2020 Election: Live Results And Coverage

Chad, I think one of the roadblocks for voters who have found they prefer to vote absentee will be the excuse requirement in many states: You need a “valid” reason to vote absentee, and while many states changed the rules to temporarily allow COVID-19 as an excuse, that (hopefully) won’t be the case next time around. They’d have to either expand the kinds of excuses, or get rid of the excuse requirement entirely, to recreate the absentee voting options in 2020.

I think, depending on how successfully this election goes off, there’s a pretty good chance we’ll see some of these expansions stick around. In some ways, the 2020 election is a radical real-time test of new systems. After states like Colorado and Washington spent multiple cycles slowly transitioning to all-mail elections, four states, plus Washington, D.C., decided to automatically mail ballots to all active voters for the first time. Two of those states, Vermont and New Jersey, did so despite casting less than 50 percent of its total ballots early or absentee in 2016. And another handful of states mailed absentee ballot applications to all voters for the first time, essentially inviting the crush of absentee ballots we’ve been hearing about for weeks.

I’ve been wondering the same thing, Chad! The fact that things are running so smoothly today has to be due at least in part to the massive early voting we’ve seen — turns out, when fewer people vote on Election Day, lines are shorter! I do have a feeling that the convenience of being able to vote early — whether it’s in-person or by mail — may outweigh the thrill of voting in person on Election Day for many people going forward.

And for some people, it could make voting possible in a way that it literally wasn’t before — a not-insignificant share of respondents in our recent survey with Ipsos said they couldn’t vote in a recent election because they couldn’t get off work, for example. But I am curious to hear from folks like Maya, who has been tracking the rules and how difficult or easy it would be to just carry over some of the COVID-19 precautions into normal election administration. Does that mostly rely on Democrats being in control in statehouses, since they’ve been much more likely to make changes that ease the voting process?

Dayshifters: We’ve seen record early voting numbers this year, in part because of the record number of people who could vote early. Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, many states expanded their mail-in ballot programs to include more voters, and many states also expanded early voting in order to ensure safer in-person voting on Election Day. But how likely do you think these expansions are to last?

We know that around 100 million Americans have already voted by mail or early in-person, which will surely amount to the largest amount of early voting in U.S. history. But on its own, that doesn’t intrinsically mean there’ll be record-setting turnout, as early votes could simply “cannibalize” Election Day votes that would have been cast anyway. Yet in combination with polling that shows very high levels of engagement, it does seem quite possible that this election will set a modern turnout record for a presidential election.

Since the voting age was lowered to 18 in 1971, the highest presidential turnout among the voting-eligible population was roughly 62 percent in 2008, according to data from the United States Election Project. But the 2016 election wasn’t far off that mark, as some 137 million total voters cast ballots for president, which amounted to 60 percent turnout among the voting-eligible population.

However, FiveThirtyEight’s forecast has an average estimated turnout of about 158 million in the presidential contest, which would work out to 66 percent turnout among the voting-eligible population and far surpass even 2008’s showing. As the low end of our turnout estimate works out to 147 million votes — 62 percent turnout — it seems pretty likely that turnout will be up at least over 2016, if not over 2008, too.

And this may not be surprising given how much voters think this election matters and how energized they are. Back in early August, the Pew Research Center found that 83 percent of registered voters felt it “really matters who wins” in November, the highest percentage dating back to 2000. And in September, Gallup found that 71 percent of registered voters said they were “more enthusiastic” about voting than in the past, the highest figure Gallup had found dating back to 1996. Together, these sentiments seem likely to produce record-breaking turnout in 2020.

There’s been a fair amount of talk this election season about QAnon, something that didn’t even exist four years ago. QAnon is a baseless conspiracy theory whose adherents believe there is a global child sex trafficking ring run by Satan-worshipping elites, and only Trump can stop it. If that sounds unbelievable, you’re going to be stunned by the number of candidates on the ballot who have at some point expressed support of the conspiracy theory, including a few who might win tonight.

Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican running in Georgia’s 14th Congressional District, has tweeted “#GreatAwakening” to Alex Jones, called Q “a patriot” and even hosted videos detailing the “evidence” she believes proves Q is “the real deal.” More recently, though, she’s distanced herself from QAnon. Greene’s opponent dropped out of the race, though his name is still on the ballot, so our forecast gives her very high odds of winning the seat.

Two other Republicans — Lauren Boebert, who’s running in Colorado’s 3rd District, and Burgess Owens, who is running in Utah’s 4th District — have also made comments suggesting a belief in the QAnon conspiracy, though they too have walked back those statements. They’re in tighter races than Greene, so it will be worth watching whether they can pull it off. There are a number of other candidates for U.S. House and Senate around the country, including 17 other Republican nominees, who have made comments sympathetic to QAnon, but our forecast doesn’t give those candidates much of a shot. There won’t be a QAnon caucus in Congress just yet, but being associated with the conspiracy clearly hasn’t disqualified any candidates from landing on the ticket.

