Sunday, November 1, 2020

2020 Elections: A Good Night for Biden and the Democrats, a Bad Night for Trump

 

At last the election is just two days away. The way it looks to me, consistent with the recent polling data, is that Joe Biden will win the popular vote by a margin of 52-45-3 percent and it now looks like he will decisively win the battle for the electoral college by a margin of 350-188. I have Biden winning all the Clinton states of 2016 and adding Arizona, Florida, Georgia (yes), North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district. His majority will be based on the votes of suburban women with the biggest gender gap ever, Blacks, seniors and the young. In House races, the Democrats are likely to pick up a net of between 8-10 seats. This will largely replicate the strength in the suburbs that occurred 2018 with a few seats coming from North Carolina’s redistricting.

 

The call for the Senate is much trickier. Put bluntly there are way too many extremely close races that can go either way. My best guess is that will pick up a net gain of five seats bringing their majority to 52-47 with one seat awaiting a Georgia runoff in January. I have the Democrats losing the Jones seat in Alabama while picking up Cunningham in North Carolina, Kelly in Arizona, Ossoff in Georgia, Bullock in Montana (an upset), Hickenlooper in Colorado and Gideon in Maine. In case of Gideon we probably will not know until next week to allow for Maine’s ranked choice voting tabulation.

 

HEALTH WARNING: The Senate races will be really close and as result there will be a high margin of error. If I am roughly right on the presidential race and if the Republicans do much better than I have predicted my explanation would be that enough Republican crossover voters and independents voted Republican fearing that a Democratic Senate would lead to packing the Supreme Court and runaway liberal legislation.

No comments:

Post a Comment