Republican Delegates after MI/ID/MO

I wasn't expecting Missouri.

Thought that wasn't going to be until May based on the Green Papers calendar.

But regardless, we got results for 54 delegates from Missouri, 39 delegates from Michigan, and 32 delegates from Idaho on Saturday.

Donald Trump got all 125 of those delegates.

And so the walk toward the nomination continues.

Next up, Republicans in DC later today, and in North Dakota Monday.

Then Super Tuesday.

134.3 days until the Republican National Convention

169.3 days until the Democratic National Convention

 

 

Delegates after Michigan Primaries

I meant to post this last night, but I fell asleep. Oops. One delegate changed in the Green Papers estimates since yesterday, so good I waited I guess.

In any case, Michigan had primaries on both the Republican and Democratic sides on Tuesday. For the Democrats, that's it for Michigan. For the Republicans Michigan still has a caucus that allocates most of the delegates on Saturday, so more to come.

On both the Republican and Democratic sides, people are trying to read the primary results for clues to what will happen in November. That's all well and good, but here I'm only going to talk about the delegate race.

On the Democratic side, there was lots of drama in the press about the vote for "Uncommitted", but from a delegate point of view, an uncommitted delegate is just that, a delegate that is still TBD in terms of how they will vote.

As of now it looks like there will be 2 uncommitted delegates coming out of Michigan. But until or unless we get actual people assigned as those delegates, and they declare who they intend to vote for, Biden still has 100% of the allocated delegates.

So yeah. That's what that was about. In terms of delegates anyway.

OK, on the Republican side, Haley got 4 out of the 16 delegates, but of course that was nowhere near what she'd have to be doing to be catching up to Trump. She is just falling further behind, although she is ever so slightly slowing Trump's progress toward the nomination.

Meanwhile, some revisions to the estimates in some earlier states. Haley lost 3 delegates to Trump in South Carolina, and 1 more to him in New Hampshire.

The lower Trump gets, the closer he is to clinching the nomination, the higher Haley goes, the closer she gets to being mathematically eliminated.

No real surprises here.


That is it for today's update. Next up: Republicans in Idaho and Michigan on Saturday, DC on Sunday, and North Dakota on Monday.

Then Super Tuesday for both parties.

137.8 days until the Republican National Convention

172.8 days until the Democratic National Convention

Republican Delegates after South Carolina

Hey wow. Looks like Haley managed to get some delegates after all.

In my last update I mentioned South Carolina was Winner-Take-All. Well… not quite. It is winner take all, but with some of the delegates being WTA statewide, but some by congressional district. And it looks like Haley squeaked out very narrow wins in South Carolina's 1st and 6th congressional districts.

This gives her 6 of South Carolina's 50 delegates.

Of course that gives Trump 44.

So Trump continues his inexorable trip to the nomination.

Well, inexorable absent something on the order of a major health crisis or some such.

In any case, here are the most important charts and graphs:

Click on any of the above for the rest of the charts, and for the Democratic side too.

Next up: The Democrats in Michigan on Tuesday. There is no drama expected there of course.

141.7 days until the Republican National Convention.

176.7 days until the Democratic National Convention.

Republican Delegates after NV & VI

Trump gets all 4 delegates from the Virgin Islands.

Haley got 26% of the vote there, but the Virgin Islands are Winner-Take-All, so that didn't matter.

Trump gets all 26 delegates from Nevada.

Haley got 30% in the primary vote there, coming in 2nd to "None of these Candidates", but that didn't matter since in Nevada, the primaries were not how delegates were allocated.

Instead, they were allocated by caucus, where the only other candidate besides Trump was Ryan Binkley, who got 0.71% of the vote. Never heard of him? Yeah, I hadn't either. Here is his website.

Anyway, that means Trump got 100% of the 30 delegates that were available tonight, which starts moving his "% of remaining delegates needed" number away from the 50% line, while Haley (and the others)  zoom upward.

Here are the most important charts and graphs:

Click on any of the above for the rest of the charts, and for the Democratic side too.

Next up: the Republicans in South Carolina on the 24th (winner-take-all), followed by the Democrats in Michigan on the 27th (proportional).

157.6 days until the Republican National Convention

192.6 days until the Democratic National Convention

Democratic Delegates after Nevada

As expected, Biden gets all 36 delegates.

There is no serious competition of course, so while I'll keep updating, we are just going to see a Biden march to clinching the nomination.

Next up will be the Republicans in Nevada and the Virgin Islands on Thursday, which is expected to be equally boring from the other side.

In any case, here are the graph and table:

159.7 days until the Republican National Convention

194.7 days until the Democratic National Convention

Democratic Delegates after South Carolina

Well, this is boring.

Biden gets all the delegates from South Carolina.

