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

ICYMI, Trump is really going after suburban women. As we wrote in October, the suburbs, in Trump’s telling, are under siege — and a Biden presidency would transform them beyond recognition. But Trump’s vision of suburbia is an outdated one. The suburbs are increasingly diverse — ideologically and racially — and so his message, which equates affordable housing with crime and insecurity, might not be resonating with its intended target, suburban white women. According to our analysis of likely voters, 54 percent of suburban white women are backing Biden — just 45 percent said they’d be supporting Trump. But suburban white men are decidedly not with Biden — 57 percent support Trump, while just 41 percent support Biden — producing a sizable gender gap in the suburbs.

Of course, we’ll have to see what the actual vote looks like. But why are suburban white women and suburban white men seemingly at odds? As we explained, even though they live in similar geographic regions, suburban white women have more progressive views about gender and are less resentful of Black Americans compared with suburban white men. And even among Republicans in the suburbs, white women take a less hardline position on immigration than white men, which is arguably implicit in Trump’s messages about suburban decay. Moreover, according to political scientist Theda Skocpal and historian Lara Putnam, women in the suburbs are increasingly politically engaged, organizing for Democratic candidates in down-ballot races, suggesting that their support for Democrats will outlive the Trump years.

If Trump loses reelection, we may look back and conclude the coronavirus pandemic was partially to blame. He downplayed the severity of the disease at the outset and was a major contributor to misinformation about the virus and its treatment. Trump is generally perceived to have mishandled the pandemic. According to our tracker of polling data about the coronavirus, 57.2 percent of Americans, on average, disapprove of the president’s response to the crisis, while 39.8 percent approve.

A plurality of Americans also named the coronavirus (or diseases more generally) as the biggest issue facing the country, according to a recent Gallup poll. That’s not exactly a recipe for Trump’s electoral success. Indeed, there was some evidence to suggest Trump’s own diagnosis of COVID-19 hurt him in the polls. And Biden has gotten particularly strong polling numbers lately in Wisconsin, a key swing state that has been hit hard by the coronavirus in recent weeks.

As I mentioned earlier today on the live blog, we will be watching races featuring female Republicans. Currently, 26 women serve in the U.S. Senate, and of those just nine are Republicans, six of whom are up for reelection this cycle. According to our forecast, the number of GOP women in the Senate will likely shrink when all the votes are counted. That’s because of the six women up for reelection, four are in precarious positions — Sen. Martha McSally in Arizona, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa and Sen. Kelly Loeffler of Georgia. (Sen. Shelley Moore Capito’s seat in West Virginia is safe, as is Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith’s seat in Mississippi.)

Of these four Senators in tough races, Ernst is best positioned, with our forecast giving her a 58 in 100 shot at reelection. Last month, in their profile of Ernst, The New Republic dug into some of the complications women face running for office in the party of Trump. In particular, Ernst, herself a survivor of sexual assault, gets questions about some of Trump’s alleged behavior or statements he makes. Moreover, voters in Ernst’s party are less likely than Democrats to consider gender representation important. As we’ve written, while the vast majority of Democratic voters agree that there are too few women in political office, just 33 percent of Republicans think so. To add to that, much of the progress the GOP has made in the Senate is due to appointments — Hyde-Smith, McSally, and Kelly Loeffler all first came to their Senate seats by appointment, which suggests an effort by the GOP to increase the number of women in its ranks. But appointments might not be enough to keep those numbers up.