Editor’s note: Polling results are often described as snapshots at a particular moment of time in a campaign. This, however, is more of a doodle, aggregating election projections from various sources, some that rely entirely on polling while others also take into consideration factors such as demographics and voting histories. This feature will be updated on a periodic basis to show you what’s being scribbled in the margins as the 2020 presidential campaign moves from chapter to chapter.
We’re now down to 21 days until the presidential election, and Democrat Joe Biden has spent his time building his lead. Of the 15 models we checked, seven showed gains for the former vice president. Six were unchanged, including three that had not been updated in the past week. Fourteen of the models also now give Biden more than the minimum 270 votes needed in the Electoral College to win the presidency. The outlier is RealClearPolitics, the most conservative of the sites in awarding votes, still listing about 1 in every 5 states as a toss-up. Biden leads on RealClearPolitics' map with 226 electoral votes to 125 for Trump.
Two of the models cut into Biden’s total, but they offered little relief to Republican President Donald Trump. One is the PredictIt Market Probabilities site, which treats the candidates like commodities. Over the past week, it knocked off one electoral vote for Biden, bringing his total down to 334. Trump got that one-vote bump, bringing his total to 204. Go a little further on the PredictIt website and you’ll land on a page that looks like something out of “The Big Short.” It sets the best offer for Biden at 67 cents, to 39 cents for Trump. For what it’s worth, the same page also gives odds for Vice President Mike Pence and U.S. Sens. Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren.
The other site where Biden’s total fell is the poll-driven Princeton Election Consortium, which deducted 16 electoral votes from Biden’s total, bringing him down to 335. But the decline was steeper for Trump, who lost 26 votes, putting his total now at 143. Undecided saw the biggest gain, with the toss-up category adding 42 votes, bringing its total to 60.
The Princeton model also offers glimpses at what the totals would be for each candidate if he improved his performance in the polls by 3 percentage points.
If Biden succeeded in upping his game by that standard, it says, his total would climb to 395 with Trump getting 125. Still in toss-up territory would be Ohio and its 18 electoral votes.
A 3-point jump for Trump would give him 203 votes to 334 for Biden. Still up for grabs would be only one electoral vote, representing Maine’s 2nd Congressional District.
‘The Bottom Line’
On the average for the 15 models, Biden added nine electoral votes over the past week.
Trump saw his average drop by six votes. Toss-ups also dropped by three votes.
Democrat Joe Biden: 299 votes this week, 290 votes last week, 284 votes the week before that
Republican Donald Trump: 161 votes this week, 167 votes last week, 173 votes the week before that Toss-up states: 78 votes this week, 81 votes last week, 80 votes the week before that
Projections as of noon Monday:
Where does Georgia stand
Just check the commercial breaks when you’re watching television and you’ll know Georgia remains a battleground state.
Eleven of the projection models on 270toWin’s pundit page now list Georgia’s 16 electoral votes as up for grabs. That’s an increase of three since last week.
But how up for grabs is Georgia? FiveThirtyEight continues to list Georgia as the last state on its snake chart supporting Trump before the segments of the serpent start siding with Biden. It now sets the president’s odds of winning the state at 54%. It’s currently predicting that the final vote will be 49.9% for Trump to 49.3% to Biden. The only closer race, according to FiveThirtyEight’s projections, is Ohio, where it says Biden has a 53% chance of winning. The final vote there, according to the forecast, will be 49.8% for Biden to 49.2% for Trump.
Real Clear Politics, which maintains its own projection site and isn’t listed on 270toWin, also lists Georgia as a toss-up state, although that’s hardly a select group as you’ll see in the next section.
What are the other toss-up states?
On its consensus map, 270toWin did a little shuffling among its toss-up states. It declared Arizona, with its 11 electoral votes, Biden turf, and it also awarded the Democrat one congressional district in Nebraska. But 270toWin also moved Iowa’s six votes from the Trump column and into the land of the undecided. The other toss-ups, in addition to Georgia, are Florida (29), Ohio (18) and North Carolina (15), plus one congressional district in Maine.
RealClearPolitics still lists Georgia and 10 other states — Texas (38), Florida (29), Pennsylvania (20), Ohio (18), Michigan (16), North Carolina (15), Arizona (11), Wisconsin (10), Iowa (6) and Nevada (6) —plus the individual congressional districts in Maine and Nebraska, as too close to call.
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