This was also completely expected of course. The only place where the token opposition of Phillips and Williamson were expected to be able to get a non-trivial amount of support was in New Hampshire, where Phillips got 19.66% of the final vote, and Williamson got 4.05%, just ahead of write-in votes for Republican Nikki Haley at 3.84%. But of course no delegates were awarded based on that vote. New Hampshire will undoubtedly eventually get to send delegates to the convention, but how they will be allocated is yet to be seen.

Here in South Carolina, as of a few hours after poll closing, the partial count has Biden with 96.22%, Williamson with 2.08%, and Phillips with 1.71%. To get any delegates, Phillips or Williamson would have had to do MUCH better than that, either state wide, or at least in one of South Carolina's 7 congressional districts. Either way, they were not even close.

So Biden gets all 55 delegates from South Carolina, and starts on what will likely be an uninterrupted journey toward clinching the nomination on March 19th, the first date where it will be mathematically possible.

We'll track the updates as they happen from now until then, but unless something very unexpected happens, there won't be any drama.

Here is the main "% of remaining delegates needed to win" chart:

And the tabular summary of where things are:

Next up, Democrats in Nevada on Tuesday night.

It will probably be just as boring. But we will be here to confirm!

162.8 days until the Republican National Convention.

197.8 days until the Democratic National Convention.

Delegates After New Hampshire

On the Democratic side, New Hampshire has been penalized and only has 10 delegates, which theoretically won't be allocated by the results of today's primary, but maybe eventually will be, just not directly. In any case, we go by The Green Papers, and at least so far, they haven't estimated any delegates there. So lets stick to the Republicans, because that is where the action is anyway.

So what happened there? Well, Trump won New Hampshire as expected, although perhaps Haley made it a little closer than Trump would have liked.

Here is the full state breakdown so far:

Which makes the overview look like this:

I explained last time that the "% of Remaining Delegates Needed to Win" column there is the most important to watch, so here is the chart of that:

Ramaswamy and DeSantis are of course racing upward out of contention since they have dropped out.

With her showing tonight, Haley managed to not have her situation deteriorate TOO much. She went from needing 50.52% of the remaining delegates to win, to needing 50.57% of the remaining delegates to win. So she didn't improve her delegate position, it continued to deteriorate, but not by all that much.

Meanwhile, Trump improved from needing 50.02% of the remaining delegates to win, to only needing 49.98% of the remaining delegates, which is his first time under 50%. But just BARELY. His line has yet to start diving down toward 0%.

But it probably will.

The next contests on the calendar that actually allocate delegates on the Republican side will be the Nevada Caucus on February 8th (not the Nevada primary a few days earlier, which doesn't matter) and Caucus in the Virgin Islands. Haley registered for the Primary that doesn't matter in Nevada, but not for the Caucus, so Trump will likely win all 26 delegates there.

Then the next real competition with both Trump and Haley will be in South Carolina. Recent polls there have had Trump far ahead, and it is a winner take all state.

The only real hope on an actually interesting delegate race that isn't just a coronation for Trump is if somehow Haley's finish in New Hampshire was "close enough" to Trump that it shakes up Republicans in South Carolina (and beyond) and they start abandoning Trump in droves. Which seems really really unlikely.

We'll have the Democrats in South Carolina and Nevada before that though. So we'll see you again for that. Of course that will almost certainly just be walking to a coronation for Biden on that side of the fence.

So… yawn!

Wake me up if something interesting shakes things up.

173.6 days until the Republican National Convention

208.6 days until the Democratic National Convention

 

 

Trump Wins Iowa Caucus (as expected)

So far, all the posts here on Election Graphs in the 2024 cycle have been about looking at state level polls for the general election in November.

That ends today, as the second part of Election Graphs opens up, as the delegate race begins on the Republican side.

The numbers may still shift a bit as all the T's are crossed and all the I's are dotted for the final counts, but the preliminary delegate counts at The Green Papers haven't shifted in a couple of hours, so that's good enough for now, lets start looking at the new charts and graphs.

Many places will have tables showing the delegate totals. Here is ours:

The first column shows how many delegates each candidate has right now, the second shows that as a percentage of the delegates so far, the third shows the percentage of the remaining delegates each candidate needs to win, and the last column is how much better than their performance so far each candidate needs to do to win.

The delegate race page shows graphs for all of these, but the main one, the one that matters the most, is the "% of remaining delegates needed" graph:

OK, we've only had the one delegate estimate from Iowa so far, so this is just a bunch of straight lines right now… kinda boring. It will get more interesting as we get results from more states.

Well, how interesting will depend on if we get any surprises in the race, but it will stop just being straight lines in any case.

Let me explain what you are looking at.