Some of the most interesting elections of 2020 don’t even have any candidates. There are 121 statewide ballot measures being decided today, such as:

• Proposition 22 in California, which will decide whether Uber, Lyft, DoorDash, etc. drivers and delivery people are independent contractors or employees entitled to legal protections. (Those companies have spent $200 million to ensure it’s the former.)
• Ballot Measure 2 in Alaska, which would implement the nation’s first top-four primary (where the top four vote-getters advance, regardless of party) and ranked-choice voting in the general election. (Massachusetts, via Question 2, is also voting on whether to adopt ranked-choice voting.)
• Amendment #1 in Virginia, which would set up a bipartisan redistricting commission.
• Proposition 115 in Colorado, which would ban abortions after 22 weeks.
• Five ballot measures across four states (Arizona, Montana, New Jersey and South Dakota) that would legalize recreational marijuana.
• And a non-binding statehood referendum in Puerto Rico.

And that’s just scratching the surface; you can read about the other interesting ballot measures we’re watching here.

So here’s a tricky issue: The CDC issued new guidelines on Sunday clarifying that people who are actively in quarantine after a positive COVID-19 test can go to the polls, in person, to vote. Obviously, this is not an ideal situation. But it’s definitely one that some voters are liable to face today, as COVID-19 cases are skyrocketing around the country. The big takeaway, I think, is less, “Boy what a good idea! There’s no risk here at all!” and more a statement reminding you that your right to vote exists no matter what your health status.

This is, in other words, one of those situations where values and science have to coexist, and people might make scientifically less-than-ideal choices in the service of their ideals. And there are steps you can take to make this choice safer, if it’s one you have to make. Besides the usual mask and distancing, the CDC also recommends sick voters let poll workers know their status when they arrive at their voting location. That will enable poll workers to take extra precautions — like limiting the amount of time a sick person has to spend around other voters. (Thanks to reader Candler Hunt for asking about this!)

After the 2016 election, Trump and other Republicans were eager to cast the results — which included Trump losing the popular vote — as a mandate for their policy agenda. This time around, whoever wins is almost sure to do the same, especially if he takes office after a protracted and partisan battle over the results. Why? My research on presidential mandate claims suggests that presidents rely on stories about election results to justify their actions precisely when their legitimacy is in question or when they’re on the defensive politically.

This year, there’s been a lot of focus from the two campaigns on religious voters, and relatively little emphasis on people who aren’t religious. But that doesn’t mean religiously unaffiliated voters can’t — or won’t — make a big difference this election cycle. When I last checked in on religious subgroups, people with no religious affiliation were strongly in Biden’s camp.

Overall, according to a Pew survey from late September and early October, 71 percent of religiously unaffiliated people were supporting Biden, and only 22 percent were supporting Trump. The skew toward Biden was less pronounced among people who identify as “nothing in particular” (62 percent for Biden, 31 percent for Trump), but self-identified agnostics (79 percent for Biden, 15 percent for Trump) and atheists (88 percent for Biden, 7 percent for Trump) were overwhelmingly leaning toward Biden.

Those strong levels of support are despite very little outreach to religiously unaffiliated voters from the Biden campaign. As Daniel Cox and I wrote a few months ago, that’s in part because religiously unaffiliated people are hard to organize politically — and it can still be tricky for candidates to openly appeal to the unaffiliated without alienating religious voters in the process. But this is a large and growing group — and it’s likely to be a huge chunk of this year’s Democratic coalition. So it’s a demographic worth watching, because Democratic candidates may start more explicitly reaching out to religiously unaffiliated voters in the future.

It’s been a nasty election year, full of ugly name-calling and loathing. But how did our politics get to be so hate-filled?

After all, the parties didn’t always hate each other so much. Forty years ago, when asked to rate how “favorable and warm” their opinion of each party was, the average Democrat and Republican said they felt OK-ish about the opposite party. But for four decades now, partisans have increasingly turned against each other in an escalating cycle of dislike and distrust, and views of the other party are currently at an all-time low.

Broadly speaking, there are three trends that we can point to. The first is the steady nationalization of American politics. The second is the sorting of Democrats and Republicans along urban/rural and culturally liberal/culturally conservative lines, and the third is the increasingly narrow margins in national elections.

Yet beneath the surface of hyper-partisan politics, the parties themselves actually have a lot of internal division, which means they share a version of the same dilemma. Republicans and Democrats can’t please all the different voters and groups who fall into their party and want their issue to be prioritized. But in a polarized two-party system, they can make it clear why — whatever someone’s frustration is with their own party — the other party is worse.

