Pennsylvania, we get Sunday, Monday, but, you know, I would love to see a bit more. Nerves are really getting to, you know, mimosas yet.

Hello and welcome to this Sunday edition of the 538 Politics podcast. I'm Galen Droog. There are now two days until Election Day and over 93 million Americans have already voted. That number is quickly approaching 70 percent of all the votes cast in 2016. Now, of course, turnout is expected to be higher this year. So we shouldn't think of that as necessarily 70 percent of this year's vote, although it's still a very high number, according to our forecast.

Biden now has a 90 percent chance of winning the election. Democrats have a 76 percent chance of winning control of the Senate, and they have a 97 percent chance of maintaining control of the House. And according to our weather forecast, there is a 100 percent chance of rain and it is raining polls.

I'm sorry, maybe that's a little too cheesy, but it's raining coal. Hallelujah. It's just time to. Exactly.

We are honestly swimming in new polls this weekend because this is when a lot of pollsters released their final surveys before Election Day. So we've gotten polls from The New York Times, ABC, NBC, the Iowa Zeltzer poll, all kinds of polls that we look at as a final data snapshot before actual Election Day. And so that's what we're going to do on this Sunday brunch edition of the podcast. Dig through some of those polls, talk about where some remaining uncertainty lies.

And, of course, we will have another podcast for you on Monday as well. So these are not our final reflections pre Election Day quite yet. But let's get to it. And here with me to do that, our editor in chief, Nate Silver.

Hey, Nate Hagelin, how's your Sunday garden? You got a mimosa, a no mimosas yet? No. Maybe I'll get some lunch later and, you know, maybe a beverage to be consumed. It's pretty stressful. It was up early this morning to do TV.

All right. Also with us is senior politics writer Carmelo Claire. He gaylan any mimosas or Bloody Marys for, you know, like Nate.

I was up early to do an edit and then a little sun cleaning. So lovely.

I'm sticking with Lacroix. Fair enough. And also with us is senior politics writer Perry Bacon Jr.. Perry, any beverages?

I also have Lefroy. This is not a great podcast for drinking. Said Let it go to our jobs. Do you people drink on your jobs? Maybe some of you, maybe on Sunday at noon.

Hopefully they do call in listeners. Do you drink on your job? We'd love to hear from you, but usually, like journalists don't like I don't drink if I'm like writing code or something. But usually you do more travel and then you have these social events where you kind of networking and drinking.

So exactly when I scheduled this podcast for noon on Sunday, I imagine I might have a Bloody Mary, but in fact I only have water, so it goes.

But before we get into all of the polls that I mentioned in the intro, we have a special surprise, and that is that we all want to congratulate Nate on his appearance last night on Saturday Night Live. He really made us all proud.

So let's take a moment and give his appearance or listen, Nate Silver, you will know the score, even though I was wrong before.

So, look, guys, our current model shows that Trump has less than a one and six chance of winning about the same odds as the number one coming up when you roll a die.

So, for example, he won.

Oh, well, I guess that shows you that it's technically possible, however unlikely. But roll it again and you'll see that it's a hard one. But roll it again.

An Electoral College tie, that's not even an option. OK, I'm just going to leave because I think our country is haunted.

Nate, you did a great job explaining probability on Saturday Night Live. I appreciate the royalty checks, you know, or have not come in yet. So to contact NBC about that. But it was was a lot of fun to be on the show. You know, grew up watching it as a kid, you know, late night.

But I feel like probabilities have gone mainstream. And also, like that dude totally jacked our impressions of Nate on the podcast.

I mean, he's a good comedian.

He, like there was some uncanny valley about some of the mannerisms of like the intonations and stuff.

I'm sure he watched these podcasts, YouTube. It was really funny. Yeah, he even had the old fashioned beat glasses. No, I haven't seen you wear glasses. I know it's a long time.

I had the thought that, like, the costume designer knew exactly how you dress because those buffalo check shirts are your jam.

Yeah, I've never had that happen before. It's pretty weird, actually, if someone invest the time, these relatively subtle things. So, you know, kudos to SNL. I love it.

Nate, what happened to those glasses? I just like the context a little better, especially now in this time of mask wearing. By the way, one nice thing about November, the mask gives you warm.