First, we specifically show graphs showing how those numbers evolve over time, not just "now". The data table is nice and all, but to get a sense of how things are going, it really helps to see how things have been changing. Is someone catching up? Or falling behind?

Second, while we do have a page that shows things in a date-based way, the primary view has the % of delegates that have been allocated on the x-axis rather than the date. This gives a much better sense of how far though the process we are. After Iowa, the Republicans have allocated 1.65% of their delegates. We are still a very long way from the end. On some primary days, only a small percentage of delegates will be allocated, but on the other extreme, 35.99% of the delegates will be allocated on Super Tuesday alone.

Third, the y-axis is of course the % of the remaining delegates that each candidate needs to win.

To me, the other graphs are nice, but this is the most important metric of all.

Why is this the most important thing? Because the absolute numbers can be misleading, because as more and more delegates get allocated, there is less and less opportunity for whoever is trailing the leader to catch up, and the leader has to do less and less in order to coast to the victory.

Just like any race, if you are behind, the less track you have left before the finish line, the faster you have to go to in order to catch up to the winner before they get to the finish line. It does you no good to catch up to them after they have already won.

The "% of remaining delegates needed to win" graph shows that more clearly than anything else.

Even though only a very small number of delegates have been allocated so far, you can already see that in the chart above. Everybody starts out needing just barely over 50% of the delegates to win.

But now with just a few delegates estimated, Ramaswamy, who actually already dropped out due to his 4th place finish here, would now have needed 50.73% of the remaining delegates to win. Haley needs 50.52%, DeSantis needs 50.48%.

Meanwhile Trump, after getting exactly half of the delegates from Iowa, only needs 50.02% of the remaining delegates to win.

As we continue through the primaries and caucuses, the losers will have their numbers move toward 100% faster and faster, while the winner will start dropping down toward 0%. This represents those who are behind needing to get a larger and larger percentage of the delegates to catch up, while the person in the lead needs less and less.

Later on in the race, it is very possible that a candidate could win a state, but not by enough to be on a pace to catch up, so even though they won, they still end up falling further behind.

In the epic 2008 race between Obama and Clinton, this happened to Clinton over and over in the second half of the race. She was winning states, but not by enough to be on a pace to catch up  to Obama.

As each losing candidate hits 100% and then goes beyond it, they are eliminated.

When the winning candidate gets to 0%, they have clinched the nomination.

OK, that sounds complicated. It really isn't. It will become clearer as the race progresses.

But if you really like raw counts better, it is there too:

On there is it just about who gets to 1,215 first.

In any case, next up New Hampshire, including delegates for the Democrats too, despite the penalties the Democrats put on New Hampshire for not moving their primary later in the year.

It is very very possible, probably very likely actually, that there will be no real drama in either party's delegate race this year. Even if Haley puts on a good show in New Hampshire next week.

Regardless, we'll track it all here, and see how it goes.

181.6 days until the Republican National Convention

216.6 days until the Democratic National Convention

Off we go.

295 Days Out: Peak Trump?

Here we go. It has been another 50 days, so time for another blog post update on the 2024 race. I'll do these more often when we get really close to the end, but for now 50 days still seems good.

Remember, here on the blog I try to do periodic narrative updates, but I update the live status on ElectionGraphs.com as quickly as I can when new state level polls come up, so the graphs and charts there will always be more up to date than these blog posts. Also follow Election Graphs on Mastodon for updates every single time a poll is added, plus daily status summaries.

As usual, I'll start with a summary.

  • Bottom line: There may be lots of time left for things to play out, but Trump is doing great right now, and Biden is… not.

OK, a little bit more:

  • The last 50 days of polls have continued to move in Trump's direction. Biden's best position of the last year was in June. The next three months were not great, but things were mostly steady. Then the bottom fell out around the start of October, and things have only gotten worse since.
  • Some of the graphs have started to turn around and move toward Biden again in the last month or so, but due to the winter holidays polling has actually been pretty sparse, and so it is too early to tell if this is the start of a new sustained trend, or just a temporary bump.
  • The tipping point right now is Trump ahead by 4.0% in Michigan. That still represents a close race. 4.0% is an amount that can disappear in less than a week depending on news events, or if polls are wrong in the opposite direction this year compared to 2020 or 2016, that lead could be a mirage.
  • Polls this far out ARE NOT predictive of the final result. However, we can see where things stand today and compare to previous cycles. Trump continues to massively outperform his state level polling at the same time in the 2016 and 2020 cycles.
  • In 2020, Biden won Georgia and Arizona. At the moment, those two states don't even look competitive, with polling showing strong leads for Trump in both.
  • In 2020, Biden also won Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Nevada. Trump is currently showing narrow leads in all four. These states have been battlegrounds before, and clearly will be again this time. To get things moving back in his direction, Biden needs to start here.
  • Some Democrats are acting as if Trump has a weak hand and any current good polling for him is just an aberration and will disappear as the election approaches and Trump's legal issues continue to unspool. Or they point to special elections and abortion referenda where they have over performed relative to expectations. Or to the large number of undecided voters that they think will end up breaking for Biden in the end. Perhaps they will be right on all that. But right now Trump is ahead, and it is foolish to underestimate him.

