The Finish Line.

Here we are at Election Day. It’s been a long road. At some point along the way I thought I’d be doing one of these every night as the election got close. Unfortunately, that ran straight into my need to make a living. But here’s one final probabilistic analysis as the campaign draws to a close.

The Traditional Version

Let’s remind ourselves how these work. I took data for electoral-vote.com either averaging the polls from the last fifteen days or taking the single latest poll if there are no polls in the last 15 days.

We ran 40,000 simulated elections and tallied the results. We ended up with almost 73% of victories going toward Kamala Harris. Running all the states it looks like Harris has at least a 70% chance of winning with less than a 30% probability. I’ve talked about why that is likely an overestimate of Harris’s chances.

That’s why we started running a second simulation.

In our swings-only projection we give every state that is not a swing state to either the Democratic or Republican candidate. That means Harris starts at 226 electoral votes and Trump builds from 213. That’s a slight advantage for Harris.

These simulations give us a 59% probability of a Kamala Harris victory and about a 40% chance of winning for Donald Trump. That’s close but not so close as projected by other sites. It’s going to be a long night but Harris has an edge.

Catching up.

Having a day job can be a drag, I promised myself that I would keep up with these but, as usually happens that intention was trampled by the sheer amount of work generated by the college and my classes. If I publish these as much as I’d like as the election draws nearer, most updates will need to look more like this.

Any commentary I would offer would be stale, but here is the map (in the featured image), the shifts, and the results for the 30 September Data.

You can get a better look at the featured image on the blog.

Shifts:

State	Change
New Mexico	Strongly Democratic to Leaning Democratic

State	Change
Nebraska 2nd	Leaning Democratic to Strongly Democratic
Michigan	Barely Democratic to Leaning Democratic
Nevada	Toss Up to Barely Democratic

Results

It’s reasonable to characterize this as roughly 3 to 1 in Harris’s favor.

Last Words

These probabilities are still mostly driven by Harris’s advantage in the Dark Blue vs. Dark Red categories. Florida and Oregon are also probably shifting back and forth more than is reasonable.