Yes. All right. Well, now that we've gotten that SNL out of the way, let's talk about the polls. So, Nate, kick us off. How much polling data have we gotten in over the past couple of days since we last talked on model talk?

Yeah, I would say we have not gotten a huge amount of hugely interesting data. We've got a lot of polls, but nothing that would kind of overall shift your impressions that much of the race.

Although let me talk about some exceptions. So the most important polls. Anywhere in the country are in Pennsylvania, a lot of pollsters waited until this very last weekend, some are still waiting to release their final Pennsylvania polls. It's a tipping point state, 35 or 40 percent, the times as important as a bunch of other swing states put together, and our math at least.

But those polls showed a race that was about what you might expect, an ABC News Washington Post poll that showed Biden seven points ahead in Pennsylvania. You had a upshot, New York Times Siena poll that had him six points ahead there. Those are both a little better than five points in our polling average. However, those are groups that had shown Biden was slightly larger leads before. So if kind of had gamed it out, six or seven points was about what I was expecting and consistent with our overall forecast there.

You know, you had an interesting, shall we say, poll of Iowa from Ann Selzer, who was maybe the best pollster in the country, who had Trump up seven points there, same margin she had in 2016, portending a big Trump sweep in the Midwest. However, unlike in 2016, that's data point stands a little bit alone. I think people don't necessarily realize that when you do polls and when you're honest about them like Ann Selzer is, then you're going to have a lot of variation within the margin of error, the margin of error and a person poll is actually about plus or minus seven points.

So if Trump is really up two points in Iowa, you're going to get some Trump plus nine or Bidens plus fives or whatever else.

There's actually been kind of a deficit this year on national polls, I think, appropriately, because who really cares about national polls? NBC Wall Street Journal had their final national poll out this morning that had Trump behind by 10. They've been behind by 11 in their penultimate poll. So, I mean, none of these polls are really showing. On the whole, I want to say none of them, because some of them show shifts in different directions. But if you kind of like, just take the average, then they show a pretty steady race in the final week here.

All right, Claire and Perry, I'm sure you have been watching all of these polls trickle in. And longtime listeners to this podcast know that we don't like to emphasize individual polls. We always tell people to average them and that will give us the best picture. But of course, all eyes are on these polls in the final days. And so to indulge just a little bit, what data has peaked your interest or have you been paying attention to over the past few days as it's come in?

I mean, I think everyone I'm kind of interested in the Pennsylvania stuff, so I'm not saying anything particularly revolutionary. This morning, I did have an email from someone I chat with occasionally in Iowa being like, I think the Iowa poll is an outlier. So there's certainly buzz that people are certainly highly attuned to what's being released in these past couple of days. But, yeah, I think I'm just attuned to the Pennsylvania stuff because I think that's the most inflects state.

So I'm not really saying anything like different from the newspaper or, you know, click on any Twitter prognostication about what's different.

The national polls are not great for the who's going to win the election, obviously, I guess. But in the sense of telling you where the state of the country is, I found the NBC Wall Street Journal poll helpful in that, you know, Biden is ahead by between eight and 10 and a lot of national polls, let's say seven and 10, a lot of national polls. And I think that is striking as we go into a period where we think there might be an attempt by Trump to contest the election in a certain way.

It is worth noting that it appears that even a majority is clear that Biden is going to win the support of most voters in the country. And I think that's notable to emphasize going into this is there's almost no poll anywhere that would suggest the majority or a plurality of voters are for Trump.

I will say, like in my pantheon of things that I'm watching, Ohio isn't getting polled as much anymore because people see it as much more red. But the latest ones we have in our average have Biden up plus five and plus one and outside of like, again, Homer ism. You know, people I talked to in reporting two years ago predicted that Biden would win Ohio back blue like that would be a personally interesting and let the circle be unbroken kind of thing for me.

So I was sort of interested to see Biden up five.

This was back when you were reporting during the primary and voters there were telling you like of the field. I think Biden is the only one who could do it.