With that out of the way, anybody who only cares about the summary should leave. For those of you who are left, I'll dump a lot of charts and graphs…

Here is what the spectrum of close states (poll average margin 10% or less) looked like when I did the last blog post on 2023-11-24:

And here we are on 2024-01-15:

Categorizing the movement of all of these states:

Movement toward Trump:

  • Maine-CD2 (1 EV): Biden by 1.6% -> Trump by 2.4% (Trump+4.0%)
  • Maine-All (2 EV): Biden by 11.1% -> Biden by 7.8% (Trump+3.3%)
  • Michigan (15 EV): Trump by 1.1% -> Trump by 4.0% (Trump+2.9%)
  • North Carolina (16 EV): Trump by 4.0% -> Trump by 6.2% (Trump+2.2%)
  • Virginia (13 EV): Biden by 6.0% -> Biden by 4.2% (Trump+1.8%)
  • Arizona (11 EV): Trump by 4.4% -> Trump by 5.8% (Trump+1.4%)
  • Florida (30 EV): Trump by 7.3% -> Trump by 8.7% (Trump+1.4%)
  • Minnesota (10 EV): Biden by 5.3% -> Biden by 4.3% (Trump+1.0%)
  • Nevada (6 EV): Trump by 2.8% -> Trump by 3.8% (Trump+1.0%)
  • Georgia (16 EV): Trump by 5.7% -> Trump by 6.7% (Trump+1.0%)
  • Iowa (6 EV): Trump by 9.2% -> Trump by 10.0% (Trump+0.8%)
  • New Hampshire (4 EV): Biden by 8.6% -> Biden by 8.0% (Trump+0.6%)
  • Colorado (10 EV): Biden by 7.8% -> Biden by 7.7% (Trump+0.1%)

No change:

  • New Mexico (5 EV): Biden by 9.3%
  • Nebraska-CD2 (1 EV): Trump by 4.7%
  • Ohio (17 EV): Trump by 9.2%

Movement toward Biden:

  • Wisconsin (10 EV): Trump by 0.1% -> Trump by 0.0% (Biden+0.1%)
  • Texas (40 EV): Trump by 5.8% -> Trump by 5.4% (Biden+0.4%)
  • Pennsylvania (19 EV): Trump by 1.2% -> Trump by 0.6% (Biden+0.6%)

Just like last time the moves were overwhelmingly toward Trump.

Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, both important states given how close they are, did go the other way by a small amount, but the impact of this was overwhelmed by so many other states moving against Biden.

The only thing that actually flipped from Biden to Trump since 50 days ago was Maine-CD2. This was due to the very first poll for this congressional district this cycle, showing  a 14.0% Trump lead, displacing the 2004 election results in the average. In 2004 Kerry beat Bush by 5.8% there.

But in 2016 and 2020 Trump won ME-CD2 by healthy margins, so this is essentially just the new poll in the average confirming that the move toward the red in this district is likely to continue in 2024, and now that it has moved into that zone, it should not be surprising if ME-CD2 not only stays red, but gets redder once there are a few more 2024 polls in the mix.

But that's just one electoral vote. Lets take a deeper look at the four states currently in the "Weak Trump" category, in order by how many Electoral votes they have:

First up, Pennsylvania. This is of course one of the states that bucked the trend and seems to be moving back toward Biden. From June through the middle of December, with a few exceptions, the movement was usually toward Trump, with some individual polls showing Trump with margins as high as 8.9%. But starting in mid-December, things started to go the other way, with 2 out of 3 polls since then actually showing Biden in the lead, and the third with only a 1% Trump lead.

You never know what the next poll will bring of course, but for the moment at least, Pennsylvania seems to be trending back toward Biden.

Repeating something I've mentioned before though, the "neither one" category, which includes both people who say they will vote for other candidates, and folks who say they are truly undecided, is huge compared to the margin between Biden and Trump. Trump leads by 0.6%. The average has 16.6% saying "neither" in Pennsylvania at the moment.

That is massive, and indicates that the situation is potentially very volatile, as both 3P support and "undecided" tend to collapse as elections approach. As an example, the "neither" category in Pennsylvania on Election Graphs on election eve in 2020 was only 3.7%.

Next up Michigan. Michigan has been moving dramatically toward Trump since July. The average has gone from Biden by 2.8% to Trump by 4.0% today. A 6.8% swing in six months.

