Political scientists say stuff about the 2020 election. Should you care?

OK, folks.  This thing is almost done.  Maybe.  And here I am, a political scientist.  I, like, read stuff, and look at numbers, 'n stuff.  I'm supposed to dispense wisdom and insight, and whatnot, about whatever is about to happen.  Let's do this thing.

Today, I put on my professional, political scientist costume.

The October, 2020 issue of PS: Political Science & Politics is our traditional vehicle for simplified mathematical models predicting a presidential election.  And I do mean, "simplified."  We use regression models based on no more than a couple of independent variables, or similarly parsimonious (if occasionally computationally complex) models to use past elections to forecast the upcoming election based on the premise that whatever is about to happen will occur following the same rules.  The rules of physics don't change, so politics shouldn't either, right?  Right?

Anyway, moving on.  Some of these models use polls, but many do not, and I am particularly interested in the models that don't use polls, from a scientific perspective, yet the ideal way to evaluate these models is the same way that we evaluate polls.  Take them together.  Yes, I have a favorite-- Alan Abramowitz's "Time for a Change" model, but he didn't even really do it this year, 'cuz this year is Capital-D "Different."  The rules, they are-a changin'.  (But Zimmy still sucks.)  Does that bug me?  Yeah, but as I commented when Q2 GDP came out... somethin' was going to be weird anyway.  So without further ado, let's have a look-see at what some models say, in very brief form.

As I mentioned, Abramowitz changed his model.  Rather than use the "Time for a Change" model, he used an incumbent punishment model that forecast 319 electoral votes for Biden.

Lewis-Beck & Tien published an economy-based model that forecast a Dem sweep.  Their model forecast Trump getting 43% of the two-party vote.

DeSart used state-level analysis to forecast a Biden victory, as did Jerome et al.

Enns & Lagodny gave Biden a very slight edge based on the economy.

Armstrong & Graefe used a multi-method approach that gave Biden an edge in the popular vote.  (I'll spare you a rant on "the popular vote" for today.)

Basically, I am giving you the impression that the models, taken together, show Biden having an edge based on "the fundamentals" and the polls.  And that is basically what they show.  That said, there were a couple of models that actually predicted a Trump victory.

Helmut Norpoth gets to publish a junk model every year, because, um... uh... Anyway, he has a junk model that uses primary divisiveness to forecast the general election, and that model, understandably, forecasts Trump because Trump had no competition, whereas there was a contest on the Dem side.  Does the model have any real, scientific value?  No.  Why does it get published every year?  We have too many trees, and too much ink.  Helmut has graciously volunteered to write some junk to help with this problem.  I'm not going to bother beyond that.

Lockerbie, on the other hand, has a scientifically useful model that gives Trump an edge.  It uses economic pessimism to predict elections, and that model forecasts a Trump victory.

I'm painting in broad strokes here, but the basic point is that the models do not uniformly point to a Biden landslide, nor do they even uniformly point to a Biden victory.  And I'm not just talking about that junk model from Helmut.

Still, according to political science forecasting models taken together, Biden has an edge.  And if I adhered to my promise from 2016, then right now, I'd just tell you that Biden will probably win.  I'd go through some kind of computation to weigh these models, and give you a weighted estimate of, I dunno, 75% chance that Biden wins.  That's the weighted number that I'm pulling out of you figure it out because I'm not bothering with the calculations.

So let's talk about why.

The Oracle of Emory, Alan Abramowitz, changed his model.  Fun story.  Back in 2008-- in the before-times-- there was a panel at the American Political Science Association about the upcoming election.  Lots 'o forecasters were presenting their models.  They speculated about all of the things that were different about 2008.  "Should we change our models," they asked?  What about race?  What about... what about... what about...  Alan got up there and did a snarky thing where he listed a bunch of stupid trivialities in 2008 that one could, in principle, say made everything different.  He then said that he was going to use the same model he had used every election going back for a couple of decades.  Ya' know... like a data analyst.

And it worked.

Then, 2012 came along, and he started fussing with his model.  I got annoyed.

In 2016, he just flat-out said he didn't believe his own model.  (To be fair, neither did I.)  And this year, he just threw it out.

Oy.

OK, so where do things stand?  Both political science (meaning: the forecasting models) and the polls agree.  Biden has an edge.  A substantial one.  The models consistently but not uniformly say that Biden is leading and Helmut should, as always, be ignored.  Lockerbie... not so much.  Like I said, consistently, but not uniformly.