Yeah, this is a story I did about two suburbs in northeast Ohio, both of which have been traditionally Democratic, and one had gone red during 2016 and one in state blue. And I just kept on hearing over and over again, Biden, Biden, Biden, Ohio, Ohio, Ohio. So I'm sort of interested to see that play out on election night and these past two polls. Biden plus five kind of caught my eye in Ohio. But again, it's one poll and everyone knows what we say about one poll.

Yeah, we have Ohio. Here's our current forecast. Trump forty nine point five percent, Biden forty nine point five percent. That is the closest state right now. I mean, Ohio has been weird. I mean, it used to be like the most polled state and now you kind of go through periods of a few weeks when it doesn't get polled. I think it's been more buzz about Iowa because there's a Senate race there and there isn't in Ohio this cycle.

But Ohio has more electoral votes. It's sort of more symbolically significant in some ways. If Trump is tied in Ohio, you would think he's losing Pennsylvania. So it's interesting. Yeah, I wouldn't hey, I don't know which other states we're going to get. I mean, all these both prices pollsters kind of think alike. They're like, we're going to treat north. Line is like a second or third tier states in much of North Carolina, polls out on Friday and then Pennsylvania, we get Sunday, Monday.

But, you know, I would love to see a little bit more Ohio and let's see more Nevada.

It's a lot of polls in Nevada, but not very much. It's high quality.

Well, so apart from what you would like to see, do you actually have a sense of how much data we will get between now and the morning of Election Day, a day and a half from now?

It should be a lot. But like it's not always as much of a climax as people think, in part because, like, so OK, from high quality, high percentage live caller polls, who's going to do more weighing in? New York Times is done. The CNN is done, at least I assume maybe going to final national poll from them. I think ABC News is done with its state poll. I don't know if it can have a national poll for you or not.

I could find that really easily, but I'm too busy and lazy. We may get more Fox News state polls, and they sometimes have polled states like Nevada that others have neglected to. That would be really nice if Fox did another round. Quinnipiac usually does something very late. I would want to get some Quinnipiac at some point on Monday. Marist might give us a Florida poll. Monmouth will give us a Florida poll. We're going to get a set of state polls from morning consult.

I am reliably told, you know, we'll get another round of Ipsos state polls. There are lots of little one offs, but the final polling is often pretty anticlimactic because like people don't want to stray too much from the consensus. And Selzer aside or ABC News aside, when we had Biden up 17 points in Wisconsin or whatever most polls are, you know, if they were a little bit of an outlier before then, magically now they kind of match the 538 or RCP average, even some of the more partisan flavored stuff.

I noticed Susquehanna was his firm that's very Republican leaning this cycle. And they had a Florida poll that shifted from Biden plus five to Trump plus five or something like that. And then this morning, oh, now it's just a one point Trump lead in Florida after all.

That's a little weird. I mean, it's not that weird one. A one point lead for Trump is a very, very plausible result in Florida. But like the little shift to drive the narrative and then the shift back at the end to cover your ass. I mean, you know, next time make it tide just so you really cover your ass.

After the Iowa poll from Selzer came out, I think people were looking for those New York Times CNN polls. People tend to think, you know, NATO's involved in those polls. The New York Times of all those polls was are hypers. We read them a plus poll. So I think the fact that they had Biden by three in Florida, Biden by six in Pennsylvania, 11 in Wisconsin, feels a bit high with the fact that they are so high single digits.

Seems right in Arizona by six. I think the CNN polls probably stopped any kind of Democratic panic that would have happened if the Pennsylvania number was like two or something, though, in a different discussion coming out the Selzer poll, I think the CNN numbers are going to make people go in Election Day.

I think assuming what we've been assuming the whole time, just Biden's heavy favorite and something to note in that New York Times Siena College polling is that the sample size there is much bigger than we usually expect from a state level poll. So like in Pennsylvania, they had over eight hundred respondents, whereas a lot of times we get polls where there are only eight hundred respondents also in Arizona, Florida and Wisconsin. And all of the sample sizes were above a thousand.

How much does that change the margin of error, given that those sample sizes are so large?

And so it's pretty unusual to have that high quality of poll issue, a state poll with an 18 person sample size, and our model will weight that poll a lot as a result. Now, it's one thing if you have like some crappy pollster, a lot of crappy pollsters do have these large samples, but like basically the combination of a plus pollster with a person sample. I mean, it's almost going get treated as like two and a half polls or something like that.

