republicans or Democrats, but the polls were better (more likely to be close to the actual result) in the close races, and more likely to be wildly off the mark in races that weren't close anyway.

Pattern E would show that when Democrats were leading in the polls, Republicans did better than expected, and when Republicans were leading in the polls, Democrats did better than expected. In other words, whoever was leading, the race was CLOSER than the polls would have you believe.

Finally, Pattern F would show that when the polls show the Democrats ahead, they are actually even further ahead than the polls indicate, and when the Republicans are ahead, they are also further ahead than the polls indicate. In other words, whoever is leading, the race is NOT AS CLOSE as the polls would indicate.

In all of these cases the WIDTH of the band the points fall in also matters. If you have a really wide band, the impact of the shape may be less, because the variance overwhelms it. But as long as the band isn't TOO wide the shape matters.

Now, back in 2019, at this point I jumped directly into looking at the pattern based on the combination of all the data from 2008 to 2016. Rather than doing the same thing now, but just adding in 2020, I think it is actually instructive to take a bit of a detour to look at each of the four election cycles separately.

First lets look at just the 2008 data points:

OK, the circles are just the individual 2008 data points, but what is the rest, what have I done here?

I've constructed "envelopes" using windowed averages and standard deviations.

Specifically, I am looking at windows with a 5% radius. At every value for the polling average at 0.1% increments, I look 5% in either direction (so a window 10% wide) and find all the data points within that window, then if there are at least five points, I calculate the average and standard deviation of those points. The 5% is of course just an arbitrary round number, as is the 5 data point minimum.

The bold line in the center is the mean, the next lines out are 1 standard deviation from the mean (about 68.3% of the data points should be inside these lines), and the next lines are 2 standard deviations from the mean (which should contain about 95.4% of the data points).

So the final chart here shows both the general trend in how far off final election results were from the Election Graphs average given where the average was, but also just how variable those results are.

For 2008, we can now see pretty clearly that this looks like "Pattern F".

When Election Graphs showed a tie, on average the actual election results were a Republican win by 0.2%. That's pretty close to a tie too. So not a lot of bias in one direction or another at the center. There is a BIG window though. If the EG average was a tie, the 95% confidence interval goes all the way from Democrats winning by 6.8% to Republicans winning by 7.3%.

But there is also definitely a trend where in cases where when Republicans were ahead in the EG average, they actually tended to win by MORE than the EG average, and if the Democrats were ahead, THEY tended to win by more than the EG average.

OK, you get the idea, so lets look at the rest of the election cycles Election Graphs has covered.

I've made the scales the same on all of these to make it easier to compare the cycles. While these all have the same high level diagonal pattern, the detailed shape of the curves is very different cycle to cycle, both in terms of the central average, and pattern of the variances.

Lets concentrate on those central curves and put them all on one chart…

You can immediately see the two elections Obama was in (the red and goldish ones) clump together, and the two that Trump was in (the light and dark greenish ones) clump together too.

They all have the general diagonal shape (Pattern F), but it stands out how, at least near the "Election Graphs average near zero" area which by definition are the states that matter in close races, how much more the poll averages underestimated Trump in 2016 and 2020, compared to a more neutral 2008, and an underestimation of Obama in 2012. Maybe these all have the Pattern F shape, but the slopes are different, and even more importantly, they are shifted vertically. They don't all just go through the origin.

And of these four years, 2020 is the only race yet where the average curve is above the zero line for its full length. For 2008 and 2012 if the Democrats were ahead in the average, on average they would do even better in the election than the polls indicated. In 2016, that was only true if the Democratic poll advantage was more than a 12.8% margin. But that didn't happen at ANY part of the range in 2020. At every range for the Election Graphs average, on average the Republicans did better than the average indicated, and the Democrats did worse. (Note that is not true for every single data point, just for the trend line.)

Does this mean anything for 2024? Quite probably not. As they say "past performance is not a guarantee of future results". It is unclear what all the reasons are for the shape of these error curves, and if pollsters are actively working on "correcting" things in the next cycle. Were the two Obama curves more "normal" and there is something unusual that just makes it harder to poll races with Trump in them? Or were the Obama races unusual too, and "normal" is somewhere in between? Or was there a systematic error that pollsters have a handle on now, and 2024 will just be a nice flat line? Or none of the above?

It would be nice if I had this kind of data from before 2008, but since that is when I started doing this, I don't. Also of course, you could argue that the world of 2024 is so different to 2004 that it wouldn't really be meaningful to look at that anyway. For other things on Election Graphs I use five election cycles (20 years) as a baseline, so I might still use older data if I had it. At least 2004. In general, I'd love to see how these kinds of curves have varied over even longer time periods. Oh well.

As it is though, since we don't know which way the errors will go in 2024, the best option I have available is to create this same sort of envelope using all four available election cycles.

This is what that looks like:

Doing this you lose the specific distinctiveness of the four presidential election cycles going into this. Instead, you essentially fold in some information about just how much polling accuracy has varied cycle to cycle.

Now, the "core" of Election Graphs has always been the dead simple method of taking the polling average at face value and classifying any states where the margin is less than 5% as states that could go either way, and presenting that range of possible results.

But starting in 2020 I experimented with producing probabilistic results too. Those probabilities were based on the 2008-2016 version of the chart above, and for 2024 I'll be using this 2008-2020 version.

The key is that for every value of the Election Graphs average, we have numbers for the mean actual election result (the EG average plus the delta), as well as an associated standard deviation. From this, we can construct a chart showing for each value of the Election Graphs average, the chances of a Democratic win and the chances of a Republican win based on the historical data. (As usual, since Election Graphs operates off the margin and not raw support numbers, if a 3rd party is ever in contention, this method falls apart.)

So what does that look like?

OK, that's nice at the same scale as all the other charts, but lets zoom into the critical central part here.

OK, given my methodology, this is a bit bumpy. I should probably smooth it out a bit or do a logistic regression or something. But given the levels of uncertainty we are talking about, I probably won't bother. I like a little bumpiness.

Anyway, this is the critical graph. And yes, this does smell a little of "unskewing" the polls. Don't worry though, ElectionGraphs will continue to show the straight up averages.

But what we see here is that over the last four election cycles, there HAS been a tendency to underestimate Republicans. Yes, as discussed above, all four cycles look different, and 2008 and 2012 look distinctly different than 2016 and 2020. But taken as a whole, the Election Graphs poll averages have underestimated Republicans.

So lets look specifically at a few data points on this chart.