The polls have kept Biden in the lead.  But, as I have also written, there are a variety of questions about whether or not we can trust the polls.  Still, if the polls and the forecasting models agree, shouldn't I just tell you that the odds favor Biden?

According to the betting at PredictIt as of this morning, Biden is ahead by a not-quite 2 to 1 margin.  For what that's worth.  Is the uncertainty based on overcorrection for 2016?  Maybe, but there's something else.

The other day, I participated in a forum about the election.  I didn't say a word about the polls.  I didn't say a word about the forecasting models.  You know what I addressed?  Vote-counting, voting technology, and Bush v. Gore.

What does it take for Joe Biden to become president?  He needs to get 270 electoral votes through an electoral process.

And... then... face inevitable legal challenges from Donald Trump and his army of lawyers, probably including the DoJ, led by Bill Barr.  Will these legal challenges have any intellectual or constitutional merit?  Fuck no.  Will that matter?

Do you remember Bush v. Gore?  What you think you know about it is probably wrong.  In 2000, the final vote tally in Florida put George W. Bush ahead of Al Gore by 537 votes.  That's it.  That came down to a lot of factors, including the "butterfly ballot" in Palm Beach County, but Gore's legal case was a request for a specific standard of recounting ballots in three counties.  And he made the case based on the 14th Amendment and the equal protection clause.  His case was arguably weakened by the fact that an equal protection case is stronger if you make the case for a full, statewide recount, and subsequent analysis of the ballots by a consortium of journalists showed that the specific recount that Gore requested would not have given him the presidency.  Yet, the recount was halted, and the Supreme Court sided against Gore in his request for that recount.

So why was Bush v. Gore so... weird?  The Justices who wrote the opinion didn't actually know what a recount would do.  They... just wanted George W. Bush to be president.  And they didn't want to create any precedent that could hurt their candidates in the future, so they wrote a ruling that said that their ruling could never be used as precedent in any future case.

That's how you can tell when the Supreme Court knows they're just reverse-engineering an opinion to get to the outcome they want.  They tell you that you can't use it as precedent.

As I often remind you, we on the political science side of things explain the Supreme Court, not with so-called philosophies of constitutional interpretation, but with "the attitudinal model."  The attitudinal model is a scholarly model asserting that judges and Justices are nothing more than conventional politicians in stupid costumes.  They dress up their partisan and ideological preferences in disingenuous bullshit that they call "constitutional interpretation," but they are nothing more than politicians in stupid costumes.

In my opinion, the evidence for the attitudinal model is sufficiently strong that if you are going to contest my claim, you had better present a very strong case for the sartorial value of those robes.  And admittedly, my fashion sense is about as lacking as any mathematically inclined college professor.  Yes, some stereotypes are true.  We, mathematicians, know nothing about fashion.  So if you are going to contest my claim, that's your best and only line of attack.

Anyway, very few politicians are straight-down-the-line liberals or conservatives on every issue.  They'll surprise you, and cast an odd vote once in a while, and so will Justices.  Nevertheless, the attitudinal model has a great deal of predictive power.  And it means that Justices will accept "constitutional" arguments that are clearly nothing more than disingenuous bullshit if those arguments will yield the outcomes they want.  Not always.  Occasionally, they will show something resembling intellectual integrity.  Mostly, though, they are politicians in stupid costumes.

Consider Obamacare.  Yeah, this is a post about the election, but I'm going somewhere with this.  Eventually. What, are you not accustomed to my circuitous writing?

Anyway, consider the individual mandate.  The individual mandate was written as a tax.  Why?  Because Congress has the power to tax.  Article I.  Trump hasn't stolen that one.  Yet.

Give him time, and he'll declare a phony national emergency in order to steal that one too.

Anyway, back on track.  In 2009, when the authors of the many-and-varied versions of the Affordable Care Act wrote the bill(s), they wrote the "individual mandate" as a tax 'cuz Congress can't throw you in jail for not buyin' somethin'.  But, Democrats didn't want to say, "hey, y'all!  We're raising your taxes!"  Obama had campaigned on a promise not to raise middle class taxes, and Democrats are afraid of their own shadows, and yadda, yadda, yadda.  So, they chose to call a thing that quacked, "a Chuck Berry Walker."

Don't ask why it crossed the state line!  Zing!

Anyway, Obamacare was a big, complex, Rube Goldberg law with lots and lots of moving parts.  Most of the big pieces were popular.  There was only one piece that was unpopular.  The individual mandate, which was originally proposed by the Heritage Foundation as part of the Republican counter-proposal to "HillaryCare" back in the '90s.  A lot of Republicans, including Chuck Grassley, even kept up their support for the mandate throughout Obamacare negotiations!  But... eventually, they needed to find a piece of the actual law to oppose rather than just ranting about "death panels" like fuckin' morons.

