2020 Presidential Electoral College Ratings and Prediction
Biden is on track to win the most lopsided election of the 21st Century
112 days before the election, Joe Biden is an overwhelming favorite to win the presidency. He leads in enough diverse battleground states that Donald Trump needs some combination of a quick virus recovery, an economic rebound and a massive polling error.
I have Biden as a substantial favorite. He’s favored to win 333 electoral votes. 197 are solid, 35 are likely and 101 lean Biden.
Trump is favored to win 170 electoral votes. 77 electoral votes are solid Trump, while 48 are likely and 45 leans his way.
35 electoral votes (Georgia and Ohio) are toss-ups.
My race ratings are predictions for what happens on November 3rd. To keep this shorter (but still probably too long, so you can just skip to the bottom section for the TLDR), I’ll pick one state from each grouping and explain why I have it there. I plan to do deep-dives on every lean and toss-up state.
Safe Republican and Safe Democrat- 98% Chance Candidate Wins
The safe states all voted for the respective candidate’s party in the last three presidential elections.
Colorado and Missouri are the only two states I think you can make a case for being in the wrong category; don’t fall for it.
I’ll have more on Colorado later in the week. For now, it’s enough to say that the state’s partisan voter index (how much more Republican or Democratic the state was than the country) has trended overwhelmingly blue. Colorado is also the country’s second most educated state (40.1% of people have a bachelor’s degree), and Trump has lost double-digit support from 2016 with college educated voters.
Likely Republican and Democrat- 85% Chance Candidate Wins
I have six red states: Indiana, Montana, Alaska, South Carolina, Kansas and Utah as likely Republican.
I’m waiting until after the August 4th primary to deep-dive Kansas. Excluding 1964, the state has gone Republican in every election since 1940. But Kansas has a high percentage of bachelor’s degree holders (16th nationally). Clinton did better than Obama did in 2012, which points to the state trending away from Republicans (though it’s certainly a heavily Republican state in a normal election). And the New York Times reported on July 2nd that Trump trailed in his own internal polling of Kansas. I think the state is too red for him to lose unless things get a bit worse, but that’s a possibility.
Lean Republican- Candidate has a 60% Chance of Winning
That Texas is this in play in 2020 speaks to Trump’s struggling position.
There’s a case for Texas as a toss-up. The states’ Hispanic population grew by 1.9 million between 2010 and 2019, while its white non-Hispanic population grew by less than 500,000, per Census data. Beto O’Rourke lost to Ted Cruz. by only 2.6 points in 2018, and as bad as the 2018 environment was for Republicans, Democrats have a bigger generic congressional ballot lead today than they did anytime in 2018. Greg Abbott’s handling of the coronavirus could also backfire for Republicans.
But I still think Trump is a slight favorite in Texas. Trump won Texas by nearly nine points in 2016. Biden is likely going to skip making major investments in the state because if he wins Texas, he’ll have already easily won the election.
Toss up- Candidate has a 50% Chance of Winning
While I think Texas gets too much attention—which makes some sense given the electoral prize—Georgia is a real problem for Republicans. Trump won by just five points in 2016, which was down from Romney’s margin in 2016.
Stacey Abrams narrowed the deficit to just 1.4 points in 2018. While she was a very strong candidate, she lost a few counties in East Georgia that Clinton won. That indicates the Democrats did not max out in 2018.
Leans Democrat- Candidate has a 60% Chance of Winning
Florida might be the most surprising state here. After Republicans won both the governor and senate races in 2016, it seemed like Florida would at least lean Republican in 2016.
But the virus has been fatal to the Republican’s Florida coalition. Trump trails in 5-of-6 polls from June and July in Florida (he’s tied in the other, which is the heavily Republican leaning Trafalgar poll).
Trump also has a real problem with seniors because of the virus. Only two of those polls have cross-tabs on the the age 65+ vote; you better believe I looked at them though. Both of those polls show Biden leading Trump by 8+ points with voters 65+. Trump won the 65+ vote in 2016 in Florida by at least 17 points in 2020, per exit polls (the margin was even higher in many post-election analyses). So we’re looking at a possible 25 point swing with a demographic group that made up 21% of the electorate. That’s just not a sustainable path to victory for Trump.
I’m also skeptical of how the “Biden is too old” attack will play with old people.
If Biden hols the Clinton states and flips Florida, he only needs to win one of the seven leans Biden or toss-up states. It’s hard to imagine Trump running the table on all those remaining states, as I’ll cover in the weeks ahead. Basically, there is no path to the presidency if Trump loses Florida.
November Prediction:
Things can certainly change, and if the rankings are accurate, Biden or Trump will win a few states they’re given a 15% or 40% chance to win. The basic principle is that if you play a carnival game at the Santa Monica Boulevard to try and win a giant penguin, the odds are against you winning after playing once. But even as a decent underdog, you’ll probably find a way to win that giant penguin if you play the game eight times. Similarly, across the eight lean states, the underdog will probably win at least one of them.
I grew up rooting for some terrible Royals teams. Even when the Royals weren’t mathematically eliminated in July, you had a pretty good idea that they just didn’t have much of a shot of going on a run and making the playoffs. There was a large enough sample size to learn the Royals probably weren’t that good. And even if they went on a miraculous run, they’d probably dug themselves too big of a hole to make the playoffs.
Trump is like those Royals. He isn’t a good candidate. He ran behind the fundamentals in 2016 against one of the least popular candidates in American history. His approval rating continues to decline, and he’s in a giant hole against Biden. He’ll have to complete one of the most impressive comebacks in presidential history to win.
Low probability events like Trump winning can happen. But you’re far better off betting on the high probability event, which is that Biden is a substantial favorite in 2020 (about 90%) and is more likely to win over 300 electoral votes than lose to Trump.
My prediction is that Biden wins Ohio and Georgia and comes away with 367 electoral votes. That would be the biggest victory in the last six elections.
You can follow Kendall on twitter @kendallkaut. You can subscribe to the newsletter, which will publish at least twice a week on the election and politics at https://kendallkaut.substack.com/