That was so brutal, I felt a little sorry for him.

I had a whole rant... but I'll save it for another time. It's just amazing how you can hear about a coming pandemic, buy stock in a medical supply company later that day, and have more than 0% of the vote. Unless the other guy is like... on video burning kittens it is shocking that it's still close.

“The thing I’m most upset about,” Mr. Perdue said of Mr. Ossoff, “is that he’ll say and do anything to my friends in Georgia to mislead them about how radical and socialist” his agenda is.

Try to debate, have no response, get wrecked, rant about how evil the left is. That's the playbook.

But that's just Tucker Carlson (and maybe Sean Hannity)

And when somebody sued Tucker a while ago, Fox whitewashed themselves by saying that Tucker doesn't deliver any news and is just a show and you shouldn't take his claims at face value. So not even Fox News believes his lies.

Of course Fox doesn't believe him. 

The problem is that a lot of people do.

Quick stats on early voting :
https://electproject.github.io/Early-Vote-2020G/index.html

• Texas & Hawaii have already bested their 2016 total number of vote (100.4% and 104.5 respectively)
• Washington, Montana, North Carolina, Georgia have more than 85% of 2016 total votes
• Idaho, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Alabama, West Virginia have yet to cross 25% of 2016 totals
• Total 83.5M votes have been cast (mail + in person)
  • Of which 40.5M are from states that report voting by voters affiliation ( AZ, CA, CO, CT, FL, IA, KS, KY, LA, MD, ME, NC, NE, NJ, NM, NV, OK, OR, PA, SD)
    • 46.5% Democrats
    • 29.8% Republicans
    • 23% No affiliation
• 90.5M Mail Ballots were requested
  • only 54M have been returned as of now (59.6%)

I think it's important to notice that, on average, just about 80% of mail ballots are returned. A lot of low engagement voters request these but never vote at all.

Also, over half on non-returned ballots are from a small number safe blue states - California (12M) New Jersey (3M) Washington (2M) and Colorado (2M).

My election prediction.

Biden wins with about 72 million votes and Trump gets 64 million. I think it's going to be 525 Biden and 46% Trump with the remainder going to third parties.

I expect this map.

Are There Shy Trump Voters?

Something that keeps me up at night (literally I was working on this when I should have been sleeping) is the shy Trump voter theory. That Trump voters are ashamed to say they are afraid of Trump because liberals are so very scary. So, I did some research to see if that holds up. I analyzed the polling in the 16 closest states from 2016 (except Minnesota where there wasn't sufficient data), comparing what the final polls predicted to the ultimate results, how many undecided voters there were, how far off they were, and how much they understated or overstated each candidate's support. The results look like this...

Here are what I think are the important conclusions we can draw.

1. It's hard to argue there were a ton of shy Trump voters influencing the results. Of the polls in the 16 states, 9 of them either had the race accurate to within a percentage or actually overestimated Trump. In 13 of the 16 states, polling was in the margin of error. Only in 3 states was Trump underestimated by a statistically significant amount.

If you want to argue for shy Trump voters, you'd have to explain why they only seemed to be shy in the rust belt. Why were they shy in Ohio, but not VA, Michigan, but not New Hampshire, or Wisconsin, but not Maine? The theory doesn't quite jive.

2. Even if there were shy Trump supporters there were not lying Trump supporters. There may have been some embarrassed folks who said they were undecided when they were actually determined to vote Trump, but there were not voters who said they were voting for Clinton who wound up voting Trump.

In virtually every state the actual percentage of Clinton voters was higher than the polling average predicted, which is expected as third parties decide. On average Clinton did 1.48% better than the final polls, and Trump did 2.875%.

Meaning that of the undecided voters, about 2/3 ultimately decided on Trump. Is this because they were actually Trump supporters all along and were just so darn bashful? Or is it because of things like the Comey letter coming at the 11th hour. Can't really say.

What does this mean for 2020?

If these patterns hold up in 2020, then Biden wins.

Take Pennsylvania for instance. If the RCP average stays stagnant till election day, Biden has 49.5% of the vote, and Trump has 45.9. This means 95.4% of voters are decided on one of the two major parties, and 4.6% are either undecided or voting for a third party.

If all of those undecided voters vote for Trump, he ties. If .1% of them go to Joe Biden, Jo Jorgenson, or any other candidate, then Biden wins. 

In Michigan, Biden has 50% of the vote. Trump has 43.5%. Again, Trump needs every undecided voter, and 0% third party support if, as in 2016, Biden is not likely to get less than his current RCP average.

TL:DR Version

If there were any "shy Trump" voters in 2016, they reported themselves as undecided. The number of undecided voters this time around is, in most states, is too small to make a difference. Even if 90% of them are actually shy Trump supporters, that won't be enough to win.

This time around, for Trump to win, there would actually have to be voters who are lyin' about Biden. We didn't see anything like that in 2016, so it's unlikely we'll see it now.

There definitely are shy Trump supporters but I don't think there are enough to sway this election.

The data doesn't really show that.

Again, I'd have to ask, why weren't there any shy voters in Virginia, New Hampshire, Georgia, Florida, Maine etc? In New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, and Texas, there were shy Clinton voters, if anything.

The only places where Trump was significantly underrated was one specific geographic region. It seems rather unlikely that there are shy Trump voters, but only in Ohio, Iowa, Michigan, and Wisconsin?

I'm not saying it's impossible that there are some Trump supporters who report as undecided for whatever reason, (there definitely are) but not only is it not enough to sway the election, but according to the data, it doesn't seem to be enough to impact it at all. 

This looks to me like the best case scenario for Trump:

Biden has been consistently leading in Georgia, though not by very much, 1-3% median lead for Biden here.

Biden has about a 4% lead in Maine's 2nd District, the only one Trump could have won here.

Biden is also leading by 2-5% in Florida, making the prospect of a Trump victory here pretty difficult now .

Biden is leading in North Carolina, though only by 1-2%. This can really go either way.

Ohio is a real tossup, even RCP has a perfect tie here right now. This can really go either way.

Iowa is also a tossup, though Biden is leading very slightly, so I'd say a tilt to Biden here.

Trump is leading in Texas by just one percent. Considering Hillary outperformed her polls here by over 2%, it's certainly not in the bag yet for Trump.

Biden has been catching up in Montana over the last weeks, being just 2% behind. While it will probably stay with Trump, the margin will be pretty narrow.

Also, Nevada, Arizona and Wisconsin, which you have marked as slightly for Biden all have at least a 6% lead over Trump.