Nate Silver’s essay discusses the limitations of gut instincts in election predictions, emphasizing that while polls in battleground states show a tight race, no one should trust their “gut” predictions. Silver’s “gut” leans toward Trump, but he stresses that polls are complex and often subject to errors like nonresponse bias. Both Trump and Harris could overperform based on various polling dynamics. He also warns of potential polling herding, which could lead to a larger-than-expected victory for either candidate. Ultimately, the outcome remains highly uncertain.
There’s a shortcut
States have the ultimate say over how their electors for President represent the will of the people. The NPV movement asks states to assign EC votes based on the result of the National Popular Vote. Several states have passed laws mandating this once enough states pass it to constitute an EC majority.
It has been passed in states making up 209 electors, and proposed in states making up 50 more. If those states passed it, and they get 11 more electors (perhaps Arizona?), then they will have the 270 votes necessary to guarantee the EC will vote in line with the popular vote. Still a hard problem, but now the problem has been confined to a handful of states.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Interstate_Compact
Let’s say it gets passed in enough states to matter and there’s an election where it changes the result. In every state where the loser would have gotten the votes of that state, but didn’t, there will be an immediate campaign to withdrawal from the pact, and it will get popular support within that state.
I don’t think it’s possible for the napovointerco to ever effect more than one election.
Politics doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
When the NPVC goes into effect, both major parties will run whole-country campaigns and swaths of the nation that are currently ignored will get actual attention. While some states may have pullback campaigns, its also likely that other states will react by joining the compact to preserve the new status quo of not being ignored.
(the compact itself does allow for states leaving, and even sets a nice 6-month time offset. )