Coming into their convention, for instance, Democrats had to bridge policy disagreements between progressives and moderates that were visible during the presidential primary. But the convention focused less on policy and spent more time discussing the existential risk presented by a second Trump term. The party reminded its voters that, whatever concerns they have about Biden, a vote for Biden is also a vote against Trump.

Republicans similarly focused on messaging against the Democrats (even if one of the reasons Trump emerged victorious in the 2016 primary was because the party was so divided that it couldn’t decide). Trump has remade the party in his image, but even for the few remaining Trump-skeptic Republicans, nothing unites like a common enemy. And in a two-party system, being anti-anti-Trump counts the same as being pro-Trump.

If all of this seems unsustainable, it should. The current levels of hyper-partisanship are clearly dangerous. It’s bad news for a democracy when 60 to 70 percent of people view fellow citizens as a serious threat to the country because they belong to a different political party. And the more the parties continue to unify their supporters by casting the other party as the enemy, the higher this number will rise.

One thing you might have noticed during this presidential campaign is how Trump has spoken to “suburban women” in language along these lines: “The suburban voter, the suburban housewife … they want security and they want safety … they don’t want to have their American dream fulfilled and then have a low-income housing process [sic] built right next to their house or in the neighborhood.”

It’s a pretty clear anti-Black dog whistle on Trump’s part; it’s also pretty clear that he thinks the way to appeal to white women in the suburbs is through race-baiting language. The strategy doesn’t match with the ideological proclivities of that particular demographic group in 2020 — college-educated voters have grown more liberal on race issues and white women in the suburbs are a Democratic-leaning group these days — Trump’s clumsy appeals are rooted in history.

The Republican Party has for decades made the choice to pursue the votes of white people at the expense of those in other racial groups. I wrote about this decades-long strategy in detail this summer. Trump’s misguided attempts to talk to suburban women are framed clearly within the electoral playbook that has dominated the GOP for much of his lifetime. While the Black vote was evenly split between the Democratic and Republican Party in 1942, by 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan would win only 14 percent of the Black vote.

What happened in the interim was that indifference on the part of Republican Party when it came to Black voters — Republicans coasted for decades on Black voters’ affinity for the party of Abraham Lincoln — turned into outright animosity with the onset of the Civil Rights movement and the shift of Southern Democrats into the Republican Party. Pitting racial and ethnic groups against each other in Northern cities as well as in the South proved to be a winning electoral strategy for the GOP.

But in 2020, the GOP could be heading for a real reckoning. Polls consistently show that most Americans think Trump is racist. That’s not a great place for the head of a political party to be, especially since white people will no longer be a majority in the country in a couple decades. No matter the outcome of 2020, I think the next few years could prove a turning point for the party.

If Trump loses reelection, one of the main reasons why will be because he lost support compared to 2016 among white voters. Back in mid-October, we compared preelection polling from Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape to 2016 data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study to see how different demographic groups were shifting.

Among the takeaways was Trump’s reduced support among white voters, who will make up around 7 in 10 voters in this election. Whereas Trump won white voters by double digits in 2016, it appears his margin could be halved, mainly because Biden is attracting more support from white women and white voters without a four-year college degree than Clinton did four years ago.

At the same time, it looks like Trump may have improved his standing among voters of color. For instance, his support has gone up a bit among Black voters, mainly younger Black voters and Black men, as has his backing among Hispanic voters, including those with a college degree. While Trump will likely lose badly among voters of color, a slight uptick in GOP support with those groups could be important if Trump also does better among white voters than preelection polling has suggested.

While in-person voting is taking center stage today, mail-in ballots will still be trickling in. Some of them will be deemed invalid, and as the data is tabulated, we’ll get a sense of just how many absentee ballots were rejected.

In every election, a certain percentage of absentee ballots are rejected (the exact share depends on the state and who you ask). Most commonly, this is due to ballots arriving past the deadline, or missing some key information, like a signature. Because a record number of voters are expected to cast ballots by mail this year due to the pandemic, rejected ballots are a bigger concern than usual.

The mistakes that lead to ballots being rejected are more common among voters who have never voted that way before — it’s hard to do something for the first time — and disproportionately affect young voters and voters of color. Some states allow voters to “cure” a ballot with a mistake so their vote still counts, but not all. There have already been signs that ballot rejections could be higher this year: An NPR analysis of 30 state presidential primaries this year found more than half a million ballots were rejected, compared to the almost 319,000 absentee ballots rejected in the 2016 general election. In a few weeks, when all the ballots are counted, we’ll have a better picture of whether rejected ballots were a big issue in 2020, or if it was par for the course.

I’m also keeping an eye out for disinformation making the rounds today. Surprisingly, one of the biggest examples wasn’t spreading online, but over the phone. Robocalls telling voters the election is actually tomorrow or telling voters to stay home have been reported in Michigan, Nebraska, Iowa, North Carolina and Kansas. The FBI is now investigating. It should go without saying that today is Election Day. If you want to vote, don’t stay home!

