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

The Democrats are favored to win back control of the Senate. But even in a year in which Democrats are likely to win the popular vote by a hefty margin, they are at a significant disadvantage in the Senate because of the chamber’s small-state rural bias.

On the one hand, the Senate has always been unequal, long giving less populous states an outsized voice relative to their population. But for more than a century, that fact didn’t pose much of an issue in terms of which party won. Until the 1960s, Republicans and Democrats competed for both densely and sparsely populated states at roughly the same rate.

But over the last several decades, that’s changed. The parties have reorganized themselves along urban-rural lines, and there is now a clear and pronounced partisan bias in the Senate thanks to mostly rural, less populated states voting increasingly Republican. It’s reached the point that Republicans can win a majority of Senate seats while only representing a minority of Americans.

In fact, over the last four decades, Republicans have represented a majority of Americans just once — from 1997 to 1998. And yet, the GOP has held a Senate majority for 22 of the last 40 years.

If Democrats indeed gain control of the Senate, the question of statehood for Washington, D.C., will leap to prominence. After all, it’s not hard for Democrats to look at the last 40 years and believe that adding a low-population Democratic state is only fair.

One story I’m keeping tabs on today is that of lawsuits being filed over voting procedures in key states. To be clear, it is extremely normal for there to be litigation on Election Day. So I’m watching for anything that could be especially significant — both in terms of the outcome and previewing what we could see in the courts after today.

A lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania by Republicans falls into the latter category. The lawsuit alleges that Montgomery County has been reaching out to voters who submitted their ballots by mail and giving them the opportunity to fix mistakes they made on the ballots. That’s not what all counties are doing, so the Republicans are claiming that this procedure is a violation of the equal protection clause. And they’re asking both for the county to stop contacting voters to fix their ballots and for the ballots that were already fixed to be thrown out.

Legal scholars like election law expert Rick Hasen seem skeptical of these claims. But as he notes, this lawsuit could also be a harbinger of Republicans’ strategy if the margin is close in a state like Pennsylvania, since at that point the fight could shift to a focus on which individual ballots should be counted.

Although Trump is doing slightly better among Black voters in 2020 than he did in 2016, Biden will likely still win Black voters overall by a huge margin. The Black vote isn’t a monolith, though. According to our analysis of likely voters, Black voters 45 and older are much more supportive of Biden than Black voters under 45 are. Our analysis found voters under 45 are still overwhelmingly supporting Biden, but the age gap among Black Democrats is noteworthy.

Why does Biden do slightly worse (and Trump slightly better) among younger Black voters? According to the African American Research Collaborative poll, Black voters under 30 are less likely to think about their vote as support for the “Black community,” which could signal that they express lower levels of linked fate than their elders. Linked fate is the idea that Black Americans vote as a unified bloc in part because their history of being discriminated against in America has made them view their fate in a collective way. In the absence of strong feelings of linked fate, younger Black voters might feel less affinity for the Democratic Party. That same poll also found that Black voters under 30 were less likely than their elders to agree that the Democratic Party is welcoming to Black Americans, or to trust congressional Democrats to “do what is best” for Black people.