Tag: Texas

Election Day: Final Tightening?

It is Election Day.

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you want more detail though, keep reading.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe.

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

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

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

So it is what it is.

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

I don't know. We will see.

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

Let's look at all the graphs.

First of all, the comparison with 2016:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OK. Time for the map and spectrum:

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

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

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

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

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

And now the trends in all the close states:


And that is that.

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

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

It was fun. Thanks everyone!

For more information:

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

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

1.5 Days Out: Good Poll Cycle for Trump

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So let's look at all the graphs.

First of all, the comparison with 2016:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OK. Time for the map and spectrum:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now the trends in all the close states:

And that is that.

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

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

For more information:

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

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

3.5 Days Out: No Big Changes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So let's look at all the graphs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So looking at Uniform Swing…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And now the trends in all the close states:

That is all for today.

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

We are so close. Almost there now.

For more information:

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

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

7 Days Out: Still Pretty Static

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

The last blog update here was three days ago on October 24th. Here are the high-level changes since that last post:

Model Metric 24 Oct 27 Oct 𝚫
Probabilities
(Indep States)		 Trump 2σ
Median
Biden 2σ		 Biden +52
Biden +162
Biden +254		 Biden +38
Biden +142
Biden +256		 Trump +14
Trump +20
Biden +2
Trump Win
Tie
Biden Win		 0.1%
0.0%
99.9%		 0.1%
0.0%
99.8%		 FLAT
FLAT
-0.1%
Probabilities
(Uniform Swing)		 Trump 2σ
Median
Biden 2σ		 Trump +52
Biden +144
Biden +294		 Trump +52
Biden +144
Biden +300		 FLAT
FLAT
Biden +6
Trump Win
Tie
Biden Win		 9.1%
0.0%
90.9%		 11.8%
0.0%
88.2%		 +2.7%
FLAT
-2.7%
Categories Trump Best
Expected
Biden Best		 Trump +12
Biden +220
Biden +294		 Trump +20
Biden +176
Biden +294		 Trump +8
Trump +44
FLAT
Tipping Point Biden +4.9% Biden +4.4% Trump +0.5%

So, as we are only 7 days out now, I'm trying to update much more frequently. But honestly, not much has changed since the post three days ago.

Some states have bounced around. Biden had taken a tiny lead in Texas last time. Texas has now moved back to a small Trump lead. Meanwhile, Georgia had bumped into a small Trump lead but is now back to a small Biden lead. Iowa crossed the center line too, moving from Trump to Biden. Florida moved from Weak Biden to Weak Trump, and then back to Weak Biden again since last time as well.

All of these are states that are really toss-ups getting jostled around by whatever individual polls come out at any given moment. There is still no evidence of any sustained trend.

It looks like we are back once again to the part of the normal range that is most favorable to Trump, but we are still in the same range we have been since June. That translates to the reasonable possibilities ranging from a narrow Trump win if there is a substantial polling error or last-minute move, to a Biden landslide if the error or move goes in the other direction.

That entire range is reasonably possible, but the most likely outcome continues to look like a Biden win of a magnitude somewhere between Obama's 2012 win and Obama's 2008 win.

So with that out of the way, let's just look at all of the graphs.

This time, we'll start with 2020 vs 2016 comparisons since that continues to come up again and again in the discussions of this election cycle.

In the tipping point, which represents the degree polls need to be wrong and/or change before the end in order to flip the winner, Biden now holds a 4.4% lead. Clinton had dropped to 1.3% by this point in 2016.

Biden is closer to the 4% end of his 4% to 6% range than he is to the 6% end, but he is still in the same zone he has been in for a long time. By this time Clinton had collapsed and there was a really close race happening.

To be fair though, 7 days out from the 2016 election we didn't know this yet. Her tipping point number at the 7-day mark as we look back at it today is influenced by polling that was in the field at this point, but not actually released until the last few days before the election. The first Election Graphs post noting the final Trump surge in 2016 came at the 4-day mark.

So while we haven't seen any signs of Biden collapse yet, and Biden's pattern has been much less volatile than Clinton, this is just another reminder that Clinton's final collapse didn't show up here until the very very end.

In terms of the expected case, where each candidate wins every state where they lead the Election Graphs average, Biden is pretty much in the center of the normal zone. Within the last two weeks, the expected case has ranged from Biden +86 to Biden+240. That is a huge range!

But with Texas (38 EV), Florida (29 EV), Georgia (16 EV), and Iowa (6 EV) all close enough that they are flipping back and forth across the center line semi-regularly, having volatility of this sort should be expected. With the exception of one brief moment though, Biden has consistently been ahead of where Clinton was four years ago, and usually by quite a bit.

OK. Forget 2016 now.

Time for the three envelopes we have covering this year:

Our median of the probabilistic view assuming all states are completely independent shows us near the top end of the normal range, but still in the range.

The 3σ envelope (99.73% of all outcomes within the bubble) just barely stretches to a Trump win by 4 EV, while the other end of this bubble would be Biden winning by the largest margin since Bush beat Dukakis in 1988.

The darker bubbles are of course more likely than those extreme scenarios. The 1σ (68.27%) range goes from Biden by 84 to Biden by 206. Comparing that to previous elections, that is basically from a narrow win similar in scale to Trump's win in 2016 to a Clinton 1992 level win on the other.

Converting this to odds, this view has Biden with a 99.8% chance of winning. This is down a little from before, but still so close to 100% that our chart of this just looks like a blue box. So we once again skip that chart.

As we have discussed before though, the independent states view results in the narrowest possible distribution of possibilities, since a candidate outperforming the polls in one state tends to be balanced by underperforming in another.

The uniform swing view instead locks all the states so they move together. This results in a much wider range of possibilities, since now if a candidate overperforms the polls, we assume they do so in EVERY state.

With this view, the 3σ (99.73%) range goes all the way from Trump beating his 2016 numbers with a 114 EV win, to Biden having a landslide even bigger than Bush in 1988 (but not quite as big as Reagan in 1984).

This view also shows a race with very little movement though.

Looking at the odds corresponding to the uniform swing view, Trump is now at an 11.8% chance of winning. Again, not breaking new ground.

Both of these views are extremes though. The official Election Graphs view of Trump's chances at this point is "between 0.1% and 11.8%". The middle of that range is just about 6%, but we don't specify a spot within the range since we haven't modeled how much correlation between states to expect.

And of course the good old categorization view we have used on Election Graphs since 2008. The lack of movement in this race is even more obvious in this view.

