Harris – Election Graphs

56 Days Out: Before the Second Debate

It has been 23 days since my last post.

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

Lets see how the polls have moved since then.

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

Now more details for those who want them.

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

And now as of 2024-09-10:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Movement toward Trump:

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

No Movement:

Iowa (4 EV): Trump by 0.6%

Movement toward Harris:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It will be a wild ride!

79 Days Out: Harris Surges to a Tie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Now, let's get into some details:

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

But let's hit some graphs.

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

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

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

Let's look more specifically at the states.

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

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

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

Here are the movements in the last three weeks:

Movement toward Trump:

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

No Movement:

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

Movement toward Harris:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Which is where we are today.

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

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

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

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

But wait, what is that white bit?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just barely.

And of course we all know Clinton ended up losing.

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

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

So Harris has plenty of opportunity to pull further ahead.

But things could go the other way too.

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

You never know.

We really are in coin toss territory right now.

Every day is going to matter.

So pay attention.

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

100 Days Out: Whole New Race

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

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

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

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

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

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

Following the debate, that was all erased practically overnight.

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

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

And that is when he dropped out.

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

So what about Harris?

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

But still not really enough yet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rest of the close states are in between.

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

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

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

Harris improves on Biden in these states:

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

No change in this state:

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

Biden was doing better than Harris in this state:

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

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

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

Lets look at some of the national trends over time:

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

Biden and Harris currently lose by exactly the same amount.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So far anyway.

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

It is quite simply too soon to tell.

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

Does that translate into lasting changes in the polling situation?

As usual, we just have to wait and see.

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

100.0 days until polls start to close on Election Day.

Hold on tight.

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

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

Is Impeachment Hurting the Dems?

Once again, too long between updates. Since the last one on November 20th there have been new polls in Wisconsin (x3), New Hampshire, California (x2), Texas (x2), Arizona, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Iowa.

If I'd been posting weekly as I had intended, there would have been a post looking at how Election Graphs win odds correlated to the popular vote polling averages at RCP and using that to measure the Democrats' Electoral College disadvantage. (Spoiler: As of right now it looks like Democrats need an approximately 6% popular vote win margin to have a 50/50 chance of winning the Electoral College.)

I also would have done a post talking about how while for us political junkies, it seems inconceivable that people don't know who at least the top five Democratic candidates are, this article in the Washington Post by Robert Griffin lays out a pretty convincing case that a large part of the differences in polling between Democratic candidates vs. Trump is STILL simply that lots of people don't know who some of these people are, something that clearly would change before Election Day if they were to win the nomination. That is obviously very important when interpreting what we see here on Election Graphs, which is 100% driven by state level general election matchup polls.

But I kind of missed talking about both those points when they were fresh. So I'll let the above suffice for now.

The main thing I want to look at today is this:

This shows the median electoral college result from the Election Graphs Monte Carlo simulations for each candidate pair.

For both Biden and Sanders there is a very clear "V" shaped pattern. (OK, if you look closely, you can see a "W", but the large scale pattern is a "V".) In the first half of this V, as new polls came in and the state averages moved from the baseline based on the 2000-2016 elections, to averages based on 2020 polls, almost every poll made Sanders and Biden look better.

Although he dropped out already, you can see a smaller scale version of this "V" pattern with O'Rourke as well.

Buttigieg doesn't show the initial portion of this V. As the initial polls came in, his results basically just stayed at about the same level as the 2000-2016 baseline. Frankly though, there was very little Buttigieg vs. Trump state level polling in this time frame though, which would explain that.

But all four of these candidates share the second half of the "V". Starting at a specific point in time, as new polling results came in, more often than not, the state averages would move away from the Democrat, and so the median electoral college results would also move the same direction.

When you look at the charts, the inflection point seems to be… well… very close to the date Nancy Pelosi announced that she was officially backing the impeachment investigation over the Ukraine issue.

There are some ups and downs, and you could argue that the best numbers for the Democrats were perhaps a little bit earlier or a little bit later, but roughly speaking, leading up to that announcement on September 24th, every week Sanders, Biden, and O'Rourke looked better in the polls than the week before, while Buttigieg held steady. After September 24th though, Sanders, Biden, Buttigieg, and O'Rourke all looked weaker in each subsequent week.

