First, let’s review the final mainstream perspective. The Swing States this time are Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, in that order.
FL: Biden + 4. The final PoliticalIQ Battleground State poll shows former Vice President Joe Biden with a modest lead over President Trump in Florida. The poll, conducted October 28-30 by Scott Rasmussen, shows Biden winning 51% of the vote while Trump picks up 47%. Two percent (2%) have or will be voting for some other candidate. If Biden wins Florida, there is virtually no remaining path to a re-election victory for the President.
PA: Biden +7. Pennsylvania has emerged as the keystone state of the entire race for the White House. The final Monmouth University survey finds Biden at 51 percent and Trump at 44 percent among likely voters in a high-turnout scenario. That’s down from Biden’s 11-point lead in the same poll from last month.
MI: Biden +8, 51-43
MN: Biden +9, 52-43
WI: Biden +8, 52-44
Arizona, Iowa, and Ohio are not swing states. Neither is North Carolina, although we’ll be tracking it as an early reporting signal.
Now, as I’ll be explaining on the Darkstream later tonight, each of these states is structured the same way, with one or two urban counties providing one-third of the entire Democratic vote, while the Republican vote is scattered over the rest of the state. To know what is going to happen in the state, all that is really required is to know what is going to happen in those six counties, namely, Broward, Miami-Dade, Philadephia, Wayne, Hennepin, and Milwaukee. Hence what I call my Swing-Key system, which is short for Swing State – Key County analysis.
At this point, the two counties I’ve examined in detail are the two Florida counties. Of the two, the Broward County information is a little more current, but both are reasonably up-to-date on the voter information. In Broward, the Democratic advantage in voter registration delta is 1.04 percent. In keeping with the general increase in registrations, this suggests a net increase of 18,448 Democratic votes in Broward County.
However, in Miami-Dade, the Republicans actually have the voter registration delta working in their favor. The Republican advantage is 5.61 percent, which suggests a net decrease of -3,495 Democratic votes in Miami-Dade County. 15,000 more Democratic votes from the two counties that provide more than one-quarter of all the Democratic votes in Florida simply isn’t going to be enough, given that Republican registrations are actually up throughout the state.
Since President Trump won Florida by 119,770 votes in 2016, these numbers indicate that he will retain Florida with relative ease despite what the polls say. This is just a metric, not a mathematical proof, and its chief utility is that it gives us an informed point of comparison by which we can interpret the results as they come in. If Biden can’t get more than 475,000 votes in Broward or 660,000 votes in Miami-Dade, or exceed 67 percent in both counties, he has virtually no chance of winning either Florida or the election.