There’s also been a fair amount of fearmongering playing off the few technical glitches I mentioned earlier, with right-wing media framing the hiccups as only impacting pro-Trump districts and raising the specter of something more sinister. Sean Hannity’s website, for example, posted about the voting machines in Spalding County, Georgia, which were down this morning but are now functioning, according to local media. Hannity’s site headlined the story “‘All Voting Machines Go Down in Georgia County That Trump Won by 24% in 2016.” Firstly, districts that went for Trump are not the only ones facing difficulties. Franklin County, Ohio, where e-poll books were malfunctioning, went for Clinton by 26 percentage points in 2016, for example. Secondly, Georgia replaced all of its voting machines less than a year ago, and any time election officials or voters are interacting with new equipment, the risk of a problem goes up.

I’ll be watching for more misleading or false information making the rounds, but feel free to send me examples (on Twitter or email) if you spot anything or have questions.

Latino voters could make a big difference in battleground states such as Florida, Arizona and even North Carolina today. In general, Latinos are more likely to be supporting Biden than Trump: According to a new NALEO/Latino Decisions poll of Latino registered voters, 69 percent of respondents were supporting Biden, while 26 percent were supporting Trump. (The rest were voting for someone else or undecided.) Another recently released NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Telemundo poll showed Biden with 62 percent support among Latino voters, and Trump with 29 percent support.

But the Latino vote is not a monolith, as Nathaniel Rakich and I wrote in September. Latino voters in Florida are likely to vote quite differently than Latino voters in Arizona or Texas; Hispanic men are likelier to support Trump than Hispanic women; evangelical Latinos are more of a swing group than Hispanic Catholics, who are a strongly Democratic group.

For example, aggregated results from nine weeks of NALEO/Latino Decisions polls of Latino registered voters showed that Biden’s support among Latinos is lower in Florida (57 percent) than in Texas (67 percent) or California (71 percent), and his lead in Florida was narrower in a separate Telemundo poll of the state released last week (48 percent support for Biden, 43 percent support for Trump).

These state-level divides are due, in large part, to differences between various ethnic groups. A plurality of Florida’s Latino population is Cuban, and although this traditionally Republican bloc has slowly been drifting toward the Democrats, there are signs that Trump’s confrontational stance toward Cuba is endearing him to Cuban-American voters in Florida this year. The Latino population in Arizona and Texas, meanwhile, is more heavily Mexican-American, which is a group that tends to lean toward the Democrats.

One macro-level factor to watch among Latinos, though, is enthusiasm. Biden clearly has the edge among the group as a whole, but his campaign has been criticized since the Democratic primary for its lackluster outreach to Hispanic voters. A lack of enthusiasm among Latinos for his candidacy could hurt him — especially if Trump stays relatively strong with conservative Latinos and Hispanic men. So one question this year is whether Biden can match or exceed Hillary Clinton’s support among Latinos in 2016, which in turn fell short of Barack Obama’s support among Latinos in 2012. A Pew Research Center survey conducted in late September and early October indicated that Latinos are less interested in the presidential campaign overall — we’ll soon see how much that affects Latino turnout and support for Biden.

Remember the Hatch Act, which we kept talking about during the Republican National Convention? Well, it’s likely to come up again today, because the Trump campaign has apparently set up a “war room” in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building in Washington, D.C.

That could be a violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in partisan political activities while on the job. Trump, as president, is exempt from the Hatch Act, but other federal employees are subject to it and presumably would be in violation if they helped with campaign activities while on the clock. The problem, of course, is that the Hatch Act is enforced by an independent agency that doesn’t have much power over political appointees, particularly ones in high places — which is how the Trump administration has been able to get away with repeatedly blurring the lines between governance and campaign activity.

A Washington, D.C., ban on gatherings larger than 50 people nixed Trump’s plans to spend election night at his hotel in that city. But Trump is planning an indoor event at the White House instead, with a guest list that is reported to run upwards of 400 people. This will be the highest-profile event at the White House since the Sept. 26 celebration of Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court. That gathering had … some unintended COVID-19-related side effects. Officials say everyone attending tonight will be tested for COVID-19, but testing is, at best, an unreliable method of preventing the gathering from turning into another White House superspreader event. The key problem: Individuals can be contagious before they test positive.

One source of potential uncertainty is the delivery of mail-in ballots in key swing states like Michigan, where ballots must be received by 8 p.m. Eastern on Election Day to be counted. In an effort to ensure that mail delays don’t leave some ballots undelivered, a federal judge issued an order on Sunday, telling the U.S. Postal Service to expedite ballots ahead of the election. Today, the same judge ordered USPS to sweep processing facilities for ballots by 3 p.m. Eastern in a number of states, including Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona, Texas and Georgia, and certify that “no ballots were left behind.”