So therefore, that will make it harder for the average to move much in these states where you have these huge upshot samples.

So as we think about the data that we've just gotten in where things stand, which I mentioned at the beginning, we're now giving Biden a 90 percent chance of winning Democrats, a 76 percent chance of winning the Senate.

I'm going to be a prick here. We're not giving anything. The polls give Biden a 90 percent chance of winning.

Our forecast has taken the polls and created a probabilistic forecast that says that Biden has a 90 percent chance of winning the election and Democrats have a seventy six percent chance of winning the Senate. Thank you for catching me, Nate. Where does the uncertainty still lie?

It lies because Pennsylvania is not exactly safe for Biden.

I mean, no state exactly. I mean, California is safe, but Pennsylvania, the fact that the margin is five points and not seven or eight or nine points like you see in a lot of polls of Wisconsin and Michigan is pretty significant. If Pennsylvania were also a plus seven for Biden, then his odds might be ninety five percent nationally, said a 90 percent. And that's a pretty big difference. I think actually a one in ten years, one in twenty chance.

So. So Pennsylvania gives Trump some hope if he wins Pennsylvania. And there's no other state that Biden can feel super duper secure about to replace it. I mean, there are many candidates, there's Arizona, there's North Carolina, which I think has become a little underrated in the final equation here. There's Florida, there's Georgia. But, you know, Biden can't feel too good about any of that. If the polls are off there for him to lose Pennsylvania, then, OK, maybe you are having a partial repeat of 2016.

You know, look, one thing to remind people to like the 90 percent include scenarios where it's much closer than expected, 90 percent includes some escape by one point. In Arizona, you lose Pennsylvania. Right. Includes Biden epic, 14 point blowout and includes right down to the wire scenario. So it's not 90 percent of Biden without any sweat, blood or tears. The Clarin.

I'm curious about your thoughts on this. A day and a half away from election morning where the uncertainty lies in reporting that you've done or digging through the data.

So this is outside of the model and that can in the polls. But obviously there's some uncertainty about how does the electoral process itself happen? There's millions of people that haven't voted and they're going to go to the polls on Tuesday and hopefully they're able to go and everything's fine. Their first question is, is there some reason that, you know, I don't want to speculate deeply here, but is there some reason why or some accident or intentional malfeasance or something where people in a state can't vote?

We can't obviously predict that kind of thing. That's unusual. And then the second part being these polls are assuming that the vote count is conducted and everyone who tries to vote gets to vote and their vote gets counted. And that we do have lots of efforts from the Trump team to in some ways maybe restrict how mail in ballots are counted. So I think that's an important uncertainty. We can't give in the forecast, even if the polls are right.

I think one question is like the scale of the Biden win, because I'm looking at the CBS News tracker, for example, and they list Biden as having likely two hundred and seventy nine electoral votes. So they list him almost certainly winning or likely winning Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. But I think Biden winning to seventy nine versus Biden also winning Arizona, Iowa, Ohio, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida, which CBS all ranks as tossups like we're talking about 270 versus 350 versus 400 electoral votes is a very big difference.

And I am pretty uncertain about which one of those it'll be.

Yeah, and of course, the differences in electoral votes that you just mentioned may very well also mean the difference in who controls the Senate, which is a massive difference in what a Biden presidency could look like and how much liberal policy they could potentially pass.

One thing I said earlier should not go totally unreported, which is that there is a ninety seven or ninety eight percent chance, whatever it is in our model, that Joe Biden wins the popular vote, which would be the seventh time in elections that Democrats won the popular vote. And so this debate is mostly about is there a path to a college for Trump? And there is. But like even conditional on winning the Electoral College, Trump is usually losing the popular vote in our model.

We're going to talk more about how we'll be covering election night itself on Monday's podcast. But I do want to mention, because this happened today, Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller was on ABC News's This Week, and he said this about how, I guess, the Trump campaign views the tallying of votes on election night. Quote, If you speak with many smart Democrats, they believe President Trump will be ahead on election night, probably getting two hundred eighty electoral somewhere in that range, and then they're going to try to steal it back after the election.

