Into the Unknown – The New York Times

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Less than a week before Election Day, more than 74 million votes have already been cast. The presidential candidates are making their final sprints through the swing states. And it’s hard to anticipate any developments that will change the overall dynamics of the race at this point. (Although it is not impossible. After all, it is 2020, the year we spend the word without precedent).

For months this race has been in the direction of Joe Biden. It is ahead in all state and national survey averages. But these last few days, I find myself thinking less about voting trends and more about the unknowns that could still drive things crazy. Here are three of the most important things that we cannot predict:

Surveys can be wrong and in ways we don’t yet understand.

When we talk about politics, we spend a lot of time concentrating on polls. But the reality is that it is a very imperfect measure: a snapshot of the electorate at a given moment, not a prediction of things to come.

Still, Biden has some room for error. As our friends at The Upshot have been reporting for weeks, even if the polls turn out to be as flawed as they were in 2016, Biden would still win the White House. (More on that below).

But what if the polls are wrong in a totally different way?

We are holding elections amid unprecedented conditions (there is the word, again!). We have never voted for president in a pandemic. We have never voted so much by mail. And as a result, our choice has never relied so heavily on a Postal Service still reporting delays.

It’s hard to account for all that uncertainty in polls, especially considering that polls often fail even in “normal” times.

This is not just a 2016 issue. A clever analysis published yesterday by David Wasserman in Cook Political Report found that state polls in 2016 and 2018 underestimated the strength of Republicans in the Midwest and Florida, and underestimated the strength of Democrats in the Southwest.

Polling can fail in all sorts of ways. And this year, we definitely have to be prepared for the unexpected.

We really don’t know what all this early voting will mean for the outcome.

There is no doubt that bank votes as soon as possible is a smart political strategy. But the Democratic lead in early results may not tell us much about the final outcome of the election.

Record early voting numbers should indicate a high turnout election. Traditionally, that would benefit Democrats, who tend to get more support from infrequent voters. But again, this choice is anything but typical.

We don’t know if the Democrats are attracting new voters or simply racking up votes that would have been cast on Election Day. But according to estimates by TargetSmart, a Democratic data firm, more than 16 million people who did not vote in 2016 have voted in 2020. Of those voters, an estimated 49 percent are Democrats and 37 percent Republicans.

Republicans argue that they are attracting new voters and will increase their margins in conservative areas by removing working-class white voters who skipped the 2016 election but now want to support President Trump. After months of Trump’s spurious attacks on vote-by-mail, large numbers of Republicans are expected to wait and vote on Election Day.

If the results are close, there could be a whole new ending.

Forget Election Day, now is Election Day, bro. (That’s “election season, buddy,” for old folks like me). The question is how long the election season will last after the voting ends.

In the final months of the contest, Trump has spent a lot of time questioning the legitimacy of the elections in advance, even going so far as to refuse to commit to a peaceful transition of power.

These charges are not entirely new: He made similarly unfounded allegations in 2016, refusing to promise to accept the election results when pressed during the third debate. Hillary Clinton’s defeat meant her threat was never tested.

A decisive victory for Biden would make it difficult for Trump to mount a justifiable claim to the presidency, the kind that could gain political traction among his fellow Republicans. But if he appears to have lost by a narrower margin, would Trump really push his argument for a “rigged election” through lawsuits or other means?

It’s another question that we won’t be able to answer until we have results. But if Mr. Biden wins, it could end up being the topic we’ll talk about in a few weeks.

We want to hear from our readers. I have a question? We will try to answer it. Do you have any comments? We are all ears. Email us at [email protected].

… Seriously

Young man! The Long and Winding Road to the Village People’s “YMCA”:

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