It's pretty clear the 2020 race is different than the 2016 election. Voters are much more firmly in one camp or the other this time. I think there were a lot of wishy-washy voters in the "I don't really like Trump, but Hillary's emails!" camp last time. Comey's ridiculous memo a week before the election caused almost all of those people to break for Trump on voting day.
Here's 538's victory projection from 2016. You can see Clinton was almost always ahead, but she had wild fluctuations in her chance's of winning:
Now here's the same graph from 538's 2020 projection. Biden has always been the favourite with none of the rollercoaster-style fluctuations we saw in 2016:
My biggest fear is election shenanigans. The following scenario is not at all far-fetched:
1. Polls open at 7am.
2. By 7:15, there are "Army of Trump" brownshirts at polling locations in heavy Democrat-leaning areas intimidating voters and openly brandishing firearms.
3. At 9am, Fox News starts blasting footage of Antifa/Black Panthers/insert any other left-wing Boogeyman "thugs" doing what the the Army of Trump are actually doing.
4. At 10am, some right-wing nutcase, inspired by Fox's reporting, goes on a murder spree and shoots up a polling location.
5. The mass shooting is all over the news on every channel by 10:30.
6. Many Biden voters then stay home out of fear of getting murdered by Trump's fascist goon squad.
And that's not even getting into the various ways the GOP will look to discredit the results of mail-in ballots and all the other ways they will attempt to disenfranchise poor people and minorities. I can't believe in the self-described "world's greatest democracy" that this is not only a possible scenario but a
probable one. How far American has fallen.