We believe that will be over 290 electoral votes on election night. So no matter what they try to do, what kinds of hijinx or lawsuits or whatever kind of nonsense they try to pull off, we're still going to have enough electoral votes to get President Trump re-elected. Now, what he said is, is not how elections work. First and foremost, I don't think it's true that people think that Trump will even be leading to the point where he has two hundred eighty electors if you just added up the states where he was leading.

But, of course, that's again suggesting that the Trump campaign does not believe that there should be any tallying after Election Day, regardless of whether that vote is by mail or in person or however. So I guess it's like that four hours between when the polls close and midnight. That is when all of the tallying should count or something like that. How should we in the media go about covering this kind of framing of the election? And if Trump tries to argue that this is the way it should be done on election night, I mean, it's misinformation, as you said, Galen.

It's not the way elections work. We have a very helpful graphic which listeners should go to and then share with their families about when you can expect votes to be counted. But I do think and I think Perry alluded to this in his answer about things, uncertainties that we're worried about. That is probably my thing that I. Watching most closely is how the Trump campaign handles this and how different media organizations handle misleading or untruthful things coming out of a campaign, because we have tons and tons of mail in ballots this time around, they are allowed to be counted right now.

So this metaphor, and I'm going to call it a metaphor for the way he's explaining his conception of how votes are counted, that the Democrats would steal back votes after Election Day, those votes being votes that haven't been counted. It's almost the way that America has typically consumed the up and down of election night via television networks. Like any network has to fill the minutes. They'll give you an update every 20 minutes with, well, this is what the vote count looks like in Florida.

And so-and-so is currently up and, you know, like so they'll give you different who's up, who's down at various points during the night. And some of those things are meaningful, but a lot of those things are not meaningful. And so it gives people different conceptions at different points in time about who's winning an election when it might not even matter. What matters at the end is who has the most votes when everything is counted. And I was reading back our 2016 live blog the other day, and I think we do a good job of telling you which one of those things matter and which one of those things don't.

You know, as far as like this indication in this particular state could be an indication of something more? I think we were pretty good, even with the four years of hindsight that we have in giving people these cautions. But I don't think some networks or organizations are good at it. And the Trump campaign is sure as hell misleading about all this stuff. I'm sure Nate and Perry have stuff to say about this, too.

Just on the Sunday before the election, one of the advisers to the president went on the American Broadcasting Network and basically announced a plan to not count people's legally. Cast a vote is outrageous. And another sign of where we are and how this president and his advisors do not respect democratic values or norms. The idea that millions of people have sent in their ballot, the news media should be very clear that those votes should be presumed to be counted, not uncounted, and maybe people should reconsider.

If people like Jason Miller should be on TV in the days of the election, if they're going to continually repeat misinformation, things that are inaccurate and suggested people is legally cast. Votes don't count. The comments were ridiculous and deplorable.

Yeah, it's menacing, gaslighting, anti-democratic, lowercase d bullshit. And we could talk about each of those adjectives individually. Something else that it is is also betraying an extreme lack of confidence in Trump's ability to win the election legitimately. One thing we do try to emphasize with our forecast is that 10 percent is a lot bigger than zero. It's not totally crazy for polls in Pennsylvania to be off by five points. So there is a shot that Trump could win legitimately.

And I kind of worry that if he does win, people will assume it was stolen somehow. At the same time, they have their advisor going on TV and kind of announcing a plan.

Well, plan is doing a lot of work there, too.

General Motors announcing a willingness to indulge in fantasies of stealing the election at the very least, and, of course, gaslighted by making it seem like the other side is doing that instead. I mean, look, this is where it gets tricky to cover. And I don't know quite where to weigh in. On the one hand, like, you have to have some legal theory by which you can stop processing votes that a judge will uphold. Now, which type of judge in which courts, that's different.

But it's not like you can just blanket say we're going to stop counting votes and wavier one. One thing that certainly has been litigated in several states is whether mail ballots that arrive after Election Day can be counted. Gailen, you and I talked about some model talk. I mean, on the one hand, if you send a ballot in and it gets delayed in the mail, it is terrible that a voter doesn't get his or her vote counted. On other hand, I'm not sure that will have that big an impact because Democrats got their votes in very early.