Biden's best case (where he wins every single state with a margin under 5%) barely moves at all.

Trump's best case does wander a little bit as some blue states dip over and under the 5% Biden lead line, but there is no trend here. At the moment though, if Trump wins every one of the close states, he squeaks out a 20 EV win.

Similarly, the centerline just meanders up and down as the very close states move back and forth between "Weak Biden" and "Weak Trump" as new polls bat them back and forth.

But overall, we just don't have any substantial change in the overall picture or trend in months.

Without the 2016 comparison line, we're more zoomed in on the tipping point here, so it looks like this is swinging dramatically, but that is just the scale. Aside from very brief moments, this has been between 4% and 6% for months.

OK, now the map and spectrum of the states:


And now the trends in all the close states:

And that is that.

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

One week. That's all.

For more information:

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

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

Back To The Normal Zone

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

I'm trying to do these blog updates more often now that we are in the last two weeks. The last blog update here was on October 20th. Here are the high-level changes since that last post:

Model Metric 20 Oct 24 Oct 𝚫
Probabilities
(Indep States)		 Trump 2σ
Median
Biden 2σ		 Biden +32
Biden +140
Biden +254		 Biden +52
Biden +162
Biden +266		 Biden +20
Biden +22
Biden +12
Trump Win
Tie
Biden Win		 0.3%
0.0%
99.7%		 0.1%
0.0%
99.9%		 -0.2%
FLAT
+0.2%
Probabilities
(Uniform Swing)		 Trump 2σ
Median
Biden 2σ		 Trump +52
Biden +164
Biden +294		 Trump +52
Biden +144
Biden +294		 FLAT
Trump +20
FLAT
Trump Win
Tie
Biden Win		 23.3%
0.0%
76.7%		 9.1%
0.0%
90.9%		 -14.2%
FLAT
+14.2%
Categories Trump Best
Expected
Biden Best		 Biden +40
Biden +164
Biden +294		 Trump +12
Biden +220
Biden +294		 Trump +52
Biden +56
FLAT
Tipping Point Biden +3.1% Biden +4.9% Biden +1.8%

Last time we talked a lot about how the big move in Trump's direction we saw then could very well just be a transient thing because there was a rush of Pennsylvania polls from small pollsters that were favorable to Trump, which might not be sustained once the bigger pollsters released new results for Pennsylvania.

That is exactly what happened. In the days since that blog post, there were quite a few additional polls released in Pennsylvania. Here is what Pennsylvania looks like now:

A brief foray into "Weak Biden", and then right back to "Strong Biden".

These results not only moved the tipping point back toward Biden, but they also knocked the top off the peak we saw last time, so instead of the tipping point getting down to a 3.1% Biden lead, now Biden's worst tipping point was only 3.6%.

The tipping point is now at Biden by 4.9%, right smack in the middle of that 4% to 6% range it has normally been in ever since mid-June.

Not only that, but the same is true of almost all of the main metrics. They are all in their "normal ranges".

Let's take a quick look:

The Tipping Point, the Independent States View, the Uniform Swing View, the Categorization View, and the odds generated from the two probabilistic views all show the race back in the "normal zone". (I didn't bother with showing the second odds chart since it is just a blue rectangle.)

So bottom line, a few days of bad polls in Pennsylvania moved things in Trump's direction. But with more polling, it doesn't seem like a "real" move representing a fundamental change.

Instead, it once again looks like this race has basically been frozen since June. The moves up and down we see are mostly just random results of which pollsters released results recently, and normal sampling errors and such. Very little, if any, real movement.

Roughly speaking, ever since June, this has looked like a race where Biden leads by between 4% and 6% in the tipping-point state, with a potential winning margin somewhere between 100 and 200 electoral votes.

We still have 11 days left of course. There is still a little bit of time left for that to change.

And also, there is still the possibility of a systematic polling error. Between our two probabilistic models based on how far off Election Graphs state averages were in 2008, 2012, and 2016, the Election Graphs estimate for Trump's odds of winning if the election was today currently stand at "somewhere between 0.1% and 9.1%".

Where in that range depends on how closely linked the results in the different states are, which we don't estimate. But everyone needs to continue to remember that 10%, or 5%, or even 1% aren't the same as 0%, and there are still paths to a win for Trump. This isn't over yet.

The map and the center of the spectrum of states look like this now:

To win, Trump needs to run the table and win every single close state, or pull in some not so close states.

Let's do the comparison to 2016 now:

In terms of the Electoral College in the categorization view, Biden has been in a better spot than Clinton since we hit 76 days out, most of the time being more than just a little bit ahead of her pace.

But Biden's tipping point has been comparable to where Clinton's was at the same point four years ago for the last few weeks. Biden has not been consistently ahead of Clinton on this metric.

As of this blog post, Biden is once again ahead of where Clinton was though. Eleven days out Biden is at 4.9%, Clinton was at 3.2%. And it was mostly downhill for Clinton after this point.

Clinton's final drop was precipitated by the Comey letter. So far nothing comparable has hit Biden, and as I write this, nearly 53 million votes have already been cast. So yes, something could still change, but time is running out fast.

OK. We didn't do it earlier in the post, so here is a quick look at the current graphs for all of the states and CDs where the Election Graphs margin is currently under 5%. I won't comment on all of them individually. Some of them have switched categories in the last few days, some have not. But all of these should be considered as active possibilities for both candidates at this point.

And that is it for today. More soon.

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

We are almost at the end!

For more information:

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

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

The Situation on Debate Day

It is a few hours before the first Presidental debate, and I am overdue for another blog update.

As always, if you are impatient for one of these updates, the 2020 pages on Election Graphs are updated nearly every day as new polls come in. Or you can follow @ElecCollPolls on Twitter to see all the polls as I add them.

First of all, let me highlight that prompted by some questions about the site sent to me by reader Wim M., I realized that while I had produced one in previous election cycles, I had completely forgotten to create a Frequently Asked Questions page for 2020. That is now rectified.

Here is the new FAQ for this website. If you have questions that aren't included there, please contact me and let me know what you want to know, and I may add the question.