Now, technically speaking because the way Election Graphs calculates averages (see FAQ, which I'm just realizing I need to update as well) there can't be exact ties in the Election Graphs average. But if there was an exact tie according to the curve above based on historical data, the Republican would actually have a 62.4% chance of winning, and the Democrat only a 37.6% chance. In order to have a better than 50% chance of winning, the Democrat would need to lead by at least 1.3%.

Looking at this another way, for the Democrat to have a better than 95% chance of winning, they need to be leading by 7.1% or more. For the Republican to have a better than 95% chance of winning, they only have to lead by 3.8%.

Again, this is based on comparing the Final Election Graphs averages to actual election results from 2008 to 2020. There is a chance 2024 looks nothing like the last four elections. Polling may be better. Polling may be worse. Polling may underestimate the Democrats this time rather than underestimating the Republicans. We just don't know. So looking at the four cycles of data I have so far is the best I can do…

Anyway, that is the curve I will be using to make my "probabilistic" views for 2024. This will not impact the traditional "categorization" views at all. They will remain as they always have been, classifying any state with a margin less than 5% as a "weak" state that could go either way. No "unskewing" there.

But I will allow the probabilistic views to take into account that based on this historical data, the Democrats have to be further ahead to have an even shot, etc.

Also important to note, is that these are the odds on a PER STATE basis (and CD for ME and NE). You can't apply these numbers to national polls. It just doesn't work that way. For that, I'll once again be doing Monte Carlo simulations using the state poll averages and the odds on the chart above.

One thing none of the above takes into account though is trying to estimate how correlated errors are between states. If errors were just completely uncorrelated, then when you run your simulation, you just roll the dice for each state. Distributions end up a bit narrower. But if things are completely correlated, so that if one state underestimates the Republican, they all do, then you essentially roll once to see how far off ALL the states are, and you end up with a much wider distribution with higher odds for the tails.

The reality is somewhere in between. I haven't had a good method for modeling "somewhere in between". So in the 2020 cycle, after a brief time mentioning only the fully independent version (which was a mistake, for which I was indirectly called stupid by Nate Silver), I ended up just showing both extremes. This wasn't entirely satisfactory either though. But at the moment I don't have a better idea.

If you are a stats and modeling person who wants to help me properly model the right degree of correlation between errors here, please get in touch. I'd love to learn more and do better.

That applies to everything else in the analysis above as well. I am well aware I am doing a few things that may not be exactly the right way to do things. I don't think anything is outright "bad", but I recognize there may be better ways of accomplishing what I am trying to accomplish, and maybe I'm wrong and some things ARE just bad. If so, I'd love to hear about it and learn… as long as you can give me that feedback nicely and gently, rather than being mean about it. Thanks.

OK. I guess that is it for the "preliminary math stuff".

Next up is standing up the actual 2024 page with only the previous actual election data (no 2024 polls yet) to define a "starting point". And updating the FAQ and things like that.

I'll post again once that is done, and before I start feeding it actual state polls for 2024 (of which there have already been quite a few).

Knock Knock… Is this thing on?

Well well. I haven't posted here in a long long time. The last thing was an update to my November 3rd 2020 Live Election Graphs Results Updates post on January 7th 2021 with the final official electoral college results after the craziness of the January 6th United States Capitol attack.

I had intended to post some sort of detailed 2020 post mortem like I did for the 2016 cycle. This site did pretty well again, in the same ballpark as some of the big guys. Roughly. I didn't ever sit down and look through all that in detail. So that post never happened. Frankly I was tired and exhausted with the election stuff, and aside from a few very minor things I would occasionally pick up and look at, I immediately fell into the mode of letting Election Graphs lie dormant until it was time to start thinking about 2024.

Welp, we are now only 78 days until the mid-term election, which is traditionally the starting gun for the next Presidential election, and we have at least one candidate making noise that they intend to make their run official even before then. So I think it is probably time.

There is no Election 2024 content live on this site yet. I've generally tried to start updating the site in earnest right around the mid-terms, although sometimes it has ended up being a few months later.

I have a to do list which I am starting to work through though, so here are some of the highlights:

  1. This post waking up the site, and announcing the preparations for 2024 are under way.
  2. Finish up the calculations to use all four elections from 2008 to 2020 as the baseline "how well did Election Graphs averages do compared to the final results" data I use to try to generate odds from the polling averages and do a blog post about that.
  3. Stand up the basic Election 2024 national summary, state pages, national comparison, and state comparison pages using only the averages of the 2004 to 2020 election results as the "starting averages" and do a blog post about that.
  4. Get all the state level 2024 presidential polls that have already been done (yes, there are quite a lot of them) entered into my system and see where things are as of now and do a blog post on that.
  5. Start regularly scanning for new state level 2024 presidential polls and adding them as they are released and doing periodic blog posts when there are any interesting changes.
  6. Set up the delegate race part of the site as well, although there is still quite a long time until the first delegates get allocated.
  7. If I have time, start adding a couple of enhancements to a few of the graphs I have been thinking about, and maybe some new maps or charts that were not there for the 2020 cycle.

I don't want to hold up anything for that last one. I have a few ideas in my head, but nothing solid, the ideas may or may not work in real life, and time is at a premium, so I may or may not have time to do them anyway. But one thing at a time.

And the one thing right now is to post this, put my stake in the ground as to what I am doing next, and get to it…

Welcome to the start of Election 2024 coverage here on Election Graphs!

Live Election Graphs Results Updates

As results start coming in, I'll update here with which states we got right, which we got wrong, and what that means for the range of possibilities based on the categorization view. I considered doing something where I updated the probabilistic numbers based on the called states, but that wouldn't really be a good model as the chances in the remaining states really should change based on which states have been called, and the vote count in the state, etc. And I'm not set up for any of that.

So we'll just stick to the best and worst cases for the candidates based on which states have been called, and assuming that only the "Weak" states might go the "wrong" way. Of course there can be surprises in the other categories too. We'll adjust appropriately if that happens.

Newer updates will be right under this introduction, scroll down for the older updates. Times listed are UTC. 0:00 UTC in November is 7 PM Eastern, 4 PM Pacific.

Refresh the page periodically to see updates.

2021-01-07 09:12 UTC

There were no faithless electors when the electoral college voted in December.

Despite a very eventful day in January when the electoral votes were presented to Congress, there were no changes to the totals.

So the final result is as expected since November 13th:

Biden 306 to Trump 232 – Biden by 74 electoral votes

At some point I'll start doing some analysis of the final state by state election results vs the final Election Graphs polling averages. I had hoped to actually do that by now. Oops.

I guess it is still fine as long as I do it before it is time to launch the 2024 version of this site, right?

