538, one of the most well-respected and popular polling groups in American politics has run the numbers and simulated the election.
They find that Joe Biden is the favorite to win.
Polling and forecasting website 538, formerly FiveThirtyEight, said that when run through a prediction simulation, Biden won November's race 53 times out of 100, with Trump coming out on top 47 times out of 100.
So the polling nerds with their computer models ran 100 simulations of the election, using numerous polls, the latest demographics, and a complicated computer program and discovered that it's a coin toss.
With the border crisis, jobs down, and general chaos surrounding the president, when it comes down to the election, if everything is fair, we're sitting at 50/50. Just like always.
Now, Trump vs. Hillary may have seen something closer to 99-1 for Hillary, but on that November day, like any election, it was anybody's game.
And that's going to be the case this year as well.
'The range of realistic Electoral College outcomes generated by our forecasting model stretches from 132 to 445 electoral votes for Biden — a testament to how much things could change by November (and how off the polls could be),' G. Elliott Morris, a data journalist for 538, wrote while sharing details of the forecast.
That's how wild these predictions are. In one of the models, Biden blows Trump out electorally. In another, it's reversed with a Trump landslide.
This seems to be a lot of work and a lot of words for, "We don't know, I guess we'll see."
The forecast notes that Trump is currently just ahead of Biden in the polls, including in the key swing states which could ultimately decide who wins the 2024 election.
Additional "fundamentals," such as changes in economic conditions and other political indicators, may favor Biden.
'To forecast the election, we rely primarily on polls asking voters whom they support,' Morris added.
'However, our forecast also incorporates various economic and political indicators that aren't related to polling but can be used to make rough predictions for the election.'
Yeah, as much as this result from 538 is non-committal, I think this is the right attitude for Republicans to take.
NOTHING is a foregone conclusion. We don't know if Trump will win in a landslide. We don't know if the Democrats will be able to steal the election. You have to vote as if it's legitimate and as if your solitary vote will make the difference.
This will certainly not be the last set of simulations run by 538. It'll be interesting to see how the polls and predictions react to the news and criminal cases on both sides of the aisle between now and November.
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