This is the last election before the 2021 redistricting process — which means it could be pivotal to determining whether one party or the other can gerrymander the House map for the next decade. By our reckoning, control of drawing 132 congressional districts (30 percent of the House) is up in the air this election:

Democrats could gain full control of the redistricting process in New York if they win a supermajority in the state Senate; in Pennsylvania and North Carolina if they flip both chambers of the legislature; in Minnesota if they flip the state Senate; and in New Hampshire if they win the governor’s office. Democrats would also retain control of redistricting if Virginia’s Amendment #1, which would set up a bipartisan redistricting commission, fails.

Meanwhile, Republicans could win total redistricting power if they prevent a Democratic takeover of the Texas state House; hold onto both chambers of the North Carolina legislature; keep the governor’s office in Missouri; successfully defend the Iowa state House; retain their supermajorities in the Kansas Legislature; and flip both chambers of the New Hampshire legislature.

For more details about these races, check out my roundup with Elena Mejía.

For years, Democrats’ ambitions of turning the Lone Star State blue seemed like something of a pipe dream. Take, for example, when Texas state Sen. Wendy Davis ran for governor — after gaining national attention for filibustering abortion restricitons and raising money from around the country — only to come up 20 points short. But in 2018, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke proved that, under the right conditions, Texas could actually be in play. He lost his bid to unseat Sen. Ted Cruz by a mere 2.6 points.

Now, Texas isn’t quite becoming a purple state. O’Rourke’s performance was likely only possible because he ran against an unusually unpopular incumbent in a national environment dominated by an unpopular Republican president. As a comparison, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott won re-election that same year by a much safer 13 points. But fortunately for Democrats, this year they are running against Trump in Texas rather than an old-school Republican like the Bushes, who — of course — dominated Texas politics for years. And tonight Texas is truly in play, with the chances of Biden winning it at 38 percent.

Traditionally, the idea that Texas could be ripe to turn blue was predicated on the fact that it’s a majority-minority state: 41 percent white, 40 percent Hispanic, 12 percent Black and 5 percent Asian. People of color generally vote for Democrats at much higher rates than white voters, but the challenge for Democrats in Texas has been that the electorate is much whiter than the overall population. Democrats have targeted Hispanic turnout as the way to turn Texas blue, but that goal has been somewhat elusive. And in recent years, much of the leftward shift we’ve seen so far can be chalked up to white, college-educated voters abandoning Trump in the vast suburbs of cities like Houston.

If Biden wins Texas, those voters will have played a big role. But we’ve also seen historic turnout in the state this year, with more people voting before Election Day in 2020 than in the whole 2016 race. So there is some question of whether this will be the year that Democrats finally crack the nut of increasing turnout in Texas.

Let’s talk a bit about voter intimidation and violence this Election Day. As the Bible reminds us, there’s war, and then there are rumors of war — and I want to take a moment to make sure we’re all thinking about the difference.

When I was reporting last week on the risks of violence at the polls, experts on both election law and militia groups took pains to tell me that those risks shouldn’t be blown out of proportion. That’s because there’s a very real risk that amplified fear of violence could create as much (or more) voter intimidation than violence itself. Take, for example, a recent report of an incident in Florida in which word spread on social media that the local Republican Party had hired armed guards who were watching people at the polls. What actually happened: Some security guards who had just gotten off work came to a Trump campaign tent near a polling site to hang out with friends and take pictures.

The experience was a good example of how we need to be careful about how we spread information online. Though some voters waiting in that line certainly felt uncomfortable, the fear and intimidation people might feel if they hear armed guards are policing voting lines might be more intimidating than the actual incident was. And, more importantly, one incident like that isn’t necessarily representative of broader conditions.

We’ll have to wait a bit longer than anticipated for North Carolina results tonight. Instead of 7:30 p.m., we’ll get the first results at 8:15 p.m. because one precinct is staying open 45 minutes late. We should get results fast and furious after that, though.

What do cattle herders in South Sudan and voters in Minneapolis have in common? Today, the answer is the Nonviolent Peace Force, a nonprofit protection agency that usually works in international conflict zones. But when I went to vote this morning at my polling place in the Near North neighborhood of Minneapolis, there were the Nonviolent Peace Force volunteers, wearing blaze orange vests with the words “Democracy Defenders” on the back.

They were there largely because the NPF’s U.S. office is located here, said Marna Anderson, NPF’s US director. After a police officer killed George Floyd this summer, the agency decided that it wanted to bring its work close to home, using volunteers from the community, just like they do elsewhere.

But distrust and tensions are running high in this city. When I got home from voting, my neighborhood listserv was blowing up with folks who were worried the Democracy Defenders were there to disrupt or intimidate voters. And that, too, is familiar to Anderson. “It’s just the nature of what happens in a conflict. When you have a lot of tension between groups and political polarization there’s a lot of suspicion,” she said.