Thanks again everybody for following us through the 2020 cycle.

2020-11-13 19:15 UTC

NBC just called Georgia for Biden. This is the last state that hadn't been called by anybody officially, although it has been clear for days that it was going that way.

So, final table:

Biden Trump Margin
Trump Best 306 232 Biden by 74
Expected 306 232 Biden by 74
Biden Best 306 232 Biden by 74

This leaves us with four jurisdictions where the final results differed from the Election Graphs calculations:

  • Maine-CD2 was "Weak Biden" where Biden led by 2.7% in our averages, which gave Biden a 71.4% chance of winning in our estimation. Trump won though, so his 28.6% chance of winning paid off.
  • Florida was also "Weak Biden" with an 0.7% lead. We translated this to only a 53.2% chance of a Biden win and a 46.8% chance of a Trump win. So Trump won this, but we had essentially identified it as a coin toss.
  • North Carolina was "Weak Biden" with an 0.6% lead. We gave this as a 52.1% chance of a Biden win, and a 47.9% chance of a Trump win. Again, Trump won the coin toss.
  • Georgia was "Weak Trump" with Trump's lead at 1.7%. For us that meant a 74.2% chance of a Trump win, and a 25.8% chance of a Biden win. In this case, Biden was the one who pulled off the underdog win.

All four of these places that went "the wrong way" were clearly in the zone where we gave significant odds to those states going the other way though, so none of them qualify as a huge surprise. So I am actually pretty satisfied with these results.

In addition, the "Biden by 74" EV was clearly within all of the "envelopes" this site produced, even if you go with the 1σ (68.27%) ranges for the two probabilistic views.

  • The "Probabilistic Independent States" 1σ (68.27%) range went from Biden by 48 to Biden by 172 with a median of Biden by 108. This was the tightest of our three ranges, and Biden by 74 was clearly in that range.
  • The "Probabilistic Uniform Swing" 1σ (68.27%) range was from Trump by 64 to Biden by 288 with a median of Biden by 132. Obviously Biden by 74 was in that range as well.
  • And finally my old fashioned simple "Categorization View Best Cases" went from Trump by 64 to Biden by 288 with Biden by 132 if everybody just won all the states they led. An exact match for the Probabilistic Uniform Swing 1σ (68.27%) range. And Biden by 74 was of course in that range.

So I don't feel bad about these results at all. Yes, there is a lot of handwringing about how far polls were off, but with ranges and probabilities that were generated by looking at how far off polls have been in the past, you end up with views that give you a level of confidence given the historical accuracy, you get a sense of just how variable the results might be given by the polling we have. Bottom line is there is a lot of uncertainty. But you can measure that uncertainty.

Once all the counts in all the states are final and certified, I will do a more detailed look at the state by state polling errors and what patterns we see there. And of course we'll track if there are any faithless electors this time around. Look for posts on both of those topics in December most likely.

But for the moment, we have calls in every state, so we'll close out this post.

Thanks everybody for following us for the 2020 cycle!

2020-11-12 03:47 UTC

Lots of other places are now calling Arizona for Biden. But we moved it into the Biden column way back when Fox called it. So nothing changes here. We're only waiting on calls for Georgia, which is also expected to be Biden at this point absent some huge surprise.

2020-11-11 15:49 UTC

A couple of hours ago several outlets called Alaska for Trump. This does not change the matrix. The only state without a call is now Georgia, where Biden currently leads.

2020-11-10 18:50 UTC

DDHQ calls North Carolina for Trump. This is one where our averages had Biden slightly ahead, so it is the third place where Election Graphs had the wrong winner. Given the 0.6% Biden margin in the state though, we still gave Trump a 47.9% chance of winning the state, so once again, this was essentially a coin flip, so we don't feel too bad about the miss.

All three misses so far were "Weak Biden" states which ended up going Barely Trump though. If current counts hold, Georgia will be wrong in the other direction.

The new matrix:

Biden Trump Margin
Trump Best 290 248 Biden by 42
Expected 290 248 Biden by 42
Biden Best 306 232 Biden by 74

Only Georgia and Alaska left uncalled.

Note that because the Election Graphs poll average had Trump leading by 5.9%, which put it in our "Strong Trump" category, it is not included in the swing above. Based on current trends, that doesn't look likely to introduce a surprise.

So the results above depend only on the call in Georgia, where Biden is currently leading. But nobody has officially called it yet.

2020-11-07 16:43 UTC

And Fox calls Nevada for Biden. So the matrix tightens further:

Biden Trump Margin
Trump Best 290 248 Biden by 42
Expected 305 233 Biden by 72
Biden Best 321 217 Biden by 104

We're only talking about what Biden's margin is now. We've known Biden was the winner since 14:00 UTC yesterday. (Arguably even before that.) Some places are just slow officially making that conclusion.

2020-11-07 16:34 UTC

Looks like all the major news outlets simultaneously called Pennsylvania, and the whole election, when Biden's lead went over 0.5% a few moments ago. But we were past that point yesterday. Still no additional change to the matrix for us. We'd already moved PA to the Biden column.

Still waiting on media calls for Nevada, North Carolina, Georgia, and Alaska.

2020-11-06 14:30 UTC

Our "Expected" case in the table below is based on who led each state based on pre-election polling. If all the remaining states just go to the candidate who currently leads the vote count, which seems very reasonable based on current trends, you get Biden 306 to Trump 232, or Biden by 74 EV.

2020-11-06 14:00 UTC

DecisionDeskHQ just called PA for Biden as soon as Biden took the lead in that state. And that is that.

Biden Trump Margin
Trump Best 284 254 Biden by 30
Expected 305 233 Biden by 72
Biden Best 321 217 Biden by 104

Biden has won the Presidency. Only question now is by how much.

(And even if Arizona is uncalled, the Trump's best cases would still be Biden by 8, so it is still just a question of how big Biden's win is.)

2020-11-06 09:22 UTC

Biden just took the lead in Georgia, and it seems unlikely that will change given the trends. Pennsylvania is expected to flip to Biden in the next few hours too. But no official calls yet. So not changing the matrix yet.

Also worth noting that while Fox/AP/Bloomberg all called Arizona for Biden, and thus we adjusted out counts here to reflect that, all the other news outlets are holding back, because Trump is closing the gap as more ballots are counted. We'll leave that call reflected here unless those outlets actually retract their calls.

2020-11-04 21:25 UTC

CNN calling Michigan for Biden. Takes that off the table for Trump.

