Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.

Voter fraud has been a major focus of disinformation campaigns this election season. The president has also been fixated on the issue, which has helped to legitimize false claims online.

Trump has claimed, for instance, that ballots have been tossed “in a river” and “in a wastepaper basket.” But the incidents he was referring to were not anywhere as sinister as he claimed: One referred to a load of mail that had been lost, then recovered, and included some ballots, while the other referred to a strange case of just nine ballots that seem to be related to a mix-up in envelopes. Trump’s claims have fed into existing disinformation narratives that are stoking fears of election fraud, such as false stories of thousands of ballots being dumped, or robocalls falsely telling voters that voting by mail is dangerous.

For their part, social media sites are ramping up efforts to fact-check, label and/or remove misleading content online during Election Day, but it’s a good reminder to be skeptical of sensational claims that might crop up as tensions run high in the final hours.

One of the biggest takeaways from the 2016 election was the educational divide in political preferences among white voters. Those without a college degree swung toward Trump, while those with a degree swung toward Clinton, both to a historic degree. There was also a record gender gap, with men preferring Trump and women preferring Clinton.

After today, we will get a lot of new data about Americans’ political preferences according to demographics. On the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast last week, we tried to foreshadow what some of those trends might look like. According to voter surveys, Biden has improved over Clinton’s performance among white voters writ large, a group that makes up nearly 70 percent of the electorate. It appears that more of those gains have come from non-college-educated white voters — a group that Biden will still almost certainly lose overall, but by a smaller margin than Clinton did. Like Clinton, he is expected to win white voters with a college degree overall, a group that has historically voted Republican. Meanwhile, Trump has held steady or even improved his standing with Black and Hispanic voters, particularly men.

For more insight into what the electorate could look like this year, check out the podcast.

One thing I’ll be keeping an eye on as we get a sense for how different groups of Americans voted: How are Trump and Biden doing among white Christians? Four years ago, Trump won handily among white evangelical Protestants, white Catholics and white mainline Protestants. I checked in on where the candidates stood among different religious groups last week and found that while Trump’s still holding strong among white evangelical Protestants — his support among this group might have actually increased — there are signs he’s struggling among white Catholics.

Slipping among white Catholics is not a good thing for Trump, because lots of them live in Midwest swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Experts told me that his lower poll numbers with this group could be due to a few things. One is that white Catholics don’t give Trump high marks for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic or the racial justice protests this summer. And another is that Biden is himself a white Catholic from Pennsylvania who has woven his faith into his political biography — so people from that religious and cultural background might feel more of a connection with him.