So far, Anderson said, it’s been a perfectly boring day in Minneapolis. But there was an incident at the polling station where she was volunteering that really highlighted the need for peaceful conflict resolution in the face of partisan suspicion. A pickup truck with two Trump flags and an American flag pulled up outside Loring Elementary, sparking anxiety in this heavily Black part of the city. But it turned out the two men inside were just there to vote. When a poll worker asked them to move their car further away from the polling place, they did. “That could have easily been a problem,” she said. “In this environment it’s easy for rumors to get started and people to react without thinking.”

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.

Happy Election Day! This afternoon I’ve been tracking reports of technical glitches with voting equipment, and while there have been a handful, that’s to be expected.

A few technical difficulties happen every election. (I wrote a whole story about it!) As Lawrence Norden, director of the election reform program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice, told me: “No election is perfect. There are always going to be some technical problems.” And no, it’s not evidence of a hack or some kind of meddling. It’s just the reality when we have 10,000 different jurisdictions, all using different technology on the same day, and some voters using new equipment for the very first time.

There have been timely, effective fixes in each of the cases I’ve found so far. In Franklin County, Ohio, election officials weren’t able to sync electronic poll books with an online database, so they switched to paper poll books to check in voters. A similar fix was made in Spalding County, Georgia after their voting machines went down — voters were able to cast ballots on paper until the machines were back up and running.

And these few examples are the outliers. The vast majority of polling places today have had no problems. Instead, there have been lots of reports of no lines and smooth sailing:

Even if Trump doesn’t win a second term as president, one crucial part of his legacy is already cemented: He reshaped the Supreme Court. In just four years, he’s successfully nominated three justices: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. All three are relatively young and very conservative, and could anchor a conservative majority on the court for years to come.

Barrett’s ascent to the court this fall was one of the speediest Supreme Court confirmations in modern history, and also the closest to an election. We don’t know exactly how conservative she’ll be, but it seems very likely that by replacing the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died in September, Barrett’s presence will dramatically shift the court’s center of gravity.

And her swift confirmation could make a difference very soon. That’s especially true if post-election litigation makes it to the Supreme Court. Either way, though, Barrett will be faced almost immediately with a docket of extremely consequential cases — and she and Trump’s other nominees will be shaping law in the U.S. long after this election cycle.

With turnout expected to be high this year, many voters who only vote sporadically are likely to cast a ballot. But in our survey with Ipsos that tried to answer why millions of Americans don’t vote, we found that people who voted only some of the time were most likely to have reported barriers to voting, such as they or someone in their household standing in line for more than an hour to vote. They were also likelier than those who always vote to say they’d faced trouble getting time off work to vote, and that they were told their name wasn’t on the list of registered voters.

These barriers were also experienced differently by race and age. Black respondents were the likeliest to say they’d had to stand in line for more than an hour, and Hispanic respondents were the likeliest to say they couldn’t get off work to vote or weren’t able to access the polling place. Americans under 35 were also much likelier than older Americans to face structural barriers like these, especially when it came to having trouble getting time off work to vote, missing voter registration deadlines, and not receiving absentee ballots in time.

The word “militia” implies an organized paramilitary group, and in the United States, those groups are usually right-wing. But the groups the term is applied to aren’t as cohesive as the word implies — they’re often wildly disorganized, predominantly online communities of individuals whose ideologies may not align beyond a general pro-gun stance and a sense that only they can save America.

That matters on Election Day because experts in these groups told me that voter intimidation and violence at the polls is far more likely to come in the form of scattered lone-wolf incidents than any kind of widespread, organized assault by a named militia group like the Proud Boys.

In some ways, this is good news: It means most Americans don’t need to fear voting, and if there is violence in one place, it’s unlikely to indicate a larger trend. But it also means that dealing with these threats is trickier than it might be if there were organized groups to track. Some states are more at risk than others — take Michigan, for example, where a small group of unaffiliated paramilitians has been charged with planning to kidnap the state’s governor. And there’s been a shift in recent years as these people, long associated with anti-government ideologies, have aligned themselves with Trump as the leader of both the government and the anti-government. Policing these groups is also complicated by the fact that there’s often overlap between these online communities and law enforcement. The reality is that, in a violent incident, Americans may be relying on protection from people who personally know the instigators.

Voter fraud has been a major focus of disinformation campaigns this election season. The president has also been fixated on the issue, which has helped to legitimize false claims online.

Trump has claimed, for instance, that ballots have been tossed “in a river” and “in a wastepaper basket.” But the incidents he was referring to were not anywhere as sinister as he claimed: One referred to a load of mail that had been lost, then recovered, and included some ballots, while the other referred to a strange case of just nine ballots that seem to be related to a mix-up in envelopes. Trump’s claims have fed into existing disinformation narratives that are stoking fears of election fraud, such as false stories of thousands of ballots being dumped, or robocalls falsely telling voters that voting by mail is dangerous.

