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

A big reason why Trump has a small but meaningful chance of winning reelection comes down to the advantage that Republicans currently have in the Electoral College. Trump has only a 3 in 100 chance of winning the national popular vote, according to our forecast, but he has about a 10 in 100 chance of winning the election. That means in most scenarios where Trump wins, he loses the popular vote.

And this disconnect exists because the battleground states tend to lean a little bit to the right of the country as a whole. You can see this by looking at the FiveThirtyEight forecast’s average margins for each state:

The rightward tilt of the Electoral College can be defined by how the tipping-point state votes compared with the nation. This year, the most likely tipping point is Pennsylvania, which we currently forecast to vote about 3 points more Republican than the national popular vote.

We can sum up the GOP’s advantage another way, too. If you take all the states that we forecast to vote to the right of the country, they add up to 286 electoral votes, while the states to the left total only 252. So if the presidential contest proves to be closer than our average forecast expects, you can see why Trump could manage to pick off some of the swing states where Biden has a narrower advantage. Still, remember that one party’s edge in the Electoral College isn’t permanent — it has bounced back and forth over time and could help Democrats more in future elections.

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.