I. The Horse Race.
We have seen another week of very little movement in the polls. Joe Biden led the RCP average by 6.8 points one week ago and he leads it by 6.6 points tonight. Biden leads the 538.com average by 6.9 points, virtually changed from 7.0 points last week. The only slight movement in these averages was caused by an outlier Rasmussen poll that showed Trump up by one. Everybody else has Biden up somewhere between six and nine points.
At the state level, there has been some modest tightening in Pennsylvania but nothing that will cause me to change any predictions.
Okay, now to the real news of the week-the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
II. Democracy.
Ruth Bader-Ginsburg died on Friday evening, aged 87. The death of a SCOTUS justice is always major news, but the proximity to the election and the expected nomination of someone at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum made this one a huge story. Polling indicates that the American people think the nomination should be filled by the winner of the looming presidential election. Facts on the ground indicate that this will not deter the Republican party from cramming through someone in the six short weeks they have to play with.
The most tiresome subject in politics is hypocrisy but a few words must be spared here for the colossal flip-flip that Republicans have made from 2016 in the aftermath of Antonin Scalia's passing. That event caused them to collectively pull a precedent out of their own ass and say that a vacancy that opens in a presidential election year can not be filled until after the election.
That precedent went right back up their ass this week in record time. The Republicans are goin to put a 6th Federalist on the bench because "fuck you, pay me" is the most subtle, nuanced idea they are capable of believing in.
I'm a moderate guy. I'm an institutionalist. I was stupid enough to think that some Republicans in 2016 would insist on giving Obama's nominee a hearing. But even II am not surprised that that they are pulling this move. They exist to exert power and they think this helps rally their base. You have to remember that a group of (mostly) men who are willing to surrender their self-respect to licking Donald Trump's shoes are not goin to be concerned with fair-play or niceties.
Despite the seemingly inevitable outcome of this process, let's take a minute to measure how bad this is for the country. Republicans have been justifying their flip-flop, to the extent they bother explaining themselves to anyone, by saying that the American people have chosen them to make these decisions. Let's take a look at the numbers behind this claim.
This coming election is the last one before I turn 50. In my whole voting life, Republicans have won the popular vote exactly once. The longest serving justice at the moment is Clarence Thomas. He was nominated by George H.W. Bush in 1991. If you add up all of the presidential elections since Bush's victory in 1988, Democrats have received 443.5 million votes. Republicans have received 416.5 million. That's a 27 million vote deficit.
As for the senate, it is true that the Republicans held on to the majority in the 2018 election by winning races against incumbents in Indiana, Florida, Missouri and South Dakota. But that doesn't tell the whole story of the 100 senators in that once august chamber. If you add up the votes from the last 3 cycles of elections, that is from the last time that every seat was up in a regularly scheduled election, you get an aggregate result of 124.5 million votes for the 47 Democrats against only 99.7 million votes for the 53 Republicans.
The senate is an inherently non-democratic institution. Creating it was part of the grand bargain between large and small states. This favors Republicans in ways that are not subtle. They currently control 53 percent of the seats after getting only 44 percent of the votes in the elections for those seats.
At least we can say the House of Representatives represents the will of the people, as it was designed to do. In the most recent regular House Election, Democrats got 60.6 million votes and the Republicans only got 50.9 million. The Democrats do have a majority in the house, although the 53.4 percent of seats they hold slightly undercounts the 54.3% of the two-party vote they got last time. And, of course, the House plays no role in confirming Supreme Court Justices.
This is not sustainable. The Democratic party have gotten over 54% of the votes during the most recent round of elections for President, Senate and the House. Those numbers are likely to be worse after November third, where I expect the Democrats to take back the White House and they are slightly favored to win control of the senate. But soon the Supreme Court will have six dogged conservatives and only three Democrats, none of whom are as consistently liberal as the late lamented RBG.
There are two specks of hope on the horizon. RBG's passing led to an avalanche of donations to Democratic candidates over the weekend. No Democratic candidate for senate with a serious chance of winning will have trouble getting the word out in the closing weeks. And Joe Biden has an apparently commanding cash lead over the idiotic incumbent he must defeat.
III. The Forecasts.
The professionals barely budged this week-again. Biden gained 1% chance of winning in both the 538 and Economist forecasts. He slid a point in the Neutral Vote and JHK forecasts.
Trump did have some good news in the state level betting markets this week. Predictit.com went a little nuts after the RBG news and flipped both NC and FL from Biden to Trump. We haven't really seen any polls to justify that movement, but the speculation seems to be that a Supreme Court Confirmation battle will rally the base to Trump. It's not a crazy idea, but I will wait to see polling evidence that the counter-effect among Dem voters isn't greater.
I will trim 1% of my confidence in Biden winning. I now give him an 84% chance of winning. The weeks in polls was fine but his lead is better described as stable than growing. With the lead he has, that's probably enough. But we're not in the zone where we should be overly confident.
IV. Taxonomy, Again.
Every time the numbers move slightly, I start to think of the electoral map in different ways. This is how I can best describe my current expectations.
I am confident that Biden will win. But the size of the outcome depends on the following:
A. It will seem close if he doesn't win Florida. He probably only gets to 290 maximum without Florida.
B. It will seem comfortable if he wins NC and GA. Getting over 350 will look like a nice win, especially if he can win a state like Georgia, which Obama never carried and which ought to be trending blue over time.
C. It will seem like a blowout if he adds Iowa and Ohio. This is where he recreates the 2008 coalition, with GA subbing in for Indiana.
D. The cherry on top would be Texas. This probably only happens if Trump craters in some way, but the psychological value of flipping Texas will be enormous.
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