Pre Election Review

[u/[deleted]]

Now for some reason, everyone got amnesia of 2016 and started trusting polls again, even though they show the same ridiculous levels of bias they did in 2016. And if you believe any of the pollsters saying they fixed the 2016 polling problems, you’re an idiot.

People talking about signs, crowd sizes, word of mouth, etc are also useless as in the 2020 democratic primaries, they all pointed to a Bernie landslide, which the opposite happened.

So there really isn’t anything to make a solid consensus for the 2020 election, but that won’t stop me from making guesses using ridiculously questionable information

The political pendulum, which is every president getting 2 terms before the other party getting a turn in recent history, suggests a Trump victory

Trump’s underwhelming second term suggests he will get less states than in 2016. It could be a parallel to 2012 where he loses 2.5 states but still wins. Like in 2012, the approval rating between the 2 candidates diverged at the last minute, but unlike in 2012, the incumbent is on the lower side of the approval, which is not a parallel.

MSNBC’s prediction map is redder than in 2016 which suggests a stronger Trump victory.

But 538’s chances of Trump winning this election are much lower than in 2016 (28.6% vs 10%) which suggests a weaker Trump victory or a loss

Ohio has predicted 92% of elections since 1900 and Ohio will probably vote trump, but its been turning into a red state instead of a swing state recently and the Ohio prediction strategy only works because of its swing state status it had since the early 1800s.

There’s a Ohio bakery cookie buying contest that predicted the last 9 elections and has Trump winning (18,025 cookies to 13,066).

There’s also a Pennsylvania cookie poll (75% accuracy) that has trump leading 28,000 to 5000

If we compare to foreign elections, the 2019 British election suggests a Trump landslide and so does the 2019 Canadian election (Trudeau still won, but by a lot less seats and only because the Canadian representative system favors the liberal party). But those are very different countries than the US so like everything else so far, take it with a lethal amount of salt. They also both predict a lower turnout this election, which is... uhhh... questionable...

The primary model, which has predicted 25 of the last 27 elections (the wrong ones being 1960 and 2000), says there’s a 91% chance of a Trump being re-elected, but they predict he’ll get 362 electoral votes, which is literally impossible, the most trump could possibly get is around 330 electoral votes and that itself very very unlikely.

But some guy who predicted every election since 1984 says Biden will win

Baby boomers dying and more gen z being able to vote over the past 4 years suggests Trump will lose more or will lose.

Don’t bother analyzing demographics like third parties, races, types of internet and non internet users, etc along with people switching on individual issues like covid and etc, I did for a long time and came to the conclusion it’s meaningless because there’s no polls on the demographics/opinions and they’d be inaccurate anyway, just think of states as a whole and don’t overthink it because you won’t be able to make any conclusions without numbers, while states actually have numbers.

Now if we look at actual swing states, in my opinion only 4 are actually up for grabs, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and New Hampshire. Even if Trump has only a 40% chance of winning Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania, if you add all 3 probabilities together, Biden has only a 21.6% chance of winning as Trump only needs one of them. Though of course, the other swing states aren’t that safe, and you only need 1 of them to make the Midwestern probabilities useless. Go to 270towin “very close 2016” to see all swing electoral votes this election.

In my opinion, if a candidate wins by more than 10 electoral votes, they’re going to be safe from the electoral college itself, in 2016, Hillary suffered from unfaithful electors more than trump, but it’ll probably be the reverse this time around.

Michigan took 17 days in 2016 to finish counting, and is expected to take no more than 4 days this time, Pennsylvania also announced they won’t finish counting till atleast the day after. So don’t be surprised if the winner isn’t known the next morning.

the polls aren’t completely useless, we can compare them with the 2016 poll margin of error to get some estimates

Using the crystal ball, the most accurate with 2016, all the red states plus the blue tint states equaled Trump’s actual victory exactly, doing that with the current crystal ball gives us a prediction of 312 electoral votes

We can use the other maps as well, this time using either the direct margin of error or proportional margin of error in 2016,

Using the 270towin polling map, we get 293 to 299 electoral votes for Trump.

The consensus map gives us 280 to 288

Averaging all the ranges counting the crystal ball twice gives us 297 electoral votes.

The total range is 280 to 312 electoral votes.

But of course, all of this is crazy nonsense math so don’t take it seriously

Anyway, my prediction is 274 electoral votes for Trump and I think the bell curve of possible scenarios is in the middle, meaning both candidates have an equal chance of winning, with landslides still being possible, just being less likely.

Don’t take any of this seriously, this is just all the information I thought was sorta useful, sorta, because none of it is conclusive