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The polls are pretty clear at this point Joe Biden is in position to win the presidential election.

Hes up nationally, hes up in Pennsylvania, hes up in Florida, and hes even up in North Carolina. Hes definitely up in Michigan and Wisconsin. If the states go the way the polls say, hes going to win the election, and it wont even be particularly close.

But many people remember reading popular poll aggregation sites four years ago and the confident predictions that Hillary Clinton would win: She had an 85 percent chance of winning, according to the New York Times, for example. Clinton, however, not only lost the key battlegrounds of Florida and Pennsylvania but even lost Wisconsin, where public polling had her so far ahead she didnt bother to campaign in person.

Is it really different this time?

The answer is mostly yes. The extreme confidence in Clintons 2016 victory was despite a modest lead in the national polls. Forecasts in 2016 differed a lot in their assumptions. But there were generally two factors at play, on top of the state polling misses: a flawed way of thinking about how state-level races relate to one another, and a misperception of the electorate in key states in the Electoral College.

Todays forecasts built in more GOP-friendly assessments of state dynamics. The main reason forecasters still think Biden has a very good chance of winning? His polling lead is just genuinely large. As of October 28, his chance of victory in the FiveThirtyEight forecast model (88 percent) is higher than Clintons was on Election Day in 2016 (72 percent).

Uncertainty remains primarily because even though Bidens lead is big and has been remarkably stable, things could change and it could shrink particularly in states key to winning the Electoral College. And if it does shrink, wed see that a lot of things have not changed since 2016. It continues to be unclear if pollsters can more precisely gauge public opinion in the key Midwestern swing states, and the Electoral College has a large bias toward Republicans. Still, even as those factors remain constant, there have been some key changes over the past four years.

There are two distinct steps involved in poll-based election forecasting. First, they look at polls to try to assess the state of public opinion; second, they build a model, using the polls and sometimes other data, that goes from those polls to a prediction.

Common sense says a 5 percentage point lead is better than a 2-point lead and a lead in October is better than a lead in July. But to generate a precise forecast, you need to formalize those intuitions.

If you look back at the 2016 forecasts, some models were super-bullish on Hillary Clinton but not all. On Election Day, she had an 85 percent chance of winning, according to the New York Times, and a 98 percent chance, according to the Huffington Post. Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight, however, gave her a more restrained 72 percent chance. The main reason was a disagreement about modeling, not about what the polls said.

The Huffington Post looked at the election as 50 separate state races where deviation from the current polling could happen in each place, but would happen independently. So if Trump had a 35 percent chance of winning Pennsylvania, a 40 percent chance of winning North Carolina, a 40 percent chance of winning Florida, and a 45 percent chance of winning Georgia, etc., then the model assumed that added up to something like a 2 percent chance of Trump carrying enough battleground states.

The FiveThirtyEight model to oversimplify built in data from previous elections and also assumed that if the polls were off, they just might be off everywhere in the same direction. So in the moderately unlikely universe where Trump narrowly wins Pennsylvania, he is likely winning North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida.

Now, of course, you dont want to model state election results as completely correlated with one another. Biden could probably boost his numbers in Wyoming by a point or two by running unanswered TV ads there, but this would have no implications for the national election. And effective outreach to Mexican American voters could help in Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Texas without moving the needle in Maine or Wisconsin.

But most everyone agrees now that Silver had the better of this argument. The current models all assume polling errors and swings in public opinion will be correlated. When the Economist says that Biden has a 93 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, it is making a methodologically sounder claim than the New York Times or Huffington Post did four years ago.

Silver, whose methods have not changed in this regard, appears significantly more confident in Bidens chances than he was in Clintons.

All of which is to say that apples to apples, Biden has a bigger lead.

