Potential Surprises
I created the above map starting from a 270-to-Win Senate projection based on current polls.
270-to-Win had Alaska and South Carolina as tossups. I felt that was a bit far-fetched although it is “possible”. Even Texas is “possible” but I discount anything under a 20% chance.
Meaning of Circles
- A red circle on a brown state designates a tossup state but one that I expect Republicans will win.
- A green circle on a brown state indicates a state that I believe can easily go either way.
- A red circle on a blue state indicates that I believe the Democrats will win the state. The state is in play for the Republicans, but not close enough to call a tossup.
- A blue circle on a red state indicates that I believe the Republicans will win that state. The state is in play for the Democrats but not close enough to call a tossup.
Iowa Senate Polls
All polls from 538 Political Polls.
Iowa Analysis
Iowa represents the Democrats best chance to win the Senate outright.
538 has the Iowa Republican Senate Forecast as 53-47 for the Republicans but I rate the state a 50-50 tossup because all recent polls of “likely voters” give Greenfield a lead with by an average of 2 percentage points.
Why does 538 have Ernst ahead? I believe it is because 538 expects Iowa to vote for Trump by a 50.5 to 48.2 margin.
By the way, that is close enough that Iowa could easily land in Biden’s column.
Georgia Senate Polls
Georgia has two Senate races in play. Republicans will easily hold the race between Perdue (R) and Ossoff (D).
In the Special Election there are 6 candidates, three of which have no chance. It is between two Republicans (loeffler and Collins), and Democrat (Warnock).
538 Georgia Forecast
The Special Election Rules are such that if no candidate gets 50%, there will be a another vote on January 5.
538 expects Georgia to vote for Trump by a 50.7 to 48.5 margin.
That puts Georgia in play for Biden. It also puts Warnock in play in the January 5 election.
Silver’s 17% estimate is thus way too low. The special election will also be influenced by turnout in January adding more uncertainty.
Republicans dismayed by Trump’s loss might not show up to vote in January.
I give Warnock a 40% chance, more than double Silver’s estimate.
Kansas Polls
That’s the only Kansas poll recent enough to discuss. It looks like a tossup but Data for Progress is a sponsored poll, I suspect by Democrats.
I accept Silver’s assessment that Republican Marshall has a 79% chance of winning.
Montana Polls
Once again there is only one poll recent enough to discuss. This time, however, the poll is by A+ rate Siena College.
The poll shows Democrat Bullock trails Republican Daines by a mere one percentage point.
Wendie Fredrickson is the Green Party candidate.
Given that Fredrickson would likely take votes away from Bullock, it’s somewhat a mystery this race is close.
Silver has Silver Republican Baines a 66% to 34% favorite over Bullock. Silver also has Montana going to Trump by a 54.2 to 43.7 margin.
Given that Montana is not really in play for Biden, I think a 34% chance for Bullock is too high. I give Bullock about a 20% shot.
Maine Senate Polls
Maine Senate Discussion
Maine has more polls to discuss than any other state. Clearly the spotlight is on Sue Collins who is expected to lose.
But note that only one poll has Gideon above the 50% mark. This is similar to no poll having Hillary over 50%.
More Information has the poll tied. I doubt it. Pollsters marked with an “*” are sponsored.
Silver gives Collins a 41% chance.
But Silver also projects Biden will win Maine and Maine1, the former 55.3 to 43.2 and the latter 60.4 to 38.2.
It will take huge split ticket voting if those numbers are accurate.
I suspect Collins has about a 33% chance of winning.
North Carolina Senate Polls
North Carolina Discussion
Tillis must be truly despised to be trailing in every poll by 4 to 11 percentage points.
Yet Silver gives Tillis a 36% chance.
I suspect the key reason is Silver expects Biden to win North Carolina by a mere 50.0 to 49.2 margin.
Given the polls, I suspect a 30% chance for Tillis is about right.
South Carolina Senate Polls
South Carolina is considered so much of a shocker that few believe it. Color me sceptical as well.
Pollster “Brilliant Corners” is sponsored, most likely by Democrats and possibly Harrison. Silver lists sponsored polls with an “*” but does not list the sponsor.
The polls from August are too stale to consider.
The best poll of the lot is by highly respected Quinnipiac University who rates this even.
Nate Silver has the odd of Harrison winning at 21%. The reason is clear to see. Silver projects South Carolina will go to Trump by a 53.8 to 45.3% margin.
