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

Since 2016, a theory has circulated that “shy” Trump voters helped make it happen — and could do so again in 2020. That is, some unknown segment of Trump’s support is too “shy” to admit they back him, so the polls are underestimating him. Despite scant evidence to support the idea, we’ve heard it again and again, even in the closing days of this campaign.

But if “shy” Trump voters were a thing, you might expect to find a difference in how respondents reply to surveys conducted by telephone versus those anonymously submitted online — the idea being that social desirability bias is less likely to kick in when a respondent is dealing with a faceless computer instead of a real person. But a September study by Morning Consult showed that Trump performed about the same against Biden whether the pollster interviewed respondents by phone or online.

While this study is just the latest dismantling of this idea, that doesn’t mean the polls are perfect predictors of the future. As we saw in 2016, the polls can be off just enough for an underdog to win. In other words, some degree of polling error could happen, and while it would have to be much larger this time around for Trump to win, that’s part of the reason that our forecast gives Trump about a 1 in 10 shot of winning the election. We know one of the problems from 2016: Many state-level polls underrepresented the number of white voters without four-year college degrees, a group that overwhelmingly backed Trump in 2016. Although many pollsters have adjusted their methodologies to better account for the education divide among white voters, that doesn’t mean the problem has been solved entirely.

But we also can’t know what new problems may arise in 2020. For instance, the COVID-19 pandemic has led a much larger share of voters to cast ballots early. If pollsters’ models of likely voters haven’t been properly tuned to this new reality, that could create problems.

Yet should Trump win, it probably won’t be because voters who support him have tried to hide their feelings.

Our forecast has Pennsylvania as the most likely tipping point state, or the state that will deliver the decisive vote in the Electoral college. Here, FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver discusses whether the outlook in Pennsylvania is different than 2016, when we’ll know the results of the general election, and the chances that the Supreme Court will need to step in to determine the winner of the presidency.

Polls coming into today suggest that Democrats will win big. If that happens — the polls could be off, remember — would Republicans interpret their loss as a mandate to become a more moderate party?

This seems unlikely. The problem is that political parties are not singular entities capable of easily changing course. They are, instead, a loose coalition of officeholders, interest groups, donors, activists, media personalities and many others. All those people and groups jockey and compete for power. Think of a giant tug of war, but instead of two people each pulling on opposite ends of a rope, the GOP has thousands of ropes — and most of the tugging has been toward more extreme and more confrontational versions of the party.

This has meant that over the past few decades, almost all the would-be moderates have either gravitated toward Trump or simply broken away from the party altogether. And all that momentum in the Republican Party will likely keep pulling it in a more confrontational, Trumpian direction — even if he is no longer at the helm.

It’s not just elected officials in the Republican Party who are becoming more extreme. Conservative media is part of this trend as well, as it has long played a central role in shaping the GOP. On some days, it’s hard to tell who’s running the country — Trump, or the Fox News hosts who give him many of his ideas (not to mention the rotating cast of characters who have jumped between the administration and the network). Finally, there are the Republican voters. The GOP is more and more a party of white people without a college degree, especially men and those over age 50.

All these forces will most likely continue to tug at the party, leaving would-be moderates with the same choice they’ve faced for decades: Quit, or get on board.