RealClearPolitics does a simple, naive polling average with no fancy math or house effects. It says Biden has an 8.6-point national polling lead, which is a bit bigger than Clintons lead was at the height of her 2016 convention bump. But Biden is not in the midst of a convention bump, and there are reasons to believe his lead will be more permanent:

The size of Bidens lead is clearly good news for him. The significance of the stability of the lead is something modelers disagree about. One way of looking at it is that views of the incumbent are pretty locked in, as are views of the former vice president and consequently, otherwise earth-shattering events like the Covid-19 pandemic and the mass protests following the police killing of George Floyd dont move the polls very much.

Under those circumstances, it just looks incredibly unlikely that anything more dramatic is going to happen over the next week which is one reason the Economist is so bullish on Biden.

One might note, though, that past performance is no guarantee of future results. We know that, historically, public opinion sometimes does exhibit sharp sudden moves. Its unlikely that there will be a huge, last-minute swing toward Trump, but why rule anything out?

All this assumes that the polls are accurate.

National polling averages said Clinton was up by a bit more than 3 points on the eve of Election Day, and she won the popular vote by about 2 points, a very modest one-point error that nobody would remember as a big deal had she actually become president.

But those same polling averages showed Clinton up 6 points in Wisconsin. Thats a fairly large error, a bit outside the normal variance youd expect. One major culprit, in retrospect, is that pollsters samples turn out to include way more college graduates than are present in the actual electorate. Since college graduates voting behavior differs systematically from non-grads, that biases the polls especially in the Midwest toward Democrats.

These days, the better pollsters address this by weighting their sample to reflect the actual education attainment of the population. Not every pollster weights, and among those who do, there is some variance in exactly how they do it.

Education weighting is also not a panacea. National polling in 2018 was accurate, but national polling was accurate in 2016 as well. On the state level, the 2018 polls underrated the GOP in Florida and the Midwest and overrated it in California and the Southwest.

The issue, pollsters tell me, is that educational attainment matters politically because its a proxy for underlying differences in personality. Poll samples are biased toward college graduates because non-graduates are more likely to have low social trust, which, among other things, makes them less likely to speak to pollsters. And in recent cycles, low-trust voters have skewed toward Republicans. But there are low-trust college graduates and high-trust non-graduates. So while education is a convenient proxy, relying on it does not fully eliminate bias in the polls.

The continued issues with Midwestern polling got obscured to some extent in 2018 by the fact that Democrats won the key races. But Debbie Stabenow and Gretchen Whitmer both underperformed their polls by about 2 percentage points. It was just a strong enough year for Democrats nationally that it didnt matter.

As long as Biden is up by 8 to 10 points in the national polling, the fact that hes only up by 5 or 6 points in Pennsylvania doesnt seem so significant. But that 6-point lead in Pennsylvania represents a huge Electoral College disadvantage.

If instead Biden were up 6 nationally and 2 in Pennsylvania, forecasters would be saying that Biden is a very narrow favorite. Two-point polling errors are pretty common, though 6-point misses arent totally unheard of.

This huge Electoral College bias is why coverage of the 2020 race can end up giving you whiplash either the polling looks like a landslide for Biden or else its a toss-up, with nothing in between. Thats a reflection of the underlying reality of a situation in which Biden probably needs to win the national popular vote by a large margin to carry the Electoral College.

Back in 2012, by contrast, the electoral map was tilted modestly in Obamas favor, so it was possible for him to have something like a safe but narrow 3-point lead in the national polls.

Due to the polling problems discussed earlier, many observers believed that Clinton retained Obamas Electoral College advantage during the 2016 race. Because Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania had voted for Al Gore and John Kerry even as they lost nationally, they were seen as a blue wall that could safeguard Clintons election, as long as she was able to secure wins in Virginia, Nevada, and Colorado, seen as swing states.

In retrospect, of course, that was not true. Clinton won Virginia, Nevada, and Colorado while losing the blue wall states. A modest 4- to 5-point national polling lead for Clinton never should have been seen as secure.