It's not that high percentage of ballots in some states important, including Pennsylvania, the most likely tipping point state those ballots can be counted for a couple of days afterward, North Carolina, too. So I'm not sure the stakes are super high as well. Ohio, but then you have escalation, right? You have the GOP trying to toss out one hundred some thousand ballots in Harris County, Texas, which is Houston, that were cast at drop boxes that the state supreme court, OK, the state legislature okayed.

If I had to bet, I wouldn't think that lawsuit has that much of a chance of succeeding. That's different, right? That to me is escalating. Like I can understand. OK, you get ballots in after mail after Election Day. You have multiple ways to vote in this state. I can kind of understand why states are different laws on that. That, to me is much more menacing, that Harris County attempt.

Yeah, so that was about drivethrough voting in particular. And there it looks like a conservative activist and three Republican candidates have asked both state and federal courts to toss out one hundred twenty seven thousand votes that were cast by drive. Now, the Texas Supreme Court, which is comprised entirely of Republicans, has already ruled in favor of drivethrough voting last week. So I think the expectation is that those votes will stand and it's a pretty blatant attempt to throw out a particular party's votes in a method of voting that was devised in order to vote safely during a pandemic.

However, of course, now this is being brought to a federal court. It's unclear how that will move forward. But I mean, again, that is obviously a clear escalation of an attempt to throw out certain parties votes. Final thoughts here as we wrap up, because we're only, I think. A matter of hours away from the next time we record a podcast. Yeah, my thought is we've talked about, you know, the polling and certainty and uncertainty a lot.

But I think this back end of the conversation we've been having is in some ways the most important one. And I think when you're thinking about, you know, health in general is a is a sliding scale of things, I think we're currently on the unhealthy side of democratic process, like the fact that these are our concerns and huge news stories and major topics of conversation is a not good sign for small democracy. All of this voting stuff and this rampant misinformation.

Jason Miller slapping some numbers on democratic statement and thinking that he can confuse voters is troubling. That's sort of where my mindset is right now, is that I hope that we will be responsible and vigilant and that vote counts will go off safely. That's my big that's a big concern of mine, too, that people will be safe and responsible and that will be able to handle this well. But it's not a great conversation to be having two days before the election.

And that's where my my head is. And that's my final thought on this Sunday afternoon.

Yeah. In some ways, I don't think obviously if Trump wins and people have lots of conversations about forecasts and stuff like that, I don't think is the race that the forecasts are very interesting, at least for the presidency. Joe Biden is a pretty big lead in polls. Not only that, so unprecedented that Trump couldn't win, but like there's no way to look at the polls and say it's anybody's race. I mean, Joe Biden's race to lose and like the fact that we put a number on that doesn't really I don't know.

So it's all the other stuff. And the fact that I mean, the downside scenarios where there are real erosions to the democratic system are pretty serious for everybody.

All right. Well, thank you, everyone, for sharing those thoughts. Those were important points to make. As much as we do talk about data and polls, they're not everything. And hopefully we've done a decent job of covering democratic norms on this podcast over the past several months as well. And I know that we're going to continue to talk about those and cover those in the final days of this process. But just to give people a little sense of what to expect, tomorrow, we're going to talk about our final pre results.

Reflections give everyone a rundown of what to expect from us on Tuesday with live blogging. And all of that stuff will be just hours away from freezing the forecast models. So we can talk about that as well. So I encourage everyone to come back and join us for our podcast and your feeds tomorrow evening. And then we'll have coverage all day long on Tuesday. But for now, let's leave it there. So thank you, Nate Claret and Perry, for sharing this Sunday with CNN.

My name is Galen Drog. Tony Chow is in the virtual control room. Claire Videgaray Curtis is on audio editing. You can get in touch by emailing us at Podcast's at five thirty eight dotcom. You can also, of course, treated us with questions or comments. If you're a fan of the show, leave us a rating or review in the Apple podcast store or tell someone about us. You can also follow us on YouTube. Thanks for listening and we'll see you soon.