Biden Trump Margin
Trump Best 264 274 Trump by 10
Expected 305 233 Biden by 72
Biden Best 321 217 Biden by 104

2020-11-04 18:35 UTC

ME-CD2 gets called for Trump by AP. That was also “Weak Biden” with a Biden lead of 2.7%. Odds wise we said Trump had a 28.6% chance of winning ME-CD2. So along with Florida, this is the second "miss" relative to our categorizations, but both were states where the odds of a flip were high enough so it isn't a surprise. That's why these are "Weak".

New matrix:

Biden Trump Margin
Trump Best 248 290 Trump by 42
Expected 305 233 Biden by 72
Biden Best 321 217 Biden by 104

2020-11-04 17:13 UTC

Wisconsin election authorities say all votes are counted, and Biden is ahead. Of course, this was "Strong Biden" by the poll average, so it wasn't even supposed to be in contention, and it is actually close enough it could be in recount territory. For the moment, the matrix doesn't change though.

2020-11-04 06:14 UTC

DDHQ calls NE-CD2 for Biden. It was Strong Biden, so expected.

2020-11-04 05:29 UTC

Montana called for Trump, no surprise.

2020-11-04 05:22 UTC

Fox/AP call Iowa for Trump. Takes it off as a possible Biden pickup:

Biden Trump Margin
Trump Best 248 290 Trump by 42
Expected 306 232 Biden by 74
Biden Best 322 216 Biden by 106

2020-11-04 05:15 UTC

Minnesota goes to Biden as expected.

2020-11-04  05:05 UTC

Hawaii goes where you expect.

2020-11-04 04:55 UTC

Fox calls Texas for Trump. So that's off the Biden pickup list.

Biden Trump Margin
Trump Best 248 290 Trump by 42
Expected 306 232 Biden by 74
Biden Best 321 210 Biden by 118

2020-11-04 04:46 UTC

Fox calls Ohio for Trump. Takes it off the possible pick up list for Biden.

Biden Trump Margin
Trump Best 248 290 Trump by 42
Expected 306 232 Biden by 74
Biden Best 366 172 Biden by 194

2020-11-04 04:23 UTC

Fox calls Arizona for Biden. That was a "Weak Biden", so not a flip, but takes it off the table for Trump's best case. New matrix:

Biden Trump Margin
Trump Best 248 290 Trump by 42
Expected 306 232 Biden by 74
Biden Best 384 154 Biden by 230

2020-11-04 04:08 UTC

Idaho goes the way you would thing.

2020-11-04 04:02 UTC

Washington, Oregon, California for Biden.

2020-11-04 03:52 UTC

NBC calls Nebraska, EXCEPT the 2nd.

2020-11-04 03:35 UTC

Louisiana, Utah,  and Kansas called the way you would expect.

New Hampshire too.

2020-11-04 02:30 UTC

NBC calls North Dakota for Trump.

2020-11-04 02:10  UTC

And AP calls Wyoming for Trump.

And New Mexico and Colorado for Biden

NBC calls South Dakota for Trump.

2020-11-04 02:05 UTC

Biden gets New York. Shocker.

2020-11-04 01:40 UTC

Arkansas for Trump. No surprise.

2020-11-04 01:30 UTC:

Missouri for Trump, no surprise.

ME-CD1 and ME-All to Biden. No surprise.

2020-11-04 01:20 UTC

DDHQ calls Florida for Trump. That had been "Weak Biden". First wrong state of the day.

New chart:

Biden Trump Margin
Trump Best 237 301 Trump by 64
Expected 306 232 Biden by 74
Biden Best 384 154 Biden by 230

2020-11-04 01:15 UTC

Massachusetts and Maryland and Delaware and DC and New Jersey to Biden. No surprises. Illinois and Connecticut too. Rhode Island.

Trump gets Alabama, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and Tennessee

Still no states that were actually in question.

2020-11-04 01:00  UTC

AP says Trump in South Carolina. No surprise.

2020-11-04 00:15 UTC

Fox calls Virginia and Vermont for Biden. Also no surprises.

AP calls Kentucky for Trump. No surprise.

DHQ calls West Virginia for Trump. No surprise.

I'll only put in a new matrix if it changes.

2020-11-04 00:05 UTC

Indiana for Trump. It was Strong Trump, so no surprise and no change to the matrix.

Biden Trump Margin
Trump Best 237 301 Trump by 64
Expected 335 203 Biden by 132
Biden Best 413 125 Biden by 288

2020-11-03 23:00 UTC

No states called yet.

Biden Trump Margin
Trump Best 237 301 Trump by 64
Expected 335 203 Biden by 132
Biden Best 413 125 Biden by 288

Election Day: Final Tightening?

It is Election Day.

Election Graphs has logged its last poll on Twitter for the 2020 season. In just a couple of hours, polls will start closing, and we will start getting actual election results.

So where did Election Graphs end up? What is our final prediction?

If you just want the bottom line, without any of the pretty charts or discussion, it is this:

Biden continues to be heavily favored to win. He is still in a stronger position than Clinton was four years ago. However, our numbers show a significant last-minute strengthening by Trump which makes Biden's lead much more tenuous than it was a week ago. If we had the same size polling error as 2016 in Trump's direction, he would win. (The same size error in the other direction would get to a Biden landslide… there are LOTS of close states.)

Having said that, the nature of some of the recent polls raises a real question about how much of this final move is "real" rather than just a lot of partisan and lesser-known pollsters flooding the final averages with polls that are favorable to Trump.

OK. If that is all you need, goodbye! See you for the 2024 cycle!

If you want more detail though, keep reading.

(There will also be a post tracking results as they come in tonight, and eventually, later this year once all the results are known and final, an analysis of how we did, so if those interest you, check back in later!)

The last blog update here was yesterday on November 2nd. There were hundreds of new polls (or at least it seemed that way) on that last day. Here are the changes in our metrics just in the last 24 hours.

Model Metric 2 Nov 3 Nov 𝚫
Probabilities
(Indep States)
Trump 2σ
Median
Biden 2σ
Biden +10
Biden +112
Biden +228
Trump +6
Biden +108
Biden +232
Trump +16
Trump +4
Biden +4
Trump Win
Tie
Biden Win
1.2%
0.1%
98.6%
2.5%
0.3%
97.2%
+1.3%
+0.2%
-1.4%
Probabilities
(Uniform Swing)
Trump 2σ
Median
Biden 2σ
Trump +84
Biden +102
Biden +314
Trump +86
Biden +132
Biden +294
Trump +2
Biden +30
Trump +20
Trump Win
Tie
Biden Win
18.8%
0.0%
81.2%
31.9%
0.0%
68.1%
+13.1%
FLAT
-13.1%
Categories Trump Best
Expected
Biden Best
Trump +64
Biden +102
Biden +288
Trump +64
Biden +132
Biden +288
FLAT
Biden +30
FLAT
Tipping Point Biden +3.5% Biden +2.3% Trump +1.2%

On the one hand, North Carolina moved back to the Biden side of the centerline. Which strengthens Biden by 30 EV in both the Uniform Swing Median and the Expected Case Median. But in the meantime, the huge wave of final polls reduced Biden's margin in the critical "Weak Biden" states.

