EG on Politics

  “Somewhere between a landslide and a nail-biter,” was 538’s final assessment, which other than being extremely wishy-washy rings true based on all the data I’ve seen – the current polling points to a landslide, but if it’s only off by a little, it then turns into a nail-biter.  And, we all remember that polling can be off! Here are my thoughts on following along from home tonight.   I’ve provided two 1-page PDFs (Senate & Presidential) that provide some key data to track.   Fundamentally, the three things to watch (other than Electoral college estimates) to get an idea of what’s happening are: Trumps’s national percentage compared to ’16 (he got 46.1% of the vote in ’16 and would need at least 49% to win the national vote this year because there aren’t strong 3 rd party candidates) Each state’s Trump percentage compared to the polling averages (I’ve included the final 538 forecast in the PDF).   If Trump is doing 2-3 points better than the final for...

The bad news: Youth are voting in record numbers, and this will be an incredible election in terms of youth participation BUT, other age groups are doing even better. Rarely have I wanted to be more wrong about the conclusions that i'm drawing from data. I encourage all of you to tell me what mistakes I’m making, but I’m not seeing youth making a difference in the 2020 election so far in terms of early vote turnout.  Several folks have highlighted the usually excellent work of Tuft’s CIRCLE (Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement) which shows how many more young people are requesting early ballots (I've copied their popular analysis at the bottom).  The problem is, an even greater number of older people are requesting (and returning early ballots). I’m just one guy with a laptop and no budget, so I don’t have access to the TargetSmart data, or the ability to crunch through large files produced in some states of voter-level early voting info....