A new election model released by FiveThirtyEight gives presumptive Democratic nomination Joe Biden
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The analysis gives Trump a greater chance of reelection than other current models.
For example, The Economist’s forecast currently gives Trump only a 10 percent chance of victory.
The FiveThirtyEight model starts with Biden as a heavy favorite in large part because of its lead in the polls.
Biden leads Trump nationally by 8 points in the FiveThirtyEight model, down from 9.6 points a month ago. Biden has clear lead in polling averages in five of the six core battlefield states Florida (5.2 points), Wisconsin (6.2 points), Michigan (7.4 points), Pennsylvania (6.3 points) and Arizona ( 3.4 points).
Biden leads by 1.4 points or less in North Carolina and Ohio. Trump leads by 1.5 points or less in Georgia, Texas and Iowa.
That distribution offers Biden more room for error and a greater path to victory at the moment, and the polls have been relatively stable for months.
However, FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver notes that much could change in the final 83 days before the November 3 election. Conventions and debates are still ahead, and no one knows what the coronavirus will look like in three months’ time.
“Biden called his running mate yesterday,” Silver wrote. “And the campaign is being carried out in the midst of a pandemic, as the United States has not seen in more than 100 years, which is also causing an unusual and volatile economy.”
“It has not been so unusual, historically, that polls shifted quite radically from mid-August to election day,” Silver added. “Furthermore, there are some reasons to think the election will come closer, and President Trump is likely to have an advantage in a narrow election because of the Electoral College.”
Analysts say Trump could potentially lose the national popular vote by 4 points and still win Electoral College in November. Biden has an 81 percent chance of winning the popular vote, compared to only a 71 percent chance of winning Electoral College. However, the FiveThirtyEight model gives Biden a 30 percent chance of winning the popular vote by double digits.
The calculated chance of Biden winning is exactly the same as FiveThirtyEight reported election day in 2016, when the news source said that Democrat Hillary Clinton
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At the time, the journalism website was criticized for giving Trump too much chance of victory.
The New York Times model gave Clinton a 99 percent chance of victory on election day.
But Trump walked the table in the traditional battlefield states, where polling was imminent, and depressing Democratic turnout in the “blue wall” states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin helped Trump win narrow victories. Trump eventually won the Electoral College, despite losing the popular vote by millions of votes.
“The uncertainty in our current forecast for 2020, on the other hand, is mostly due to the fact that there is still a long way to go before the elections,” Silver wrote. “Take what happens when we suffer from our model and tell them that the election is going to be held today. It turns out that Biden has a 93 percent chance of winning. In other words, a Trump victory would require a much bigger poll error than what we saw in 2016. “
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