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Here we are, the end of a very long and exhausting road. Election Day is tomorrow. But 100 million Americans may have already voted before Tuesday even dawns. Voting in the time of COVID-19 has been just as different as everything else we've been living through.
Welcome to our penultimate Electoral Math column. Next Monday, I will post my own final picks for the 2020 presidential election, for better or for worse. And I promise, in the final column, there will be no tossup states at all -- I'll make a prediction even for those I've got to flip a coin to decide.
Once again, it is time for our Monday rundown of the state-level polling in the presidential race. Since last week, Donald Trump has returned to the campaign trail in a big way, after his quick recovery from COVID-19. His rallies are (as usual) packed shoulder-to-shoulder with nary a mask in sight, even though we're on the leading edge of the next big wave of infections across the country (indeed, in many of the states Trump is travelling through).
It's Monday, so it is time once again to take a look at the state-level polling for the presidential race. I have to point out as a reminder, right up front, that no matter what the national-level polling shows, it simply does not matter to how we actually elect our presidents, as both Al Gore and Hillary Clinton can easily attest to. This is why I never even mention these numbers in this column series.
Any given week of the presidency of Donald Trump can feel like an eternity. Last week was no different. We started with the revelation that Trump only paid $750 in federal income taxes for two years running, then we all saw the worst presidential debate in American history, then at the end of the week Trump announced he had tested positive for COVID-19 and entered the hospital. All in one week. This is why we are now moving to a weekly schedule for these "Electoral Math" columns. We'll post a new numbers-crunching column every week until the Monday before Election Day (which is now only four weeks from tomorrow).
It has been two weeks since the last time we looked at the polls, and not a whole lot has changed. The race tightened a bit in a few states, but overall Biden still has the clear advantage.
It has been four whole weeks since we took a look at the presidential race at the state level, and much has happened in the meantime. Both parties held their national conventions, multiple new scandals have emerged for President Donald Trump, and Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have begun hitting the campaign trail in person.
I realize that the last time I wrote one of these Electoral Math columns, I said I would only be doing them every three weeks for a while to come. However, I hadn't checked the political calendar closely enough, because doing so would have put the column right between the two parties' conventions, next Monday. Instead, I thought it would be more valuable to do one before both conventions, as a baseline, and then revisit the issue afterwards to see if either candidate (or both) got the traditional "convention bounce" in the polls. Because it's only been a couple of weeks, though, this is going to be a somewhat-abbreviated column, with quicker takes on the data.
Welcome back to the second of our quadrennial Electoral Math column series. The first installment was three weeks ago, which is our standard gap for the start of the contest. As time goes by and things start to move more quickly, we will start doing these every other Monday, right up to Election Day.
Welcome to the first 2020 installment of our quadrennial series tracking the electoral math in the presidential race. We've done this three times previously, and (like pretty much everyone else in the political prediction game) failed miserably the last time around. Hey, two out of three ain't bad, right?