It will take enormous split-ticket voting if Silver has the presidential forecast correct.
Polls show Trump leads Biden in South Carolina by 6 to 10 percentage points.
If that lead holds, it will be very difficult for Harrison to pull this off.
Nate Silver 538 Senate Projection
Nate Silver’s Senate Projection has the Democrats a slight (62-38) chance of winning the Senate.
Here is my assessment.
Possible But How Possible?
To hold the Senate, Republicans will need to win a clean sweep of Iowa, Montana, Kansas, South Carolina, and the Georgia Special Election, plus Maine or North Carolina or some unknown surprise.
If the above map holds and it comes down to Maine and North Carolina then Republicans should hold the Senate as winning one of those two states is likely.
The problem is the the “IF“. The above map is “possible” but very unlikely based on a more realistic assessment.
Expected Results
I expect Democrats will win all the blue states, the Republicans all the red states plus all the tossup states with red circles.
That makes the map 50-49.
That’s a win for the Democrats if they win the White House as is increasingly likely.
Odds of Democrats Winning At Least One of Iowa or Georgia
- If we assume the Democrats odds of winning Iowa are 50% and Georgia 40% then the odds of the Democrats winning at least one is (0.50 + 0.40) – (0.50 * 0.40) = 0.70.
- If you go with Silver’s model, the odds of the Democrats winning at least one are (0.47 + 0.17) – (0.47 * 0.17) = 0.56.
Thus even Silver’s has a better than 50% chance of the Democrats winning at least one of those two states.
Democrats chances of winning the Senate are substantially higher than Silver projects. Georgia and Iowa are the keys to understanding why.
Mish
The DIMS CANCEL movement is demanding a new system but they are voting for a man that has been in office 47 years, he is the system. He’s been in the system 20% of the time America has been a country.
Democrats have been showing the American public for months now just how morally corrupt and evil they actually are. They have supported treason, and insurrection in the streets, they are openly trying to steal the election by criminal means, they are doing everything in their power to create a race war. The American people can see what they are doing, and will vote to reject it. That is when the Democrats will attempt to steal the election by force and the civil war will begin…. America will not fall to the Communists without a fight.
At last report I saw, Maine has single transferable vote (or something similar) for Federal elections, meaning that the 8 points for the Libertarian and the Green get moved someplace in the Maine Senate race.
Abstract
Technology and social media use are increasingly associated with delays in nightly sleep. Here, we consider the timing of President Trump’s official Twitter account posts as a proxy for sleep duration and how it relates to his public performance.
Its going to be rough very rough in the near future and most likely beyond for we plebeians
Looks like there’s an answer to the $4B question on Trump’s finances: Smells like mortgage fraud
Early last year, Michael Cohen released a few pages of Trump’s financial statements in advance of his testimony to the House Oversight committee, newly in the hands of a Democratic majority. I noticed something strange in those statements, and wrote a diary about it: In the March 31, 2013 statement of Trump assets, there’s a new asset line for “Brand Value,” listed at a whopping $4 billion, that wasn’t on the previous statement from June 30, 2012. This $4 billion accounted for nearly the entire increase in Trump’s net worth over those 9 months. So I asked:
How was that valuation of the “brand” justified? Who came up with it, and who was involved in the discussions surrounding it? More importantly, why? Why was it so important for Trump’s net worth to nearly double in the course of 9 months? Was it, as Cohen said it might be, a vanity exercise to get high placement on a Forbes list? Or was it, as he also said could be the case, to get a loan or favorable insurance premiums? And why was the 2013 disclosure done in March instead of June like the previous ones? Was there perhaps some immediate financial need that required a loan in Spring 2013?
Well, the diary didn’t get much attention, and understandably: Trump had managed to keep his financial details under wraps up to that point, so there just wasn’t much to go on to answer those questions.
But now, thanks to the New York Times’ bombshell reporting today, we have a whole lot more, and it looks like there’s an answer to these questions.
Everyone should read the full article, but the apparent answers can be found in the Times’ summary of revelations from the tax documents. First, we have:
With “The Apprentice” revenue declining, Mr. Trump has absorbed the losses partly through one-time financial moves that may not be available to him again.
In 2012, he took out a $100 million mortgage on the commercial space in Trump Tower.
