I’m going to try not to get too carried away with election 2020 posts. For one thing, a lot of people know a lot more than me about election 2020. Nate Silver for example. In 2012 I made a little spreadsheet electoral college model that helped me understand the election that year. By 2016, that sort of thing was so easy to find on the internet and so much more sophisticated than anything I could hope to come up with that it wasn’t really worth the trouble. For another thing, it can be fun to forecast the outcomes of certain events, sports for instance, and come back later to see how you did. Sports are fun because you pretend to care about them, but you know deep down that they don’t matter. Politics is not like that – they matter and I care, so it is just not that fun to be wrong.

Okay, with that rambling preamble, and before the first voting starts in the Iowa caucus (I’m writing on Sunday, January 26), I’m going to give my predictions. But before I give my predictions, let me be open and honest about what I want to happen. I want Bernie Sanders to be elected President, and I want him to serve alongside a Democratic House and a Democratic Senate. This would give the United States a chance to tackle the systemic corruption problem that is dragging our nation down, and put us on a path to future success. Elizabeth Warren would have a chance of doing this too, and I actually prefer her policy positions overall, but I think Bernie Sanders is the stronger leader and the leader we need right now.

I don’t think that is what is going to happen. Of the three (President Bernie Sanders, Democratic House, Democratic Senate), the Democratic Senate is particularly unlikely. Let’s look at PredictIt – gamblers there are giving about a 70/30 chance of the Senate remaining in Republican hands. Those are not awful odds for Democrats, but in a straight-up betting situation you would not take those odds. And keep in mind, a super-majority of 60 in the Senate is required to pass major legislation, not just a majority of 51. So even if Sanders or Warren gets in as President, and assuming the House stays Democratic as seems likely, it will be close to impossible to get major progressive legislation through on issues like campaign finance, health care, childcare or education. A Republican Senate will also block any efforts to reengage with the United Nations or ratify treaties on things such as climate change or human rights. A Democratic President will be stuck trying to fine-tune rules and regulations across the executive branch, rebuild the State Department and shape foreign policy to the extent possible through the executive branch.

Let’s start with general election polls out as of right now. People say these don’t mean anything. But I recall looking at Clinton vs. Trump in these polls, before we knew that either of them would be the nominee in 2016, and being surprised that people thought Trump would beat her. The same polls showed Bernie Sanders beating Trump. So let’s look at these wildly inaccurate, not very useful polls on RealClearPolitics as of Sunday, January 26.

• Biden vs. Trump: Biden leads by 4.3% nationally, an average of 6 polls taken between December 4 and January 23. Of these 6, 1 shows Trump leading and 1 shows a tie, while the others show Biden leading by 2-9%.
• Sanders vs. Trump: Sanders leads by 3.2% nationally, an average of 6 polls taken between December 4 and January 23. Of these 6, 1 shows Trump leading , while the others show Sanders leading by 1-8%.
• Warren vs. Trump: Warren leads by 1.4% nationally, an average of 6 polls taken between December 4 and January 23. Of these 6, 2 show Trump leading and 1 shows a tie, while the others show Warren leading by 5-7%.
• Incidentally, today PredictIt gives the eventual Republican nominee a 52% chance of beating the eventual Democratic nominee, which doesn’t exactly gel with the numbers above.

The first thing that occurs to me is that these polls (not counting PredictIt) show any of the three most likely Democratic nominees winning the popular vote, whereas they showed Hillary losing it at a similar point in 2016 (based on my memory, I don’t know how to get the historical poll data). Democrats have reasons to be confident, but they are under-confident for obvious reasons. They are probably about as under-confident right now as they were over-confident as of Hillary Clinton’s victory party-like last rally in Philadelphia on election-eve 2016.

The second thing that occurs to me is that the Warren thing is just too close for comfort. I like Warren, but she seems like a risky nominee when Bernie Sanders is so similar in his policy views, and is the stronger potential leader in my view. Similar to Obama, people have this weird reaction to her as an elitist egghead. I personally am comforted when I feel like the people leading the country have a better grasp of subjects like economics and history than I do, but it does not seem as most of my fellow humans share these feelings.

Which leaves us with Sanders and Biden. Let’s go back to Nate Silver and his Monte Carlo models which are so much better than anything I could come up with. His model suggests a 58% chance that no Democratic candidate wins a majority of delegates. Biden has a 42% chance, Sanders a 22% chance, and there is a 15% chance that nobody gets a majority. Nate points out that in the event nobody gets a majority, but somebody gets a clear plurality, one thing that could happen is that the delegates cast votes for their pledged candidate in the first round of voting, but the candidates and delegates arrange in advance for the plurality candidate to get the majority of votes in the second round. I think you have to say that the two most likely outcomes as of today are that Biden gets a majority of delegates on the first vote, or Biden gets a clear plurality of delegates and gets a majority vote on a second ballot as a pre-determined outcome. Put those two together and this is the likely outcome – the Biden vs. Sanders showdown goes to Biden, the Biden vs. Trump showdown goes to Biden, and we have President Biden.

Now let me tell you why my purely subjective, purely anecdotal experience suggests that a President Sanders is a real possibility. It could be that I am rationalizing what I want to happen, of course, which would make me a human being, but nonetheless here it is. I am originally from Martinsville, Virginia, a former Appalachian manufacturing powerhouse that has fallen on very hard times, and this is an understatement. My grandparents’ generation moved from rural subsistence lifestyles to urban factory worker lifestyles. My parents generation worked in those factories when they were young, then got laid off when the factories moved to Mexico and eventually China. I remember friends and relatives railing against Bill Clinton and NAFTA because they thought this took their jobs and the quality of life of their families away. Now, in my personal view, NAFTA was just the final nail in the coffin created by decades of policies meant initially to prop up Cold War allies, which then proved a convenient narrative for multinational corporations, and turned out to be straightforward to represent in abstract mathematical models by academic economists.

Barrack Obama made Martinsville, Virginia one of his early campaign stops, and I know for a fact that some of my hillbilly friends and relatives you would never expect to vote for him bought into his “hopey changey” vision and voted for him in 2008 and 2012. When 8 years of Obama didn’t noticeably improve their lives, and the Democrat running in 2016 had the last name “Clinton”, these same friends and relatives voted for Trump in 2016. I think people who self-identify as America’s lost industrial base in Pennsylvania (where I now live), Ohio, Michigan, and Wisconsin did the same. To state the obvious, 2020 is not 2016, there is no candidate named Clinton, and Bernie Sanders won the 2016 primaries in some of these states. At least some of these “working class” Trump voters are going to love Bernie Sanders. Combine this with the coin toss in Florida which went Trump’s way in 2016, an outside chance of Texas flipping Democratic in 2020, and uncertainty about the economy, and Bernie has a good chance. Like I said, Democrats are under-confident.

So let’s be clear: I think the odds favor Biden, a Democratic House, and a Republican Senate. I think Sanders, a Democratic House, and a Republican Senate is the second most likely outcome. Trump, a Democratic House, and a Republic Senate is probably the third most likely outcome. Nobody knows what is going to happen with the economy or geopolitical events, but in the next 11 months something is probably going to happen. Sanders, a Democratic House, and a Democratic Senate is not a high probability, but as Nate Silver might point out, a sports metaphor might help us realize that the odds are not that different from perhaps an underdog like the Philadelphia Eagles winning the 2018 Superbowl (which they did). It’s likely enough to be worth fighting for.