US 2020 Presidential Election Predictions

This is the only site with all 2020 US Election Predictions

May 2, 2020 where we stand:

The 2020 Election still looks a lot like the 2016 Election, in terms of swing states and solid blue and red states. Also, every state that was won by 5% or less of the voters in 2016, is either a toss up, tilt or lean states.

The Covid-19 virus has crashed our economy, and drastically changed our daily lives. Yet, I've see only slight shifts in the Presidential election forecasts. Trump's approval rating according to Gallup, is 49% for the period April 14 to 28, 2020, which is on the high side of his normal range. It was 43% on average for the prior 14 days. I don't see much in the way of a trend.

The state ranking models (also referred to as poll survey based models) favor a Democrat victory and analytical equation models favor a Republican victory. All analytical equation results are way out of date. Six of the state ranking models predict Biden winning by a margin of 7 to 23 EV's (277 to 293 EV's). The "270towin" model is a consensus model so one would expect it to be consistent with the others. It would be better to say we have 5 models in close agreement.

Two state ranking models predict a much higher margin for Biden, the Niskanen Center and electoral-votes.com websites, which predict approximate EV's of 334 and 390 respectively. I have not yet posted their maps to this website. Both of these websites show Biden's chance of winning is over 90% compared with approximately 70% for the other models.

I look closely at the differences among the models. The fate of the 38 electoral votes from Texas is uncertain. Forecasters have labeled the state as likely Republican and lean Republican. Yet the electoral-votes.com website jumps the fence and ranks the state "barely Democrat" based on a recent poll, bucking the long term trend of solid Republican victories dating back to 1980. Florida with 29 EV's is ranked as either a toss-up or leans Republican by most forecasters, however electoral-votes considers the state to be "barely Democratic."

Introducing the PAWN gang

The keys to the White House are not 13, only 4 swing states: PA, AZ, WI and NC, which I call the PAWN group. Larry Sabato, Charlie Cook and others list these states as toss-ups. Not everyone agrees. Inside Elections has PA as tilting Democrat. The Niskanen Center has PA, AZ and WI as Leaning Democratic. The PAWN group holds 56 EV's.

What does the gambling crowd think?

The odds are constantly changing but my last check of oddschecker.com showed a slight lead by Trump (53% to 47%). There may be some thinking that the incumbent has a definite advantage of rallying his base. Realclearpolitics.com also shows the betting sites favor Trump with a 8.8% spread.

Bottom Line

Almost everything says that this is likely to be a tight election.

I hope to post more maps from other websites in the coming months. There are about 10 different forecasts at present and I have only posted 7 maps.

David Lord

May 2, 2020