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

According to FiveThirtyEight’s model, Pennsylvania is the most likely tipping-point state, meaning that it is the state most likely to give a candidate the 270th Electoral College vote he needs to win the presidency.

In each election, candidates put together coalitions that may help them more in the Electoral College than in the national popular vote, and Pennsylvania is estimated to be a few percentage points more pro-Trump than the country as a whole. By taking a quick look at Pennsylvania’s demographics, we can start to see why.

Pennsylvania is whiter than the nation as a whole, with 75.6 percent of residents identifying as non-Hispanic white (versus 60 percent nationally). While the Black population at 10.7 percent isn’t far below the national figure of 12.4 percent, the Hispanic/Latino population is only 7.8 percent of the state’s residents, less than half the national figure of 18.4 percent. Pennsylvania also has a smaller fraction of Asian Americans — 3.5 percent — than the national fraction of 5.6 percent. And at just 0.1 percent, its share of American Indians is also lower than the national figure of 0.7 percent.

Simply put, Pennsylvania is significantly whiter than the country as a whole. Since white voters are more GOP-leaning than other large racial or ethnic groups, Pennsylvania’s slight GOP tilt is partly a product of those demographics.

But other demographic factors in the state don’t cut to the Republicans’ benefit. Education has become an increasingly strong predictor of voting, too, and 30.8 percent of Pennsylvania’s adults 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree, a number almost identical to the 31.5 percent nationwide. On religion, though, Pennsylvania stands out. With 85 Evangelical Protestant adherents per 1,000 residents, Pennsylvanians are less likely to be Evangelical Protestants than are residents of most other states. That helps explain why Pennsylvania’s politics are different from those of many Southern states.

In 2016, most pollsters — nationally and in swing states — had Hillary Clinton with a small lead on Election Day. After Trump’s victory in the Electoral College, many Americans felt misled by those polls and the coverage of them. So, four years later, can we really trust the polls? Here, FiveThirtyEight database journalist Dhrumil Mehta explains what went wrong in 2016 (and what didn’t) and encourages you not to give up on polling in 2020.

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.