Welcome!
Millions of Americans have been voting for weeks, but this is it: Election Day 2020 is here, and we’re here to help you make sense of it all.
Voting in the middle of a pandemic has created a number of unique challenges this year — including changing the methods we use to vote and the rules governing them — but it also means that there’s a very real possibility we won’t know who won on election night. (We at FiveThirtyEight are certainly bracing for a long night.)
The stakes of this election are high, too. Enthusiasm for voting, among both Democrats and Republicans, is much higher than it was in 2016, and poll after poll has found that many Americans think this election is very important.
Our forecasts are now frozen -- in other words, we’re not collecting any new polls or updating the odds. The final forecasts: Joe Biden is favored to beat President Trump; Democrats have a good shot at taking back the Senate; and the House will very, very likely remain under Democratic control (they might even expand their majority by a few seats).
Of course, no matter your political persuasion, for many the memory of the 2016 presidential election looms large. Will the polls underestimate Trump again? We’ll have to wait and see. Systematic polling errors do occur, but it’s hard to predict their size or direction in advance.
But what we can say is that we’re past the point where a 2016-sized polling error is enough for Trump to win reelection. It would take a bigger error this year. That’s possible, and largely why there is still a pathway for Trump to win the White House. We’ll be tracking all that and more on this live blog. But as I said at the outset, we’re unsure how long it will be before we know who won -- it may take days. That doesn’t mean anything is wrong, though -- there’s been a huge increase in vote-by-mail this year due to the coronavirus pandemic, and mail ballots take longer to count. We’ll keep you informed until we do know who won, and we’ll continue to track any outstanding races. We’ll be taking extra care this year, too, to be clear about what the results we do have show, and what the results we don’t have yet could mean — as the vote count could change in a number of key states as more ballots are counted. That also means we won’t be afraid to say what we simply don’t know.
If you have any questions as we muddle through election night/week/month together, be sure to ping us at @538politics.