What Happens Now?

Just as I was finishing up what will now be the final forecast update in the race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, the President announced he would be suspending his re-election campaign and endorsing his Vice President, Kamala Harris, to succeed him.

Obviously, we had a feeling this was coming. Over the last few weeks, I have been making preliminary arrangements for this possibility. The Harris v. Trump model exists on the back-end but not on the front-end just yet, so there may be some delay in that forecast launching officially on the website. Let’s tentatively put a flag down for, say…August 1st. Might be a bit earlier (probably not - I will be at San Diego Comic-Con most of next week), might be a bit later.

Not that it means anything now, but today’s update would have been somewhat catastrophic for Biden and the Democrats had this decision not come down this afternoon. Trump now has (had?) a 63% chance of winning the Electoral College, and for the first time since the model started tracking this race back in December, Biden would have needed to win all the tossup states and at least two states rated “Lean R” in order to pull off an upset victory. Meanwhile, states that had previously been “Likely D” just a few weeks ago - Minnesota, Virginia, New Mexico - had drifted into tossup territory. Bleak!

Separately, I could not have picked a worse time to add some additional content to the Presidential forecast page. In addition to ditching the Courier font (I liked how it looked on desktop but grew to hate how it looked on mobile, which turns out to be how most people access Solid Purple), I will now be publishing tipping point state calculations, conditional probabilities, the odds of certain outcomes like a popular vote landslide, a histogram of simulated outcomes, and a breakdown of electoral college bias. I have some additional plans for similar updates to the House and Senate forecast pages as well, and if there is anything you’re curious about that you would like me to share with the class, feel free to ask! It’s only a few extra lines of code and the audience is small enough that I am incredibly receptive to the whims of any and every reader.

So with that…anyone see Twisters yet? I’m going on Tuesday.