This may be a coincidence. It may just relate to which pollsters put out polls in which states during this time period. It may just be a "reversion to the mean" after a series of earlier polls were more favorable to the Democrats than was really reflected by the ground truth…

But the location of the inflection point compared to the date when impeachment moved from something a few people were talking about, to a real thing that was happening is hard to ignore. It certainly LOOKS like the impeachment efforts are hurting the Democratic candidates in state level head to head polling against Trump. State after state where the polling averages had moved from red to blue, have now slipped back into the red again.

But wait. There has been one clear omission in the discussion above.

Warren's trend line just does not match the patterns followed by the four candidates discussed above. (Neither did Harris's for that matter, but she dropped out, so we won't spend more time there.) There is no clear "V" shape like Sanders, Biden, and O'Rourke. Nor does Warren follow Buttigieg's pattern.

In fact, Warren does not show any change that looks like it coincides with impeachment events. Initially as early polls came in, she looked like she would do worse than the median based on the 2000-2016 averages. Then she started doing a little better than that. And now she's a little worse again.

The fact that the reversal in fortunes that lines up with the impeachment announcement does not seem to apply to Warren (or Harris) seems notable. After all, Warren was one of the first Democratic candidates to come out strongly in favor of impeachment, and she did so strongly. If there was an impact from impeachment, why wouldn't it touch her? Perhaps even more than other candidates? This may in fact be an argument toward this movement NOT being tied directly to impeachment, but rather to something unrelated.

Without information that specifically digs into motivations rather than just candidate preferences, it is hard to say anything definitive. But the alignment certainly is suggestive. We shall see if those trends continue as the impeachment saga continues to play out.

In the mean time, we'll close out by looking at the changes in our main metrics since the last update post, followed by some of the state level charts.

Dem	20 Nov	16 Dec	𝚫
Biden	+158	+126	-32
Sanders	+88	+56	-32
Warren	+50	+24	-26
Buttigieg	-6	-44	-38

All four still active Democrats weakened significantly in their "median case" from the Election Graphs Monte Carlo simulations.

This has not been a good month for the Democrats.

Dem	20 Nov	16 Dec	𝚫
Biden	99.9%	99.4%	-0.5%
Sanders	95.0%	83.5%	-11.5%
Warren	81.8%	67.2%	-14.6%
Buttigieg	44.3%	16.5%	-27.8%

Given how far ahead Biden was, his win odds are still 99%+. But the other three took pretty big hits these last few weeks.

Especially Buttigieg. Last time he was already the only candidate with a less than 50% chance of beating Trump. But now that has dropped to a paltry 16.5%.

Dem	20 Nov	16 Dec	𝚫
Biden	+210	+178	-32
Sanders	+118	+58	-60
Warren	+48	+14	-34
Buttigieg	+6	-86	-92

Using the older and simpler "expected case" where every candidate simply wins every state where they lead the polls, you see similar across the board drops to what you see in the "median case" from the simulation, but the drops are even more dramatic.

Dem	20 Nov	16 Dec	𝚫
Biden	+4.4%	+4.3%	-0.1%
Sanders	+1.8%	+1.0%	-0.8%
Warren	+0.6%	+0.6%	Flat
Buttigieg	+0.2%	-1.3%	-1.5%

For the tipping point, which measures how much of a gain would be needed to flip the electoral college winner if that gain occurred uniformly across all states, Warren manages to stay flat, but the other three Democrats get weaker.

Finally, presented without additional commentary, the updated state charts in each of the states with new polling. You'll notice the recent swing toward Trump occurs in almost every state.

The news is coming hot and heavy these days. Iowa is now less than 50 days away. Things will develop quickly. Stay tuned.

323.6 days until polls start to close.

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 to go to a page with the current interactive versions of that 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.

Goodbye Blue Texas

It has once again been longer than I like, but it is time for another post.

Since the last update, there have been new polls in Michigan (x3), Nevada (x2), Texas (x2), Arizona (x2), Pennsylvania (x3), Florida (x2), North Carolina (x3), Wisconsin (x2), Iowa, Georgia (x4), and New Hampshire.

That is a lot. Sorry about that. Oops.

The most striking individual state result is that after peaking in September with three of the top six Democrats leading Trump in the Texas averages, and two more getting close, Texas has been moving back toward Trump.

As of now, none of the six most polled Democrats lead in Texas, and only three of those keep Trump's lead to less than 5%. And one of those (O'Rourke) has already dropped out of the race, leaving only Sanders and Biden still making it close.

Converting this to win odds, Biden has a 30.1% chance of winning the state (if the election was today), and Sanders has a 25.0% chance of winning.

None of the rest (except O'Rourke, who is out) is above 5%.