With that out of the way, the last update here was 12 days ago on September 17th. Here are the high-level changes since that last post:

Model Metric 17 Sep 29 Sep 𝚫
Probabilities
(Indep States)		 Trump 2σ
Median
Biden 2σ		 Biden +44
Biden +152
Biden +256		 Biden +46
Biden +144
Biden +256		 Biden +2
Trump +8
FLAT
Trump Win
Tie
Biden Win		 0.1%
0.0%
99.9%		 0.1%
0.0%
99.9%		 FLAT
FLAT
FLAT
Probabilities
(Uniform Swing)		 Trump 2σ
Median
Biden 2σ		 NEW
NEW
NEW		 Trump +84
Biden +168
Biden +312		 NEW
NEW
NEW
Trump Win
Tie
Biden Win		 NEW
NEW
NEW		 7.5%
0.0%
92.5%		 NEW
NEW
NEW
Categories Trump Best
Expected
Biden Best		 Biden +6
Biden +240
Biden +288		 Biden +8
Biden +168
Biden +294		 Biden +2
Trump +72
Biden +6
Tipping Point Biden +5.6% Biden +5.4% Trump +0.2%

Hey! There is a whole new section. And it shows Trump with a much better chance of winning! Where did that come from? What is that?

After the last blog post, I had a question from reader Jason H. asking why our Biden win odds were so much higher than a lot of other sites showing odds for the election and if this was related to treating the results in states independently. I answered that for the moment, the biggest difference is that this site only does "if the election was held today", not an actual forecast that tries to how things may change in the remaining days before the election, but that indeed, our simulation did consider the states to be independent, and if there was still a big difference by the time we got to the election, that would be why.

But frankly, it is getting close enough to the election to know that a 99.9% chance of a Biden win is too high. Sure. He is a favorite. But 99.9%? Nah. That can't be right. Even if the election was today.

Around the same time, there was a blowup on "Election Twitter" around the same issue, roundly criticizing models that treated the states as if they were uncorrelated. I am too small to have been mentioned by name, but this criticism very much applied to this site too. So I needed to do something.

The new FAQ has some additional info, but the bottom line is that while I don't have a good way at the moment to predict the degree of correlation between states, I can put bookends around the possibilities.

What I have shown in the past in the probabilistic model is the completely uncorrelated case. It assumes that what happens in one state has no predictive value toward the other states at all. Because an upset in one state can be compensated for by an upset in another, this results in a much tighter range of possibilities overall.

I have now added a "uniform swing" view that assumes essentially that all the states always move together. This is the other extreme. If you know how far off one state is from the poll average, you can figure out where all the other states will be. It results in a wider distribution, with larger chances for upsets (or landslides).

Looking at the historical "envelopes" I produce, the difference looks like this:

You can clearly see that Uniform Swing produces a much wider range of possibilities, even in the central 1σ (68.27%) band. Basically, forcing the states to move in lockstep results in a much more uncertain view of the race.

In terms of win odds, while the "Independent States" graph is now just a solid block of blue with Biden's win odds pinned near 100% since June, the Uniform Swing view looks like this:

Biden is still heavily favored across this whole time period, but Trump has spiked as high as an 18.7% chance of winning. That is much much better than 0.1%.

These two views are the extremes given the polling averages I have, and the state margin to state win odds mapping I calculated using the historical 2008 to 2016 data on this site.

The truth is somewhere in between these two views, but my methods don't pinpoint an exact value for that "true" value.

So this means that Election Graphs right now thinks that Biden's chances of winning are somewhere between 92.5% and 99.9%, while Trump's chances of winning are between 0.1% and 7.5%.

This is still based ONLY on poll averages, it is not a model that factors in all kinds of other things like some other places do.

And critically, this is still "if the election was today". It doesn't become a prediction until we add the last polls right before the election. Because of this, you'll notice that we still have higher win odds for Biden than some other famous places. They are trying to factor in the chances that Biden's current lead disappears between now and the election. I still don't do that.

But this seems more intuitively reasonable than the near 100% Biden lock we have been showing.

The main 2020 Electoral College page has now been updated to include these new views along with everything that was shown there before. Sorry I didn't add all this earlier!

With all of that out of the way, time for all the things we usually highlight in these update posts:

This week's TL;DR: Biden is still significantly ahead. The race is mostly stable. A few states that were just barely on one side or the other of the centerline switched sides. But either way, they are really too close to call. So even though the "Expected Case" in the Categorization view moves a lot, the actual state of the race isn't much different.

Let's look at all the places that shifted in or out of "Weak Biden" and "Weak Trump" since the last update.

First up, Texas. Biden was up by a little bit for a while, but no longer. It is still a close race though, with Texas actively in play.

Pennsylvania has mostly been "Strong Biden", but for a brief time, Biden's lead slipped under 5%. Then Biden strengthened again, and it is back where it usually is… just out of Trump's reach.

Ohio has been just barely Trump for awhile. The latest average moves it to just barely Biden. But the "just barely" part of that is more important than the candidate's name you put after that. Ohio is on the edge.

Georgia is also right on the edge, but because it has been polled more often, it appears more volatile. In the 12 days since the last update, Georgia flipped over the center line in my averages seven times. But it was Weak Biden 12 days ago, and it is Weak Trump now, so the net change is for Trump this time. But given the history, it would not be surprising for it to flip dozens of times before the election.

Like Pennsylvania, Biden's lead briefly dipped under 5% in Michigan. Unlike Pennsylvania, the timing of the polls was such that the brief foray into "Weak Biden" was actually erased from the graph once all the data was in.

From the other direction, the addition of some older polls from June, July, and August actually pulled Trump's lead in South Carolina under 5% for much of the summer. That older poll data wasn't available when we posted 12 days ago, so it only reflected as a switch to "Weak Trump" when we added those polls a few days back. But then a few polls from September quickly pulled the state back into the "Strong Trump" zone.

Exactly the same thing happened with Alaska. The addition of older data from June and July briefly pulled the average under 5%, but then it popped back up again.

Montana on the other hand did actually move from "Stong Trump" to "Weak Trump. That one data point showing Biden actually leading Montana sure looks like an outlier though. So don't be surprised for this to jump back to "Strong Trump" when that poll rolls off the average. (Assuming there are at least 4 more Montana polls before the election, which there may or may not be.)

And Nebraska's second congressional district, where the average finally catches up with the individual polls, which have been showing 6%+ Biden leads since the spring.

And then the "Weak" states and CDs that did not switch categories this time, without commentary:

Add up all of these changes, the categorization view now looks like this:

Note because we backfilled a lot of June, July, and August numbers that became available last week, some of the older part of the chart moved around a bit as well as just the newer weeks.

But the picture here is pretty static for August and September. The middle line bounces around a bit as the close states cross back and forth over the centerline. But basically, there isn't much consistent movement one way or another. Where we are now is very close to where we were two months ago.

