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

Overall, women are more likely than men to vote, so it’s a coveted group — but hardly a monolithic bloc. That said, more and more women are supporting Democrats for president, while more and more men are supporting Republicans, resulting in a big gender gap. The size of that gap has varied since it emerged in 1980, but we saw the largest gap yet in 2016. According to the Pew Research Center, the gender gap four years ago was a substantial 13 percentage points — Trump won support from 52 percent of men and just 39 percent of women. That gap was even bigger among white voters: Trump won a hefty 62 percent of white men compared with 47 percent of white women, for a 15-point gender gap.

Depending on the poll you look at, Trump is doing worse among both men and women now compared with 2016, but he has lost more support among women than men, including working-class white women. All told, it’s a safe bet that we’ll see a large gender gap in 2020. And we might see the largest one yet.

Yes, Geoffrey, the theory of “shy” Trump voters first emerged even before Trump won the 2016 election. The idea was that some voters who intended to vote for Trump would decline to share that information with pollsters because of social-desirability bias — supporting Trump could be viewed negatively by the person conducting the survey. Trump’s victory, alongside a larger-than-average polling error in the Upper Midwest, only bolstered the idea that voters weren’t revealing their true intentions to pollsters.

Between the 2016 and 2020 elections, we’ve received A LOT of questions about “shy” Trump voters, most recently because of a Politico article in which two pollsters suggested these voters could play a role in 2020. The reality is that there isn’t good evidence “shy” Trump voters exist — or that they exist in any larger proportion than, say, “shy” Biden voters. We ran through many of the reasons for that in this recent episode of Model Talk on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast. If you’re looking for something to do while you wait for the vote to start coming in, give it a listen.

Since 2016, a theory has circulated that “shy” Trump voters helped make it happen — and could do so again in 2020. That is, some unknown segment of Trump’s support is too “shy” to admit they back him, so the polls are underestimating him. Despite scant evidence to support the idea, we’ve heard it again and again, even in the closing days of this campaign.

But if “shy” Trump voters were a thing, you might expect to find a difference in how respondents reply to surveys conducted by telephone versus those anonymously submitted online — the idea being that social desirability bias is less likely to kick in when a respondent is dealing with a faceless computer instead of a real person. But a September study by Morning Consult showed that Trump performed about the same against Biden whether the pollster interviewed respondents by phone or online.

While this study is just the latest dismantling of this idea, that doesn’t mean the polls are perfect predictors of the future. As we saw in 2016, the polls can be off just enough for an underdog to win. In other words, some degree of polling error could happen, and while it would have to be much larger this time around for Trump to win, that’s part of the reason that our forecast gives Trump about a 1 in 10 shot of winning the election. We know one of the problems from 2016: Many state-level polls underrepresented the number of white voters without four-year college degrees, a group that overwhelmingly backed Trump in 2016. Although many pollsters have adjusted their methodologies to better account for the education divide among white voters, that doesn’t mean the problem has been solved entirely.

But we also can’t know what new problems may arise in 2020. For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic has led a much larger share of voters to cast ballots early. If pollsters’ models of likely voters haven’t been properly tuned to this new reality, that could create problems.

Yet should Trump win, it probably won’t be because voters who support him have tried to hide their feelings.