POTUS/General Election Thread 2020 + Aftermath

[Montmorency]

https://twitter.com/profmusgrave/sta...48875397378048

Liberals want to evict an elderly, financially troubled Covid survivor and his family from inner-city public housing

Maine and Nebraska are the only two states which do not award winner take all for the entire state.

Maine dedicates two points to overall winner of the state, and then gives each congressional district within Maine (there are two) a single point for the winner of that district.
Biden won the vote in District 2 and he won it by such a margin that he also won the overall state count. He lost the other district which went for Trump (it's more rural), so it was split 3 to 1.

And Biden exchanged it for one in Nebraska. I believe this is actually the first ever election in which the split-district system has produced a split in a state' electors.


Incidentally, I checked the Generic Ballot (overall balance of polling for the House elections) and the same pattern as above appears, namely that the results conform to the polling if you redistribute all the Undecideds to the Republicans, adjusting post-hoc for the small third party share of less than 2%. (With the caveat that as blue states like California and New York release their tallies next week, the Democratic vote share will increase.)

This wasn't quite what happened in 2016, since there were so many Undecideds (and third party voters) that many of them did come to Clinton - they just broke for Trump overall. As far as I'm seeing with 2020 polling, the Undecided-to-Trump/Republican vote is something like 90 to 100% of them (without third party), or maybe 50% Trump/Republican, 40% third party, very roughly. There shouldn't be a reflex to simply categorize Undecideds as de-facto Republicans going forward, since it's quite possible this phenomenon is an artifact of living under Trump. But I will struggle to resist looking at future polling through the lens of Undecided = Republican.

This should also underscore that, contrary to liberal fixations, third parties routinely siphon vastly more votes from Republicans than they do from Democrats. It's a justifiable outrage, but there's maybe 1 election in American history where a third party clearly harmed Democrats*: 2000 Naderism.

Libertarians definitely cost Trump Georgia and Arizona for example.

*Arguably also George Wallace in 1968, but that reflected an actual schism within the party and those white Southerners promptly switched to Republicans permanently under Nixon.