So Trump’s TV profits were declining, and he needed cash to cover losses from his golf resorts. And indeed, it appears that this loan was taken out sometime in late 2012, between the 2012 and 2013 financial statements: The 2012 statement lists loans on commercial New York real estate at less than $250 million, but in 2013 that number is $322 million, a jump that the $100 million loan could account for.
But this doesn’t address the $4B “Brand Value”—wouldn’t a mortgage on a property be based on the value of collateral, i.e. the property being mortgaged, not some other “asset”? Usually, but not in this case, since Trump personally guaranteed those loans:
In the 1990s, Mr. Trump nearly ruined himself by personally guaranteeing hundreds of millions of dollars in loans, and he has since said that he regretted doing so. But he has taken the same step again, his tax records show. He appears to be responsible for loans totaling $421 million, most of which is coming due within four years.
Now, you don’t personally guarantee a loan unless you absolutely have to. So it looks like whoever was underwriting this mortgage didn’t believe there was enough equity in the property itself to back the loan. (Trump’s 2013 financial statement has the net equity of New York City commercial real estate at $1.06 billion.) So the lender required a personal guarantee. But Trump needed to show personal assets to back that guarantee, and poof! The $4 billion in “Brand Value” appears.
Wherever that “Brand Value” supposedly came from, apparently it’s not real enough to generate actual cash, since Trump hasn’t paid off a single dime of that loan:
He appears to have paid off none of the principal of the Trump Tower mortgage, and the full $100 million comes due in 2022.
There’s a term for inflating assets, or making them up out of whole cloth, in order to secure a loan: Mortgage fraud. Now, the usual caveats apply: I’m not a financial fraud expert, we can’t draw definitive conclusions from just a few pages of actual documents, etc., etc. But this certainly does smell. It looks like it smells to New York State investigators too, as there’s an ongoing fraud investigation into the Trump real estate business (emphasis mine):
The attorney general, Letitia James, a Democrat, has been conducting a civil investigation into whether President Trump and the Trump Organization committed fraud by overstating assets to get loans and tax benefits.
To summarize (TL;DR):
In late 2012, Trump’s golf properties are hemorrhaging money, and with his “Apprentice” revenue drying up, he needs a cash infusion to cover the losses.
He gets a $100 million loan on Trump Tower, but he needs to personally guarantee it.
At the same time, a new $4 billion “Brand Value” asset appears on his financial statements.
Whatever personal assets he claimed to the lender would enable him to pay back the loan, he’s not actually making any principal payments. So it’s possible that there aren’t any actual assets that could be used to cover the loan.
interesting analysis. i guess i’ve spent too much time in silicon valley because i expect all valuations to be bullshit, i don’t even have it in me to question who/why etc.
Thank you C_O for the great post, I cannot read the NYT because I will not shut down my ad blocker. I may be able to see the same from other sources like Kos though.
I also wanted to point out that the only polling firm to give Trump a very narrow positive approval rating is Rasmussen which is notoriously friendly to him, even that is by a small single digit. But yesterday they also include a poll on approval that shows a full 20% disapproval over approval which has dropped back to the 30’s.
SEP 26, 2020
Morning Consult
1,990 Registered Voters
Approve 39%
Disapprove 59%
Disapprove +20%
And that was polling done prior to the tax fraud bombshell hitting the news.
Expecting his supporters to rebut with “but, but, Hunter Biden…”
Trump seems to love urine.
Biden camp clapback: Trump’s best debate case ‘made in urine’
..
Even Biden had to chuckle at Trump’s latest taunts, although the Democratic nominee opted against saying anything when a reporter asked him later Sunday about the president’s demand.
“He’s almost …,” Biden said before interrupting himself. “No. I have no comment.”
Later, the Biden campaign reconsidered.
“Vice President Biden intends to deliver his debate answers in words. If the president thinks his best case is made in urine he can have at it,” said Kate Bedingfield, Biden’s deputy campaign manager. “We’d expect nothing less from Donald Trump, who pissed away the chance to protect the lives of 200K Americans when he didn’t make a plan to stop COVID-19.”
That was just sad from the Biden handlers.
gross
Posted 2 hours ago: Ilhan Omar connected Ballot Harvester in cash-for-ballots scheme: “Car is full” of absentee ballots.
