Nate Silver: If Trump Wins North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, It's a 50/50 Election

Even this leftist drip geek is conceding that.

If Trump wins all three Needle States the election is 50:50.

The "Needle States" are FLA, GA, NC. I don't know why they're called that.

My Florida poll-watcher guy is very optimistic about Florida.

In the below chart, blue does not mean Democrat advantage. It means that the GOP has not yet reached its 2016 totals.

He's analyzing the ballots cast every twenty minutes

At 10:20 am, the GOP was close to exceeding its entire 2016 vote level.

He predicted that by 11:20 am, the GOP would exceed the number of GOP ballots cast in 2016, and it did.

When the colors flip to pink/red, it means the GOP has surpassed the 2016 numbers.

The last column in that chart -- "Indy R/D" -- attempts to guess at whether the Indies are voting R or D. The assumption made is that independents turning out in red counties will tend to vote GOP, and that independents in blue areas will tend to vote Democrat.

And then he analyzes whether indies are turning out more in red counties or blue counties.

At the moment, there's a slight advantage for the Democrats as far as independent turnout in blue counties. But remember, this chart is of the total vote, including early/mail-in vote. Democrats/Biden banked a big advantage there before election day.

That advantage is dwindling every twenty minutes.

The Biden campaign distributed this analysis of what percentage of election day votes Trump needs to overcome the Democrat early vote advantage.

In Florida, Trump needs 56% of the E-Day vote to win, Biden estimates.

My friend reports that the partisan breakdown of ballots cast today is 51R / 24D. Yes, only 24% Democrat. My friend calculates that Trump would have to lose the E-Day independent vote 95%-5% to not reach that 56% of all E-Day votes threshhold.

Let's look just at Pinellas County.

Patrick Rufini -- a NeverTrump squish, kind of a soft Democrat -- modeled that Democrats would finish the day with +2000 ballots cast in Pinellas.

Instead, it now looks like Republicans will carry the county in ballots cast by 12,000.

Florida looks very good for us.

Our next worries are GA and NC, and of course PA.

posted by Ace at 12:02 PM

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