For their part, social media sites are ramping up efforts to fact-check, label and/or remove misleading content online during Election Day, but it’s a good reminder to be skeptical of sensational claims that might crop up as tensions run high in the final hours.

One of the biggest takeaways from the 2016 election was the educational divide in political preferences among white voters. Those without a college degree swung toward Trump, while those with a degree swung toward Clinton, both to a historic degree. There was also a record gender gap, with men preferring Trump and women preferring Clinton.

After today, we will get a lot of new data about Americans’ political preferences according to demographics. On the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast last week, we tried to foreshadow what some of those trends might look like. According to voter surveys, Biden has improved over Clinton’s performance among white voters writ large, a group that makes up nearly 70 percent of the electorate. It appears that more of those gains have come from non-college-educated white voters — a group that Biden will still almost certainly lose overall, but by a smaller margin than Clinton did. Like Clinton, he is expected to win white voters with a college degree overall, a group that has historically voted Republican. Meanwhile, Trump has held steady or even improved his standing with Black and Hispanic voters, particularly men.

For more insight into what the electorate could look like this year, check out the podcast.

One thing I’ll be keeping an eye on as we get a sense for how different groups of Americans voted: How are Trump and Biden doing among white Christians? Four years ago, Trump won handily among white evangelical Protestants, white Catholics and white mainline Protestants. I checked in on where the candidates stood among different religious groups last week and found that while Trump’s still holding strong among white evangelical Protestants — his support among this group might have actually increased — there are signs he’s struggling among white Catholics.

Slipping among white Catholics is not a good thing for Trump, because lots of them live in Midwest swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Experts told me that his lower poll numbers with this group could be due to a few things. One is that white Catholics don’t give Trump high marks for his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic or the racial justice protests this summer. And another is that Biden is himself a white Catholic from Pennsylvania who has woven his faith into his political biography — so people from that religious and cultural background might feel more of a connection with him.

As Nate has written before, a bad economy makes for a tough reelection. And we’re in a bad economy (likely for a while). So, does that sink an already unpopular incumbent like Trump? Not quite. Like just about everything in 2020, even the relatively objective state of the economy is partisan. At the time of the September jobs report release, only 8 percent of Democrats rated the conditional of the national economy as good, compared to 80 percent of Republicans.

Part of that difference can be attributed to a difference of perspective: Republicans see month-to-month growth; Democrats see an economy still in the COVID-19 hole. With so few undecided voters, and such wildly different interpretations of the economy, the current recession might not be the kind of major factor you’d expect in a standard election cycle.

Before this year, the 2008 race between Barack Obama and John McCain seemed like the American presidential election that centered most heavily on race. After all, it was the first (and still only) presidential election to feature a major-party presidential nominee who is a person of color. But 2020 has arguably surpassed 2008 in terms of being a referendum on American racial attitudes.

Obama tried to avoid talking much about being Black during his 2008 run, even as it was a central feature of media coverage of Obama and the election. His opponent, John McCain, didn’t talk about Obama’s race or racial issues much either. And there wasn’t a ton of civil rights activism happening in 2008.

In contrast, the protests over the police killing of George Floyd this summer were by some measures the largest political movement in American history, with estimates that somewhere between 15 and 26 million people attended at least one of the demonstrations. Neither Biden nor Trump was the principal reason for those protests, but the demonstrations made racial issues a central part of the campaign. Both men had to react. Trump ran against the core goals and general ethos of the protests. Federal officials used tear gas on people protesting Floyd’s death outside the White House to clear a walking path for the president to attend a photo op. The Trump administration has banned diversity trainings that could be categorized as anti-racist, a term many of the protesters were using. Restoring “law and order” by tamping down the protests became one of Trump’s central campaign themes.

In contrast, Biden embraced the protests’ core claim, suggesting that America has “systemic racism” that he would seek to fix as president.

But it wasn’t just reacting to the protests; Biden and Trump have themselves leaned into racial issues in ways that made those subjects more central than they were in 2008, or even 2016. During the Democratic primary, Biden linked his candidacy with defending Obama and Black Americans more broadly. He promised to pick a Black woman for the Supreme Court. His selection of Kamala Harris as his running mate was in part an acknowledgment of the large bloc of voters of color in his party.

Racial issues, of course, were a huge part of Trump’s political identity before 2020. He won a crowded GOP primary in 2016 in part because of his promises to build a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and ban Muslims from entering the country. As president, he has made a long list of controversial statements about race, as well as implemented race-focused policies, such as numerous measures limiting the number of immigrants to the country.

A Trump win would suggest that Americans, particularly white Americans, are comfortable with the president’s approach to race — or at least more comfortable with that approach than that of the increasingly “woke” Democratic Party. A Biden win would suggest that Republicans can no longer win presidential elections, as they did in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, by appealing to white Americans’ racial anxieties.