So Texas is reverting to form. It may be closer than it has been in previous years, but at least for the moment, the Democratic hopes for a blue Texas seem to be fading.

I'll go over other states with new polling at the end of the post, but first, a look at four ways of looking at the changes in the national summary since the last post.

O'Rourke vs. Trump is now in the top six best-polled candidate combinations (replacing Sanders vs. Pence). But since O'Rourke dropped out, we will leave him out and only look at the top five for now.

I haven't done posts showing the update-to-update comparisons for the older "categorization method" before, but since that used to be the bread and butter of Election Graphs, let's start there.

Dem	1 Nov	20 Nov	𝚫
Biden	+254	+210	-44
Sanders	+190	+118	-72
Warren	+38	+48	+10
Harris	+20	+20	Flat
Buttigieg	+6	+6	Flat

In this "expected case" view, where every candidate wins every state where they lead in the poll average, both Sanders and Biden have lost ground.

Warren improves her position a little.

Harris and Buttigieg are flat.

Dem	1 Nov	20 Nov	𝚫
Biden	+5.3%	+4.4%	-0.9%
Sanders	+4.7%	+1.8%	-2.9%
Harris	+1.4%	+1.4%	Flat
Warren	+0.3%	+0.6%	+0.3%
Buttigieg	+0.6%	+0.2%	-0.4%

Looking at the tipping points, which is analogous to the popular vote, but adjusted for the structure of the electoral college, once again, Warren is the only Democrat who is improving.

Harris is flat.

Biden, Sanders, and Buttigieg all lose ground to different degrees.

Note that while for a short time, Biden had a tipping point greater than 5%, meaning he could win using only states where he led by more than 5% and didn't even need any swing states. That is no longer true.

Now all five of these Democrats have tipping points indicating that they need to win at least some tight states to win.

Now, moving on to the more elaborate probabilistic model I look at a bit more these days…

Dem	1 Nov	20 Nov	𝚫
Biden	+184	+158	-26
Sanders	+124	+88	-36
Warren	+36	+50	+14
Harris	+8	+12	+4
Buttigieg	-4	-6	-2

This view shows the "Median Case." The median case is the electoral vote margin in the exact middle of the 1,000,001 simulation runs done for each candidate combination when sorted by the margin. About half the time, the Democrat does better than this. About half the time, they do worse.

Warren and Harris both improve a bit. Biden, Sanders, and Buttigieg all lose ground.

Note that while in the classification view, all five Democrats lead Trump, in the probabilistic view, Buttigieg's median case is actually to lose.

But we need to look at probabilities, not the single "median case" estimate. You should not think that since a candidate is ahead or behind on the median case, that maps to winning and losing.

For instance, Buttigieg's median case is a six electoral vote loss to Trump. But if you look at the 2σ range, that is the range of outcomes that you would expect to occur 95.45% of the time; you get a range from Buttigieg winning by 92 electoral votes to Trump winning by 90 electoral votes.

There is a huge range of possibilities. It isn't just "Trump is ahead in the median case, so he wins."

So time to look at the win odds…

Dem	1 Nov	20 Nov	𝚫
Biden	100.0%	99.9%	-0.1%
Sanders	98.3%	95.0%	-3.3%
Warren	73.1%	81.8%	+8.7%
Harris	54.6%	58.2%	+3.6%
Buttigieg	46.0%	44.3%	-1.7%

The trends above, which cover just under three weeks, show Warren and Harris improving, while Biden, Sanders, and Buttigieg slip back.

But looking back a bit farther, we can see some overall trends going back to September.

Biden continues to be pegged at a 99%+ chance of winning. His lead in some states has slipped, but his overall margins are high enough that this hasn't yet started to impact his chances of winning.

Sanders never had as big a margin lead as Biden, so as some of those states slipped back toward Trump, you see a more significant impact on his odds of winning.

Harris and Buttigieg have never done all that much better than a coin flip against Trump, peaking at around a 70% chance of winning. But since September, they have both dropped significantly, with Buttigieg now only at a 44.3% chance of winning, and Harris only at 58.2%.

The only candidate consistently improving over the last few months has been Warren. She bottomed out at only a 41.7% shot of winning in June, and while there have been ups and downs, the trend is clearly in Warren's direction.

We will, of course, see if that lasts. As can be seen by the spike toward Trump in June, trends can reverse quite quickly.

Now, besides Texas, here are a few additional states where there are trends worth noting. (Since so many places had new polls, I'll skip a few where there is less to comment on.)

