Methodology - 2020 U.S. Presidential Election Model
Below you can read about how the winner for each data category was established, how the winner for each state in the electoral college was picked, and how they were all combined to get the final race rating and electoral vote estimate. Unfortuantely, I do not still have access to the full details, so some of the specifics on picking winners will not be known.
View Full Model (Google Sheets)Specific Categories
Simply put, the winners for each category are all about which party is ahead in said category. For the Fundraising category, the data was directly from the FEC. (Federal Election Commission) With the Recent History category, this was whichever party had won more presidential elections in the past 12 or so elections. This data was from 270toWin.com. For the last election category, it was whichever party won the state in the 2016 Presidential Election. This was retrieved from Wikipedia. For the expert forecast category, it was whichever party was favored by the 270toWin consesus forecast/map. For the polls category, this was based on either FiveThirtyEight's polling average or whatever the latest poll result was if no average was available. There was also a sixth rating labeled as "Congress", which I believe factored in what party the state's representatives/senators were, but I am not sure on the specific details.
Race Ratings (States)
The race ratings took into account the winner of each category and assigned a rating depending on who won more categories. Unfortuantely, this was a slightly opinion-based process as I didn't have a specific formula I was sticking with. If a party won all six categories, then the race would be assigned a "Strong" rating for that party. If a party had five categories, the race was "Safe". Four categories gave the race a "Leaning" rating, and a 3-3 tie was assigned a "Toss-up". You can view the ratings and see the correspondence to the categories won above by clicking the spreadsheet link. (green button)
Electoral Vote Estimate (National)
For the electoral vote estimate, I simply looked at the winner of each state, assigned the winning party that state's electoral votes, and then totaled them up for the estimate, which allowed for an overall winner projection.