It’s the holy grail of the presidential election may be the knowing which states will be the decisive in the Electoral College. We have our guesses: States like Arizona, Michigan, north Carolina and are Wisconsin. widely expected to be among the the top swing states it is the year 2020. But how confident can we really be in to those expectations five months before the election?
To find out, we went back and checked which states ‘ election handicapper The Cook Political Report a thought would be “swing states” as of mid-June of 2004, 2008, 2012 and 2016. We then compared the daily show to where the current swing states turned out to be after the election. (To be clear, the Cook, does great work, and we’re not trying to pick on them — we’re simply using them as a proxy to see where the conventional wisdom was stopped at the time. It’s actually surprisingly hard to find the historical sources for this, and Cook is one of the only outlets that we could consistently find with the early assessments of the presidential race-back to the family in 2004. In an e-mail, and Charlie Cook, the founder of The Cook Political Report, told us he thinks of its audience, and the rough guidelines, particularly at this point in the cycle: “My view has always been that we are not trying to predict outcomes as much as help our readers see which states are safely in the party”s column, which you aren’t but I could get into a play, which ones are competitive but one side seems to have an advantage, and which ones are” really, really close.”)
Importantly, much of how accurate these early ratings are hinges on how you define what is a swing state. For instance, the “swing-state” could mean simply the state that is closely contested the toss-up state in cooking lingo. But it could also mean a bellwether state, — also known as the state whose results closely match the national popular vote. This might sound like semantics, but it’s actually an important distinction: In the roughly tying the election, toss-up states, and bellwether states are more or less the same; however, in an election in which, say, one candidate has the lead nationally and 10 points by the bellwether states, and may not actually be all that close. So how you define ” swing state doesn’t matter.
And as it turns out, the early ratings are often wrong about which will be the states toss-ups – in November. But, as we will explain, that doesn’t mean they are useless or even bad. In fact, Cook does have a pretty good track record of identifying an election’s bellwether states “early on, and arguably that’s more important.
First, though, that, let’s look at which states are the Cook expected would be toss-ups at this point in the cycle, in the last four presidential elections, and which states actually ended up being toss-ups. The teal states in the chart below are those that Cook in the correctly-rated in the toss-ups, the pink ones are the states that Cook is rated in the toss-ups, but this did not turn out to be that close, and the gray ones are the states that the Cook did not appear in the toss-ups, but I ended up close enough to count as one.
As you can see, you have to cook the record of the calling toss-ups is mixed. In In June of 2008Ohio was the only toss-up state, called it correctly. In late May-2016it correctly identified the New Hampshire and North Carolina, and ace has the throw-ups but I missed the nine other states that turned out to be tight. On the bright side, in the April 2004Cook correctly foresaw the seven states as’ toss-up status, missing only four, and incorrectly calling “toss ups” just-in-Florida -, and four-year terms. And in the late may 2012it correctly pegged all four of the possible toss-up states; while at first the black legend as it appears they cast too wide a net by also rating, Colorado, texas, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania in the toss-ups in the states of the all the ” just barely missed the cutoff for being the current toss-ups (then-President-elect Barack Obama won them by each of the 5-to 7-point type).
But what went wrong in 2008, and in 2016 it wasn’t that the Cook misread the electorate in specific states; it’s that it didn’t do how competitive (or uncompetitive), the presidential race would be the overall. (To be clear, this is not the cooking of the fault; there was no way for anyone to anticipate that the economy would collapse in the fall of 2008, sending Obama to a landslide victory, or that then-FBI Director James Comey’Oct. 28 letter to Congress, it seemed to bring the 2016 campaign within a normal-sized polling error of Donald Trump, maybe.)
This is clear when you look at the states that are cooking springtime show implied would be bellwethers: Most of them turned out to be the current bellwethers in November.
In late May Of 2016, Cook-was-wrong-to-think-is a former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s visit was an overall favorite, but it did correctly anticipate that the Colorado, Florida, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, west Virginia and Wisconsin would closely mirror the national popular vote (although three other states also did). Similarly, in June 2008, the cook, the show implied in the presidential race that was too close to call, but even after the races shifted in the Democrats’ favor, and four of the six states, Cook is viewed as the likeliest bellwethers indeed turned out to be bellwethers (although so did four of the other states, Cook said missed). And in 2004 and 2012, and the Cook had even more success in pre-identifying bellwether states than they did in pre-identifying toss-up states.
So where does that leave us in 2020? Well, as of June 16, The Cook Political Report shortcut to six states the toss-ups: Colorado, Florida, Michigan, north Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And since Democrats have the advantage in the states that are worth only 232 electoral votes, and the Republicans have the advantage in the states that are worth only a 204, the Cook is therefore also expecting a look at these six states are to be bellwethers.
The historic suggests, you can largely trust those bellwether of audience, too — though you should expect the election to still throw us a few curveballs. One or two of those states will probably not be that close to the national popular vote; two or three states that are not on this list and probably will turn out to be good for the national bellwethers.
The toss-up of the audience, on the other hand, should not be taken literally — not, at least at this stage. And that’s because, while handicappers are pretty good at abstract in Portuguese objective: how the states will cast their vote in relation to one another, it is more challenging to forecast the political to the national environment so far in advance. But in a way, that’s OK, the bellwethers are really matter what.
It doesn’t really matter if, say, Virginia or Texas hold is decided by just 1 point, because if either one of those scenarios comes to pass, the election is likely a landslide. Knowing the bellwethers in advance is arguably a far more valuable ” because we can then focus our energy on looking at who is leading in them — because whoever wins the bellwethers wins the election.