No clear trends in Florida except to note that it is an exceptionally close race no matter which Democrat you match up against Trump. As has been usual for the last few presidential races, Florida is right on the line. And it is big. So it makes a huge difference.

The general trend in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin over the past few months has been for Democratic leads to decrease.

In Pennsylvania, there is no Democrat with more than a 5% lead, and Warren (and O'Rourke) are both slightly behind.

At this point, only Biden has a lead higher than 5% in Michigan.

In Wisconsin, all the Democrats still lead, but none by more than 5%.

These are, of course, the three states that gave Trump his victory in 2016. At the moment, they are all looking to be close battlegrounds once again.

The people who say that the Democratic nominee needs to pay close attention to these states are certainly not wrong.

And at the moment, the Democrats seem to be slipping in all three.

Pollsters have not paid as much attention to Georgia as I would like. But there have been a bunch of polls in the last few weeks and they show a competitive state, which is a significant change from the historical average.

The poll average now shows Biden and Sanders ahead, with Warren, Harris, and Buttigieg all bringing Trump's lead under 5%.

(O'Rourke has never been polled in Georgia, and now that he has dropped out, probably will never be. Sniff.)

Although Biden has reversed a bit recently, overall Sanders, Warren, and Biden are making North Carolina a narrowly fought battleground.

Harris and Buttigieg, while they are still keeping Trump's lead under 5%, do not seem to be gaining any additional ground lately.

Arizona has also been moving toward the Democrats. At least for Sanders, Warren, and Biden. Warren and Biden actually are slightly leading. Sanders brings Trump's lead under 5%.

Harris and Buttigieg, on the other hand, are not making things much closer than the historical 7.6% average Republican margin in the state. Just as in North Carolina, they lag behind the stronger Democrats.

So Trump is gaining in Texas, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

But the Democrats are gaining in Georgia, North Carolina, and Arizona.

As we get closer, things will heat up; there will be lots more polls and more movement.

Are we having fun yet?

349.7 days until polls start to close on election night.

For more information:

Harris and Buttigieg Struggling in Trump Matchups

Apologies for the radio silence. I had been trying to post a blog update here weekly, but things got in the way the last few weeks. One of the items was the fact that my wife Brandy is running for local office, and I've been helping do things like put out signs and such. If you happen to live in South Snohomish County, Washington, take a look at her campaign site and vote! Ballots are due Tuesday! No polls for races like this, so no previews. We'll see the results when we see the results.

In any case, it is only the blog summaries that have suffered; the actual polls have continued to be updated this whole time. You can always check the 2020 Electoral College page for the current status. In any case, let's look at what has changed.

Since the last update, there have been new polls in North Carolina (x2), Ohio (x2), Virginia, Maine (All), Iowa, Minnesota, California, Florida, Wisconsin, Arizona, and Washington.

Let's look first at the changes to the national probabilistic views.

The main theme of the nearly three weeks since the last update is Harris and Buttigieg doing significantly worse in matchups against Trump.

Dem	13 Oct	1 Nov	𝚫
Biden	+166	+184	+18
Sanders	+124	+124	Flat
Warren	+30	+36	+6
Harris	+20	+8	-12
Buttigieg	+24	-4	-28

All of the above vs. Trump. Sanders vs. Pence flat at Sanders +28.

The decline for Harris and Buttigieg is even more apparent in the win odds:

Dem	13 Oct	1 Nov	𝚫
Biden	99.9%	100.0%	+0.1%
Sanders	98.3%	98.3%	Flat
Warren	70.6%	73.1%	+2.5%
Harris	68.0%	54.6%	-13.4%
Buttigieg	66.8%	46.0%	-20.8%

All of the above vs. Trump. Sanders vs. Pence at a 72.7% chance of a Sanders win. This percentage is down 0.1% from 72.8% on 13 Oct, but this is just random fluctuation of the Monte Carlo model, not a real change. (There was one new Sanders vs. Pence poll, but it was in California and did not make any difference.)

Biden ticks up to 100.0%, but that is because I round. It is really 99.98% at the moment. Still, Biden is doing extraordinarily well in these state by state polls against Trump and continues to get stronger.

Note that Buttigieg is now at a less than 50% chance to win against Trump. The last time any of the most polled Democrats were under 50% was in June when Warren briefly dropped below that threshold before rebounding.

At this point, there are three tiers of Democrats against Trump.

Winning decisively: Biden and Sanders
Leading, but narrowly: Warren
Coin toss: Harris and Buttigieg

Next, let's look at the changes in each state with new polls to see what is driving the national results.