Normally at this point, we'd show the probabilistic view and talk about it a bit, but that was covered at the beginning of the post this time with the addition of the Uniform Swing view. If you scroll back up and look at the probabilistic charts, you'll see they also show a pretty steady picture. Sure, there is some movement up and down as polls come in and out of the averages. But there is no clear directional movement. Neither candidate is breaking out of their "normal" range.

Is it any different for the tipping point?

Aside from some very short-lived spikes, the tipping point has been between 4% and 6% Biden since mid-June. And most of that time has been between 5% and 6% Biden. While as always, there is noise, this also shows a very stable race.

As a reference, in the three elections I have tracked, the biggest difference between the tipping point based on the final averages here and the actual tipping point based on the election results was 3.45% in 2008. Biden's tipping point lead is currently 5.4%.

The RCP average of national polls currently shows a 6.1% Biden lead. Comparing to the 5.4% tipping point, this implies that the structure of the electoral college is currently giving Trump a 0.7% head start. This is up from 0.3% head start in the last update.

The spectrum of states where the margin is less than 10% now looks like this:

Now time to compare to 2016:

In the expected case, Biden is down from where he was, but he is still doing better than Clinton was at a comparable time. This time in 2016 was a peak for Clinton, but Biden still beats it. Barely. But this is the high end of Clintons range, while it is the low end of Biden's.

But let's look at the tipping point comparison:

Clinton's early October peak was pretty substantial. While Biden's "expected case" is still better, in terms of the tipping point, he actually slightly lags where Clinton was at the same point. Biden is at 5.4%. Clinton was at 5.6%

So in terms of how much of a swing in nationwide polling would be needed to change the outcome, Biden is essentially exactly the same place Clinton was at this point in terms of the tipping point margin. And Clinton collapsed.

Quoting from the last post, since this hasn't changed?

What's different this time?

Aside from the big movement toward Biden in June, Biden's tipping point has been more stable than Clinton's. Clinton's line swung back and forth wildly. Biden is certainly jittering around a bit, but the magnitude of the movements is a lot smaller.

Election Graphs focuses on margins, but looking at the details of the polling and the actual absolute amount of support for each candidate, one big difference in 2020 vs 2016 is that we have a significantly smaller set of undecided voters now than in 2016. So the group who are available to "slosh around" and shift back and forth over time is a lot smaller.

Does that exclude the possibility of a Clinton style collapse?

No. It does not.

But it probably does mean you need a pretty huge news event to cause that kind of movement.  It would not only have to make the undecideds break strongly toward Trump but also keep some current Biden supporters from voting for him, either by actually flipping or just by staying home.

Clinton's tipping point at this point in 2016 was one of the highest levels she ever hit on this metric. Biden is about where he usually has been. This does seem to make the kind of collapse Clinton saw less likely.

But we are about to enter October. Will we get "October Surprises" this October that match the impact of what happened in 2016?

We only have a few weeks left to find out.

Finally, the current map:

Like everything else in this post, the map shows where things stood when I started this blog post. But we have entered the part of the season where new polls are being released nearly constantly. There have been several during the time I have been writing this update. Time to go and start adding them in…

For now though, the usual closing with the countdown:

35.2 days until the first results start coming in for Election 2020.

Hold on tight.

For more information:

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

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

Mixed Messages

Time for another blog update. As always, if you are impatient for one of these updates, the 2020 pages on Election Graphs are updated nearly every day as new polls come in.

The last update here was 10 days ago on August 25th. If you didn't notice it at the time, please check that last post for a CORRECTION I added on the 26th. The fixes mentioned on that correction are the baseline used here, rather than the originally posted numbers.

Here are the high-level changes since that last post:

Model Metric 25 Aug 5 Sep 𝚫
Categories Trump Best
Expected
Biden Best		 Biden +6
Biden +146
Biden +288		 TIED
Biden +220
Biden +288		 Trump +6
Biden +74
FLAT
Tipping Point Biden +6.0% Biden +3.3% Trump +2.7%
Probabilities Trump 2σ
Median
Biden 2σ		 Biden +50
Biden +148
Biden +258		 Biden +38
Biden +152
Biden +254		 Trump +12
Biden +4
Trump +4
Trump Win
Tie
Biden Win		 0.1%
0.0%
99.9%		 0.2%
0.1%
99.7%		 +0.1%
+0.1%
-0.2%

This week's TL;DR: Biden is still significantly ahead, and if he wins every state where he leads the polls, he wins by a larger margin than before. However, he is has weakened in a lot of the close states, meaning Trump has more possible paths to a comeback than he did before, and Biden's lead is more precarious than it was.

A bunch of states moved in and out of "Weak Biden" and "Weak Trump" in these 10 days, so let's look at those first:

First up, Texas. The big one. The average in Texas has once again moved from just barely Trump, to just barely Biden. Biden now holds a thin 0.8% lead in our average. In terms of probabilities, we have it 54.2% Biden, 45.8% Trump. If the election was today.

Then Pennsylvania. Biden had been looking pretty strong there, with a lead as high as 7.0% as recently as August 25th. But Trump has gained since then, and Biden's lead here has slipped to only 3.3%, which translates into a 79.4% chance of winning. But Trump winning Pennsylvania is back on the table as a reasonable possibility.


Georgia is perpetually close, and once again crosses the centerline, this time moving from Biden to Trump. Election Graphs now has Trump leading by 1.5%, which is a 71.6% chance of a Trump victory.


Meanwhile, North Carolina goes the other way. After only a very short time on the Trump side, North Carolina is back to "Weak Biden", which is where it has been for most of the last few months. We have Biden up by 1.4%, which is a 63.3% chance of a Biden win.


Biden's lead in Arizona increases, moving it to the "Strong Biden" category. Biden now leads there by 5.7% in our average, which is a 93.5% chance of winning.


There have not been many Nevada polls. We have to go back almost 10 months to get the five polls for our average. But with the latest poll, Biden's lead jumps to 5.4% or a 92.5% chance of winning the state.

Texas, Georgia, and North Carolina crossed the center line. Texas (38 EV) and North Carolina (15 EV) moved toward Biden, while Georgia (16 EV) moved toward Trump. That is a net movement of 37 EV toward Trump, or a 74 EV increase in Biden's expected margin.

Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Nevada on the other hand, impacted what we call Trump's "Best Case". That would be where he wins every single state that he leads our averages, plus every state where he is behind by less than 5%. Pennsylvania (20 EV) moved toward Trump, while Arizona (11 EV) and Nevada (6 EV) moved toward Biden, for a net improvement for Trump of 3 EV, or 6 EV of net margin.

In our categorization view, this ends up putting Trump's best case at an actual 269-269 tie, which would throw the election into the House of Representatives. To get to that Trump would need to win all that states he is ahead in, all five states where Biden is ahead by less than 5%, and also both Maine's 2nd congressional district and Nebraska's 2nd congressional district. But if that happened… tie.

As always though, we want to look beyond the simple categorization of states based on the averages. So a few more states to look at.

In addition to the states above that changed categories and stayed there, there were three additional states that moved in or out of "Weak Biden" and "Weak Trump", but then moved back again, leaving no net category change in the last 10 days, even though the actual average moved around a bit. In some cases, you can't even see the category change in the charts anymore, because the timing of the polls actually erased the change. But here they are anyway:

And finally, the locations with margins under 5% that didn't change categories at all this time around:

Putting all of this together into our probabilistic model, you get this trend:

Looking at the center median line, we can see a move toward Biden as the Democratic Convention happened, with that leveling off, then a move back toward Trump again starting as the Republican convention was going on. As of right now, Biden is a little bit better off in this view than he was right before the conventions started.

Basically though, we been in the same sort of range since the bigger movement toward Biden in June. The median has not left the Biden by 134 to Biden by 180 zone since the end of June.

We HAVE, on the other hand, seen the upper end of these probabilistic bands increase. These are the lines showing the best scenarios for Trump. They bounce around a lot but have generally been creeping upward since the end of June.

This basically indicates a pattern where Biden's electoral college lead has been pretty steady but has been getting more precarious, as leads in a variety of states diminish.

The simulations now have Biden at a 99.7% to win to Trump's 0.2%. The remaining 0.1% is that 269-269 tie possibility.

This is if the election was today of course, and the election is not today. I mentioned that the increases in the upper end of Trump's range indicate that perhaps Biden's lead is a little less solid than the margins would imply. This brings us to the tipping point:

Biden's tipping point has cratered since the conventions began, going from 6.5% on August 18th to only 3.3% now.

If Biden wins every state he leads, he wins by a very impressive 379 electoral votes to Trump's 159. That is a 220 EV margin. That would be a larger electoral college margin victory than any election since Clinton's defeat of Dole in 1996 with exactly that margin.

But Biden's margin in Pennsylvania, the state that currently puts him over the edge, is only 3.3%. You only need that small movement in the "Weak Biden" states to flip the election. Or a polling error of that magnitude.

In June we saw the tipping point move 5% in two weeks. We have just under two months left until the election.

(OK, if you look closely, you'll notice a 3.3% move would only get us to that 269-269 tie, it would currently take a 5.3% move to actually also flip Minnesota and have an outright Trump win, but the point stands…)

The RCP average of national polls currently shows a 7.0% Biden lead. Comparing to the 3.3% tipping point, this implies that the structure of the electoral college is currently giving Trump a 3.7% head start, up significantly from 1.6% in the last update. Like 2016 and 2000, the situation where Trump loses the popular vote but wins the electoral college is a live possibility.

The spectrum of states where the margin is less than 10% now looks like this:

To win, Trump needs all the close states. But all of those states are VERY close. It isn't that big of a stretch from where things are right now.

Now comparing to this time in 2016:

<59 Days Out> 2016 2020
Expected Case Clinton by 5 Biden by 220
Tipping Point Clinton by 0.9% Biden by 3.3%

This point in 2016 was Clinton's late-summer low point, before surging back to a strong lead in October, which then of course completely slipped away in the last month.

The best Clinton saw in the Expected Case in the last 59 days was a 154 electoral vote margin in October. Biden is a lot stronger than that at the moment.

Clinton's best Tipping Point in the last 59 days was 6.0% in early October though. Biden was stronger than that in mid-August, but he isn't anymore.

People argue that the presidential race is much more stable this year than it was in 2016. There are fewer undecided people. And both candidates have less "soft" support that can easily slip away. This does seem to be true. So maybe the chances of a lot of movement are less than there were.

But the amount of movement you need to change the outcome right now isn't all that large.

The map below is where things stand today. Keep watching!

59.0 days until the first results start coming in for Election 2020.

For more information:

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

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

Trump Narrows The Gap

I am overdue for another update. The 2020 pages on Election Graphs are updated nearly every day as new polls come in. So you can always see the current status there for yourself in between these posts. But here comes another blog post…

Since the last update on July 24th, there have been new state polls in Pennsylvania (x8), Arizona (x7), Florida (x7), Michigan (x10), Ohio (x5), North Carolina (x9), South Carolina (x4), Minnesota (x5), Colorado (x3), Georgia (x5), Texas (x4), Virginia (x3), Wisconsin (x9), New Jersey, Massachusetts, Alaska, Iowa (x5), Maine All (x4), Montana (x2), Maine CD1 (x2), Maine CD2 (x2), Washington, New Hampshire (x3), California, Alabama, Kentucky (x4), Hawaii, Indiana, Oklahoma, Utah, and Kansas.

That's 31 out of the 56 entities that allocate electoral votes in only 16 days. That's more than half. Given that, I'm going to stop calling out the states with polls each update. In short, the answer from now until the election is always going to be "a lot of them", and "multiple polls for all the close states".

It has been 16 days, how much has changed?

First the summary table of changes:

Model Metric 24 Jul 9 Aug 𝚫
Categories Trump Best
Expected
Biden Best		 Biden +36
Biden +168
Biden +288		 Trump +34
Biden +180
Biden +288		 Trump +70
Biden +12
FLAT
Tipping Point Biden +6.5 Biden +4.2% Trump +2.3%
Probabilities Trump 2σ
Median
Biden 2σ		 Biden +80
Biden +168
Biden +272		 Biden +50
Biden +154
Biden +264		 Trump +30
Trump +14
Trump +8
Trump Win
Tie
Biden Win		 0.0%
0.0%
100.0%		 0.1%
0.0%
99.9%		 +0.1%
FLAT
-0.1%

So compared to 16 days ago, what is the TL;DR summary?

Biden still leads by a large margin and actually improves his margin in the "everybody wins every state where they lead the average" expected case metric, but overall Trump has managed to reduce Biden's margin in a number of states, thus increasing the likelihood he might steal those states back and strengthening his position. And if he managed to flip ALL the close states, he could once again pull off a narrow win.