And it looked worse a few days ago. The most recent poll in Michigan, from Target Insyght, in the field from January 4th to 10th, shows Biden ahead by 4%. But this is the first poll showing a Biden lead since early November. It is way out of line with all the other recent Michigan polls. It honestly looks like an outlier.

Immediately before this poll was added, the average in Michigan had Trump up by 5.8%… which was redder than Texas currently is in the EG average.

Michigan with Trump ahead by more than 5% is very very bad news for Biden. With Michigan at those levels, the EG "categorization view" which takes the poll averages at face value, and just says any state with a margin under 5% could go either way, shows Biden still losing even if he won ALL of those close states.

That new poll puts Michigan back as "Weak Trump" rather than "Strong Trump" though. Because while I may speculate here on the blog that maybe it is an outlier, for the averages on the site, I don't judge, and just include everything.

Maybe that new poll is actually just the start of a new trend, and it is really the earlier polls showing Trump significantly ahead in Michigan that were the outliers, in which case maybe things are starting to move toward Biden again. Who knows? But if not, Michigan is looking very challenging for Biden right now.

If Biden campaign people aren't deep diving to figure out how to tackle Michigan right now, then they are committing political malpractice. They need Michigan. (And all of the states we are talking about today actually, but Michigan is the biggest problem at the moment.)

Oh, and once again we have a massive 17.8% of people in the "neither" category. They are probably the people that Biden needs to target first.

The current EG average shows Trump by 0.0%. This is of course rounded. The unrounded average has Trump leading by 0.04%. But that level of precision is false precision. This average is really a tie.

Looking at the actual individual poll results included in the average, they range from Biden up by 5% to Trump up by 6%. The scatter on the chart is all over the place. There is no obvious trend, and we have about as many polls with Biden leading as with Trump leading. The average has been close to the tie line since the beginning of November.

I really want more polls in Wisconsin. For the moment, all I can say is that it looks like Wisconsin is close, the variation on the polls there is pretty wide, and polling there is slow enough that we can't really judge short term trends.

And of course big "neither" numbers in Wisconsin too.

Biden hasn't led a poll in Nevada since October, but looking at the polls since then, it looks like they might be trending back toward Biden after a spike toward Trump, but with Trump still firmly in the lead. Well, once again with a "neither" category much larger than the margin. But still a lead on the margin.

Nevada is only 6 electoral votes, but at the moment if you gave Biden all the states where he leads the average, plus Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin…  you end up at a 269/269 tie, which would send the election into the House of Representatives where the NEW House that just won election would vote by state delegation, not by individual representatives… a voting structure that would probably mean a Trump win in the end, even if the Democrats win back the House.

So if Biden wants a clean win, Nevada needs to get pulled back over the line too.

OK, so now lets zoom back out to the national view, and bring in all three of the different ways EG has of looking at the national picture:

Let's look first at the "odds ranges" between the Independent States and Uniform Swing views. These are the odds of a Biden win:

  • 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%
  • 2023-06-25: Between 43.9% and 46.0%
  • 2023-08-13: Between 42.9% and 44.2%
  • 2023-10-01: Between 35.7% and 44.2%
  • 2023-11-26: Between 3.0% and 23.1%
  • 2024-01-15: Between 1.2% and 4.4%

This is by far the worst performance we've seen in these blog posts. The two ends of these ranges represent the difference between assuming that the polling errors are going to be the same in every state, and assuming that the polling error in each state is completely independent of the errors in other states. The truth is going to be somewhere in between.

Both probabilistic views do base their probabilities on the differences between the final EG poll averages and the actual vote totals in 2008 through 2020. For details of how all this works see my post from January 2023. The bottom line though, is the probabilistic views assume that in the closest states, the Election Graphs poll averages are underestimating the Republican by a bit, because that is how it was averaging out all the results from 2008 to 2020. If the poll error is in the other direction this time, things will of course look a bit better for the Democrat.

I should make a graph that explicitly shows the range between these two probabilistic views, but in the mean time, here are the two charts on the probabilities:

Still looking at the probabilistic view, but looking at likely Electoral College outcomes instead of the odds:

The independent states view is the most dynamic in terms of how sensitive it is to every single new poll added, so when looking for trends, it is the one to look at. Looking carefully at this chart, there is an inflection point around December 12th.

Trump is still way ahead of course, but there starts to be SOME movement toward Biden after that date. Trump had "a" peak on December 12th. Only time will tell if this was "Peak Trump" overall.

The uniform swing view is a lot less clear, but you can see a little movement toward Biden in recent weeks if you squint.

Taking the probabilities out of it, and just looking at the Classification view, you get this:

The only sign of movement toward Biden on this view so far is that the spike representing Michigan being out of reach because Trump's margin was greater than 5% was really short lived.

