2020 Election Projection: A Biden wave, but Florida is a red state
(Don't worry, there's alot of anxiety behind this confident facade, so if you are looking for downside in the polls or the election procedures skip ahead to the spooky section on the ghosts of 2016.)
A Biden Wave: In the imagined words of Joe Biden. "Look. The polls have us up. 8 or 9, now I remember the Nixon elections, and if a 8 point win isn't a wave, then I don't know what a wave is anymore. Now, my friend Barack didn't even win by 8 points in 2008."
In all seriousness, for as static as the 21st electoral college maps have been, the fact that Georgia, Arizona, and Texas are on the table for president, and Democrats are favored for the US Senate in Arizona, and are competitive in IA, NC, GA(!) and SC(!!) is pretty remarkable for Democrats. My personal view is that with the politics of the country nationalizing, the salient divide is between urban and rural areas. Particularly, an influx of "younger" (Gen-X, millenials, Gen-Z) in urban areas, and older voters in rural areas. This is one reason Ohio has become so consistently red.
Georgia and Texas on the map now because of the growth in the urban populations of those states, a trend which could be durable in years to come. Nobody hates the Electoral College as much as I do (well, besides Al Gore and Hillary Clinton), but I think the moment Texas becomes a blue state is when the Republican party will change it's tune and abolish that undemocratic institution. For the US Senate, my view is that Democrats gain a narrow Senate Majority (+ME, +AZ, +IA, +NC, +CO, -AL) for 51 seats total. Nancy Pelosi retains her gavel.
Florida is a red state: Despite being bullish on Biden's nationwide chances, my belief that Florida is a red state persists. To the prior point, Trump has seemingly activated the rural areas of Florida in a big way in recent years, and consistent in-migration of older voters to Florida (the key component of my urban-rural theory, although I need to stop talking demography, I'm literally making this up) will make it less exposed to the urban growth that can tip NC + GA. The 21st century presidential elections have all been about Florida, and it will be key to the story yet again. That being said, for people that want an old-fashioned electoral night call from the networks, if Biden wins Florida, the night will be over quick.
Addressing the Ghosts of 2016
Yesterday, I drove 360 miles from Vermont (which I've been working remotely for the semester) back to Philadelphia so that I can vote in person tomorrow (long story short, Pennsylvania's mail-in ballot vs. absentee ballot system does not work well), so I had the opportunity to check in with many friends and family about the election. As far as the chances of the Democrats go, nobody I talked to was as confident in Biden's chances as I was. Which is a strange position for me, because I do not feel very confident in this projection. Many of those fears are about (1) polling failures, (2) illegitimate conduct of the election. So let's tackle those fears.
The polls. The polls were off in 2016 in a big way and in small ways. After all the national election polls were not wrong, they predicted a Hillary Clinton win on the national popular vote outside the margin of error and they were right. The big way they were off is that there were just not enough high quality polls of what turned out to be key swing states (Wisconsin and Michigan) for amateur prognosticators like myself to know what would happen in the Electoral College. It's easy to forget, but we were blinded by the national popular vote, which does. not. matter. under our the Electoral College. In 2020, the American public is now woke on the need to focus on the states.
The seed for the more insidious way the polls was off can be seen in my fateful 2016 election projection, where I discussed the "white, working-class vote" that was breaking for Trump. My outsider understanding of what happened was that there was also a pretty consistent 2016 polling error towards Trump in well-polled states, like Pennsylvania, primarily because of a share of the population that is particularly hard to poll via telephone or internet methods -- mostly rural white voters, whose highest educational degree is a high school diploma -- that disproportionately favor Trump. Now pollsters have started to "weight by education," or put in a bit of special statistical sauce in their soup to correct for this hard to poll part of the population. As a professor who teaches the virtues of random sampling to estimate the behavior of the population this makes me uncomfortable. However, I don't have a better solution in mind and we have to grapple with the fact that polling methods that worked for decades need to be updated. So my projection reflects trust in my colleagues who publish those polls.
In terms of illegitimate election interference, there's a non-zero chance that the sincere will of the people will not be reflected in the election count that the states certify. To the degree our election system is resistant to capture, it's because our election is actually 50 simultaneous elections, which makes the entire election robust in totality, but certainly offers plenty of opportunities for individual states to be hacked by a party with minority support in the electorate, but control of the institutional levers of power. So keep an eye on that dynamic for Florida, South Carolina, Iowa, Texas, Georgia and Arizona. The Supreme Court does not have the tools to pick winners, but they can certainly tilt the playing field in a recount or (yikes) initial count of ballots that arrive by mail, and the Court has taken an odd position in the past couple of weeks that prioritizes election law written by state legislatures against state Supreme Courts or state-level Secretaries of State, so I would keep that dynamic in mind for states split on those dimensions: Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Wisconsin, Michigan or New Hampshire. See Jonathan Ladd on how the court's decisions since Shelby v. Holder have turned it into a micro-manager of local election procedures, a trend that defies the stated principles of nearly all of these justices.
My final takeaway on this election is that if the prior paragraph enrages you, the work in the next few years will not be done with Joe Biden in the White House, and the remnants of the anti-Trump "resistance" should set their sights on state politics and re-write election laws. When mail-in ballots work, it's a better way to vote, and state legislatures can make this form of voting more common, and elections in general work better. This is supposed to be a government "of the people, by the people, and for the people" after all.
