Elections Forecasts Spell Good News for Democrats, but are Polls and Forecasts Still Trusted?

As the 2020 election nears, polls and expert ratings spell good news for Democrats in both Congress and the presidency. Several forecasts and swing state polls show a clear advantage for Biden in the presidential election, and house and senate forecasts paint an optimistic picture for the legislative elections as well. Elections analysis website FiveThirtyEight (as of writing) projects, an 87% chance of victory for Biden in the electoral college, a 95% chance Democrats keep the House, and a 72% chance Democrats take hold of the Senate; a majority of similar forecasts have come to approximately the same conclusions. These conclusions spell out a realistic chance that Democrats gain control of the House, Senate and Presidency for the first time since the 2008 election.

Polls and election forecasts have become surprisingly controversial subjects since forecasts widely favored Hillary Clinton in 2016. Most infamously was a Stanford student projection which gave Clinton a 99% chance of winning the election. Unsurprisingly, these widespread failures to predict a Trump upset, led to a quick discrediting of the polls, but in many regards the problem wasn’t with the polls but in how those polls were reported. National polls were quite accurate at predicting the popular vote, and most statewide polls were within their prescribed margin of errors. 

Even some forecasts didn’t write off Trump’s odds at an electoral victory. Simply look again at FiveThirtyEight, who gave Trump a 30% chance of edging out an electoral college victory. While their model still predicted a Clinton victory, a 30% chance of rain is far from what you can reasonably write off.

However, what’s most surprising about recently polling is how much better of a position Biden is compared to Clinton. Biden currently leads Trump by about 8.5 points nationally, while Clinton only led by around 2.5 points following the release of the Comey Letter bombshell in October. Biden also maintains strong leads in states which Trump carried in 2016, including the rust belt states of Pennsylvania and Michigan which were crucial for Trump’s election. And Senate forecasts for Democrats are even more bullish than 2016, where the prescribed odds of Democrats taking control of the Senate were dead even with the Republicans.

The election is far from over though, especially considering how unprecedented the times we’re living in today are. With the Trump administration’s efforts to cancel mail-in ballots, and a news cycle constantly on the fritz, this election won’t be decided until all the votes are counted. In the meantime, take forecasts as general probabilities and not prescribed decisions. In a time where the existential risk of catching COVID-19 rules over our personal lives, understanding odds and probabilities is as important as ever.