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

A strong wind blew down a non-masked voting booth in New Hampshire today, injuring one, which led our office to ask … Wait? Non-masked voting booth? Yes, and the Granite State isn’t the only place segregating voters by mask status. While at least 33 states are requiring masks to vote in a polling place today (and several others have a statewide mask mandate in place), officials told ABC News that they weren’t planning on turning away voters who showed up without a mask. Some states are trying out curbside voting, and others are segregating areas for the masked and the unmasked. Separate outdoor booths for the unmasked (like the one that blew over in New Hampshire) are just one way of compromising between public safety and a desire to make sure everyone gets a chance to cast a vote.

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.