The 2020 Presidential General Election thread

The Bitch is back.

I know...you can call it....Mexico???

I missed you too.

Math was never your strong suit.

Meth, however...

See what you do is you take NV, AZ, NM, CO with you (as well as WA and OR obviously) and, here's the kicker, bring along Utah but give them a special status to Mormon it up as the see fit as long as they are in your economic zone. Wouldn't that pretty much solve the water issue?

I think continuing to steal water like we normally do will be a better solution.

Get rid of Hetch Hetchy dam.

Why on earth would we do that? Cite anyone other than John Muir or anyone who cites him.

I went with funny, but I'll have you know it was very close running between funny, winner, and teh baba.

When I spent the summer in Yosemite, granted it was fifteen years ago, there were a lot of people advocating for it. These weren’t tourists either, they were native Californians, extreme environmentalists.

Biden takes an early lead.

Hartsfield's Landing!

Obama inspired people to vote for him, Trump has inspired people to vote against him...
I mean, turning red states purple...

Based on Trump's own criteria, we can stop the voting now. There's a clear winner, no need to count any further votes.

The popularity of this tweet (a minor pundit misspeaks) vs the practically undiscussed daily demonstration of near-senility by The Candidate on the left (nominally being considered to "lead the free world") is why I'm confident in the future of the leftists, big tech, corp. media, academia, and other "popular" influencers of our time.

Unless there are more polls early in the morning, this is my final "undecideds matter a lot" map. All 50 states, all districts accounted for except NE-3, which uses 270towin's consensus value of solid Trump.

Once more, how this is generated: for each state, figure out Trump's and Biden's polling average. Sum them, and subtract that number from the total percent of voters who voted for Romney or Obama in 2012. That's what the real undecided number is. For each state, figure out what percentage of late-deciding voters who voted for a major party candidate, went for Trump and Clinton respectively. Multiply that fraction by the undecided number calculated earlier to figure out which way the undecided voters might go, add that to each candidate's current polling average.

Basically, assume that Trump and Biden outperform their polling averages as much as Trump and Clinton did in 2016, but accounting for the fact that third parties are significantly less important this time around. See post 39 in this thread for examples.

0-1% - Tilt
1-5% - Lean
5-10% - Likely
10+% - Solid



What's new and notable: NE-2 is above B+5, as is WI (the latter happened two days after my last map). FL is above B+1 (ditto, I think), and ME-2 seems to be coming round to Biden after all. albeit barely. MN, a source of constant anxiety for me, has stabilized and bounced back two points towards Biden, for B+7.16. MT just just barely above the T+5 mark. Another week or two of this campaign, and Trump might have been in real trouble there.

So let's look back at this map. I made it as sort of a "worst realistic case" scenario. Did I succeed? Eh, maybe. There are definitely states in which it's about as bad as it could get. WI, for instance. As long as there isn't a Trump-favoring outright polling error/lots of Biden voters vote Trump last minute in addition to the undecideds breaking 99.3% in favor of Trump, I feel pretty good about WI.

But let's get pessimistic. What happens if every state is as off as WI was in 2016, relative to undecideds?



FL, AZ, and GA flip, IA and NE-1 get redder, MI, NH, VA, CO, NE-2, and NV get one shade lighter, and... well not much else. Fact is, all of the northern swing states and NC were [/i]already[/i] almost as Trump-biased as WI. All above an 80% break for Trump. Not even ME-2 flips in this scenario. MI and NV take the biggest hits here, ME-2 the smallest.

Okay, let's get as pessimistic as we possibly can based on the data. There were 9 states, all very red, in which Clinton actually underperformed her polling average. Let's go with the one in which Trump did his best and Clinton did her worst, relative to the polling average: WV, where Trump won 127% of undecided voters, and Clinton won -27%. This is gonna actively cost Biden some votes, not just flip undecideds.



Jesus that was a nail-biter, filling that map in in alphabetical order. I really didn't know who the winner was going to be until I hit WI. This is the worst possible map for Biden that we actually have evidence for. Anything more would take systemic combined errors in the polls greater than what we saw in 2016. It really makes you clench, and it would come down to a recount in all the tilt states and districts, though I'm not certain about NE-2. But at this EV margin, even a single vote could matter.

Yeah, I guarantee you every single one saw the John Muir play... "The valley [Hetch Hetchy] is dying, and I with it". When it was up for a non-binding vote in SF (for which it's the primary water source), it was rejected something like 86-14. Most I've ever seen on a ballot prop. It's fucking dumb. Not even most environmentalists favor removing that dam. Everything in that valley is long-dead. The ecosystem is utterly shot. It'd be decades before it came back, and we'd lose the water supply.

Aw man. My stomach is in knots. It's a Pepto day.

If it comes out anything like that it will be an interesting few weeks...

"Interesting" in a very bad way...

Decades ago, the GOP were blue on the map.

It was in 2000 when the networks first synced up. It's been downhill ever since.

Yes, just a joke based on the fact that in the UK (and Australia for that matter) the Conservative party colour is blue with Labour being red.

I'm at my polling place and there's a good-sized line -- first time I've seen that since 2008.