Spent some time earlier today going over what limited state-by-state presidential approval polling I could find and decided to use that to refine my prediction here. While obviously approval polling isn't going to match up exactly to voting outcomes, I think it should correlate reasonably well with the order in which states may flip. As such, I've switched Iowa to Democratic, and have also moved Texas from Tosssup - which was a characterization I was never entirely comfortable with on the last map - to Lean Republican. There are also a few other minor percentage changes that I've made, but honestly at this early stage it's probably not worth going into detail on any of those.

First real prediction of the 2020 cycle, rather than the previous simulation. I see the Democrats as being favored to win the presidency next November, but with a fairly large range of possible outcomes, particularly given the uncertainty in the economy. I went back and forth on whether or not I should have Texas as a tossup, but I've seen enough suggesting that the state will at least be close that I ultimately decided it should be classified that way. Not really taking possible Democratic nominees into account for the predictions just yet, but honestly I'm not sure the nominee is going to make much of a difference given how strongly polarized opinions of the current president are.

Am I doing this again? I guess I'm doing this again. Not so much a formal prediction to start off, just the outcome of a spreadsheet simulation I've set up based on a chosen hypothetical national popular vote outcome of D 53%, R 45%. Two uniform national swings producing the same final national 2020 margin are applied to each state relative to the 2016 and 2012 results, these are then averaged together at 80-20 weighting (which I think is more likely to be predictive than the 50-50 weighting that PVI uses), and finally the result in each state is adjusted by a randomly generated number. I'll do more thought-out predictions later once we have more information to go off of, but this feels like a good enough placeholder for now.