And yes, it is the same thing I mentioned last time when I said:

There have been dozens of new polls since the update on the 31st. While there were exceptions, the overwhelming theme was polls showing a better picture for Trump and a worse one for Biden than we had seen any time recently. So almost all of the metrics above move in Trump's direction.

As with a couple of the other recent spikes toward Trump in the last few weeks, you can look at the specific polls in the average, and start wondering if this is just a bunch of right-leaning pollsters flooding the zone with polls in the last few days. While there were plenty of results from large mainstream pollsters released in these last few days, there were quite a few partisan polls released too, and some of them definitely helped move the averages toward Trump. I talked about this phenomenon on October 20th, October 24th, and October 31st… so I won't delve into that in-depth again.

Will this deteriorate further in the limited time left? Or bounce back? Or neither? If I had to guess, I'd say reversion to the mean. There have been no major news events in the last week that would seem likely to drive a tightening. So I expect this "tightening" is actually just an artifact. But that is just an educated guess. We will all know soon enough.

It did not revert to the mean. Biden's situation deteriorated a lot more. It ended up being significant in the final numbers.

So I guess I do have to delve into it again. Bottom line, in the last few days before Election Day, every pollster in existence seems to have wanted to make sure they got a shot at Election 2020, and a huge volume of polls was released. Many of these were from pollsters that have clear partisan leanings, and whose results were much more positive to Trump than what we had been seeing. Others were just lesser-known pollsters.

Election Graphs uses a "Last X Polls" model, specifically so that as the election approaches and there is more polling, we look at shorter and shorter timeframes and are more responsive to changes. We also use the mid-date of polls to determine just which polls are part of the "Last X" rather than the end-date. This means that in terms of the "final" averages we favor the very last-minute polls put out with very short times in the field.

The result is that many of the large well-known polling companies with good reputations that put out their final polls late last week or even over the weekend got crowded out of the critical state averages by the large volume of random polls, which often just covered one or two days in the field.

Those pollsters tended to be much more bullish on Trump than the usual suspects who had been polling this race regularly over the last year.

So the averages in many states jerked a few percentage points toward Trump, just in the last few days.

If there was a big event in the news that was bad for Biden, then it would be easy to say that was the cause. The closest thing to that has been the drip-drip of information about Biden's son, but for the most part that has not seemed to actually get much traction. But maybe?

In the absence of a clear reason for movement, while there is most definitely a clear difference in the nature of the polling that comprises the average, it seems reasonable to think that maybe the movement is just an artifact of the polling, and doesn't represent a real change.

So perhaps the picture the site had of the race a week or two ago is actually a better representation of what is happening?

Maybe.

But four years ago we had a similar move in the last few days before the election. And that time it also seemed to be driven by a surge of polls from outlets that hadn't been doing a lot of polling earlier in the cycle. And we ended up closer to the final result because we reflected the change caused by those polls. That last burst of polls ended up being closer to reality than the more established pollsters they displaced.

Of course, that could well have just been luck too.

We set the rules for how we define the averages, what we would include and would not include, etc over two years ago, based heavily on what we did in 2008, 2012, and 2016. We're not going to change anything on the last day.

So it is what it is.

We'll find out in a few hours if the short time frames and the burst of lower quality polls ended up causing Election Graphs to dramatically overestimate Trump and underestimate Biden. If we are way off, maybe we'll change something for 2024. Or maybe the movement seen in these last 48 hours actually better represents what is going on.

I don't know. We will see.

So I can give the caveats above, but the numbers are what they are, and so we'll do the rest of this discussion taking them at face value.

Let's look at all the graphs.

First of all, the comparison with 2016:

After a brief spike toward a stronger position for Biden, the collapse we have been talking about happened. The final tipping point was only a 2.3% Biden lead. Biden had seen worse tipping points, but not since early June.

Even at this level though, Biden is stronger than the 1.6% that Clinton ended with. So he is still in a better position.

However, the difference between the Election Graphs final tipping point and the actual election results in 2016 was 2.36%. So the same size error in the correct direction would make Trump the winner.

In terms of the expected case, where each candidate wins every state where they lead the Election Graphs average, Biden is in the low end of his recent range, but not any lower, and still significantly ahead of where Clinton was.

OK. Let's look at the range of margins predicted by our three models:

In all three of these cases, the center lines have moved toward Trump, but are either still in their normal ranges, or are just barely out it. What has changed though is that in all cases the upper end of the envelopes, representing Trump's best cases has stretched out significantly further into the Trump wins zone.

This makes sense because most of what we saw was not states actually flipping from Biden to Trump in the averages, just Biden's lead in states being significantly diminished. So the straight-up scenario that happens if the averages are all correct doesn't move much. But the sensitivity to the averages being wrong and therefore states flipping to Trump based on those errors increases significantly.

As a sanity check, let's compare our three centerlines with what other sites are saying at the moment:

So I'm in the zone. Most of the big folks have Biden doing better than I do, but there are a few places that have him doing worse.

And the Election Graphs "expected case" exactly matches what the Upshot says would be the result if the polling error in 2020 was the same magnitude and direction as the error in 2016. Which is interesting.

I note of course that nobody has Trump winning in their "expected case".

OK, with that done, let's look at odds.

While still small, the red zone in the Independent States odds view is now significantly larger, with Trump's chances now at 2.5%.

Trump's odds in the uniform swing model are massive now though, at 31.9%.

Fundamentally, since this imagines the extreme case where all the states move in a completely synchronous way, the only thing that matters is the odds in the tipping point state. And as of the final situation, the tipping point is Pennsylvania, and our average has Biden leading Pennsylvania by only 2.3%.

And in our analysis of our results from 2008 to 2016, we discovered that when we have a Democrat leading by 2.3%, that translates into a 68.1% chance of the Democrat winning, and a 31.9% chance of the Republican winning.

So Trump's chance of winning Pennsylvania is 31.9%, and if all the states are locked together, that means his odds of winning the whole election would be 31.9% too.

