Biden Needs More Paths to 270 Electoral Votes

Nate Silver: “It’s not crazy to think that this 270-268 map could work. Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania are relatively similar to one another demographically — meaning their outcomes are likely to be correlated. And the map is consistent with what you might expect if Biden indeed loses ground with Black and Hispanic voters while holding his own among white voters in the Rust Belt.”

“But I think people are understating just how precarious this narrow path is. True, in some sense, it’s only the tipping-point state — the one that provides the decisive 270th electoral vote — that matters. But as the person who coined the term tipping-point state, I’m here to tell you that people are getting too cute with the concept. The problem is that you can only identify the tipping-point state after the fact — beforehand, there’s typically a lot of uncertainty about it, which is why you always want multiple paths to 270+ electoral votes.”

“Take 2020 as a contrast. In that election, Biden held polling leads in the Blue Wall states and in the ‘Sunbelt Trio’ of Georgia, Nevada and Arizona. For that matter he was even slightly ahead in polls of Florida and North Carolina. Biden substantially underperformed his polls in the Blue Wall states — as Hillary Clinton had in 2016 — but not by quite enough to lose them. He did lose Florida and North Carolina, of course. However, Biden also had backup options in the form of Georgia, Nevada and Arizona, where the polling proved to be largely accurate.”