Starting with California since it has the most electoral votes, but you won't find any hints as to changes to the national picture here. California is very solidly blue, and nothing is changing about that.

Florida, on the other hand, has lots of electoral votes and is close. So small changes make a big difference. Harris is now 2.6% behind Trump, which translates into only having a 16.6% chance of winning the state, down from 24.2% before this update. With 29 electoral votes at stake, that makes a real difference in the overall picture.

Similarly, Buttigieg moves from a 45% chance of winning the state down to 35%.

Compare to Biden with a 2.7% lead and a 71% chance of winning.

Florida is important. Winning it is part of many paths to victory on the national level.

So when Biden and Warren make gains in Florida and lead, while Harris and Buttigieg fall further behind, it makes a difference.

No category changes, but Sanders, Warren, and Biden are clearly improving, while Harris and Buttigieg (whose lines overlap) are moving in the opposite direction. In win chance terms, Harris and Buttigieg move from a 40% chance of winning Ohio, down to only 23%.

North Carolina is a key state. It is in the "swing state" zone for all five of these Democrats against Trump.

Sanders flipped from just barely winning, to barely losing in North Carolina.

That was the only category change, but both Biden and Buttigieg weakened considerably here. Looking at how this translates into win chances, Biden goes from a 91% chance of winning North Carolina to a 68% chance. Either way, still nicely favored, although certainly by less than before.

But Buttigieg drops from a 30% chance of winning down to only about 8%. Basically, from "OK, he's behind but has a shot" to "Yeah, not impossible, but it would be a major upset if he pulled off a win."

Every Democrat improves in Virginia. The state is still significantly under polled. So far, each update makes it look bluer as real 2020 polls replace old elections in the averages.

Biden's lead moves from "strong" to "solid" in my categorization.

Sanders' and Warren's leads both improve from "weak" to "strong" in the categories.

All the polled Democrats increased their leads over the historical average margin. Washington is a blue state that is getting bluer. It is not in contention right now.

In Arizona, Warren improves a little bit against Trump, but every other combination is flat.

All of the Democrats have significant leads in Minnesota, and the new polling just increased the margins for those polled. Minnesota is not currently in play.

With this last update, Wisconsin moved from Weak Biden to Strong Biden, and from Strong Sanders to Weak Sanders.

But the most significant change was for Buttigieg, whose 4.2% lead (85% chance of winning) dropped to a 1.0% lead (56% chance of winning).

Iowa is a swing state for all candidate combinations. But with this last update, Sanders and Warren both weakened, with Sanders moving from slightly ahead to slightly behind. Biden strengthened, moving from just slightly behind to just slightly ahead. Warren drops to only a 14% chance of winning the state.

The worst Democrat in Maine (Biden) still has a 99.2% chance of winning the state. Maine (CD2) might come into play again, but Maine as a whole doesn't look like it will.

That's all the states.

Now to wrap things up by looking at the changes on the categorization view. I prefer the probabilistic view these days, but just looking at who leads where and by how much is still useful.

The expected case changes:

Biden vs. Trump: Biden +242 to Biden +254
Sanders vs. Trump: Sanders +232 to Sanders +190
Warren vs. Trump: Trump +20 to Warren +38

And the tipping point changes were:

Biden vs. Trump: Biden by 4.4% in WI to Biden by 5.3% in PA
Sanders vs. Trump: Sanders by 4.3% in VA -> Sanders by 4.7% in VA
Warren vs. Trump: Trump by 0.1% in NC to Warren by 0.3% in FL

A reminder that sometimes the "median case" in the probabilistic view can have a different leader than the "expected case" in the categorization view.

Divergence like this occurs when there are states that the leader barely leads, and there is a better chance of enough of them to make a difference flipping than there is of states flipping the other direction.

One final categorization comparison to show the three tiers of Democratic candidates against Trump that I mentioned at the start of the post. Time to look at the "spectrum of the states" for the five Democrats against Trump and compare what they look like:

The Democrats that are winning decisively:

The Democrat who is leading, but narrowly:

The Democrats whose chances are a coin toss:

And that is where we are.

367.7 days until polls start to close.

For more information:

Slow Week

Since last week's update, there have been new polls in Montana, Connecticut, and North Carolina.

Warren vs. Trump is now the "best-polled candidate combination" based on the metric I use, so it is now the default when you go to the Election Graphs 2020 Electoral College page, displacing Biden vs. Trump.