For the categorization view though, there is another way of looking at things, namely through the "tipping point", which is the margin in the state that puts the winner over the edge:

  • 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
  • 2023-06-25: Biden by 0.9% in Georgia
  • 2023-08-13: Biden by 0.7% in Michigan
  • 2023-10-02: Biden by 0.7% in Pennsylvania
  • 2023-11-26: Trump by 1.2% in Pennsylvania
  • 2024-01-15: Trump by 4.0% in Michigan

We do have a graph of this one though!

We see the spike over 5% for the short time Trump's margin rose up to 5.6% in Michigan, moving the tipping point very briefly to 5.4% in TEXAS.

That was stunning. Texas as the tipping point state? But it didn't last long, and the tipping point is back down to a 4.0% Trump lead in Michigan.

That is still substantial though. Since I have been doing this sort of election analysis, the biggest delta between the final EG tipping point and the actual tipping point based on the election results was 3.45% in 2008. That year the polls underestimated Obama.

We have many months to go, but if we still had a Trump by 4.0% tipping point on Election Day, the overall polling error would need to be underestimating Biden this time, and be bigger than the errors we had in any of the previous four presidential elections in order to result in a Biden win.

The tipping point can also move very quickly. In 2016, Clinton's lead in the tripping point lost almost 6% in just the last couple of weeks before the election. There is the variability inherent in polling in general, plus news events really can move opinion. Leads can evaporate almost overnight under the right circumstances.

This is one of many reasons why polling this far out is not predictive, it only tells you about how things are right now, and where candidates need to put in effort to change things.

Here is the tipping point comparison with the last two election cycles:

For almost this entire election cycle Trump has been doing better than he was doing in either the 2016 or 2020 cycles. Since October, he has been doing SUBSTANTIALLY better than these previous cycles.

You can also see this looking at the center lines for the electoral college margin view:

All of the above assumes Biden vs Trump, because that currently seems like the almost certain matchup, absent something really unexpected coming up.

Election Graphs will be covering the delegate race starting with the Republican caucus results in Iowa, which will start to come in less than 24 hours from when I publish this blog post.

Expect a post about Iowa delegates once things settle down a bit in the election coverage and it looks like we have stable delegate estimates.

We will know before too much longer if the Biden vs Trump assumption about Election 2024 ends up holding true.

In the mean time, a quick look at other possibilities for the Election 2024 matchup, using the Independent States Probabilistic View median electoral college result since that is the most interesting to look at:

There is enough polling on Biden vs Trump and Biden vs DeSantis to feel like the lines above are pretty good. Trump is considerably stronger than DeSantis when pitted against Biden.

Biden vs Haley is getting there, but should still be taken with a significant dose of salt, because state by state polling for that combination is still pretty sparse, so a lot of the EG state poll averages are still based significantly on election results from previous cycles. But it looks like she PROBABLY does better against Biden than DeSantis, but not as well as Trump does.

All three of these Republican candidates are leading Biden though, the question is by how much, and how secure that lead is.

The other three combinations on the chart above have barely been polled, and should be ignored. Harris, Pence, and Youngkin aren't even running at this point anyway.

Finally, closing the post with the current Biden vs Trump map:

295.8 days left until the polls start to close on Election Day 2024.

Less than a day until the Iowa caucuses on the Republican side.

Buckle up everybody. Things are starting for real now!

345 Days Out: Trump Stronger Than Ever?

I had thought about doing another blog post update at the one year mark, but never got around to it. So I guess for now I am sticking to approximately every 50 days. We are now just under the 350 day mark. And it is a long holiday weekend, so I have some time. So here goes.

These only represent snapshots where I look back at how things have changed recently. The live current situation is updated whenever new polls come out, as quickly as I can manage given other commitments. That live status is now the main page of ElectionGraphs.com instead of this blog, since it is always more current.

Anyway, the TL;DR of where things are right now:

  • The last 50 days of polls have been great for Trump and horrific for Biden. Specifically starting in early October there have been poll after poll after poll showing Trump leading in critical states.
  • With this change, the situation has moved from "A toss up race with Trump slightly favored" 50 days ago to "If the election was today, Trump would be the heavy favorite."
  • Although down a little bit from his peak at the end of October, Trump is very near his all time best polling compared to his Democratic rivals, not just in this cycle, but also far outperforming his own numbers in both 2016 and 2020.
  • That fact should NOT be underestimated. Because of that, Trump is most definitely favored right now. Democrats acting like everything is fine are deluding themselves. Polls right now are NOT predictive of the final outcome. But they do indicate where things are now, and where things are now is that Biden has lots of work to do.

