A Lot Has Happened But Nothing Has Changed. (The Road to 270, Take 6)

The election is 10 weeks from today. It has been exactly 30 days since my last forecast. In those 30 days, the Joe Biden selected kamala Harris as his running mate and the Democrats held their modified mostly vitual convention from a small arena adjacent to a minor league baseball stadium in Wilmington, Delaware. Both Senator Harris and the convention have been well-received. The polls have been pretty steady. Biden's average in the "poll of polls" has been somewhere between seven and nine for most of the summer. At the moment it's about eight. The Republican convention started last night to decidenly mixed reviews. The early speakers were Nikki Haley and Tim Scott, who got mostly good reviews but the night ended with bizarre speeches by both Donald Trump Junior and his girlfriend, who appeared not to notice that she was addressing an empty room. For reasons unkown to this correspondent, they both finished their speeches several minutes faster than planned, leaving seven minutes of dead air time for the networks to fill with pundits desperately trying not to speculate about what caused that. The other item of interest to readers of this blog that happened since our last forecast is that Nate Silver finally published his forecast. The headline is that he gave Biden a 71% chance of winning, the exact same percentage that he gave Hillary of winning going into Election Day 2016. But I hvae to mention that the new website is an ugly, awful mess. The graphics are busy and stupid. It is difficult to get important information such as what polls have been added to the forecase recently. I'm still not sure why he took so long to publish, but we can safely rule out a desire to improve the viewing experience of his audience. I. My Forecast. I have not changes to announce. My previsou forecast had Biden at 334 and Trump at 204. I see no reason to change that. Last week I was wavering on putting North Carolina in Trump's column but we have seen gotten two polls that show Biden up by 4 and 3 points, respectively. That race will be close but Biden is the narrow favorite for now. II. Other Forecasts. Now that Nate Silver has joined the fray, I think we can make a chart to track where everyone stands.

With 70 days to go, there is something of a consensus-Biden is the favorite. He will probably win with a state or two to spare but things could get close. I am having a hard time seeing Trump make up all that ground though. The American people know him and they don't like him. The message of the Democratic convention was both straight-foward and true-the President is an asshole and maybe that shouldn't be so. The Republican convention seems to be a mixture of scaring people into thinking that their way of life is imperiled and that only Donald Trump can save them. That would have a lot more plausibility if we weren't still living in a pandemic as the rest of the world gets back to normal. Trump has a big enough base that he won't be blown out like McGovern or Mondale. He should even avoid Duakakis like numbers. I intend to update this blog every Tuesday between now and November 3rd. At some point, things will probably be close than they are right now. Maybe Biden will have a bad debate. Maybe the deaths from and new cases of COVID-19 will plummet enough to create a sense of relief. But it sure seems more likely that we'll thrash about with something like a 50 to 42 split for most of the coming months.

Thoughts on Pearl Harbor Day.

Seventy four years ago today, the Empire of Japan killed more than 1,000 American servicemen at Pearl Harbor. Over the next 44 months, more than 100,000 Americans were killed in the Pacific theater and several times that number of Japanese died at American hands. We interned thousand of our own innocent citizens because they had Japanese ancestry. They tortured American prisoners of war. We incinerated two of their biggest cities with atomic weapons. And then we stopped butchering one another. But rather than humiliate our defeated enemy, we did something truly remarkable. We waged peace in a way that had never really been tried before. No two nations have ever gone from such brutal warfare to such deep and abiding respect for one another. And the benefits for both have been immeasurable. The seventy years of cultural exchange, economic integration and shared political values that have followed is one of humanity's greatest achievements. That is what we should remember on December 7th.