Love your drill down material. I'm a Trump supporter too, big time one actually, but nothing trumps my love of Canes. Truthfully, I had no idea of your politics. I argue with you because it is hard to find decent discourse with anyone other than a fellow UM Law grad.
Now, not to start another tiff, I figure 320 plus electoral votes in November for second 4 years. I hate both political parties, but if you have a horse in the race, do you have a projection on the vote that matters?
This year will be insanity when it comes to the electoral college, I think the truer indicator will be states that allow absentee ballots vs. those that do not.
Again, some guys on the board don't know how to DISCUSS politics without making things political. I was a Political Science major, so I can swing it.
To take just an example, when Wisconsin decided NOT to allow the mail-in ballots for the primary, the number of in-person polling places in Milwaukee dropped from over 100 to 5. When you layer in (a) lack of funding for an "unusual" election cycle, (b) the cost of new machinery, (c) the likelihood that many poll-workers (who are largely volunteer and/or elderly) might not show up, (d) the disincentive to vote in person when anyone sees/expects long lines at polling locations, and (e) the relative differentiation between more "Democrat-leaning" city voters and more "Republican-leaning" rural voters, then you might get "electoral college" outcomes that are very different from "opinion-polling" numbers.
Thus, you might be able to look at, again, say Wisconsin, and for the next 5 months, the polls may be showing that the state will flip to Biden. However, if people cannot vote by mail, and if the practicalities of in-person voting results in a greater "non-vote" in urban areas, then you could have a result which skews the outcome (vs. the overall support for the candidates). For instance, pretend that Wisconsin is polling 55-45 Biden over Trump. That type of a margin would be beyond error, from a statistical sense. One would begin to project that Biden will win the state and take all of the electoral votes. But if the availability of polling places/machines/workers/tabulations causes a decreased actual vote count in urban areas, but not as big of an impact on rural areas, then you could get an actual outcome of, say, 51-49 Trump over Biden, which then awards all of the electoral votes to Trump.
What is interesting is that most of the states that (so far) are not allowing mail-in ballots, or require a reason, or give a state the ability to reject a mail-in request, tend to be in the South. And if you expect the South to go for Trump, then one could make the argument that this really shouldn't make much of a difference, that Trump would "carry Alabama" whether Alabama allows mail-in ballots or not.
Therefore, the true differential comes down to swing states, particularly "purple" southern states (such as Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina) and rust belt states (Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin).
The bottom line is this. Right now, in statewide races, the polling numbers for Lindsey Graham (SC) and Mitch McConnell (TN) are not great. Those guys may actually lose. And maybe they lose by 1 vote, but that is all it takes. But when a presidential candidate wins those states, he gets ALL of the electoral votes, so the "close wins" count a lot more than the runaway wins. Hillary got 3 million more votes than Trump, but her biggest margin was in California, and she didn't get any extra electoral college votes for "winning big". Meanwhile, the combined number of voters by which she lost 3 rust belt states (which would have given her the win) was less than 100,000. Thus, if 50,000 people had changed their votes in three rust belt states, Hillary would have won both the popular vote AND the electoral college vote.
So, yeah, there are only a few states that are, ultimately, going to make the difference. And while Biden is ahead in most of those places (purely from a polling standpoint, and I know it is still early), and even if Biden continues to lead in the polls up until election day, the ACTUAL vote count outcome will be more dependent upon voting methodology this year than at any time ever before.
Keep in mind, we have allowed mail-in voting since the Civil War. Mail-in voting and absentee voting are not new. But, Covid-19 is new, and how that impacts the process of voting will be the biggest wild card.
No projections yet. Too many variables, still. The key to EVERYTHING this year will be voter turnout/voter participation, and especially the rules that constrain voter turnout.