Now some of the charts, starting with the categorization view:

We can see that while Biden improved his expected case, Trump's best case has improved significantly.

So which specific states changed?

First, it was Iowa that moved from barely Trump to barely Biden, improving Biden's margin in the case where each candidate wins every state where they lead the average. But Biden leads Iowa by only 0.2%. And it looks pretty likely that the lead is due to a single outlier poll that showed a 6% Biden lead. So far no other polls indicate a Biden lead of that magnitude. So it would not be surprising at all to see Iowa slip back to the Trump side with the next poll, or at least when that outlier slips out of the average.

But then there is Florida. Biden's substantial lead in Florida has slipped significantly. He still leads, but no longer by huge margins. In our average Biden now only leads Florida by 3.0%. If the election was today, we estimate that translates into a 73.8% chance that Biden would win the state. But we actually have 86 days until the election, and there is plenty of room for this to move further.

The substantial swings here over June and July indicate that as polarized as things tend to be these days, there is still a non-trivial group of voters who have shown they can change their minds over time. In this case, they moved away from Trump for a while, but seem to be coming home again, once again putting Florida within Trump's reach.

Much the same pattern has played out in Pennsylvania. Biden built a substantial lead in June, but over the course of July, it faded quite a bit. Biden still leads Trump by 4.2% in Pennsylvania, translating into an 84.9% chance of winning the state in our model if the election was today. But that is significantly less certain than the 98.8% we had at Biden's peak.

Given Florida's 29 electoral votes and Pennsylvania's 20 electoral votes, together these states can change the margin by a massive 98 electoral votes.

Having these two states close enough to be in play is critical to Trump. At the moment, he is still behind, but close enough that it is easy to imagine scenarios where Trump could come back from behind and win them.

Not all of the movement was bad for Biden.

In Wisconsin, at the time of the last update, Wisconsin had flipped from "Strong Biden" down to "Weak Biden". But that didn't last long, and Wisconsin is once again a strong enough Biden state that we don't include it in Trump's best case. (At an 8.6% lead, our odds estimate is a 99.1% chance of a Biden win if the election was today.)

New Hampshire also moves out of Trump's reach with Biden leading the average by 7.8%, which would be a 98.6% chance of a win if the election was today.

But Wisconsin and New Hampshire are only 14 electoral votes, compared to 49 electoral votes for Florida and Pennsylvania. So the net change is 35 electoral votes in reach for Trump that were not when we did the last blog post, meaning a 70 electoral vote increase in Trump's best case.

So, now to dash through the "weak" states that are in play that didn't switch broad categories this time around, in order by  the number of electoral votes:

When you mash all of these movements together into our probabilistic model that doesn't just say that since one candidate is ahead in a state they are going to win it, but instead simulates many possible election results recognizing that close states can go either way, you get these trends:

Roughly speaking, the darker the color, the more likely the final margin will be in that range.

Looking at the center median line, where half the simulated election results were better for Biden, and half were better for Trump, Biden's most recent peak was a 180 electoral vote margin on July 17th. Since then he has slipped down to a 154 electoral vote margin.

All of the other bands have moved toward Trump as well, each to a differing degree. The moves aren't as dramatic as the categorization view shows, but there has been a steady deterioration for Biden since that peak.

June and the first half of July were a constant stream of bad news for Trump, and his position in election polls reflected that. Since then things have slowly been moving back in his direction.

To be absolutely clear, Biden still has a huge advantage. But less so than he did a few weeks ago.

It is still too small to see directly on the chart, but Biden's chances of winning when we did our last update rounded to 100.0% (it was actually 99.9931% in our simulation), and now they round to 99.9% (it is actually 99.9265% in our current simulation).

So that is still substantial, even if it is less than it was.

But that is if the election was today.

How vulnerable is that lead?

Biden's tipping point lead peaked at 7.3%. It is down to 4.2%. That's a 3.1% decline in a little over a month. If that trend continued, in another month Biden would still have a lead, but it would be quite tenuous.

That is not a prediction. It seems more likely that if Biden's spike in June was just an aberration and things are returning to the mean, that the tipping point will settle out between a 2% and 4% Biden lead.

But that is the level of lead that might just be a systematic polling error. Or that could be erased by a major event in the last few days of the campaign, too late to be measured by the polls.

So how does this look compared to 2016?

<86 Days Out> 2016 2020
Expected Case Clinton by 164 Biden by 180
Tipping Point Clinton by 6.0% Biden by 4.2%

So Biden is ahead of Clinton at this same point in time in terms of expected margins if all the states fell where their polls indicated. But Clinton's lead was actually a bit more secure than Biden's is right now, and of course, it slipped away before the end.

If the election was today, Biden would almost certainly win. But his lead is somewhat precarious. If 2% or 3% of people change their minds from Biden to Trump in a few critical states, Trump takes the lead.

Now the spectrum of battleground states :

Here is what it looked like in our last update:

And here it is today:

Out of the close ("weak") states, Biden only has to hold Arizona and Pennsylvania. He can afford to lose all the rest and still win.

But we're once again in a position where with a sweep of all the close states, Trump could win.

Finally, the current map:

86.0 days until polls start to close on election night. Stay tuned!

For more information:

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

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

Biden Plateau?

It has been too long since my last update. Oops.

Given that, I'll start with a reminder that while I only do these blog posts occasionally, the 2020 pages on Election Graphs are updated nearly every day as new polls come in. So you can always see the current status there for yourself.

In any case, since the last update on July 1st, there have been new state polls in Arizona (x9), Florida (x7), Michigan (x7), North Carolina (x6), Pennsylvania (x7), Wisconsin (x4), Colorado, Montana (x4), Texas (x7), Maine, Alaska (x2), Alabama, Iowa (x2), Georgia (x4), Missouri, Nebraska CD2, Kentucky (x4), South Carolina, Ohio, and Minnesota.

Yeah. Like I said. Too long since the last update.

Last time around, Trump was collapsing. Over three weeks later, where are we now?

As usual, let's start with the summary table of changes, then get into the graphs:

Model Metric 1 Jul 24 Jul 𝚫
Categories Trump Best
Expected
Biden Best		 Biden +56
Biden +162
Biden +288		 Biden +36
Biden +168
Biden +288		 Trump +20
Biden +6
FLAT
Tipping Point Biden +7.3 Biden +6.5% Trump +0.8%
Probabilities Trump 2σ
Median
Biden 2σ		 Biden +82
Biden +158
Biden +262		 Biden +80
Biden +168
Biden +272		 Trump +2
Biden +10
Biden +10
Trump Win
Tie
Biden Win		 0.0%
0.0%
100.0%		 0.0%
0.0%
100.0%		 FLAT
FLAT
FLAT

So compared to 23 days ago, we've got a mixed bag. Some metrics move toward Trump, some move toward Biden.

