Given my big miss in 2016, I’m not sure why anyone would be interested in my election predictions, but I’ve received several emails asking me to offer up my guesses for 2020 (perhaps some of them are long-time readers who remember 2010, when I actually did a good job?).
Before I offer up my prediction, I’ll first share some of the guesses from the experts.
Everyone is predicting Biden, though my Trump friends regularly remind me that the experts were wrong in 2016.
We’ll start with the outlook from Real Clear Politics.
Next, we have Nate Silver’s 538 numbers.
Here are the betting odds for the election, as compiled by John Stossel and Maxim Lott.
And here’s Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball forecast.
I’ll add one caveat to the above estimates.
This tweet from Frank Luntz explains why my Democratic friends are still nervous.
RCP battleground poll average:
. ,
• Florida: (Tied)
• Pennsylvania: Clinton +5.6
• Michigan: +7
• Wisc: +6.2
• NC: +3.2• Florida: Biden +1.2
• Pennsylvania: +5.1
• Michigan: +7.8
• Wisc: +4.6
• NC: +1.5https://t.co/ZBRpAvXwZT https://t.co/GZmTCAxlSI
— Frank Luntz (@FrankLuntz) October 25, 2020
Finally, for those of you who want my guess, here’s my prediction of a comfortable Biden victory.
It’s basically the same (wrong) prediction I made in 2016, except I’m now giving Arizona and Michigan to the Democrats and Pennsylvania to the Republicans.
For what it’s worth, I was very tempted to give Pennsylvania – and maybe a few other states – to Biden.
Why? Because I think late-deciding voters may decide that they’re tired of all the drama and fighting that we get with Trump in the White House.
But I ultimately decided on the above map because I also think some of those voters may worry about Biden’s age. And they may worry even more about the Democratic Party’s leftward drift.
I guess we’ll know in a week (or so!).
In any event, if you really want to have fun, you can take my predictions, give Arizona, Florida, and North Carolina to Trump, along with one of Maine’s congressional districts, at which point you’d have a 269-269 tie. That would be a perfect ending for 2020, huh?
I’ll close with a few words about policy.
Biden clearly would move the country to the left on certain issues, most notably taxes and regulation. The only silver lining to that dark forecast is that I suspect that his tax increase will be much smaller than what’s contained in his awful plan.
I’m also somewhat hopeful that he won’t push for the so-called Green New Deal and that we’ll instead get the more-modest kind of Solyndra-style cronyism that we got under Obama. That’s bad, but not the end of the world.
The good news is that trade policy will move in the right direction.
But the biggest silver lining to a Biden victory is that Republicans will revert to pretending to once again be opposed to big government.
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Image credit: Kārlis Dambrāns | CC BY 2.0.
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