Project Veritas is an American right-wing activist group.[1][2][3][4] The group uses “disguises and hidden cameras to uncover supposed liberal bias and corruption”.[1] The group is known for producing deceptively edited videos about media organizations and left-leaning groups.[5][2][6][7][8][9][10] In a 2018 book on propaganda and disinformation in U.S. politics, three Harvard University scholars refer to Project Veritas as a “right-wing disinformation outfit”.[11]
In March 2020, The New York Times published an exposé detailing Project Veritas’ use of spies recruited by Erik Prince, to infiltrate “Democratic congressional campaigns, labor organizations and other groups considered hostile to the Trump agenda”. The Times piece notes O’Keefe’s and Prince’s close links to the Trump administration, and details contributions such as a $1 million transfer of funds from an undisclosed source to support their work. The findings were based in part on discovery documents in a case brought by the American Federation of Teachers, Michigan, which was infiltrated by Project Veritas.[12]
Project Veritas was founded in 2010 by James O’Keefe.[13]
During the 2016 campaign, the organization falsely claimed to have shown that the Hillary Clinton campaign accepted illegal donations from foreign sources.[14] O’Keefe was sued for defamation by a man he wrongfully depicted as a “willing participant in an underage sex-trafficking scheme”; the suit led to a settlement in 2013, in which O’Keefe issued an apology and paid $100,000.[15][16][17]
In 2017, Project Veritas was caught in a failed attempt to trick The Washington Post into posting a fabricated story about Roy Moore.[2][3][18][19] Rather than uncritically publish a story that accused Republican candidate Moore of impregnating a teenager, The Washington Post critically examined the story that they were presented with, checked the source, assessed her credibility and ultimately found that there was no merit to her claims, and that instead Project Veritas were trying to dupe The Washington Post.[11]
O’Keefe has been barred from fundraising for Project Veritas in Florida and other states because of his federal criminal record for entering a federal building under fraudulent pretenses.[20][21]
Yes, every Democrat among US elite absolutely hates O’Keefe so many “experts” supporting Democrats are ready to say that Project Veritas is bad, bad, bad and Wikipedia has had Democrat bias for years because so many Wikipedia editors are Democrats.
The Wikipedia Democrat bias has gotten even worse after George Soros started funding Wikipedia:
Democrats are trying desperately to steal the election. The American people will see this, and reject the criminal Democrats…..
The Senate confirmation hearings will likely have some interesting impact on the Senate elections, but the effect is not one I can predict. Some will be happy with the outcome, others will be unhappy. Some will be happy they held hearings, others will be unhappy. It may increase turnout, or increase support for certain candidates, or decrease it. As a result, polls may shift quite a bit in the last month.
My prediction:
Republicans lose 2 Senate seats (currently 53-47) but keep Senate 51-49
Trump will lose the popular vote but win the presidency.
Biden will win two of the states Trump won in 2016 but Trump will get Minnesota this time due to the riots and looting and arson and increased crime after Democrats decided to abolish the Minneapolis police and reimagine policing and Trump gets over 270 electoral college votes and continues as president.
If Joe Biden has meltdowns in the debates like he has in interviews and his virtual appearances then it might become a Reagan style trouncing and Trump will win more traditionally Democrat states than in 2016.
That’s best case for Trump
The police force in Minneapolis did not get abolished, Russian bot.
Let me fix this for you:
My hope:
Republicans lose 2 Senate seats (currently 53-47) but keep Senate 51-49
Trump will lose the popular vote but win the presidency.
Biden will win two of the states Trump won in 2016 but Trump will get Minnesota this time due to the riots and looting and arson and increased crime after Democrats decided to abolish the Minneapolis police and reimagine policing and Trump gets over 270 electoral college votes and continues as president.
In my wettest dream, if Joe Biden has meltdowns in the debates like he has in interviews and his virtual appearances then it might become a Reagan style trouncing and Trump will win more traditionally Democrat states than in 2016.
More wishful thinking / propaganda. Seriously, how much do they pay you for this slop?
Fact is, Biden is a nasty hate filled person, as we have seen by his lashing out several times. He is now that he is old and senile, he cannot control his temper. Trump will easily be able to trigger him in the debates and he will lash out in front of the entire country. Game, set, and match.
I read and posted reporting that gives Democrats a 70% probability of capturing the Senate but that probability goes down if Trump ekes out a win because voters often vote down ballot
I’d like to see trump win the election and the democrats take the house and senate. I figure armageddon is baked in at this point… lets see some SPORT!
I like your thinking.
I could give two craps less I just want to be entertained.
Hopefully though it will be split somewhere. The thought of solid red or solid blue is nauseating.
Hell NO…No TRUMP EVER