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

There are few reports of long lines today, and one jurisdiction I’ve been watching in particular is a fascinating case study in how to reduce voter wait times: Maricopa County in Arizona. Maricopa County is the most populous county in the state (it includes Phoenix and Scottsdale) and the fourth-most populous county in the nation. Between 2008 and 2012, it cut the number of polling places from 403 to 211, and long lines started to become a problem. During the 2016 primary, which saw hourslong wait times across the state, Maricopa had just one polling site for every 21,000 voters and vote centers there closed, on average, more than two hours late. At that point, and in response to a lawsuit, the county enacted a “wait-time reduction plan,” with a goal of having voters wait no more than 30 minutes to vote, on average. The plan included strategies such as hiring more poll workers, increasing the number of voting sites, and having backup equipment and ballots. It has been updated each election.

This year, the final plan included allowing voters to vote at any polling place in the county, rather than assigning each voter to a single voting location. The county also has a website where voters can check wait times before heading to the polls. We’ll need to wait until after the election to get a full sense of how well Maricopa County’s plan has gone, but so far it seems to be working: According to the site, the longest wait time is currently 25 minutes, at Surprise City Hall in Surprise, a suburb of Phoenix. Surprise, indeed!

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 But Trump’s vision of suburbia is an outdated one.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.