The attached spreadsheet shows the state of the presidential election race based on both the national polls and those of the individual states and their predicted results in Electoral College. Updated Sunday, 10/4/2020.
This week I have added Nate Silver’s odds of the candidates winning each state. Silver and his team are nationally recognized as the best at statically analyzing, ranking, and compiling data from the numerous political polls. Prior to the 2016 election his team predicted that Hillary Clinton would win the national vote by 2.7%. She ended up beating Trump in the popular vote by 2.1%.
I will update the spreadsheet every Sunday until election day. Check back on this site – www.cajunscomments.com to see how the race has changed. You can now also see how the race has changed over the previous week.
Data obtained from Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight website.
Click on the download button below to download the spreadsheet.
NOTE: The attached spreadsheet is best viewed on a PC monitor or using an iPad or tablet. If using an iPad, tablet, or cell phone, after clicking on the download button below you will be given a choice – “”Download” or “View’. Chose the “View” option
Update 5:15 pm CDT Wednesday, 10/8/20: I haven’t had a chance to do a midweek update the spreadsheet yet, but there is good news. Biden’s weighted average lead in the national polls has increased since yesterday from 8.5% to 9.5%. (For reference Silver had Clinton with a 2.7% national lead the night before the election.) The better news is that the website now gives Trump only a 16% chance of winning. (For comparison it gave Trump a 35% chance of winning last time around.)
Cajun (Rick Guilbeau) 10/4/2020
Despite this nation’s fractious and divisive appearance, despite the rise of haters, bigots, white supremacists, despite the GOP becoming an enemy of democracy, and the Democrats an absurdly ineffective bunch I remain staunch in my faith that this too shall pass.
I think we are basically strong, our democracy sturdy enough to recover, even from a Trump! Even from a McConnell! I believe that we have come to this place, not because of any weaknesses in our democratic foundations, but because far too many decided they did not need to be involved in the process.
Complacency leads to non-participation which , in turn, leads to rot. When ,repeatedly, almost half the eligible voters do not exercise their duty to vote, the door is open to corporate influence, an involved minority, hell bent on inflicting their hatreds upon us all. That has happened rather obviously to the Republican Party, the Party of Lincoln is now the party of Moscow Mitch McConnell.
The former Tea Party, once a fringe group no one took seriously, joined the GOP, changing its name, if not its ideology, to the Freedom Caucus and leveraged the current party into one more resembling Germany in the forties than American values.
Complacency must be combated , people must take part, if we wish to save our democracy. I have faith that a majority of Americans are decent people. They are also become lazy people.
When democracy was created, back in ancient Greece, it was practiced in the marketplace (the Agora) and all turned out en masse to make decisions. When a hundred or more million cannotbe bothered to vote elections, and the course of this nation, both foreign and domestic , are decided by those who do participate. That is not representative of the entire population and thus is not true democracy.
“Those who are too intelligent to engage in politics are punished by being governed by those who are not.” Plato
I will end this rather extensive and effusive missive with a quote from my great good friend and High School valedictorian:
“There comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you cannot take part, you cannot even passively take part.
And you’ve got to put your bodies on the gears, and upon the wheels, upon the levers ,upon all the apparatus. And you’ve got to make its stop!” Mario Robert Savio
We have reached that time folks.