Since both of these models are extremes, and the truth is somewhere in between, the official Election Graphs statement on Trump's chances at this point is "between 2.5% and 31.9%". Election Graphs doesn't actually model where the right spot is within this range, but the middle is as good a spot to look at as any. That would be a 17.2% chance of a Trump win at the moment.

Once again, let's compare with the other folks:

My two extreme models are unsurprisingly near the extremes. "The middle" puts me lower than most of the "big" outlets. So maybe they think which there is some correlation between the states, their models still think they are more independent than not.

In any case, Biden is a favorite in all of these views. But in some, the chances of an upset are much more than others.

Not including the three from me, the median is a 9.3% chance of a Trump win. Including all three of mine, the median is 10.0%.

So as usual I make the statement that people tend to be bad at interpreting odds. 10% is not 0%. 10% happens all the time. Biden is favored, but a Trump win is still very possible.

Looking at the tipping point without the 2016 comparison, the main thing to notice is the huge volatility at the end. Swinging first in favor of Biden, then against him. This is an indication that perhaps for 2024, I should look into ways to make this a little LESS sensitive to short term changes in the last weeks.

OK. Time for the map and spectrum:

This view makes the volatility of the race clear. There are 10 states (and Maine CD2) with margins less than 5%.

The polling error in 2016 was 2.36%. There are 8 states closer to the centerline than that, including the tipping-point state.

If we get a 2016 size error favoring Trump, we get a very narrow win for Trump, squeaking past the post with an 18 EV margin.

If we get a 2016 size error favoring Biden, Biden wins by 288 EV, the largest winning margin since 1988.

More likely than either extreme of course is that we just get a solid but not extraordinary Biden win.

And now the trends in all the close states:


And that is that.

It is election night. The first results will be coming out within a couple of hours. We may or may not end up knowing who wins tonight, but we'll still learn a lot. And soon enough, we will indeed have a winner.

I hope you have enjoyed Election Graphs and found it useful this year. Aside from seeing how things turn out and how we did, we are done.

It was fun. Thanks everyone!

For more information:

This post is an update based on the data on the Election Graphs Electoral College 2020 page. Election Graphs tracks a poll-based estimate of the Electoral College. The charts, graphs, and maps in the post above are all as of the time of this post. Click through on any image for current interactive versions of the chart, along with additional details.

Follow @ElectionGraphs on Twitter or Election Graphs on Facebook to see announcements of updates. For those interested in individual poll updates, follow @ElecCollPolls on Twitter for all the polls as I add them. If you find the information in these posts informative or useful, please consider visiting the donation page.

1.5 Days Out: Good Poll Cycle for Trump

As always, if you are impatient for one of these updates, the 2020 Electoral College pages on Election Graphs are updated multiple times every day as new polls come in. Or you can follow @ElecCollPolls on Twitter to see all the polls as I add them. While you are at it, follow @ElectionGraphs too.

The last blog update here was on October 31st. It is now November 2nd. We only have about a day and a half to go until we start getting actual results from Election 2020. I expect to do one more blog update before polls close on Election Day.

Model Metric 31 Oct 2 Nov 𝚫
Probabilities
(Indep States)
Trump 2σ
Median
Biden 2σ
Biden +52
Biden +150
Biden +256
Biden +10
Biden +112
Biden +228
Trump +42
Trump +38
Trump +28
Trump Win
Tie
Biden Win
0.1%
0.0%
99.9%
1.2%
0.1%
98.6%
+1.1%
+0.1%
-1.3%
Probabilities
(Uniform Swing)
Trump 2σ
Median
Biden 2σ
Trump +52
Biden +176
Biden +294
Trump +84
Biden +102
Biden +314
Trump +32
Trump +74
Biden +20
Trump Win
Tie
Biden Win
14.6%
0.0%
85.4%
18.8%
0.0%
81.2%
+4.2%
FLAT
-4.2%
Categories Trump Best
Expected
Biden Best
Trump +20
Biden +176
Biden +288
Trump +64
Biden +102
Biden +288
Trump +44
Trump +74
FLAT
Tipping Point Biden +4.3% Biden +3.5% Trump +0.8%

There have been dozens of new polls since the update on the 31st. While there were exceptions, the overwhelming theme was polls showing a better picture for Trump and a worse one for Biden than we had seen any time recently. So almost all of the metrics above move in Trump's direction.

As with a couple of the other recent spikes toward Trump in the last few weeks, you can look at the specific polls in the average, and start wondering if this is just a bunch of right-leaning pollsters flooding the zone with polls in the last few days. While there were plenty of results from large mainstream pollsters released in these last few days, there were quite a few partisan polls released too, and some of them definitely helped move the averages toward Trump. I talked about this phenomenon on October 20th, October 24th, and October 31st… so I won't delve into that in-depth again.

But there is one critical difference. Judging by what happened in the last couple of cycles, there might be a handful of straggler polls released Tuesday morning, but we really only have one full day left for polls to be released. And many of the major pollsters have already released their "final polls" for the critical states. That means that any outliers introduced in the last few days, or in the remaining time we have left, will very likely still be part of the final averages this site produces.

There is no longer much time for an outlier poll to be "washed out" by additional polling. We are nearly at the end.

So while there may be some changes tomorrow, let's take seriously what we have today, and not try to make excuses. Four years ago on this site, there was a similar move toward Trump in the final days, and I somewhat dismissed it by pointing out the influence of partisan pollsters and what looked like possible outliers in the late-breaking polls. And of course, in retrospect, that move was real.

Is this move real? We'll know once the actual votes get counted.

So what do we have today if we take our averages seriously?

So let's look at all the graphs.

First of all, the comparison with 2016:

In the tipping point, which represents the degree polls need to be wrong and/or change before the end in order to flip the winner, Biden now holds a 3.5% lead. This is the worst level Biden has been at since mid-June, but it still beats the 1.6% Clinton was at four years ago by a significant amount.

Will this deteriorate further in the limited time left? Or bounce back? Or neither? If I had to guess, I'd say reversion to the mean. There have been no major news events in the last week that would seem likely to drive a tightening. So I expect this "tightening" is actually just an artifact. But that is just an educated guess. We will all know soon enough.

In terms of the expected case, where each candidate wins every state where they lead the Election Graphs average, Biden has a slightly lower margin than he has seen before in the last three months. Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Ohio, and Iowa, all of which have spent time on the Biden side of the centerline, are all now in "Weak Trump" territory in the Election Graphs averages at the same time.

But Biden is still ahead by 102 electoral votes in this view. By this time four years ago, Clinton was hanging on with only an 8 electoral vote lead.

