As Election Day Nears, Here’s What We Know

As Election Day Nears, Here’s What We Know

By Jonathan Bernstein 

bloomberg.com

3 min

A weird year.

Get Jonathan Bernstein’s newsletter every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe.

Since March, I’ve been saying that there was a lot more uncertainty in this year’s presidential race than models based on past elections would detect. With seven weeks until Election Day, that’s becoming less true.

There were basically three sources of uncertainty this year.

Perhaps the most obvious was the coronavirus pandemic. The course of the virus was essentially unpredictable back in March, and so was its likely electoral effect. There simply weren’t enough similar events historically to make anything more than an educated guess about how voters would react, and whether they would reward or punish President Donald Trump. No one could even predict the relationship between the pandemic’s severity and public opinion: Some foreign leaders and U.S. governors saw their polling numbers shoot up during the crisis, despite high case and death counts, while others didn’t.

At this point, though, whatever effect the virus may have had is almost certainly built into the race. There’s still the possibility of some significant event unfolding before the vote. But that can happen in any election year — and most late events fail to change things much.

The second big unknown was the economy. The effects of economic change on elections have been studied for years, but the huge swings the U.S. has undergone since the pandemic began are off the scale. Making matters worse, there was reason to believe the entire relationship might not have worked as normal this time. Usually, voters punish presidents when the economy is bad and reward them when it’s good. But this year, it was at least possible that they would forgive a recession deliberately imposed to save lives.

Again, all of that is mostly built in by now. It’s conceivable that seven weeks of particularly good or bad economic statistics might move voters a bit. But the bulk of the effect has surely already taken place.

That leaves one further source of unusual uncertainty: voting during a pandemic. Pollsters don’t know who is going to vote — in fact, voters themselves at this point only know their intentions, which may or may not predict what they actually do. Modeling the likely electorate is always difficult, but toss in a pandemic — and a president who seems determined to disrupt the election in unusual ways — and it’s going to be harder than usual to know if turnout models are correct. Quantitative forecasters can try to include such variables in their calculations. But the truth is we won’t really know until the count is complete — days, or even weeks, after Nov. 3.

1. Excellent Dave Hopkins item on the Trump campaign’s money woes.

2. William Howell and Terry Moe at the Monkey Cage on the presidency after Trump.

3. Wendy J. Schiller and Charles Stewart III on the direct election of senators.

4. Will Wilkinson makes the case against Trump on the pandemic. I’ve tended toward the view that Trump’s failures through March were excusable because information was scarce and a lot of other governments made mistakes too. (From April on, I think it’s hard to deny Trump’s culpability.) Wilkinson’s argument is that a merely average president would have done much better early on. Plausible!

5. And Emily Badger, Quoctrung Bui and Margot Sanger-Katz on the slowing of the U.S. mail. Yup, it really happened.

Get Early Returns every morning in your inbox. Click here to subscribe. Also subscribe to Bloomberg All Access and get much, much more. You’ll receive our unmatched global news coverage and two in-depth daily newsletters, the Bloomberg Open and the Bloomberg Close.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

To contact the author of this story:

Jonathan Bernstein at jbernstein62@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:

Timothy Lavin at tlavin1@bloomberg.net

Published on September 15, 2020, 7:30 AM EDT

Comments 0