It was this misperception, more than anything else, that drove the misguided complacency about the campaign. A candidate up 3 points in preelection national polling averages is in fact very likely to win the national popular vote, which Clinton did. But a candidate up 3 points and facing a 2-point Electoral College bias is at serious risk of losing the election which she did.

The good news for Biden is his national polling lead really is a lot bigger than that. The bad news is that the questions about the reliability of state polling have not vanished and the Electoral College bias does not appear to have diminished.

Bidens national lead is currently simply too big to be plausibly overcome by state-specific polling error or Electoral College bias. But if it shrinks by only a few points due to debates or news events or whatever else the likely outcome could tip from potential landslide to a squeaker in the blink of an eye.

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Election 2020 polls: Can you trust the polls this year? Whats different from 2016 - Vox.com

On election night in 2016, Yolanda Russell and a close friend were on vacation in Savannah with their mothers, who went to bed thinking they would awaken to the first woman having been elected president of the United States. Russell had to deliver the news that it hadnt happened, that the country had instead elected Donald Trump.

In the months that followed, as her mothers dementia worsened, Russell had to tell her again and again.

She would see him on TV and be like, Who is this? And I would be like, Mom, thats the president, said Russell, now 66, a retired public health official who lives in Orlando and heads the Florida Democratic Senior Caucus.

And she goes: The president of what? The president of this country? And I would say: Yeah, mom, the president of this country. And she would say: How did that happen? How did that happen?

She was horrified every time, Russell said.

Trumps victory in 2016 unleashed gleeful joy among Americans who voted for him and stunned the larger group that voted for Hillary Clinton.

For some, Trumps win was disorienting, challenging what they thought they knew about this country and their fellow Americans. For others, it was a sad confirmation of what they had long felt or suspected. For many, it was traumatic and life altering, provoking everything from activism to disdain for the political system.

In the days after the election, there was a rush of sick days, therapy sessions, social media rants and tear-filled huddles that often involved comfort food or alcohol. Some mosques and Islamic community centers encouraged members to gather and openly share their fears. School counselors watched for students who might be struggling, especially those from immigrant families. Pastors who typically never touched politics in their sermons grappled with how to address the election.

Democrats in states that unexpectedly voted for Trump scoured precinct-by-precinct results, trying to answer the question so many were asking: What happened? For many of those who felt targeted by Trump during his campaign, the question was more dire: What could happen?

The trauma of that night has hung over the party. Many Democrats say they will not allow themselves to become too optimistic this year, even with some promising signs: Sweeping successes in the 2018 midterm elections, Joe Bidens narrow polling advantages, a rush of liberal activism, long lines at early voting locations and a palpable sense of energy in many cities and suburban neighborhoods.

So many are afraid they could be wrong again, and this election alone wont erase that fear.

There are a lot of things that Im afraid of in this election that I was not afraid of in 2016, said Liliana Lily Bollinger, 22, who graduated from the University of California at Los Angeles in June. If Americans were reasonable, it would be apparent that Biden was going to win ... I am not staking my sanity on whether Biden wins or not because thats a big gamble.

Four years ago, she and her friends went to an election night party featuring cocktails with politics-themed names like Sexism on the Beach. When they saw where the results were headed, they returned to their dorm, where it was utter chaos.

People were crying. Were Gen Z. We dont really remember 9/11, but I feel like this must have been what it was like. People were just crying in the open hallways, people were sobbing, Bollinger said. We were so afraid and filled with dread.

Later in the night, she and others rushed into the streets, marching and yelling. Some of her classes the next day were canceled, and she doesnt remember the others.

Across the country that night, Democratic gatherings grew quieter instead of louder. Bottles of champagne sat unopened in melting ice, noisemakers sat mute and balloons remained clustered beneath ceilings, undropped. At Clintons party under the glass ceiling at the Javits Center in New York City, supporters held one another and cried as cameras snapped.

At the Trevor Projects 24-hour crisis hotline for LGBTQ youth, including those contemplating suicide, the phones began to ring, the number of calls at leastdoubling normal.

