The 270-268 Scenario

Most of my posts over the past several days have covered the move in respectable opinion through the five stages of grief to reach depression and finally acceptance that Trump is on track to win the November election. There's an increasing consensus that Biden, even five months out, has run out of time to turn things around, and the only possible remedy is maybe Gretchen Whitmer at the top of the ticket, or something like that, which is pure fantasy.

But now we have two important people, Nate Silver and Sean Trende, suggesting a possible new reason for optimism, which I will call the 270-268 scenario, whereby Joe reverses the Republican strategy, loses the popular vote, but ekes out the thinnest possible Electoral College victory by flipping a few of the so-called "battleground" states at the last minute. Yes, right now at the aggregators, Biden is behind in all of them, but Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin are closer. According to Nate Silver,

Take 2020 as a contrast. In that election, Biden held polling leads in the Blue Wall states and in the “Sunbelt Trio” of Georgia, Nevada and Arizona. For that matter he was even slightly ahead in polls of Florida and North Carolina. Biden substantially underperformed his polls in the Blue Wall states — as Hillary Clinton had in 2016 — but not by quite enough to lose them. He did lose Florida and North Carolina, of course. However, Biden also had backup options in the form of Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, where the polling proved to be largely accurate. That was enough to provide him with a relatively robust 306 electoral votes. Biden could have lost any two of Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada and Arizona — and in some permutations, even three of these states — and still come out victorious.

But Silver acknowledges Biden has far fewer states he can potentially flip in 2024:

Very much unlike Clinton in 2016, Biden could withstand quite a bit of polling error and still squeak by [in 2020]. It was unfortunate for him that the tipping-point states were to the right of the country overall — Biden won the popular vote by nearly four-and-a-half points — but at least he had a lot of them to choose from.

Sean Trende's version is very similar:

[Trump's gains with black and Hispanic voters] provided a boost in important states with large non-white populations, like Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada.

. . . The gains in Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada are consequential. They only get Trump to 268 electoral votes. Assuming the GOP holds a majority of the congressional delegations after the elections (which would ensure Trump wins the presidency in the event of a tie), he needs one more.

. . . One doesn’t have to be gifted with a particularly vigorous imagination to see what could happen here: Trump has substantial improvements among non-white voters, driving gains in some red areas (like Texas) and flipping some important swing states. He also makes gains in some blue states like Virginia, New Mexico, California, and New York, but is unable to flip them because the hole with educated whites is just too deep. Then, in relatively white Rust Belt states like Wisconsin, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Michigan, very little changes.

The result could easily be Trump winning the popular vote, but Biden eking out a narrow 270-268 Electoral Vote victory (assuming that NE-02 holds for him).

The odd thing is that both Silver and Trende, whose reputations and livelihoods depend on how they interpret the polls, are assuming fairly large-scale polling errors in favor of Trump in this scenario, when the polling errors we've seen over decades have consistently favored Democrats. The 2020 polling was no exception:

Comparing the final election results to the poll numbers for each candidate, Trump’s support was understated by a whopping 3.3 points on average, while Biden’s was overstated by a point — turning what looked like a solid Biden lead into a closer, if still decisive, race.

It seems to me that there's been no change in the actual dynamics of polling: the polls are conducted by polling companies who sell their results to the legacy media. The legacy media buy the results that confirm their bias -- and media bias from time immemorial has been toward Democrats. But Silver and Trende are expecting a different result this year -- they're effectively saying Trump is so far ahead in Nevada, Arizona, and Georgia that we can't discount for polling error there.

But in all the other states where Trump has been leading the polls ever since last fall, the numbers are closer, and if we factor in a potential polling error that favors Republicans, maybe Joe can otherwise run the table, lose the popular vote, but squeak by in the smallest possible Electoral College total, in recent times something only Reoublicans have done in 2000 and 2016. This is at best counterintuitive.

Silver in particular sees this strategy as plausible but unrealistic:

It’s imprecise to say the 270-268 map requires Biden to draw to an inside straight — that isn’t the right metaphor, since the polling error between the various states is correlated, not independent like the order of a deck of playing cards. It’s an eminently plausible scenario. But it does require a lot of things to go right. Pinning one’s hopes on this exact scenario feels a little bit like the bargaining stage in the phases of grief over Biden’s continually mediocre poll numbers.

Ah, yes, the stages of grief. That's the point I've been making.