OK. Let's look at the range of margins predicted by our three models:

All three of these still have their centerlines with the narrowest Biden lead they have seen in the last three months. These levels were last seen in June. So not unprecedented, but still breaking out of the recent zone.

In terms of odds from the probabilistic views, the Independent States chart no longer just looks like a blue square. So here it is:

See that little bit of red at the bottom right? For the first time in a long time, Trump's chance of winning is visible in this view, as it rises to 1.2%. Prior to this bump, the highest this has been in the last three months was 0.2%.

Those odds assume that there is no correlation between polling errors in different states though. So time to look at the other extreme.

In this view, Trump is now at an 18.8% chance of winning.

As with all of the other views, this is the best Trump's numbers have been in the last three months.

Since both of these models are extremes, and the truth is somewhere in between, the official Election Graphs statement on Trump's chances at this point is "between 1.2% and 18.8%". The middle of that range is 10.1%.

While Election Graphs doesn't actually model where the right spot is within this range, the middle is as good a spot to look at as any. So I'll just call it a 10.1% chance of a Trump win at the moment. That is up from 7.4% when we looked at this two days ago.

As 2016 should have taught everyone, a 10% chance of winning is not the same thing as a 0% chance of winning. Things that happen 1 in 10 times happen many many times every day.

Having said that, Biden is still a heavy favorite. We're not in a coin toss scenario, and certainly not in a situation where Trump is favored.

Looking at the tipping point without the 2016 comparison, there is one additional thing I would like to point out besides the fact that the tipping point is at a 3.5% Biden lead, which is outside of the range it has been in for the last three months.

Specifically, look a few days earlier. The many polls that came since the last update included a lot of polls that were very favorable to Biden that were in the field a few days earlier than the ones that drove the current numbers toward Trump. So I now show a peak on October 29th to a 7.4% tipping point lead for Biden based on that polling! That was also outside the normal range for the last three months. In fact, it was the best tipping point number Biden has EVER seen!

Because polls are coming in fast and furious, and Election Graphs is intentionally very sensitive to short term changes as polling velocity increases, we are seeing LOTS of volatility as outliers come and go from the averages.

Which is another reason to think that the "truth" here is probably a fairly stable Biden +5% tipping point lead, and the ups and downs here are just polling noise. Maybe in future cycles, I should consider making things a little LESS sensitive to short term changes. Maybe a 10 poll average instead of a 5 poll average. That would smooth things out a little bit.

For now though, when you see a noisy graph like this, it almost always means that the true "signal" is not actually an underlying reality rapidly moving up and down, but rather you are just seeing measurement artifacts, and you want to consider the overarching trend, not the transient jiggles.

OK. Time for the map and spectrum:

As with all the other views, we have shown, this spectrum shows a lot closer race than we have seen since June. There are more states on the Trump side of the centerline, and the "Weak Biden" states are weaker than they were.

Subject to any changes due to additional polls coming in over the next day or so, what does that mean in different polling error scenarios?

As we discussed last time, the Election Graphs tipping point was off by 0.89% in 2012, 2.36% in 2016, and 3.45% in 2008.

You need a larger error than any of those three election cycles to get a straight-up Trump victory.

But a 2008 level error would have Trump winning Maine CD2, Arizona, and Florida in addition to the states he leads, and leave Biden's win dependant on a lead of less than 0.1% in Pennsylvania. With all of the talk of legal disputes over what ballots are counted, a 2008 level polling error in this direction would certainly put that scenario into play.

On the other hand, even a 2016 level polling error in the other direction would result in Biden winning Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, Ohio, and Iowa. That would be Biden 413, Trump 125 in the final count, or a 288 electoral vote margin, which would be the largest win since Bush beat Dukakis in 1988.

The most likely result is of course in between: A Biden win, but not by an overwhelming margin.

And now the trends in all the close states:

And that is that.

1.5 days until the first results start coming in on election night.

If you are eligible to vote in the US and have not yet done so, make your plan and get it done.

For more information:

This post is an update based on the data on the Election Graphs Electoral College 2020 page. Election Graphs tracks a poll-based estimate of the Electoral College. The charts, graphs, and maps in the post above are all as of the time of this post. Click through on any image for current interactive versions of the chart, along with additional details.

Follow @ElectionGraphs on Twitter or Election Graphs on Facebook to see announcements of updates. For those interested in individual poll updates, follow @ElecCollPolls on Twitter for all the polls as I add them. If you find the information in these posts informative or useful, please consider visiting the donation page.

3.5 Days Out: No Big Changes

As always, if you are impatient for one of these updates, the 2020 Electoral College pages on Election Graphs are updated multiple times every day as new polls come in. Or you can follow @ElecCollPolls on Twitter to see all the polls as I add them. While you are at it, follow @ElectionGraphs too.

The last blog update here was early UTC on October 28th (with numbers as of the end of the 27th UTC). Just over three days ago. Here are the high-level changes since that last post:

Model Metric 27 Oct 31 Oct 𝚫
Probabilities
(Indep States)
Trump 2σ
Median
Biden 2σ
Biden +38
Biden +142
Biden +256
Biden +52
Biden +150
Biden +256
Biden +14
Biden +8
FLAT
Trump Win
Tie
Biden Win
0.1%
0.0%
99.8%
0.1%
0.0%
99.9%
FLAT
FLAT
+0.1%
Probabilities
(Uniform Swing)
Trump 2σ
Median
Biden 2σ
Trump +52
Biden +144
Biden +300
Trump +52
Biden +176
Biden +294
FLAT
Biden +32
Trump +6
Trump Win
Tie
Biden Win
11.8%
0.0%
88.2%
14.6%
0.0%
85.4%
+2.8%
FLAT
-2.8%
Categories Trump Best
Expected
Biden Best
Trump +20
Biden +176
Biden +294
Trump +20
Biden +176
Biden +288
FLAT
FLAT
Trump +6
Tipping Point Biden +4.4% Biden +4.3% Trump +0.1%

I'm updating more often since we are so close to the end, but the bottom line is again that things are fairly steady. If you look at the numbers above, yes, they move around a bit. But we still have nothing that looks like a sustained move as opposed to just poll averages meandering up and down as specific polls come in and out of the average.

Now, if I'd been making this post a bit sooner, it might have looked a lot like my "The Race Tightens? Or Not?" post from October 20th. This time the tipping point moved from Biden+4.4% on the 27th, down to Biden+3.1% on the 29th. I would be asking if this was the beginning of the race starting to tighten.

