The Economist - USA (2020-11-07)

26 United States The EconomistNovember 7th 2020

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1

W

atchinghisre-electionodds falter

intheMidwestonNovember 4th, Do-

naldTrumppulledouta backup plan: sal-

vationthroughlitigation.“We’ll be going to

theUSSupremeCourt,”hesaid in the wee

hoursafterelectionday,repeating a weeks-

longmantrajustifyinga rushtoinstall Amy

Coney Barrett into the late Ruth Bader

Ginsburg’schair.Continuingto count bal-

lotsis“afraudontheAmericanpublic”, he

declared,withoutexplanation. “We want

allvotingtostop.”

The scattershot legal strategy that

emergedhourslatercarriedan air of des-

peration and included, as promised, a

quest to stop counting ballots in states

whereMrTrumpwasinthelead and per-

hapsinsomewherehewasbehind. Mr

Trumpandhissupportershave now filed

suitsinGeorgia,Michigan,Nevada, Penn-

sylvaniaandWisconsin.InPennsylvania,

theTrumpcampaignclaims, rogue offi-

cialsareopening“abackdoortovictory” for

JoeBiden.Furthersuitsmaycome in Arizo-

na.However,thebarrageoflitigation is no

morelikelytochangethepresident’s for-

tunesthanhistweetannouncing he would

“herebyclaimthestateofMichigan”, where

MrBidenhadalreadyekedouta win.

MrTrump’slawyersandallies are par-

ticularlybusyinPennsylvania, where the

presidenthasalsodeclaredvictory prema-

turely.Thehoped-forwinrelies on at least

fivelawsuits.Fourofthemarerather small

potatoes.TheTrumpcampaign is appeal-

DonaldTrumpsuestostop

vote-countingandtossballots

Electionlawsuits

Courting the

presidency

Enter the president’s lawyer

ment of American politics, but an interreg-

num between Trumpism and something

else. Bipartisan accord might not stretch

beyond infrastructure spending, if even

that. A resuscitated Republican worry

about debts and deficits would probably

hamstring any serious spending legisla-

tion of a Biden presidency, just as hap-

pened with much of the Obama presidency.

With such a narrow result, the hope that

America might be able to move beyond its

high-stakes, ultra-partisan legislating

seems to be extinguished. “Cry more, lib”,

was the first public statement of Madison

Cawthorn, a 25-year-old newly elected Re-

publican congressman from North Caroli-

na. A vocal supporter of the QAnon con-

spiracy theory, Marjorie Taylor Greene

from Georgia, will soon be seated in Con-

gress. The moderate Democrats who

helped secure a large House majority in

2018 were the first to get wiped out.

America’s rickety constitutional design

gives big rewards for even razor-thin mar-

gins. This encourages partisans to stay in

their trenches until the next contest, and to

sabotage as much as possible the ambi-

tions of the other side. Nothing has hap-

pened this time to change that. Even if the

next president is not yet confirmed, you

can confidently predict how much will get

done in the next Congress: very little. 7

O

n themorningofelectionday,The

Economist’s election-forecasting

model gave Joe Biden a 19-in-20 chance of

winning the presidency. Once all the

votes are tallied, Mr Biden will probably

be sitting behind the Resolute Desk next

year. But it will be by a much closer mar-

gin than we forecast.

As we went to press, Mr Biden had

amassed 253 electoral votes. He looks to

be holding leads in enough states to

bring his margin up to 270—the bare

threshold needed to win. He could well

pick up another 20 votes in Pennsylvania

as mail-in ballots are tallied. That is still

quite shy of the 356 we predicted.

Simply put, this is because the presi-

dent did much better than the dismal

showing the opinion polls expected. Mr

Biden may win Wisconsin by less than

one percentage point, whereas polls

suggested he was ahead by eight. The

model incorporated similarly large

misses in Ohio, Iowa and Florida.

Dependingonhowtheremaining

states finish, Mr Biden is expected to win

one of 270, 290 or 306 electoral votes. A

showing at 270 would be outside our 95%

confidence interval for the range of

outcomes, meaning that our level of

certainty was too high. The other likely

outcomes would be at the bottom end—

what could be expected in one out of

every three or four of simulations we ran.

The Economist’s model had found that

Mr Biden was comfortably ahead in so

many places that it was hard to envisage

him losing them all. But he may have

come close. Our errors may reflect a

general weakness of quantitative mod-

els: they try to predict the future by ex-

trapolating from the past. Perhaps this

election, held in the midst of a pandemic

and a volatile economy, stretched this

assumption too far.

Usually polling errors do not follow

the last election’s pattern because poll-

sters try hard to correct their mistakes.

Yet the polls still overestimated the

positions of Mr Biden and Hillary Clin-

ton in mostly the same states—and often

by similar magnitudes.

One worrying possibility is that sur-

veys again did not accurately gauge the

share of working-class whites who sup-

ported Mr Trump. Before the election,

polling showed that they had shifted

towards Mr Biden. But preliminary elec-

tion returns indicate that counties with

lots of white working-class voters actual-

ly swung further towards Mr Trump. This

suggests that Trump-supporting work-

ing-class whites were less likely to re-

spond to pollsters in the first place.

Should that theory prove true, it would

present a very serious problem for the

polling industry to solve.

Whiffing twice

Polling error redux

Polls—and our election-forecast model—overestimated support for Joe Biden

Double fault

United States, presidential elections, polls’ error

in predicting two-party Democratic vote share

2016 v 2020, percentage points

Sources: New York Times;

The Economist

*States with over

98% of votes counted

420-2-4-6-8-10

Error in 2016

Error in 2020*

2

0

-2

-4

-6

FL TX

IA OH

WI

States where polls

underestimated

Republican vote

in 2016 and 2020