There are several reasons for Biden and his partisans not to despair yet though:

  • The election is not today, there are nearly 350 days of developments yet to play out, including several Trump trials. These may or may not end up damaging Trump's poll numbers, but they represent a major source of uncertainty.
  • Historically incumbent candidates have been weakest about a year out before their elections, and have often "come back" and finished strongly, using the advantages of incumbency to benefit their campaigns.
  • The "heavy favorite" narrative I quoted above is in large part due to the fact that this site assumes the pattern of polls underestimating the Republican that held in 2 of the last 4 elections (2016 and 2020) holds again. The picture starts looking very different if the polls underestimate the Democrat like they did in 2012 (which would perhaps even indicate a Biden lead), or even if they are about right as they were in 2008 (where Trump still leads, but it seems much closer).
  • While Trump currently leads in all the critical battleground states in the EG averages, his leads are quite small, with the current tipping point being Pennsylvania, where Trump only leads by 1.2%, a margin which could literally disappear with a single good poll for Biden.
  • The percentage of respondents saying "neither", including both 3rd party support and people who insist they are undecided, is huge. This number swamps the margins between Biden and Trump in the swing states. Both 3P and undecided numbers tend to collapse as the election approaches, leaving a lot of room for persuasion.

Reminder that those who want to see a list of all the polls can just look here, and 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.

OK, now for actual numbers and graphs and such for those who want them.

This is how the spectrum of close states looked as of the last blog post on 2023-10-02:

And here is what it looks like as I write this on 2023-11-24:

There is clearly a lot more red than there was. Here is the movement since last time:

Places where the poll average moved toward Trump:

  • Arizona (11 EV): Trump by 0.3% -> Trump by 4.4% (Trump+4.1%)
  • Florida (30 EV): Trump by 3.3% -> Trump by 7.3% (Trump+4.0%)
  • Wisconsin (10 EV): Biden by 3.8% -> Trump by 0.1% (Trump+3.9%)
  • Michigan (15 EV): Biden by 2.0% -> Trump by 1.1% (Trump+3.1%)
  • Nevada (6 EV): Biden by 0.3% -> Trump by 2.8% (Trump+3.1%)
  • Georgia (16 EV): Trump by 2.7% -> Trump by 5.7% (Trump+3.0%)
  • North Carolina (16 EV): Trump by 1.3% -> Trump by 4.0% (Trump+2.7%)
  • Pennsylvania (19 EV): Biden by 0.7% -> Trump by 1.2% (Trump+1.9%)
  • Minnesota (10 EV): Biden by 6.9% -> Biden by 5.3% (Trump+1.6%)
  • Virginia (13 EV): Biden by 7.0% -> Biden by 6.0% (Trump+1.0%)
  • Texas (40 EV): Trump by 5.0% -> Trump by 5.8% (Trump+0.8%)
  • Iowa (6 EV): Trump by 8.6% -> Trump by 9.2% (Trump+0.6%)

Places with no change:

  • New Mexico (5 EV): Biden by 9.3%
  • New Hampshire (4 EV): Biden by 8.6%
  • Maine CD2 (1 EV): Biden by 1.6%
  • Nebraska CD2 (1 EV): Trump by 4.7%

Places where the poll average moved toward Biden:

  • Colorado (10 EV): Biden by 7.0% -> Biden by 7.8% (Biden+0.8%)
  • Ohio (17 EV): Trump by 10.6% -> Trump by 9.2% (Biden+1.4%)

The overwhelming trend is obviously toward Trump in this timeframe. The small movements in Colorado and Ohio in the other direction don't matter much in the face of all the movement elsewhere, especially since neither of these two states are particularly competitive.

No states flipped from the Trump side to the Biden side. And while there are lots of states that moved toward Trump without flipping sides, lets take a closer look at the four states (highlighted in red above) where the EG average actually flipped from having Biden ahead to having Trump ahead:

Starting with Pennsylvania as it is both the tipping point state and of these four the one with the most electoral votes, so a doubly critical state.

In the past in these posts, I've just shown the graph, but this time I'm including the status block that shows the averages for each candidate as well. Plus the "neither" number, which I added to the display a few weeks ago within the "<>" brackets.

As I mentioned in the TL;DR, this shows a big part of the story that otherwise is not visible. Yes, Trump is up by 1.2% in my average, but the average also shows full 14.4% refusing to support either. This just puts that 1.2% in context that is necessary to understand the potential volatility of that margin number.

Having said that, let's look at the trend. Biden's lead in Pennsylvania had peaked in June, and was slipping away a bit since, but the big jump came at the beginning of October. Although it looks like this jump coincides pretty closely with the start of the Israel-Hamas war, a few of the polls that started this move toward trump actually were in the field right before that. But additional polls later in the month confirmed the trend.

In the end this moves Pennsylvania from a small Biden lead to a small Trump lead. But given where all the other states lie, Pennsylvania is one of the critical states. For both candidates, most of the likely paths to victory include Pennsylvania.

