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

If he wins tonight, Biden’s plan for COVID-19 include a nationwide test and trace system, which many experts have said the U.S. should have had up and running months ago. The problem: It may now be too late for such a system to offer meaningful benefits. Test and trace — interviewing people who have tested positive for COVID-19 and tracking down their recent contacts so those people can also be tested or quarantined — works best when there are clear points of contact and people can make educated guesses about where they might have contracted the illness. Thanks to the recent surge, there are many parts of the country where this is no longer possible. Running for president this year was always going to be about how each candidate will deal with the pandemic — but at this point, it’s going to affect what options any potential Biden administration has available to get the disease under control. If he wins tonight, he has some big challenges ahead.

One county in Georgia is keeping polls open for an extra two hours after having technical problems this morning:

It’s a fine line between a landslide and a nail-biter.

As I wrote in our final forecast overview, there wasn’t a lot of change over the past 24 or 48 hours, as most of the late polling either came in close to our previous polling averages, or came from — frankly — fairly random pollsters that don’t get a lot of weight in our forecast, which means the forecast didn’t shift that much.

Our final forecast had Biden with an 89 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, as compared to a 10 percent chance for Trump. (The remaining 1 percent reflects rounding error, plus the chance of an Electoral College tie.)

But the reason I say it’s a fine line between a landslide and a nail-biter, is that it wouldn’t take that big of a polling error in Trump’s favor to make the election interesting.

Importantly, interesting isn’t the same thing as a likely Trump win; instead, the probable result of a 2016-style polling error would be a Biden victory but one that took some time to resolve and which could imperil Democrats’ chances of taking over the Senate. On the flip side, it wouldn’t take much of a polling error in Biden’s favor to turn 2020 into a historic landslide against Trump.

Biden’s standing is considerably stronger than Clinton’s at the end of the 2016 race, but a 10 percent chance of something happening isn’t a zero percent chance, and as I wrote earlier this week, Trump still has a path to the White House.