I mean, you couldn't actually bring a case to the Supreme Court challenging the law on the basis of "death panels," right?  Right?  They have limits, right?  Right?

Anyway, so here's the thing.  It was a fucking tax.  Article I.  And basically everyone with an iota of intellectual seriousness knew it.  So let me tell you about how NFIB came about.  I ain't gonna name names here, but I have a personal connection to one of the movers and shakers behind the pseudo-intellectual case.

After Obamacare passed, the serious legal theorists on the conservative/libertarian side basically said to themselves, "yeah, this law sucks, but it's clearly constitutional."  But then they got to talkin'.  But only to themselves.  And they asked themselves, "hey, can we talk ourselves into a case that this is unconstitutional?"

OK, so here's what you should never, under any circumstances, do.  Never try, actively, to talk yourself into intellectual comfort.  You will always succeed.  Even if you are completely full of shit, you will always succeed.

So here's what they decided.  They decided that because the Democrats chose not to call a tax "a tax," they couldn't use Article I.  Article I only applies if the politicians making the public pitch use it in their rhetoric.  And yeah, everyone who actively engages with society in any way will eventually interact with the healthcare system, so there is a cost imposed on society by not purchasing health insurance, but... imagine this...

[I'm not making this up-- a very prominent legal theorist who built the case in NFIB thought this was a really important point...]

Imagine some hermit living out in the middle of fucking nowhere, who never interacts with anyone ever.  You know, like a survivalist who hunts and fishes and all that...  Our survivalist hermit actually has no income.  'Cuz... he's got no fuckin' job.  So in fact, he has no tax to pay.  And he never interacts with the healthcare system anyway.

But 'cuz the law was written to use the terminology of "mandates," the law calls our survivalist hermit some kind of scofflaw for not buying health insurance, and in so doing, does harm to our survivalist hermit who never interacts with society ever.

Like, fucking ever.

So you see, it's not a tax, it's a mandate, and because it hurts our survivalist hermit in this way, it does irreparable injury to people who... oh fuck it.  I can't keep typing this shit.

The thing is, one of the big movers and shakers behind NFIB actually, seriously made this case.  To me.  In public.  As an explanation for why it is a mandate, not a tax, and why it is harmful as a mandate rather than a tax, and therefore an unconstitutional act of Congress.  For real.

This is what happens when a bunch of people decide that they are going to try to talk themselves into an outcome that they know is bullshit.  They'll succeed.  And their argument will be total bullshit.

John Roberts stopped them.  Yet... even his approach was bullshit.  Why?  Anti-injunction.  Little-known principle of tax laws.  The courts can't rule on tax laws until they go into effect.  So, if it is a tax, the Supremes can't rule on it until it goes into effect.  So how could Roberts uphold Obamacare's mandate as a tax when it hadn't gone into effect yet?

It was Schrodinger's mandate.  It was a mandate until you observed it, at which point it changed its state, and became a tax.  If it were a tax, he couldn't have ruled on it because of anti-injunction, but he...

wanted to uphold it.  So, he called it a mandate for the purposes of anti-injunction.  That let him rule on it before the tax went into effect, at which point he called it a tax, so that he could uphold it as a tax, because Congress's Article I powers allowed them to pass a fucking tax.

Which... they did.  Did you follow that?  'Cuz it sounded nutty to me.  Yes, Congress had the Article I authority to pass that bill.  But in order for Roberts to say so, he had to go through some serious pretzel logic.

So even in Roberts's conservative apostasy, he was stretching logic and consistency to get around legal principles.  He had an outcome that he wanted.  And nothin' was gonna stop him from getting that outcome.  So much disingenuous bullshit, from so many quarters.

When I say that constitutional law is a field of disingenuous bullshit, this is what I mean.

And now, Obamacare is under assault again.  From an even crazier notion, that even the theorists behind NFIB think is nuts.  Basically, Congress repealed the mandate, but since Roberts upheld Obamacare on the basis of Congress's power to tax, the plaintiffs argue that the repeal of the mandate nullifies the constitutionality of the rest of the law.  It is only slightly less crazy than that, and at some point, I'll write more about it, but the problems are a) this is what happens when you go down the road of disingenuous bullshit, and b) this Supreme Court is so crazy that they'll do anything to get rid of Obamacare.  If I had to bet, I'd bet they go for this lunacy.  Roberts can't stop them anymore.