Overall this week, Biden weakened a little bit versus Trump, but he is so far ahead at the moment it doesn't make much difference. All of the other Democrats tracked here get a little bit stronger against Trump with this week's polling.

Looking at the categorization model first, only North Carolina made a difference:

Biden's lead decreased a bit. Sanders and Harris improved a lot. Warren and Buttigieg got a little stronger.

So how did this impact the national picture?

Let's look at some graphs to illustrate the changes.

Biden vs. Trump tipping point change: Biden by 5.1% in NC -> Biden by 4.4% in WI
Warren vs. Trump tipping point change: Trump by 0.1% in FL -> Trump by 0.1% in NC

Biden vs. Trump state category change: NC has moved from Strong Biden to Weak Biden
Trump best case vs. Biden has changed: Biden 283 to Trump 255 -> Biden 268 to Trump 270

So the categorization model once again has the "best case" in Biden vs. Trump include a Trump win if he wins ALL of the swing states because Biden's lead in North Carolina slipped to below the 5% mark, bringing it back into play.

Sanders vs. Trump state category change: NC has moved from Weak Trump to Weak Sanders
Sanders vs. Trump expected case change: Sanders 370 to Trump 168 -> Sanders 385 to Trump 153

In terms of the expected case, where everybody wins every state where they lead the average, with Sanders now taking the lead in North Carolina, he would win by 232 electoral votes, nearly matching Biden's 242 electoral vote margin in this scenario.

In this expected case, Biden and Sanders have substantial leads over Trump. Harris and Buttigieg have very narrow edges. (As does Sanders against Pence.) Warren loses to Trump.

The picture from the tipping point is very similar.

Time to flip to the probabilistic model. How do things look this week?

Since we were looking at the "expected case" in the categorization model, let's look at the median Monte Carlo result first:

Dem	6 Oct	13 Oct	𝚫
Biden	+170	+166	-4
Sanders	+114	+124	+10
Warren	+28	+30	+2
Buttigieg	+22	+24	+2
Harris	+18	+20	+2

All of the above vs. Trump. Sanders vs. Pence flat at +28.

Unlike the categorization view, all of the Democrats lead here, although we once again see a situation where Biden and Sanders have very substantial leads, while Warren, Buttigieg, and Harris have very narrow edges.

Biden slips just a little this week, while Sanders has the biggest gain in terms of the median electoral vote margin.

And now the odds:

Dem	6 Oct	13 Oct	𝚫
Biden	99.9%	99.9%	Flat
Sanders	97.3%	98.3%	+1.0%
Warren	68.9%	70.6%	+1.7%
Harris	64.0%	68.0%	+4.0%
Buttigieg	66.5%	66.8%	+0.3%

All of the above vs. Trump. Sanders vs. Pence flat at 72.8%.

Biden has a substantial enough lead that the little change this week doesn't have a notable impact on his percentage chances.

As Sanders' position in the various state polls continues to improve, he is rapidly catching Biden in terms of how solid his lead over Trump looks.

Harris improves the most this week, but Warren, Harris, and Buttigieg remain stuck in the high 60's, low 70's. Certainly favored to win over Trump, but by no means sure things.

To date, the most common explanation for this division has been name recognition. People know Biden and Sanders. Aside from political junkies, like anybody who might be reading this, "normal" people still aren't paying attention yet, and when polled about these other names may not have a good idea who they are.

The further along we get though, the less likely that is to explain things thoroughly. Now, some national polls have started to show that the gap between Warren and Biden in their performance vs. Trump has been decreasing as Warren gains in the Democratic primary competition. If so, this has been a relatively recent change, and will still take a while before we can see this in the state-level polls we look at here at Election Graphs.

If these kinds of differences persist when we get to actual caucus and primary voting in February, however, then it might be time to acknowledge that there could be real differences in how well the various Democratic candidates could be expected to fare in a general election.

386.6 days until polls start to close on Election Day 2020.

For more information:

Enter Pence?

Since last week's update, there have been new polls in Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin.

First of all, I should mention that while the 2020 Electoral College page on Election Graphs lets you pick any Democrat and any Republican that has been polled in the 2020 cycle, here on the blog, we restrict ourselves to talking about the six "best polled" candidate combinations. I use a metric for this that is a weighted average of how far back in time the "five poll averages" go in each state. The weighting gives low margin states more influence in the metric than places where one candidate is far ahead.

Up until now, this had been six different Democrats vs Trump. In mid-September though, SurveyUSA did a poll of California that included Pence and Haley as potential Republicans in the general election too. And this last week, Emerson included Pence in a poll of Ohio.

