Generational Dynamics World View

[pbrower2a]

OK. Here's how I thought the Presidential election of 2020 would go based upon the most recent polls and the likelihood of a win by Biden or Trump. One week before the election. I will expose also how off either I, that system, or my interpretation could be:


Quinnipiac, Ohio: Biden up 5

No further updates here despite a flood of polls.  Note well: what Trump did not do in the last six months he cannot do in fewer than four days.

L  %W
0    50
1    60
2    67   
3    76   
4    85   
5    89
6    92   
7    94   
8    96  
9    97
10  98

Directly from Nate Silver's probabilities of wins in Senate races with one week left in the race; others interpolated

Numbers on states indicate chances of a Biden win; subtract from 100 for the chance of a Trump win.


 

Except that I do not have an extremely-recent number for Arizona,  Iowa, Ohio, ME-02, or NE-02, this is all that you need to know at this point. 

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This is my handicap based upon the likelihood of a politician winning a certain race in a state based on his lead at the time. This method does not predict the magnitude of a win, so it does not distinguish between a win by 0.1% or by 15%; it is still the same. There isn;t much that a politician can usually do in the last week of the race that he could not achieve earlier.

In another post I spoke of President Trump's chance of winning the state going into a black hole as a certain and unredeemable loss, as in Colorado, New Mexico, and Virginia, where Biden's chances of winning were above 99%. Results in Colorado, New Mexico, and Virginia were like that. Kentucky, one of the few states on this map that had recently been polled that was a sure thing for Trump, could have been similarly described as in the "black hole zone" for Biden chances. 

The numbers, where shown, suggest what the system showed as a chance of a Biden victory. I saw Biden having a 67% chance of winning both Arizona and Florida, separately. The states are very different in their politics, and they split. The chance that Trump would win one of those state4s but not the other was 4/9, which is just over half. Probabilities of independent events are multiplicative; the chance that Biden would win both was only 4/9, which is slightly less than half. I saw both Michigan and Pennsylvania nearly out of reach, which doesn't look like a good prediction. It still ended up right. I would expect that a state with a 99% chance of going against the President to not go against him by a razor-thin margin than showed in historical reality. All three states did go for Biden. 

Late polls suggested that Trump was losing both Iowa and Ohio... based on the polls in question I would have given Trump a 2.25% chance of winning both... and somehow he did. I was surprised to see both Georgia and North Carolina as likely wins for Biden, but Biden won Georgia but not North Carolina. Go figure.  The subtle difference between an 89% chance and an 85% difference was the difference between the two states. Finally, Texas was a genuine toss-up in the system and it could not have been predicted either way. 

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So what went wrong with my prediction of a Biden landslide? My assumption, along with that of the statistician Nate Silver, that a candidate can do practically nothing to win in the last week that he did not do in the previous six months. Biden was hiding from COVID-19, and Trump was holding rallies in which people got away with not wearing masks. Damn the virus! Full speed ahead! Trump showed physical courage that Biden thought more likely to do harm than good. Democrats did not canvas for votes late in the campaign because such seemed pointless... and too dangerous. 

Trump had some late ads. One in Florida tried to equate Joe Biden and Kamala Harris politically with Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, anathemas among the large Cuban-American population of southern Florida. Trump got big gains because Democrats lacked a swift and effective response to such messaging.   

I remember this one in Michigan. With a female voiceover (it is not an exact quote):

Let's look at the Democrats. They'll raise taxes. I can't afford that. Biden will take away the Trump tax cuts. My husband is out of work, and it will be harder for him to get a job. 

Well, that's simple. I'm voting Republican"

In essence, no matter how much one despises Donald Trump and the interests for which he stands, if you know what is best for you you will still vote for him. Life is all about money, and never forget that -- peon! Remember to suffer in This World on behalf of cruel and rapacious plutocrats and executives so that you can deserve pie-in-the-sky-when-you-die.. and give suffer in great cheer in This World to your Divinely-appointed masters because hardship in This World is preferable to ending up with muggers, rapists, Commies, and Nazis in the Next World.  That may not be your religious heritage, but it is what many that I know were brought up with. Many of those still believe it and more have come to believe it. That's the equivalent of the Stockholm syndrome for people who see themselves just one slip-up from hunger and homelessness. 

That ad may have worked. Trump had won over perhaps a couple million votes and had sealed victories for his right-wing Senate allies other than McSalley (R-AZ, and wholly inadequate) and Gardner (R-CO, and in a state spiraling away from the GOP), and the two Senators from Georgia (much too early to decide the run-off elections for their Senate seats). 

Either the system is wrong, the polling is wrong a week before the election, or the 2020 election is not normal. 

This little fellow



makes the 2020 election unique. It is a genocidal killer. 

Oh, yes -- small late changes in the margin of a lead make all the difference in the world in that model. Those are rare in normal elections.