But as with that post, I would have expressed skepticism because just as it was back on October 20th, this spike was driven by a rash of polls from pollsters that tend to put out outliers. As new polls came out on the 30th, the tipping point bounced back to Biden+4.3%, almost back to where it had been before. It was just a transient spike.

In some cases the outliers that drive this are extreme. In one dramatic instance, Trafalgar came out with a poll showing Trump ahead by 2% in Michigan at a time when the other polls in the Election Graphs average ranged from Biden+7.7% to Biden+13%. The Trafalgar number was not just at the Trump end of the range we had been seeing, it was on a whole different planet.

Whenever I see polls like that come in, I start wondering if I shouldn't have switched Election Graphs from using averages to using medians years ago. Or maybe that I need some sort of weighting by historical pollster accuracy, or to do something more complex to deal with and adjust for outliers, or just include more polls to wash these outliers out a bit more.

But one of the main ideas of Election Graphs from the beginning has been to include everything and keep to relatively simple averages, and see how far that gets you. It does make us bounce around when we get outliers though, and makes us VERY sensitive to just which pollsters have been in the field most recently.

If there is a REAL move, then after you get a spike led by a particular poll, additional polls will confirm the move, and you'll see a sustained change that lasts even after that first poll rolls off of the average. When it is just a movement driven by an outlier though, things will move back to where they were once a few new polls come in.

The problem here at the very end of the race is that at some point there will be no new polls. The last pollsters in the field will dominate the average. And they may or may not be the ones with the most accurate results. Last time around in 2016 Election Graphs did pretty well. Maybe we were lucky. We'll see how it goes this time.

For the moment though, when you look at the graphs, it seems that after a brief spike where it looked closer for a moment, we're back in the same familiar territory for this race as we have been since June, showing Biden as a heavy favorite, but with the possibility of a Trump upset not completely out of the picture.

So let's look at all the graphs.

First 2020 vs 2016 comparisons since everybody on both sides keeps saying "But what about 2016?" when people talk about Biden's lead.

In the tipping point, which represents the degree polls need to be wrong and/or change before the end in order to flip the winner, Biden now holds a 4.3% lead. Clinton was at 1.6% by this point in 2016.

Biden is closer to the 4% part of his "normal range" than the 6% end, but we are still in very familiar territory. This race is pretty much in the same place it has been for months, Biden remains stronger than Clinton was, and we do not see any evidence of a collapse.

In terms of the expected case, where each candidate wins every state where they lead the Election Graphs average, Biden is still pretty much in the center of his normal zone, and significantly ahead of where Clinton was.

OK. Time for the three envelopes we have covering this year:

Instead of saying it three times, I'll say this once, since it is the same for all three:

There has been no substantive change to the race in months. All of these charts just show little bounces up and down as polls move in and out of the averages.

Fundamentally, the race looks the same now as it did at the beginning of August or even mid-June.

In terms of odds from the probabilistic views, the Independent states chart still looks like a big blue square. Biden's chances in that model have been pegged near 100% for many months.

So looking at Uniform Swing…

In this view, Trump is now at a 14.6% chance of winning. That is higher than his chances have usually been, but not out of the range we have seen.

Since both of these models are extremes, the official Election Graphs statement on Trump's chances at this point is "between 0.1% and 14.6%".

We don't officially specify a spot within that range since we haven't modeled how much correlation between states to expect, but I guess the midpoint is as good a value to look at as any other. The middle of that range is 7.4%.  That intuitively feels reasonable. Not total correlation, not total independence, but right in between. And frankly, that seems to be in the same general ballpark as all the big players who are doing election modeling. So call it 7.4%.

At 7.4%, Trump has about a 1 in 14 chance of winning. That would clearly be an upset, but is not so far out of the realm of possibility that people should be thinking about it as if a Biden win was a done deal. Of course, because of 2016, almost nobody is.

By contrast, Trump was at about 14% in 2016 if you looked at the median of all the sites giving odds. That would be about a 1 in 7 chance of winning.

So yes, Biden's polling lead is not so great you can say that there is a negligible chance of a Trump upset, but the chances of that kind of an upset are around half what they were in 2016.

This is just zooming in on the Tipping Point line without the 2016 comparison. Like all the other charts, this shows some bouncing around, but fundamentally a static race. The few times it looked like we might have been breaking into new territory in one direction or the other, it has proven to only be a short term spike once more data came in.

Of course, there is no guarantee that something won't change in the last few days, but there simply isn't much time left for a significant change.

Looking at this spectrum, one thing that you can look at more clearly than some of the other views is imagining polling errors of the sizes we have seen in the last three elections.

As measured by the difference between the final Election Graphs tipping point, and the actual tipping point based on votes cast in the elections, you had these errors:

  • 2008: 3.45%
  • 2012: 0.89%
  • 2016: 2.36%

Assuming uniform swing, and that the polls are overestimating Biden:

  • 2012 level error: Just our expected case, Biden wins by 176 EV
  • 2016 level error: Trump wins the states he leads, plus Maine CD2, Iowa, Arizona, and North Carolina. Biden still wins, but only by 110 EV.
  • 2008 level error: Trump wins all the states above, plus Georgia and Florida. Biden still wins, but only by 20 EV, and with only an 0.85% margin in the tipping point state of Pennsylvania… perhaps within range of complicating things with recounts and court challenges.

So in order to win based on "polls were wrong" (rather than a last-minute move in the polls in the next few days), we would need a bigger polling error than we have seen in the last three cycles.

On the other hand, also assuming uniform swing, but this time assuming the polls are overestimating Trump:

  • 2012 level error: Just our expected case, Biden wins by 176 EV
  • 2016 level error: Biden wins all the states he leads, but also Ohio and Texas, which ends up at what we call Biden's best case, winning by 288 EV.
  • 2008 level error: Biden by 288 EV. Same result as the 2016 level error. Even a 2008 level error isn't enough to pull in wins for Biden in the next closest states of Montana, Alaska, and Missouri.

And now the trends in all the close states:

That is all for today.

3.5 days until the first results start coming in on election night.

We are so close. Almost there now.

For more information:

This post is an update based on the data on the Election Graphs Electoral College 2020 page. Election Graphs tracks a poll-based estimate of the Electoral College. The charts, graphs, and maps in the post above are all as of the time of this post. Click through on any image for current interactive versions of the chart, along with additional details.

Follow @ElectionGraphs on Twitter or Election Graphs on Facebook to see announcements of updates. For those interested in individual poll updates, follow @ElecCollPolls on Twitter for all the polls as I add them. If you find the information in these posts informative or useful, please consider visiting the donation page.