538 releases a model predicting what they think is going to happen every elections, and this time they released a crazy one, where "Biden is only slightly favored to win the election", and Trump has insanely high 30% chance of second term.
This is in stark contrast to everyone else's predictions. For example The Economist gives Trump just 9% chance of winning, and this is a much more sensible number.
In this post I'll explain why 538 believes elections are quite close, and why it's completely wrong.
It's not a terribly sophisticated analysis, but it's too long for a tweet, so I thought I'd put it here.
If you're interested, I wrote "A Guide to 2020 Elections for non-Americans" a while back, and I dislike both Trump and Biden very much.
Why 538 model believes what it does
Their model is very sophisticated, but its basic assumptions leading to their crazy conclusions are fairly straighforward:
- Biden is far ahead in polls, however:
- there's still a lot of time until elections
- things are likely to change until then
- especially since pandemic year is full of events
- Electoral College benefits Trump, so he will likely win even if he losses popular vote narrowly
- the economy went to hell earlier this year, but they think it will improve, and that will somehow benefit Trump
Why 538 is completely wrong - not much time
The only thing they got right is that Biden is indeed far ahead in the polls. They're wrong about everything else.
The elections are a lot closer than they think. In normal times, most people vote on Election Day. This time due to the pandemic a lot more people will vote by mail early, and mail voting opens about a month before Election Day, depending on the state. So for a lot of voters, time until elections is only half of what they think. And people might be voting even earlier as there's a lot of talk about Post Office having trouble processing votes in time.
Even if Biden says the dumbest thing he ever said one week until elections, or Trump single-handedly invents coronavirus vaccine, enough votes will be cast by then that it probably won't matter.
Why 538 is completely wrong - pandemic prevents most campaigning
People don't change political beliefs based on clocks ticking, they do based on events and campaigning. This time due to pandemic there's going to be a lot less campaiging, and people's attention will be largely on other issues.
It's not even certain if the usual debates will happen or not. And even if they do, only the first of the three is supposed to happen before mail voting starts.
Why 538 is completely wrong - people already made up their mind
If you compare Trump's approval ratings with all past presidents, Trump's are the least volatile.
People love Trump, or hate Trump, and there's a lot fewer people in between that could be convinced by the campaigns. So no matter how good Trump's campaign is, it will likely not matter. And likewise, while Biden will almost certainly win, he's also very unlikely to win by 1984 style landslide.
Why 538 is completely wrong - Electoral College advantage can go either way
In 2000 and 2016 elections, Democrats won the popular vote, but Republicans won the presidency. While this might give an impression that Electoral College system inherently benefits Republicans (the way Senate arguably does), if you look back both parties benefited from the system about equally often.
Right now it might look like 2020 map will be similar to 2016 map, and seems to benefit Trump. This thinking is completely mistaken.
If very little changes, Trump will lose terribly, and while he might indeed lose Electoral College by less than popular vote, it will be completely inconsequential.
For elections to be even competitive, fairly big changes must happen. But while it's possible, there's no reason to expect that they'll uniformly apply to all states (in proportion to their "swinginess").
For example if Biden says something that will offend a million Californians and makes them stay at home or vote third party, this will significantly reduce his popular vote share, but it won't matter for Electoral College one bit, since California will go Democratic regardless.
Trump needs not only a really big swing - he needs a swing that's either eerily uniform, or happen in just the right states.
In reality, if a major swing happens, it throws all assumptions about Electoral College advantage out of the window. Even if much bigger swing than could be reasonably expected happens, and Trump somehow manages to reach vote share similar to what he got in 2016 (losing popular vote by 2%), it's actually still quite unlikely that this swing will leave his Electoral College advantage intact, and get him another victory.
Why 538 is completely wrong - the economy will not favor Trump
A popular way to predict elections is by looking at "economic fundamentals". The thinking goes that whenever economy is doing poorly, people blame whoever is in charge for it, and vote for someone else. This is generally true, and after every major economic crisis like 1929 or 2008, governments all across the world got a lot less popular, regardless of which part of the political spectrum they were on, and how much or how little they had to do with causes of the crisis. There's no reason to expect 2020 to be any different.
538 really hates fundamentals models, and for a good reason. While bad "economy" affects people's voting preferences, there's no obvious way to pick a single number for what is the "economy". You can use unemployment, or GDP, or disposable income, or stock market, or so many other indicators, of combinations of indicators. So in year were economy is doing so-so, you can't really use those models to predict much.
Instead of stopping there, 538 somehow decided to ask experts where the economy will go just before elections, and since most expect some recovery from the worst of the lockdowns, they count this as benefiting Trump. While there's a room for reasonable disagreement how to model this, there's no way in hell 2020 economy could possibly benefit Trump, people's memories are longer than a few weeks, and US is still and will likely be in state of mass unemployment.
Are 2020 Elections a foregone conclusion?
Democrats are overwhelmingly likely to win the House - they'll win the popular vote, and there's not even a possibility of Electoral College stopping them. Republican House is about as likely as Nicola Sturgeon becoming the next Prime Minister.
Biden is extremely likely to win presidency - things would need to go really damn well for Trump.
Senate is another matter. Only 1/3 of it is reelected each time, and Republicans do have a meaningful structural advantage there, so it seems fairly close to even who's going to win. And it probably matters more than anything else this year.
If Democrats control the Senate, they'll be able to abolish filibuster, pass pretty much whatever they want, and then possibly also pack Supreme Court with ten new liberal judges that will pronounce all of that Constitutional. They probably won't go that far, but in principle they could.
In Democrats keep the House, and Republicans keep the Senate, then it will most likely be four more years of gridlock regardless of who's the president. The parties hate each other so much, they won't compromise on anything beyond the most routine operations of the government. Biden's policies will be different than Trump's, but presidential policies don't matter as much as people thing, an the next president in 2024 might very well reverse most of them.
And yes, I obviously put money where my mouth is.