We got so many calls from people who were just scared and uncertain and surprised and shocked, said Paloma Woo, the senior crisis services manager. It was a wide range of emotions ... Anxiety and sadness, I think there was anger, too, and frustration, and general uncertainty about the future.

In the Phoenix area, Diego Acevedo watched the election returns with his parents and older sister. He was 13 and enrolled at a predominantly White private middle school, thanks to a scholarship. He didnt tell anyone that he was undocumented, fearful that being open about his status would hurt his family.

As more and more states turned red, they watched in near silence. His parents teared up as he and his sister bawled. His mother tried to comfort them, telling them that everything would be OK, that she would keep them safe, that they would succeed no matter what challenges were thrown in their way.

I was numb. I really didnt know how to process it all. It felt like a nightmare, Acevedo, now 17, said. Its one of the nights that makes up my childhood.

The next day at school, many of his conservative classmates were celebrating. He tried to act like everything was OK, fearful they would see my weakness and see who I really was. He worried Trump would quickly start his promised mass deportations.

Inside I was screaming, and I was crying, and I was yelling, he said, but outside I was just numb and with a straight face, just trying to get through the day.

Nearly a year later, the Trump administration stopped taking new applications for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program that was started by Barack Obama. For years, Acevedo and his sister had looked forward to being old enough to apply, considering it a beam of light in their future. But now that option was gone, complicating their college applications and probably limiting their future job opportunities. His sister was two months away from being eligible.

In early November 2016 in the Portland area, Kimberly Phillips didnt think she could feel anymore hopeless. A few weeks earlier, her appendix had ruptured, and as the doctors tried to save her life, she lost an early pregnancy.

Her husband had brought her mail-in ballot to the hospital so she could vote for Clinton. She was excited for the United States to elect a female president and didnt think it was possible for Trump to win after the country heard his comments about women on an Access Hollywood hot mic.

On election night, her parents and husband were in her hospital room for what was supposed to be a celebration amid so much suffering and heartbreak. Instead, they watched in growing dread. Phillips remembers vomiting at some point. She was alone when a text alert arrived early the next morning announcing Trumps victory.

It immediately changed the way she thought about her country, as she saw Trumps election partly fueled by a pocket of people who didnt like that a Black man was president and did not want a woman holding the position.

I remember just feeling so ill, that life couldnt get any more devastating, said Phillips, now 38, a public health researcher. I remember being in that hospital bed and just feeling so hopeless.

On the other side of the country in the Washington, D.C., suburbs, Jacqueline Grazette awoke the morning after the election and saw her husband standing over the bed, looking as if someone had died. He told her that Trump had won.

I was like: What are you talking about? I dont understand what youre saying. ... I could not believe it, Grazette, now 60, said. I started moaning, and I covered my head ... I just couldnt deal with it.

Eight years earlier, she hadnt thought it was possible for Obama to be elected president, as she doubted that enough White voters would back him. At the time, she was a government teacher at Georgetown Day School, where most of her students enthusiastically supported Obama, though she kept her support for him secret. The morning after that election, her students came into her classroom excitedly shouting: He won! He won! He won!

I burst into tears, she said. It just hit me what had happened.

That gave Grazette hope that a woman could also be elected, and she campaigned for Clinton. She went to bed early on election night confident that she had nothing to worry about.

Trumps win confirmed the feelings she had before Obama was elected. For weeks, she felt like she was in a fog. The day after Trumps inauguration, she headed to the Womens March on the National Mall and remembers being surrounded by women from everywhere. Every car on the Metro was filled with women who shared their hopes for the day and for the country. She felt the fog lifting.

It reminded me, she said, that there is a large number of people - not just in the United States but around the world - who know this isnt right.

Russells mothers health began to fail in March of 2017, and she died that June. Russell is convinced Trumps presidency exacerbated her mothers decline.

I think she just thought: This is it. People have lost their minds, Russell said.

