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

The word “militia” implies an organized paramilitary group, and in the United States, those groups are usually right-wing. But the groups the term is applied to aren’t as cohesive as the word implies — they’re often wildly disorganized, predominantly online communities of individuals whose ideologies may not align beyond a general pro-gun stance and a sense that only they can save America.

That matters on Election Day because experts in these groups told me that voter intimidation and violence at the polls is far more likely to come in the form of scattered lone-wolf incidents than any kind of widespread, organized assault by a named militia group like the Proud Boys.

In some ways, this is good news: It means most Americans don’t need to fear voting, and if there is violence in one place, it’s unlikely to indicate a larger trend. But it also means that dealing with these threats is trickier than it might be if there were organized groups to track. Some states are more at risk than others — take Michigan, for example, where a small group of unaffiliated paramilitians has been charged with planning to kidnap the state’s governor. And there’s been a shift in recent years as these people, long associated with anti-government ideologies, have aligned themselves with Trump as the leader of both the government and the anti-government. Policing these groups is also complicated by the fact that there’s often overlap between these online communities and law enforcement. The reality is that, in a violent incident, Americans may be relying on protection from people who personally know the instigators.

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.