If I had to characterize the whole thing at once, I'd say Biden has improved his "right now" position a bit, but it is slightly more precarious than it was, and movement has slowed. Things seem to have plateaued the last couple of weeks.

At least in the probabilistic view. The categorization view is more volatile.

For instance, this update would have looked significantly different a week ago in the categorization view. Things looked much better for Biden a week ago, but they have swung back since then.

You can see that clearly on the chart:

That giant dip in the expected cases is caused by Georgia, Texas, and Ohio all flipping from just barely Trump, to just barely Biden, but then Georgia and Texas flipping back again.

In the categorization view, the difference between "just barely Biden" and "just barely Trump" is massive, as the state immediately changes sides. But in reality, either way, you have a tossup situation.

The probabilistic view accounts for that, and we'll look at that view shortly.

But first, let's look first at all the states that moved in or out of our "Weak Trump" and "Weak Biden" categories since the last post.

In order from biggest to smallest:

Texas is, of course, a huge electoral vote prize. The hope of a blue Texas completely changing the political map is once again tantalizing Democrats as it seems like it could be in reach. Our polling average briefly dipped into the blue before reverting to the red side of the centerline.

The bottom line here at the moment is just that Texas is very much a battleground state. As of this update, in the Election Graphs averages, Texas is the closest state of them all, with Trump leading by only 0.3%.

Florida, on the other hand, is not a close state at the moment, even though it famously often has been. For a very brief moment in the last few weeks, Biden's lead in Florida fell below 5%. But then subsequent polls drove Biden to his biggest lead in Florida yet, with an 8.4% margin over Trump.

Ohio continues to be more sparsely polled than you would think it would be, so the average isn't as responsive to events. But with the latest poll, the average flips from the Trump side to the Biden side.

Either way, Ohio is a close state and very much in play.

Georgia is another super close state. Since the last blog post, Georgia has flipped from Biden to Trump, back to Biden, then back to Trump yet again as new polls came in.

Just looking at the states we have flagged as "super close" so far…  Texas, Ohio, and Georgia… tells you quite a lot about the race. If these three states are the close states, the Republican is in deep trouble.

After a lot of polls in June showing Biden with 10%+ leads in Michigan, more recent polls caused Biden to drop below a 5% lead in the average… for a little bit… before new polls showed Biden's lead increasing again.

Biden's lead is nowhere near as strong as it was in mid-June, but it is still a very strong lead.

Wisconsin exhibits a similar pattern. A big move toward Biden, which has subsequently receded, still leaving Biden with a lead, but a much less substantial one than he had.

In Wisconsin's case, at the moment, Biden's lead is still under 5%, which means we consider it to be a state that Trump could steal under the right conditions, so this movement is responsible for the 20 electoral vote improvement to Trump's best case margin.

Along with Maine, Nebraska is one of the two states that award some of their electoral votes by congressional district. Polls for the two congressional districts in Maine and the three in Nebraska tend to be rare. But we now have two for Nebraska's 2nd congressional district.

The five poll average still includes the 2008-2016 election results as a baseline as well as the two actual 2020 polls. But both of the new polls show a substantial Biden lead, which is enough to pull the district into "Weak Biden" territory for the moment. If future polls back up the first two, this may end up as a Strong Biden electoral vote before we are done.

In addition to the states above that changed categories, we have some intra-category movement with these close states:

There is a decent amount of range between the best polls for Biden and the best polls for Trump in North Carolina. The poll average itself has bounced around quite a bit too.

But, in the last year, aside from a short time in May, polling has consistently had North Carolina in the "Weak Biden" category, even when other states have been swinging dramatically in one direction or the other.

Arizona had a bit longer foray over to the Trump side from late January to early March, but since then, Biden has maintained a small but steady lead.

And finally, Iowa, which has been "Weak Trump" since December, but where Biden has been gaining on Trump since late April.

With all of these changes together, the probabilistic model produces a view that recognizes that "just barely Trump" and "just barely Biden" are both tossups, rather than immediately classifying a state on one side or the other. We run about a million simulations based on the current polling, and an analysis of the 2008-2016 polling average accuracy here on Election Graphs, and get this…

The big move toward Biden and back caused by Texas and Georgia is not evident here like it is in the categorization model.

Instead, in the median case, we see the rapid movement toward Biden in the first half of June, a slower movement toward Biden through about the July 4th holiday, and then things being stable since then. This is our plateau.

In addition, for the lines showing the top of our 2σ (95.45% chance) and 3σ (99.73% chance) probability bands, you can see Trump improving at the end of June, but losing most of that gain over the following few weeks. This represents Trump's temporary improvement in Weak Biden states, which then slipped away again.

In terms of Biden's chances of winning if the election was held today (which it is not!), the odds are still pegged at a number which rounds to 100%. But if you look at the unrounded number, it is 99.9931%, which is not quite as good as the 99.9977% in the last blog post.

The risk for Biden would not be in the odds if the election were held today. At the moment, Biden has a very strong lead, large enough that we wouldn't expect a different outcome due to systematic polling error or anything like that. No, the risk is that there are still 102 days until election results start coming in, and there is time for the situation to change.

Which brings us to the tipping point, which measures just how much things have to change to flip the winner.

Last time we noted the movement from Biden by 2.7% to Biden by 7.3% in less than two weeks. Since then, Trump improved in this metric to only losing to Biden by 4.8% in the tipping-point state but then slipped again, now losing by 6.5%.

The thing that this chart helps us remember is how fast things can change with the right events in the news. If Biden can gain 4.6% in two weeks, then given the right combination of events, he could lose 4.6% in a similar period. If that were to happen, he would only be ahead by 1.9% in the tipping point state… just barely better than the 1.6% lead Clinton had in the tipping point on Election Eve 2016, so clearly within the realm that things could go the other way.

But that isn't where things are today. Today Biden has a huge lead. The question is if he keeps it over the next 102 days.

As we have in the last couple of posts, let's make a quick comparison of where Biden is today and where Clinton was at the same point in 2016.

<102 Days Out> 2016 2020
Expected Case Clinton by 144 Biden by 168
Tipping Point Clinton by 2.8% Biden by 6.5%

Biden continues to be significantly stronger than Clinton was.