This is pretty sparse polling, but it happened to make the new Sanders vs. Pence polling average in Ohio very close to a tie, which because of the way my metric for "best polled" works, increases the Sanders vs. Pence poll quality up higher than it probably deserves, and Sanders vs. Pence bumps O'Rourke vs. Tump off of my top six.

I suspect this will not last, but for now, I'm looking at Biden, Sanders, Warren, Buttigieg, and Harris vs. Trump… and Sanders vs. Pence.

Within these candidate combinations, the only change in the categorization model was Ohio flipping from just barely Trump, to just barely Sanders:

The current average here includes three actual 2020 polls, plus the 2008 and 2016 elections, ending up with a 0.2% Sanders lead. Now, this is one of those zones that is a bit different. Based on the historical performance of Election Graphs averages, a 0.2% Democratic lead only translates into a 47.8% chance of the Democrat winning.

The categorization model doesn't care about that, though. Ohio is now on the blue side of the centerline for Sanders, so the "Expected Case" includes him winning Ohio. Sanders now leads in this "everybody gets all the states where they lead in the average" case by 202 electoral votes.

I've been spending a lot of time on these blog posts lately on the probabilistic model, and I'll get to that in a second, but first a quick look at the expected cases for all six of the best-polled candidate matchups in terms of the categorization model:

Biden leads Trump by 242 electoral votes. Sanders now leads Trump by 202 electoral votes. Every one of the other combinations is a close race. The only Democrat losing is Warren, who falls short by 20 electoral votes.

Flipping back to the probabilistic view, which takes into account all the changes in all three states that got polls this week, not just the one category change, we see this:

Dem	29 Sep	6 Oct	𝚫
Biden	99.9%	99.9%	Flat
Sanders	97.2%	97.3%	+0.1%
Warren	66.7%	68.9%	+2.2%
Buttigieg	66.5%	66.5%	Flat
Harris	64.0%	64.0%	Flat

Of these five, only Biden, Sanders, and Warren received new results this week. Nothing new for Buttigieg or Harris.

But let's not forget Sanders vs. Pence. Based only on the results of the last five presidential elections, this stood at a 68.1% chance of a Sanders victory. The earlier California poll had not changed this at all. But adding the new Ohio poll to the average brings Sanders up to a 72.8% chance of beating Pence.

Let's also look at how the median electoral college result for these candidate matchups have changed in the last week:

Dem	29 Sep	6 Oct	𝚫
Biden	+166	+170	+4
Sanders	+112	+114	+2
Warren	+30	+28	-2
Buttigieg	+22	+22	Flat
Harris	+18	+18	Flat

And of course, Sanders vs. Pence. The result based only on the last five election results was Sanders +22. The new polling moves that to Sanders +28.

And that's it for this week.

393.7 days until polls start to close.

For more information:

Blue Virginia

Since last week's update, there was only one new poll released, a University of Mary Washington poll of Virginia.

They polled Biden, Sanders, Warren, and Harris against Trump. No new data for Buttigieg or O'Rourke.

This poll was the first public polling of Virginia this cycle. The only glimpse we had previously was leaked Trump internal polling from March which only included Biden.

Virginia has been trending blue over the last few elections, but Election Graphs starts with the average of the previous five elections before we have polls and the average margin from 2000 to 2016 ended up as a 0.1% Republican lead.

The leaked Biden vs. Trump poll moved the state from Weak Trump (by 0.1%) to Weak Biden (by 4.9%) in the Election Graphs average, but with no 2020 data, all the other Democrats remained in "Weak Trump" territory despite the general sense that because of the trends in Virginia, this was unlikely to stay the case.

At long last, we have a new public poll of Virginia though. So we start to see how the state looks for 2020.

All four Democratic candidates led Trump by double digits in this new poll. The poll averages still include some older election results though, since this is the first 2020 polling in Virginia for every matchup except Biden vs. Trump.

In terms of categories, this moved the state from "Weak Trump" to "Weak Democratic" for Sanders, Warren, and Harris.

Biden, having already taken the lead after that leaked Trump internal poll, now moves from "Weak Biden" to "Strong Biden."

In terms of odds of winning, that means that every Democrat that has been polled in Virginia so far is estimated to have an 80%+ chance of winning the state according to the historical accuracy of Election Graphs poll averages.

As usual, I must repeat the universal caveat on this site: These numbers are if the election was today. The election is not today, a lot will change between now and then.

