Barely Biden, and Not Much Change

Election 2020 nears its end with relatively little change nationally.

The House and Senate likely remain with a seat or two of their current divisions. State legislatures remain largely unchanged, too.

We don’t know how much Joe Biden will win by, in either the popular vote or the Electoral College. It’s still too close to call in several states. Plus, Donald Trump has tried to declare himself the winner.

What 2020 tells, so far:

• State polls were way, way off this year (again), by approximately 6 percentage points.
• Democratic overweighting seems to be a problem with polls since 2012, increasing 2 percentage points each cycle (2, 4, 6… let’s not go for 8).
• Aggregators like FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics missed the mark because when you aggregate polls that are mostly in error, you get aggregated error.
• Blue Wave theories proved wrong, obviously.
• Democrats spent a lot of money on races that didn’t flip, a historic amount of money.
• Confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court didn’t lead to any flipped Senate seats.
• More than a fifth of Trump voters told pollsters they don’t like or trust Donald Trump.
• Roughly half of Biden voters were voting against Donald Trump.
• A third of Biden voters split their ballots in at least one national race (House or Senate).
• The rural-urban and male-female divisions were deeper than expected, though the dividing line moved slightly further into the suburbs.
• More than 140 million people voted, a historic number.
• Both Biden and Trump received more votes than any other candidates in history, too.

What can we determine from the above? Not much.