Now a quick look at the spectrum of states that are either actively in play, or could be if there is a significant movement toward one candidate or the other:

Here is what it looked like in our last update:

And here is how it looks today:

Fundamentally, while at the moment Biden can win without ANY of the close states, at the same time there are a LOT of "Weak Biden" states that are stealable by Trump with a relatively small move in the polls, so it wouldn't take a lot to change this picture dramatically.

Finally, the current map:

102.0 days until polls start to close on election night. Stay tuned!

For more information:

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

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

Trump Collapsing?

Since the last update on June 18th, there have been new state polls in Utah, Kentucky, New Hampshire, North Carolina (x5), Minnesota, Alabama, Michigan (x3), Wisconsin (x5), Texas (x2), Ohio, Pennsylvania (x3), Florida (x2), Arizona, Georgia (x2), Missouri, and New York.

In our last update, we noted that while national polls were moving rapidly against Trump, the story with state polls was more complicated.

Not this time. With very few exceptions, these polls have been bad for Trump. State polls have caught up with the national polls, and this time around we see a dramatic move away from Trump and toward Biden across metrics.

As usual, let's start with the summary table of changes, then get into the graphs:

Model Metric 18 Jun 1 Jul 𝚫
Categories Trump Best
Expected
Biden Best		 Trump +42
Biden +130
Biden +288		 Biden +56
Biden +162
Biden +288		 Biden +98
Biden +32
FLAT
Tipping Point Biden +4.8 Biden +7.3% Biden +2.5%
Probabilities Trump 2σ
Median
Biden 2σ		 Biden +32
Biden +132
Biden +242		 Biden +82
Biden +158
Biden +262		 Biden +50
Biden +26
Biden +20
Trump Win
Tie
Biden Win		 0.3%
0.1%
99.6%		 0.0%
0.0%
100.0%		 -0.3%
-0.1%
+0.4%

Not a single one of our national metrics moved toward Trump this time.

Let's start by looking at the states that moved in or out of the "Weak Biden" and "Weak Trump" categories that our categorization model thinks could go either way since the margin is less than 5%.

In order from biggest to smallest:

With a series of really strong polls, Trump seems to be collapsing in Florida at the moment. Now, it would be natural for there to be some reversion to the mean at some point, and maybe the poll showing Biden with a 10%+ lead is an outlier. But for the moment, Florida moves from "Weak Biden" to "Strong Biden", meaning the categorization view no longer sees Florida as being in reach for Trump if the election was today. (Spoiler, it isn't.)

Pennsylvania also moves from "Weak Biden" to "Strong Biden" as a wave of new polls showing him ahead wash the most recent poll showing Trump leading Pennsylvania out of the average.

Now, Florida and Pennsylvania moving out of Trump's reach (for now) is big news, but perhaps the even bigger news is Biden retaking the lead in Georgia. Now, this is just barely. He leads by 0.9% in our average at the moment, which means we give Biden about a 55% chance of winning the state.

Georgia is clearly a battleground state at the moment, which is significant in and of itself, no matter which candidate is slightly ahead. In a world where Trump was doing well, you would not expect him to have to be fighting for Georgia, let alone be losing it.

With these categorization changes, you get this chart for the range between the categorization view's best and worst cases for each candidate:

In terms of the central "expected case" line, we are at a 162 EV win for Biden, which is almost, but not quite back to the 166 EV win we had for him in early May.

But Trump's best case is not only a loss for the first time since last October, but it is also the worst it has ever been in the Biden vs. Trump matchups. At this moment, if Trump were to win EVERY close state, he would still lose to Biden by 56 electoral votes.

Of course, the categorization model is very coarse. Let's look now at the rest of the close states that had new polling since our last update and see how those change the probabilistic model.


Where are Wisconsin and Michigan? Aren't they key swing states? Well, maybe. But at the moment they are not CLOSE states. Biden leads Wisconsin by 7.1% and Michigan by 8.0%. That may not stay that way. In both states, Biden's lead is down a bit from its high. But at the moment, Biden has quite a strong lead in both.

When you mash all of the movements in all of the states with new polls together into our probabilistic model, you get this:

Trump peaked in the middle of April in our simulations, dropped quickly, then plateaued, increasing to a second peak right around the beginning of June before falling again. Then things started to flatten out again, but that most recent bit of the chart is still subject to change as new polls covering that time period come in.

In terms of the median case of our simulations, Biden is now winning by 158 EV, almost at his recent best of 160 EV. His all-time best was 184 EV back in October.

In terms of probability of winning our site now shows Biden at 100.0%. That is rounded though of course. Looking at the unrounded numbers, it is actually 99.9977% at the moment.

This is the time for the usual "if the election was held today" warning. If Biden's polls end up looking like this on election eve, he would almost certainly win. But we have almost 126 days to go. And things can change.

So let's look at the tipping point, which measures just how much things have to change in order to flip the winner.

The tipping point has moved dramatically toward Biden. Between June 9th and June 22nd, it moved from Biden by 2.7% to Biden by 7.3%. That's 4.6% in less than 2 weeks.

On the one hand, that is a dramatic collapse for Trump. But on the other, it shows just how quickly things can move. Something that can go down quickly can potentially go up quickly too.

So for the two metrics we had in 2016 as well as today, how does Biden stack up to Clinton at the same time period?

<126 Days Out> 2016 2020
Expected Case Clinton by 144 Biden by 162
Tipping Point Clinton by 3.2% Biden by 7.3%

So yes, Biden is doing better on both metrics than Clinton was at this same time in 2016.

From this point, Clinton would improve a bit. In August 2016 she got up to a 188 EV lead in the expected case and a 6.1% lead in the tipping point. This, of course, did not last all the way until the election. By the time we got to the election, Election Graphs had Clinton leading, but just barely.

Other analysts looking at the internals of various polls, both at the state and national level are saying that Biden's support is more solid than Clinton's was. That she had weaknesses that Biden does not.

Maybe, maybe not. In any case, he is doing better at this time in the race than she was. A 7.3% tipping point is a SUBSTANTIAL lead.

Another way to look at the change since the last update on June 18th is to look at how the center portion of the spectrum of states changed.

Here is what it looked like in our last update:

And here is how it looks today:

Things are getting bluer.

To close things out, the current map:

And that is where we are.

But it is only July. Time to watch what happens over the summer.

125.7 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 for current interactive versions of the chart, along with additional details.

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