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As we get closer to the US presidential election, we often report support for candidates. We often describe that according to recent national polls, Joe Biden’s support is much higher than Donald Trump’s, the difference between the two being around 8-10 percentage points.
As we have always said in our previous articles, we now point out that national support does not give an accurate picture of the election result, but looks to individual member states, but especially so-called battlefield states where competition is intense. . Between the parts. In this article, we detail exactly how the parties are ranking according to recent polls, as well as how much Trump is lagging behind. We bring three scenarios:
- In the first case, we analyze the most likely scenario: we always collect survey data in each Member State and use it to model the current most likely scenario for the election.
- In the second scenario, we show Trump’s shortest path to victory: we tweak the poll results so that Trump is just ahead of Bident, and this is done by reorganizing as few voters as possible.
- The third scenario is completely extreme, we have prepared it just to illustrate how irrelevant it is to predict from national support.
What is the US presidential election system like?
It is important to know about the American electoral system that the president is not chosen directly by the people, but by the so-called voters. The 538 electors in the 51 Member States are roughly distributed in proportion to the population: currently the largest Member State sends 55 electricity, the smallest only 3. Voters in each Member State vote for the presidential candidates, and whoever wins the contest in that Member State the entire electorate of that Member State wins. It doesn’t matter if the winning candidate wins by 51% or 70% at that location, they still get all the electricity, while the loser gets nothing. The president will eventually be the one with at least 270 votes in the electoral college. That is why we are paying attention to those populous Member States where the competition is fierce, because the presidential elections are actually decided here.
If everything turned out according to the polls, Biden would win without problems
In the first scenario, we examine the most likely outcome of the election. For the votes cast, we use the 2016 votes per member state, for all votes we look at the sum of the votes cast for Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump at that time. Next, we analyze the potential support of the two candidates by Member State, here we analyze the aggregated results of the electoral aggregation portal Real Clear Politics by Member State (the polls are a few days old, only in those Member States where the result is almost certainly – we found a summer poll in only two or three cases, but these are usually small Member States where the election result is not really questionable).
Based on this, we see that if the election is based on recent polls, Joe Biden would get 379 electricity and Donald Trump 159 electricity.
You can see that national support is 50.5-42.3% in favor of Biden, but this, as mentioned in the box, is completely irrelevant. Instead, we have to look at the Electoral College result, but now it leads to the same result: Joe Biden would easily win the election.. On the map below, we have marked in blue the Member States where Biden now leads, and in orange, where Trump is winning:
As can be seen above, in a significant number of states, the competition has run, leading one or the other candidate with a great advantage. This is always the case. In these states, Trump can expect 100, Biden 238 voters
– that is, Biden only needs to collect 32 electricity from the battlefield states in addition to the electricity that he will surely earn.
It also appears that several of the more populous Member States have a narrower gap between the parties. These can be considered the most important battlefield states, shown on the map below:
Of course, we must point out that we cannot infer from the 2016 electoral turnout the current electoral turnout, but in the absence of a better one, we start from that.
Does Trump still have a chance of winning?
In the second scenario, we show Trump’s shortest path to victory. To do this, we take into account the previous model, and in those Member States where Biden’s advantage was the smallest percentage, we simply equalize the nominal votes (we take half the difference of Biden’s voters, we add the same to the Trump voters and one more), then Trump you get it. We start with the member states with the narrowest percentage differences and adjust the results for each battlefield state until we reach Trump’s minimum majority in the Electoral College. The more Member States we had to play this game, the more likely Trump was to win.
The difference between the two tables is the states in bold, where Trump benefited, that is, according to current polls, there are at least 8 member states where Trump needs to reverse the competitive position. These are in the order of our modification: Ohio, Georgia, Iowa, Florida, North Carolina, Arizona, Wisconsin, Nevada. Of course, Trump doesn’t have to translate these exactly, but here’s the smallest percentage difference between the two, so presumably these have the best chance of translating.
Therefore, Trump will have to reverse the competition in 8 member states compared to his current position to have a minimum majority in the electoral college.
Ohio and Georgia have a high probability of doing this because the percentage difference between the parts is minimal at these locations, but Iowa and Florida are also within the measurement error limits. However, there are already 8 Member States (such as Wisconsin or Nevada) where the difference between the two exceeds 5 percentage points. It is clear that national support has hardly changed compared to the previous table, while more than 100 voters have changed farmers (Therefore, it does not make sense to observe the change in national support either).
The 8 Member States seem like a lot, but if we look at the difference in votes between the two in these Member States, it can be said that nominally, at the national level, it is enough to misjudge the preferences of only 388,000 voters for the current polls to be incorrect. . Of course, it is also sufficient if the system cannot evaluate so many hidden voters. For President Trump, polls in the previous eight member states have an average error rate of 2.9% and in the member state with the largest difference, 5.2%. Basically, it can be said that President Trump can remain president in two cases at the moment:
- if polls underestimate him by at least 5.2 percentage points versus Binden, or
- if you can narrow the gap between the two in the next two weeks, and it’s enough if the polls are less wrong.
These two options are by no means an unlikely scenario, Trump was also significantly underestimated in 2016. (We draw attention to the possibility of this anyway). In any case, we must be attentive to the polls over the next few days, because if the scissors widen, Trump’s chances decrease, if they narrow, they grow. It seems almost unthinkable at this point that Trump would get more votes nationwide than Biden, but this is exactly how, in 2016, it won’t matter: the real fight for the electorate, however, is not running.
We should also note that if the poll’s error rate is greater than 6 percentage points, there could even be a Trump smooth win rather than the currently predicted smooth Biden win.
While this is an unthinkable mistake at the national level, if the gap narrows slightly, it can abundantly occur in a major 1-1 state, as we saw an example from 4 years ago.
Why don’t national votes count?
In the third, strictly theoretical scenario, we show how in a US presidential election, it is possible for a candidate who receives multiple national votes to lose the election. The model was built so that Trump would have a minimal majority in the electoral college while lagging far behind in the national vote. We played chess with individual member states until we could get a small lead from Trump in the electoral college, and in those member states where the Republican president won, he won only 1 vote over Biden, while in member states he won 99.9 % of votes. got yours. Once again, we draw attention to the fact that this possibility is completely unrealistic, we have created it only to illustrate the peculiarities of the electoral system.
In this model, Joe Biden would get 73% of the national vote, while Donald Trump would get only 27, however, the latter would be the legitimately elected president because he would get a majority of 6 people in the electoral college. The relevance of the national votes is 0. It is also clear from the model that if we classify Michigan as Biden, it could have a president with 9 winning states, losing in 42 states; this is also a feature of the US presidential election system. However, this is all an unrealistic scenario, and we just wanted to focus on the point: you just need to look at the electoral college. And in the electoral college, the majority will be the one who wins the battlefield states. If both sides withdraw the states that appear to have been exhausted and the top 8 battlefield states mentioned above are taken over by Trump, where Biden now leads, he will remain president, but if he loses just one, he will leave office.
Friday will be decisive for the presidential elections, as the parties will debate at dawn in Hungarian time. The discussion will be covered live, followed by a short evaluation.
Cover image: Caitlin O’Hara / Getty Images
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