Last week, FiveThirtyEight—under the ownership of The Walt Disney Company (ABC News; without involvement of its founder Nate Silver)—presented its Election 2024 forecasting model.
It is a joke.
FiveThirtyEight gives Joe Biden 53 percent in odds for prevailing on November 5, 2024. (The model can adjust the numbers from time to time; in fact, after Day #01, FiveThirtyEight has already done a little tweaking. This addresses Day #01 of FiveThirtyEight’s model.)
Donald Trump—who has been routinely leading in the polls in the “Swing States” since at least November 2023 (one year out from the general election)—gets 46 or 47 percent. (I did not see the exact numbers from Day #01. A related discussion elsewhere mentioned the 53 percent for Biden.)
The model has Trump stopped at an allocated 268 electoral votes. His map from 2020, a starting point of 235 electoral votes, comes with 2024 Republican pickups of Arizona, Georgia, and Nevada. But incumbent U.S. president Biden wins with exactly 270—the required number of electoral votes for election/re-election—with 2020-to-2024 Democratic holds of leading bellwether states Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
In his 2020 Democratic pickup of the presidency, while unseating Trump, Biden’s raw-vote margins in these states (all, except Nevada, were pickup states), were in the following range: +10,457 (Arizona) to +154,188 (Michigan).
2024 Trump is likely to flip all these states. This isn’t some Herculean task. Slice these states’s 2020 Democratic margins by a little over 50 percent and a given state will flip. Take 5,279 votes out of the 2020 Democratic column and switch them to the 2024 Republican column … that will flip Arizona. Take 77,095 votes from the 2020 Democratic column and switch them to the 2024 Republican column … that will flip Michigan. Follow suit, but with their different and necessary numbers, with the four remaining “Swing States.” (And three of these “Swing States”—Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Michigan—are Top 10 populous states, each with a population north of 10 million residents, and which combine for 10 percent of all U.S. citizens.)
With Biden in constant struggle for 40 percent in job approval—at least according to Gallup—there is no compelling reason to believe what a Day #01 FiveThirtyEight presented will manifest.
I encourage readers to view the above video by YouTube content creator Retaking the Nation. It is a critical and insightful response to this model by FiveThirtyEight. Below is the link to FiveThirtyEight.
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