For months, several polls in her home state of Florida have shown Biden beating Trump there. But Russell is skeptical.

I dont believe anything that anyone says - I have been sucker-punched. I have PTSD, she said. I am not going to let that happen to me again.

In Southern California, Bollinger - the recent UCLA graduate - is worried her mail-in ballot wont be counted, as her signature doesnt exactly match the one on her drivers license.

I tried to correct it and now it looks fake, and I am in this spiral of, Oh my God, I need my vote to count, she said. Ive never been so paranoid about making sure my vote counted. Ive never been this afraid that it wont be counted.

In the Phoenix area, Acevedo - the undocumented high school senior - has spent months helping young Latinos register to vote and prepare to cast their ballots. He now talks openly about his status, finding that advocacy work is the best way to calm his anxieties.

Soon after the DACA program stopped taking new applications, his mother took him to hear undocumented immigrants and members of mixed-status families share their stories, which were so similar to his own. He decided there could be security in being vocal rather than silent.

Hes hopeful about Tuesday but also fearful.

These past elections and news about things like DACA have taught me not to get excited, he said. I try a lot to not think about the outcome.

In the Portland area, Phillips has found herself wondering: What else could go wrong? This year has brought a deadly pandemic,a spate of police shootings of people of color and protests over them that have occasionally gone violent. The West Coast has gone up in flames, at one point making the sky in her neighborhood look like Dantes inferno.

But there has been a burst of good news, too: Shes pregnant and due around Inauguration Day.

There are so many parallels between 2016 and now. She tries to be hopeful, but she remembers what happened then.

I think we all got pretty scarred from 2016, she said.

In Maryland, Grazette - the teacher who is now a college admissions adviser - draws hope from the students she works with, nearly all of whom wrote their college admissions essays about racism. The tide has changed in the country, she said, and she hopes its enough for Trump to be defeated. She doesnt know what she will do if he is reelected.

The Black woman in me says: You always get up and put one foot in front of the other, and you just keep marching and walking, because thats what weve done for centuries, she said. But the human in me says: I dont know. I dont know. I dont know.

Read more:
Another election night nears, with trepidation replacing hope for Trump opponents - Anchorage Daily News

Right-wing religious fanatics are never short of bizarre conspiracy theories, but one of their latest is truly stunning. Last Friday, self-proclaimed Apostle Robin Bullock told televangelist Sid Roth on his Its SupernaturalYouTube channel that the devastating COVID-19 pandemic was caused not by environmental destruction or President Donald Trumps failed leadership, but by people who voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton in 2016 oh, and abortion, too.

When Hillary Clinton was running for president, shirts were made, Im With Her, Im With Her, everything was about Im With Her, Bullock said. Well, now the Book of Revelation talks about Jezebel, and Bill and Hillary Clintons life is perfectly paralleled with Ahab and Jezebel. Thats who they are. And I mean, perfectly parallel, even to the land scandal and the death and all, the murder.

Bullock did not elaborate on what the land scandal was or which deaths and murders the Clintons supposedly caused.

Okay, so all of this thing happened. When they started putting shirts, Im With Her, the Lord showed me in the Book of Revelation, He said, You see this right there, and Im looking at this in the scripture, He said, I will make a bed, and those who commit fornication with her, they will go into great tribulation, and it says this. Then it talks about, it says, I will kill her children with death. This means a pestilence or a plague, Bullock continued, referring to the coronavirus.

But then Bullock blamed the COVID-19 pandemic on abortion, making a circular, non-specific argument about death causing death.

So, the vote for Hillary Clinton Im just being bold right here and telling you something when they voted for this, the champion of abortion herself, when they voted for this, it brought the coronavirus, Bullock alleged. Thats where it came from, because He said, then it will bring a death that will kill them with death.

There are no legitimate bases whatsoever for any of Bullocks outlandish, unscientific theories.

