Election Battleground Scorecard, Can You Beat the Pollsters and Nate Silver?

Here’s your handy dandy, follow along election scorecard. Make your predictions and beat the experts.

Pollster Sources

• AtlasIntel Battlegrounds
• AtlasIntel National
• NYT/Siena
• YouGov
• Trafalgar
• Nate Silver
• Real Clear Polling

Methods and Models

Silver and Real Clear Polling have models. They calculate odds based on pollster weight, presumed pollster bias, recency of poll, and other factors.

The pollsters have methods that can and do change from election to election. The change this election was huge.

About three-fourths of the Pollsters made a change to incorporate recall voting, asking people how they voted in prior elections.

This has known issues, mainly people forget how they voted. In many cases people report voting for the winner when registrations show they did not vote at all.

No one knows how this will turn out. The NYT/Siena poll is in the minority of pollsters who do not use voter recall. AtlasIntel did not respond to my question, nor do I know whether Trafalgar uses recall.

I don’t know if Silver has a better model than RCP and neither do they.

Silver calls it a tossup: A random number generator determined the “favorite” in our forecast

When I say the odds in this year’s presidential race are about as close as you can possibly get to 50/50, I’m not exaggerating.

At exactly midnight on Tuesday, I pressed the “go” button for the final time on our election model this year. I knew it was going to be close. I felt like I was spinning a roulette wheel. (Appropriate, I guess, in a year when I published a book about gambling.) We’d decided ahead of time to run 80,000 simulations instead of our usual 40K.

And after 80,000 simulations, Kamala Harris won the Electoral College in … 40,012 of them, or 50.015 percent. The remaining 39,988 were split between Trump (39,718) and no majority — a 269-269 tie — which practically speaking would probably be resolved for Trump in the U.S. House.

Harris jumped out to a huge early lead, ahead 50.7%-49.3% after the 18,000th simulation — but then Trump + no majority mounted a thrilling comeback. But on simulation #79,281, Harris went on a winning streak, claiming 15 of the next 17 simulations to turn a 5-sim deficit into a 8-sim lead and never looking back. Trump closed to within single digits again as late as simulation #79,603, but couldn’t seal the deal.

But I guarantee you: there are literally going to be people who say, “NATE SILVER PREDICTS A HARRIS WIN” as a result of this. Literally.

Pollster Accuracy

Silver rates they NYT/Siena as A⁺, the second-best pollster after Selzer. But Selzer has done so few polls this cycle.

Accuracy in 2020 does not imply accuracy in 2024. But let’s discuss track record of AtlasIntel.

About AtlasIntel

• AtlasIntel was the most accurate pollster of the 2020 presidential election and of the 2022 midterms in the United States.
• In 2020, Atlas polls had an average error of only two points and anticipated election results within the margin of error in all swing states during the worst cycle for the US polling industry in four decades.
• AtlasIntel was the most accurate pollster of the 2022 presidential election in Brazil.
• AtlasIntel was the most accurate pollster of the last three election cycles in Argentina.
• AtlasIntel was the most accurate pollster of the 2022 Constitutional Plebiscite in Chile
• AtlasIntel polls anticipated the major swings of the 2022 presidential race in Colombia, during the primaries and the campaigning for the 1st round of voting and then the runoff.
• AtlasIntel was the only pollster to correctly anticipate the deadlock resulting from the 2023 legislative election in Spain

That speaks volumes to me and so does the above chart Trafalgar whom I know little else about.

That is why I created a tab averaging AtlasIntel and Trafalgar.

Mish Methods

I don’t have a model. It is far beyond the scope of would I could do.

I do have methods.

I decided to hugely overweight two pollsters with good historical track records that also forecast all of the key states. Those two pollsters are AtlasIntel and Trafalgar.

I ignored NYT/Siena and YouGov directly. That was my penalty. Instead, to hedge my bet I factored in NYT/Siena and YouGov indirectly via Nate Silver and RCP as follows.

Mish State-by-State

• In PA, NC, AZ, NV, and GA I averaged AtlasIntel, Trafalgar, Nate Silver, and RCP.
• In WI, I averaged AtlasIntel and Trafalgar, then went with a hunch that voters will toss Senator Tammy Baldwin for Republican Eric Hovde and that will spill over enough to help Trump.
• In Michigan, I am on a hunch of close but no cigar for Trump.
• I struggle to see Trump winning the national vote so I took Nate Silver and subtracted RCP.

I have strong reasons to overweight AtlasIntel and Trafalgar, so I did. My reason for Wisconsin as a tipping state is based or a rise from the gutter in the Wisconsin Senate polls for Republican candidate Eric Hovde over Tammy Baldwin.