And to those conservative/libertarian legal theorists who built the original case against Obamacare, what I'll say is this:

This is what you have wrought.  This is the danger of disingenuous bullshit.  This is what happens when you start with a goal, and decide that you will construct arguments around it.

This is also the nature of "constitutional law" as a field.  And it's getting worse.  I'm not sure which field I respect less:  law, or psychology.

So here's the Court right now:  Barrett, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Roberts, Kavanaugh, Kagan, Breyer, Sotomayor.

Wait a minute.  This was supposed to be a post about the 2020 election, right?  OK, so here's the thing.  I gave you a rough number of .75.  Let's say that Biden has a 75% chance of winning a straight-up election.

Suppose he does that.  What happens next?  Trump files lawsuit after lawsuit after lawsuit.  Not just in one county, and not just in one state.  What will those lawsuits be?  I don't know.  How crazy will those lawsuits be?  Will they be even one iota less crazy than the new Obamacare lawsuit that the Court is about to use to strike down Obamacare?  At least with NFIB, the plaintiffs were using rhetorical jiujitsu, and saying that if the Democrats didn't want to call Chuck Berry "a duck," then Article I won't let him cross that state line with a teenager.  Um... wait a minute... never mind.  You know what I mean.

If Biden "wins," his next challenge is to convince five Justices to let him win.  And remember how Bush v. Gore went down.  A less crazy, less Trump-y Court wrote an opinion so disingenuous that they said, in the opinion, that it couldn't be used as precedent for any future case.

Bush wins.  Period.  And we're scared about anyone using our reasoning to help a Democrat in the future, so you can't use our reasoning ever again ever.

Now look at the current line-up.  Do you trust the current batch more or less than the 2000 Court?

I will assert, with complete confidence, that Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh and Barrett will back any lawsuit Trump files.  Thomas is a teabagger.  Alito is a slightly more polite teabagger.  Kavanaugh...  Do I have to say anything about him?  Barrett pointedly refused to say that she'd recuse herself while Trump demanded that she be seated in order to rule on an election challenge.  If you don't think that these things were discussed behind closed doors, then hi!  I'm a Nigerian Prince!  Would you please tell me your bank account number?

Roberts?  A case could be made that he'd look at some bullshit Trump challenge and try to salvage democracy.  I'm thinking NFIB here.  That's why I wrote that long digression.

Gorsuch?  He surprised on that transgender rights ruling.  I'll call him a gettable vote, given that surprise, but he's still a pretty solid conservative Republican.  And as for integrity, remember that the dude's a fuckin' plagiarist.

The thing is, Trump only needs one of them.  And notice that I am approaching this question without even considering what Trump's "legal" argument will be.  Sarcasm quotes around the word, "legal," because it'll be bullshit anyway.

Conventional analysis of the 2020 election right now is to look at a map and ask who can win which state.  Can Trump peel off Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, and so forth?

That's not how I am approaching this question.  I am approaching the question as follows:  can Biden peel off Gorsuch and Roberts?

That's the real question.  Biden needs to win not just 270 electoral votes, but both Roberts and Gorsuch.  Alito, Thomas, Barrett and Kavanaugh are lost causes.  Roberts is probably gettable.  Gorsuch... I don't know.  I hope Biden's lawyers are hard at work looking at everything Gorsuch has ever written, trying to find an angle.

The attitudinal model has a lot of predictive power.  Otherwise, I wouldn't be able to tell you, without looking at the case, how Alito, Thomas, Kavanaugh, Barrett, Kagan, Sotomayor and Breyer will vote.  Democracy depends on a failure of the attitudinal model.  Not just success for the presidential election forecasting models (and our general ability to disregard Norpoth), but failure for the attitudinal model.

So bottom line.  As I get to the end of this post on an appropriately gloomy All Hallow's Morning.  What's-a-gonna happen?  I don't bet.  My financial advice is, as ever, for you to put your money in a properly diversified portfolio.  But I did make a promise last time.

The odds favor a Biden "victory," but I will put some sarcasm quotes around the word, "victory."  Put no money on this.  Will Biden become president?  The odds of that are noticeably lower.

I have written recently that the odds of Trump successfully stealing the election went down with our October surprise, and I think that's right.  Trump will have a hard time suborning the compliance of governors, state legislators and other actors.  The Supreme Court, though?  That's my biggest concern right now.

There will be chaos.  It could get ugly.  We could see actual violence.  If Biden wins, Trump may actually try to stoke violence.  This could be very bad.  How worried am I?

Worried.