Also, in this case, we still have sparse polling.

So, what does the national picture look like now in terms of the chance of the Democrat winning?

Dem	22 Sep	29 Sep	𝚫
Biden	99.9%	99.9%	Flat
Sanders	95.3%	97.2%	+1.9%
O'Rourke	83.1%	83.1%	Flat
Warren	62.4%	69.7%	+7.3%
Buttigieg	66.5%	66.5%	Flat
Harris	54.7%	64.0%	+10.7%

It is hard for Biden to improve his position much given where he is, but the movement of Virginia in the blue direction helps the other three Democrats with poll results, with the most significant boost going to Harris.

And that is all for this week.

400.9 days until polls start to close.

For more information:

Another Mixed Week for Dems

Since last week's update, there has been new polling released in Arizona (x2), Colorado, Kentucky, Maine, North Carolina, California (x2), Florida, Texas, and Missouri.

Once again we have mixed results.

Two of the six most polled Democrats (Biden and O'Rourke) improve their positions in the probabilistic view when you combine the results of all of those polls.

The other four (Sanders, Buttigieg, Warren, and Harris) slip in their matchups against Trump. Some weaken significantly.

So let's start with the national "Odds of a Democratic Win" view:

Dem	15 Sep	22 Sep	𝚫
Biden	99.8%	99.9%	+0.1%
Sanders	96.9%	95.3%	-1.6%
O'Rourke	80.8%	83.1%	+2.3%
Buttigieg	67.0%	66.5%	-0.5%
Warren	69.0%	62.4%	-6.6%
Harris	65.7%	54.7%	-11.0%

The two that stand out here are Warren and Harris. The new polls this week hurt their win chances significantly. Harris is now looking only slightly better off than a coin toss in a race against Trump.

We'll look at each state to determine where these changes are coming from, but first, you can also see this pattern dramatically when looking at the "Median Case" from the Monte Carlo simulations.

In this view, you can see that the winning margins of every Democratic candidate except O'Rourke have been decreasing lately. Including Biden.

A lot of the "movement" of these various lines up until now could still be attributed to actual 2020 polling replacing old elections in our state polling averages. We are getting to the point though where a lot (although not all) of the critical states are mostly 2020 polls.

So we may start seeing trends that represent real changes in public opinion. We will also begin to see what level of variability is just inherent in looking at the election this way. It may end up being "normal" that some of these lines bounce up and down quite a bit as we go along.

In the meantime though, time to look at the trends in each of the states where there was new polling over the last week. There are a lot, so I'll be brief.

California is so blue; it is mostly irrelevant to the national race. All of the Democrats have a 100% chance of winning California. It is notable though that all six candidates are doing even stronger in California than the historical average from the 2000 to 2016 elections. California is getting even bluer.

A lot of the win odds changes this week can be attributed to Texas. With the latest polling in Texas, the trend of each new poll moving the state further in the Democratic direction has ended. Biden and O'Rourke still improve slightly, but every other Democrat erodes. Along with Biden and O'Rourke, Sanders retains a lead. Warren, Harris, and Buttigieg not only lose Texas but the picture of them "making it close" is slipping. At least this week.

Florida is the other big state responsible for much of this week's changes. The only Democrats who did not weaken in Florida this week are the ones that were not in the polls. Florida has a lot of electoral votes, and Florida is close, so it has an outsized impact on the national picture.

The only mover this week in North Carolina is Biden, with his average moving to a greater than 5% lead for the first time. Trump leads all the other Democrats by narrow margins.

Arizona is another state where there is a big gap between Biden and the rest of the field. This week Biden took the lead in the Arizona poll average. Add Arizona to Texas as red states that flip, and you can see why Biden's national position remains so strong. Sanders also makes Arizona close, but all of the other Democrats are hovering around the historical average, which is a Strong Republican win.

Missouri is clear red state, and with two polls so far this cycle, it just looks like it is getting redder.

At the same time, Colorado is getting bluer. Only Biden moves the state into Strong Democrat territory so far though. The other candidates still only have narrow leads in the polling average.

Kentucky is red and not in contention for 2020. With the small amount of polling so far though, Biden still does best, actually decreasing the Republican margin slightly. Not so much for the others.

Finally Maine. Maine is blue and does not look to be changing into anything else. With the first few polls, Biden looked like he might be making it even bluer than before. But as we stand today, all of the Democrats are pretty close to the historical average for the state.

And that is where things are this week.

408.0 days until polls start to close.