The story looks similar in Michigan, except the upward trend seems less abrupt, looking like more of a continuation of a trend that started in June rather than something abrupt and new in October. The "neither" group is even bigger here than in Pennsylvania.

All of these seem similar to a degree. All have a movement toward Trump in October, all have a huge number in the "neither" category. In Wisconsin's case, we also have what is currently the closest state in our poll averages. Yes, there is a Trump lead in the poll average, but just barely.

Now, given the history of how the final poll averages did in 2008-2020, I translate a 0.1% Trump lead into a 63.3% chance of Trump winning the state if the election was today, simply because looking over all of those years, more often than not a nearly tied poll average resulted in a Republican win.

Finally Nevada. Nevada had been straddling the center line since April. The jump toward Trump in this case really didn't hit until the end of October rather than the beginning. That may just be related to when there was polling and when there wasn't though. We still aren't at the point in the cycle where all the close states are being polled every week or anything.

This move just puts Nevada back where it had been in the first part of the year though.

All four of these states are in the situation where a small number of polls favoring Biden could flip the average back to the other side quickly. So the situation is volatile. That will always be true in a situation where the tipping point state is "close". There is lots of opportunity for the situation to change.

But as of right now, the national situation looks like this:

All of this looks incredible for Trump, and horrible for Biden.

As of right now Trump is ahead in all the critical states, and in the probabilistic views, to look good for Biden, he would not only have to be leading in those states, but leading by a couple percent.

Looking at how the probabilistic ranges have evolved in terms of the 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%
  • 2023-06-25: Between 43.9% and 46.0%
  • 2023-08-13: Between 42.9% and 44.2%
  • 2023-10-01: Between 35.7% and 44.2%
  • 2023-11-26: Between 3.0% and 23.1%

This is the lowest Biden has been this cycle.

Looking at the two odds charts:

These vary by how the eventual errors between poll averages end up correlating between states.

That is, in the independent states version, the polls can be off from historical norms in one direction in one state, and in the other direction in the next state and there is no relation between what happens in one state and what happens in another. Whereas in the uniform swing model, if polls underestimate one side, they do so in the same way in every state. Of course the reality is somewhere in between.

The general shape is the same, but the Independent States version is more dynamic, so it is nicer to visualize trends. At the moment it is also worse for Biden and better for Trump, basically because the polls have to be underestimating the Democrats in multiple states to get to a Biden win, where with Uniform swing, you just have to have the nationwide error be missing Biden support.

Moving away from win odds to the Electoral College, here are the current views for each of the three ways EG has of showing the range of possible outcomes:

We are just showing all the different ways of looking at the same picture here. The median cases with Trump ahead by several states, but Biden wins are possible if he flips a few of the key states.

The other way we have of measuring how hard those flips would be besides the probabilistic models, is looking at the "tipping point", which is the margin in the state that would put the winner over the top.

Here is how that number has evolved:

  • 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
  • 2023-06-25: Biden by 0.9% in Georgia
  • 2023-08-13: Biden by 0.7% in Michigan
  • 2023-10-02: Biden by 0.7% in Pennsylvania
  • 2023-11-26: Trump by 1.2% in Pennsylvania

Or in graph form:

One point that shows up more in this view than in the others, is that there has already been some movement back toward Biden after a peak around the beginning of November.

And it is a good time to point out again that 1.2% is not much. The tipping point went from Biden by 1.6% at the end of September to Trump by 1.9% at the end of October. These numbers can be volatile and move quickly. If the election was today, Biden would be an underdog, but there is time.

Having said that, the overall trends compared to 2016 and 2020 are dismal for Biden. For more than a year, Trump's polling has been consistently better than the previous cycles looking at both the median electoral college result and the tipping point:

Even with all the reasons I gave that Biden isn't out of the game even though numbers don't look great right now, this last observation should concern Biden folks the most.

Maybe the polls are all just wrong, and completely missing a large swath of Biden support. But if not… then Biden is not only running behind the pace of his narrow win in 2020, but is also lagging Clinton's loss in 2016.

Team Biden has some work to do. Running on a strategy of "well, we won last time" and/or "Trump's support will eventually collapse" is highly risky.

OK, quick look at the "What if it isn't Biden vs Trump" chart:

At this point there is finally just about enough polling to consider the Biden vs DeSantis numbers trust worthy as well as the Biden vs Trump numbers.

But you can safely ignore all of the others. There just isn't enough polling to say anything meaningful about those combinations. Don't trust those lines.

But we do see that with this latest surge, Trump once again does better against Biden than DeSantis does.

To explore Biden vs DeSantis more, look here.

Finally, as usual, closing with the current Biden vs Trump map:

345.1 days until polls start to close on Election 2024.