EDIT: for those unaware, not only did the republican party take control of the House, Senate, and Presidency in 2016. They also made big gains in state elections. In fact, the republican party had a 'trifecta' (house, senate, and executive) in 25/50 states. It was a very significant shift in power: https://ballotpedia.org/State_legislative_elections,_2016
I’m not. The above analysis only depends on a lack of confidence in a GOP trifecta. That’s the only case where pissing them off could result in unilateral action and thus consequences for these moves.
Previous result are only predictive to a point.
For comparison, the Republicans did very well in the 2014 mid term, convincingly taking over both houses of congress.
The democratic party had every advantage for a convincing win in 2018 and they instead had a very poor showing. The party is not good at elections and I don't see a reason why we expect this election to be different.
Dems did well in 2018, the issue was that the 1/3 of senators that happened to be up that year were in very bad states for dems geographically.
[1] https://www.axios.com/2018-midterm-elections-democrats-won-h...
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/democrats-horrible-2018...
Its a fair point that polls missed in 2016. 2020 has kicked the hornet’s nest (rather, the last four years), voter turnout appears to be higher than previous years, and I’d bet an expensive bottle of bourbon current polls align close to what results will be (with modeling lessons learned from 2016).
Tangentially, quite a few Trump voters have simply aged out over the last four years (roughly 1.8 million voters over the age of 55 die each year). Broadly speaking, much older voters skew conservative compared to younger cohorts (per Pew Research), hence the confidence in a shift towards the left across branches in government representation during this election cycle. GOP support is quite literally dying out.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/03/907433511/trumps-base-is-shri...
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/03/01/the-generati...
https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-chance-taking-senate-fore...
https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2020-election-forecast/
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/12/biden-tops-270-poli...
While your point about ideology drift over time has some merit, I don’t believe it to be significant enough to materially consider.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/706889?jou... (https://doi.org/10.1086/706889 if you want to grab the full paper from SciHub)
“Consistent with previous research but contrary to folk wisdom, our results indicate that political attitudes are remarkably stable over the long term. In contrast to previous research, however, we also find support for folk wisdom: on those occasions when political attitudes do shift across the life span, liberals are more likely to become conservatives than conservatives are to become liberals, suggesting that folk wisdom has some empirical basis even as it overstates the degree of change.”
I'd point out that it's not the polls that are predicting such things. Rather it's people who are interpreting those polls.
Polls are just a snapshot of opinion in time. They are useful and can provide information about public opinion, but they certainly aren't predictive in the way you're stating.
Making predictions like "Biden is 80% likely to win" is a guess. Possibly based on polling data, but are not a poll.
A poll reporting[0] that the respondents of that poll prefer one candidate over another is not a prediction, rather it's data.
[0] https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general...
Some rural counties that are know to be republican strong holds by a huge margin are favouring Biden by ridiculous amounts. Its not going to happen. Its obviously an error, and the accumulation of these errors are the final polls. (Source https://www.pscp.tv/w/1YqKDpqkYBOKV)
Its true that the democrats are winning the early mail in voting. But since republicans don't trust mail in voting, as Trump told them to vote in person. They will come out on election night, by a large margin.
“Early voting turnout continues to shatter records, as sky-high voter enthusiasm meets the realities of the United States' creaky machinery of democracy amid a pandemic. That means long lines in some places and administrative errors with some mail ballots, but a system that is working overall, according to experts.
More than 26 million people had voted as of Saturday, according to the U.S. Elections Project, a turnout-tracking database run by University of Florida political scientist Michael McDonald. That's more than six times the number of votes cast by the same point in 2016.”
Doesn’t that mean older generations have more influence?
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/28/millennials... (Millennials overtake Baby Boomers as America’s largest generation)
Young voters outnumber older voters, but this is mutually exclusive from an aging populace and a declining birth rate. You can chalk it up to population momentum and previously higher levels of immigration. It does mean Millennials will hold on to their electorate influence longer though.