Hovde closed a huge gap. Trafalgar has Hovde winning but AtlasIntel is the other way. We will see. Wisconsin is going out on a limb.

Mish Senate Picks

Republicans Pick up seats in Montana, Ohio, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.

This would make it 53-47.

Mish House Call

This will be very close. I flipped a coin but a raven snatched it mid-air.

If you insist on a guess, then give Democrats a 3-seat edge, 219-216.

Some Scenarios

If Trump wins Pennsylvania, he can afford to lose either North Carolina or Georgia but not both.

If Trump wins Wisconsin (my preferred tipping state), he can afford to lose Pennsylvania and Nevada. That would make it 272-266.

Trump has many more ways to win than Harris, including some interesting ones involving New Hampshire.

This makes the final Nate Silver coin flip a bit weird. If Trump wins Pennsylvania as Silver shows (albeit by a mere 0.1PP), it is not that easy to envision a scenario in which Trump loses.

It appears that a raven snatched Nate Silver’s coin or the coin landed on edge. A tie is possible and it would probably involve New Hampshire.

Odds vs Margin

Nate Silver is not calling a winner. He was emphatic about that.

I am calling a winner, and that is Trump. But I am not putting much faith on that because I do not like the end of momentum for Trump.

Silver varies on momentum.

So far, the election has followed a sine-wave-like pattern, with small shifts of momentum roughly every three weeks, and the last shift seems to be favoring Harris, at least if you trust our numbers.

Let me be very careful here: under most circumstances, I’m actually pretty distrustful of the concept of “momentum” in the context of elections. Because what goes up tends to come right back down — the sine wave. But now we’re at the end so there’s no time for it to come down. Harris polled mostly rather well this weekend among the higher-quality pollsters that I trust not to herd, namely Selzer, Marist College, and for the most part NYT/Siena (although their results are a bit more mixed).

I believe in momentum, but that belief does not imply it goes on forever. And I question Marist as a high-quality pollster, at least in comparison to AtlasIntel.

But I averaged all that together in my own peculiar way that seems to make sense today, but may not tomorrow.

Mirror Test

Unless a tipping state is decided by fewer than 10,000 votes (in which there will be a recount), this is what I propose Trump and Harris do.

• Walk to a mirror
• Look straight at the mirror
• Say to the person in the mirror “I lost the election mostly because I was a fool.”

If Trump loses it will be because of his arrogant comeuppance and refusal to prepare for a debate with Harris.

If Harris loses it will be because she refused to distance herself from Biden.

Neither candidate made a real effort to reach out to moderates.

If the economy and immigration override abortion and Trump’s narcissism and arrogance, he will win.

If not, then Harris will win, despite herself. Telling The View she would not have changed anything Biden did was quite telling.

The number of unforced errors by each person is stunning. It is conceivable Trump loses Pennsylvania by having an idiot comedian poke fun at Puerto Rico.

Mish Odds

I am I am 54-46 Trump down from 55-45 a few days back. If I have an edge over Silver and RCP, it is on the economy.

People are pissed and economists cannot figure out why.

I explained why in The Brookings Institute Wonders Why Consumer Sentiment is So Bad, I Can Help

I list about 18 reasons people are pissed. That undoubtedly helps Trump. And polls show younger voters and Black are switching over to Trump.

But will enough of them turn up to vote? I don’t know, and you don’t either.

The polls don’t show how the last final set of undecided voters will break. I based my final call based on a belief they will break for Trump.

Beat the Experts

Here’s your chance. Print my spreadsheet, plug in some numbers, and see how you do.

The winner in each state is the one closest to the final margin, regardless of which party wins the state.

But you get a bonus point for each key Senate race (NV, AZ, MI, WI, OH, MT) , the tipping state, and the electoral college total. The over/under line on the House is D+3.

I have the Electoral College in favor of Trump at 297-241.

If Republicans get to 51 Senate seats, the Democrat agenda will be dead for at least two years.

Be Prepared for Anything

• We might have a blowout either way, with the national average winner up less than a half-point.
• We may know the winner by 2:00AM or not for three days.
• We probably will not know the House for at least two weeks.

One side or another will scream. Neither Harris nor Trump will blame themselves.

But no matter who wins, the world will not end even if the screams from the loser travel faster than the speed of sound and are heard on the moon.

So print out my spreadsheet, make your own calls, and get a huge bowl of popcorn. All won’t be lost unless Democrats get a trifecta sweep.