Watch below, courtesy of RightWingWatch:

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Right-Wing Religous Nuts Blame Hillary Clinton Voters and Abortion for COVID-19 - HillReporter.com

As I went on, I could feel a change in the atmosphere. Delegates, even (or especially) from countries I was criticizing, were leaning forward. And then I said this: If there is one message that echoes forth from this conference, let it be that human rights are womens rights and womens rights are human rights, once and for all.

When I finished, the room erupted into cheers. The delegates rose, giving me a standing ovation, a rarity at buttoned-up UN gatherings. As I left the hall, women hung over banisters to grab my hand. Some had tears in their eyes. The declaration of a simple, obvious message should perhaps not have had such a galvanizing effect. But 25 years ago, it caused shock waves.

Since 1995, the phrase Womens rights are human rights has appeared on tote bags, cellphone cases, needlepoint pillows, and T-shirts. Im happy about this. But the most transformative moment of the conference wasnt my speech. It was the adoption of the Platform for Action, whereby representatives from all 189 nations committed to the full and equal participation of women in political, civil, economic, social, and cultural life. A 270-page document might not lend itself to bumper stickers or coffee mugs, but it laid the groundwork for sweeping, necessary changes.

In many ways, women are better off than they were 25 years ago. A girl born 25 years ago in Lesotho could not own property or sign a contract; today, she can. In East Africa, a girl born 25 years ago grew up in a region where female genital cutting was widespread; since then, the practice has declined significantly. In 1995, domestic violence was a crime in just 13 countries; today, it is illegal in more than 100. Weve nearly closed the global gender gap in primary-school enrollment, and maternal mortality has dropped by more than half.

Rita Colwell: Women scientists have the evidence about sexism

But the work is nowhere near done. As the changes laid out in the Platform for Action have been implemented, whats become clear is that simply embracing the concept of womens rights, let alone enshrining those rights in laws and constitutions, is not the same as achieving full equality. Rights are important, but they are nothing without the power to claim them.

In 2017, the Womens March brought millions to the streets to protest sexism and misogyny. More than a decade after the activist Tarana Burke coined the phrase Me too, the movement has reached every corner of the world. The coronavirus pandemic, the loss of millions of jobs, and the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, among too many others, have prompted activists to shine a light on the injustice and inequality facing communities of color, especially Black women. All of this has a lot to do with rights, but its also about something more. Its about power: who has it, who doesnt, and how we confront that imbalance.

Read the rest here:
Hillary Clinton: How Far Have Women Come? - The Atlantic

The chart shows the comparison between Clinton and Biden ahead of their respective elections.

Biden has opened up a wide polling lead but we're 22 days away from the election and it's notable that this was the exact time last cycle that Clinton peaked. Her support faded over the final three weeks of the campaign and Trump won narrow victories in Florida, Pennsylvania and Michigan to take the Presidency.

Will history repeat itself? As Trump gets back on the campaign trail after coronavirus, it's worth contemplating but there are two big differences: 1) Clinton never reached this much total support. Biden is at almost 52% while Clinton never hit 50%. 2) There are fewer voters who say they are undecided; leaving less room for a swing.

In 2016, almost all presidential election polls pointed to a Hillary Clinton victory over Donald Trump. The IBD/TIPP Poll was one of only two election polls credited with predicting President Trump's 2016 victory. TIPP, IBD's polling partner, succeeded in picking up on the greater enthusiasm among Republicans for their candidate.

Yet the latest IBD/TIPP Trump vs. Biden poll has a few stark contrasts with the Trump vs. Clinton race. Most obviously, a majority of likely voters back Biden (51.9%). Yet Clinton's support topped out around 45% in IBD/TIPP presidential election polls in the final weeks of the 2016 race.

Further, Biden's 9-point lead among independents in the latest IBD/TIPP 2020 election poll is a big turnaround from 2016. Trump carried independents 43%-42% in 2016, according to a postelection Pew Research survey of verified voters.

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Hillary Clinton's support peaked at this point in the last election cycle - ForexLive