I’m more interested in the fivethirtyeight forecast. They rate pollsters as to how reliable they are, use that to weight those polls — and use the result to drive 40K iterations of an election simulation, then add up the number of times each candidate wins the electoral college. As of my writing this, Trump has a 25% chance of winning. 25% is far from no chance. Think of the odds of getting two tails in a row if you’re flipping a coin. Using that same methodology, they showed Trump with a 29% chance in 2016, and, again 29% is not zero — which I had a really bad feeling about.

If you’re wondering why neither of these are what you’d expect given the lead that Biden has in the polls, that’s the popular vote, not the Electoral College, which, as sparsely populated states tend to be red, gives the Republicans an advantage. Clinton won the popular vote in 2016, as expected.

Of course, the polls lag actual events. Bob Woodward just recently released recordings showing that Trump 100% knew how bad the corona virus was (fatality rate, airborne, young people not immune) in early February. Gotta wonder how that — and his remarks about fallen Marines at Beleau Wood — are going to impact them.

As a side note, lagging polls is how we got that photo of a re-elected President Truman holding a newspaper with “Dewey Wins in a Landslide!” headline.