Florida. Great for beach vacations, bad for Al Gore circa 2000.

As we’ve all heard for weeks now, the vote count this Election Day could be slow and the results could be contested — the campaigns each have an army of recount lawyers at the ready. In the fragile political environment of America in 2020, that has lots of people worried.

A few weeks ago, I turned to history to see if there were any lessons we could learn from the contentious recount in Florida in 2000 that pitted Republican candidate George W. Bush against Gore, the Democrat, and eventually found its way to the United States Supreme Court. Mostly what I found was that back then, though many people were angered by the way the election was decided, they mostly kept their faith in democratic institutions and the process.

The same can’t be said of today: In a late September Monmouth University poll, 39 percent of people said they were “not too confident” or “not at all confident” that the 2020 election would be conducted “fairly and accurately.” A FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll from about the same time found that while 60 percent of people surveyed said the election would be fair, 39 percent said it wouldn’t be.

For comparison, back in 2000, 60 percent of people in one CBS News poll said there had not been a fair and accurate count of votes. Still, 59 percent of people in an ABC News/Washington Post poll from the same time said their opinion of the Supreme Court remained unchanged. That same poll asked what people would think if there were an unofficial recount and Gore were declared the winner. Would they consider Bush legitimately elected? Eighty-four percent answered, “Yes.”

In other words, most people were willing to move on and trust that the democratic process had worked well, even if their preferred candidate hadn’t won. In today’s highly partisan America we’re discussing all-out civil war if things are too close to call or if people feel the process has been less than fair. What a difference 20 years can make.

Pandemic conditions have prompted Biden to campaign differently – fewer in-person events and campaign stops, more campaign surrogates. The result has been something that resembles a 19th-century presidential campaign, with less emphasis on the candidate as the focal point. Before the 1880s or so, presidential candidates rarely campaigned on their own, relying instead on other members of their parties to run local campaigns. Biden’s surrogates have been a mix of politicians and major celebrities – old-school campaigning with a contemporary twist.

In the past, presidential campaigns bound these highly diverse party coalitions together. You see a bit of this in 2020, with some party activists on the left supporting Biden despite differing policy visions. As a result, the Democrats’ 2020 campaign has felt less oriented around Biden than those of Clinton in 2016 or Obama in 2008. Biden comes off as a creature of his party rather than a cult of personality. Some campaign messages have emphasized his empathy and character, but the overall effect has been to highlight the coalition over the individual.

One big question hanging over Election Day isn’t about today’s vote — it’s about what happens after the polls close and legal battles over absentee, mail-in and late-arriving ballots begin. To be clear, fights over postmarks, signature-matching, and ballot verification happen every election cycle. But this year, there’s a real possibility that some of these conflicts could end up at the Supreme Court, depending on how close the results are in key battleground states.

The most obvious candidate for a Supreme Court battle is the count in Pennsylvania, which has already been the subject of many, many legal battles over how its election is being run. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court declined for the second time to halt a Pennsylvania Supreme Court ruling that extended the receipt deadline for mail-in ballots by three days. But the fate of those ballots is still very much up in the air, because the Supreme Court didn’t actually rule on the constitutionality of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision, and Pennsylvania state officials are separating late-arriving ballots in case the courts revisit the issue. In fact, several conservative U.S. Supreme Court justices indicated that they think the state court’s ruling was unconstitutional, and could revisit the case. The fate of those late-arriving ballots could make a difference, too, if the result in Pennsylvania is close.

Similarly, late last week, a federal appeals court ordered state officials in Minnesota to separate late-arriving ballots, while strongly hinting that a state court consent decree that extended the deadline to receive ballots was invalid. What happens to those ballots is now in question, too, pending further action by the courts.

And that’s not to mention the fighting that could go on in other states, like Wisconsin and MIchigan, that couldn’t even begin counting absentee ballots until yesterday or today. Even in states like Pennsylvania, there are other sleeper issues that could turn out to be quite important — like the disqualification of “naked” ballots that arrive without a secrecy envelope.

So far, in the election law cases it’s heard this year, the Supreme Court has basically adhered to the principle that federal courts are not allowed to order changes too close to an election, and should generally defer to state courts and election boards’ decision-making. That would seem to make the Pennsylvania and Minnesota cases relatively easy to resolve, since they both revolve around decisions made by state courts and officials.

The wild card, though, in any post-election litigation is Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was confirmed to the Supreme Court too late to participate in any of the pre-election voting litigation. And Chief Justice John Roberts will no longer be the decisive vote once Barrett starts weighing in on cases; he has been the deciding vote in several of the cases we heard before the election.

One thing that is important to underscore: It is very unlikely that the Supreme Court will intervene (or that their actions will matter) unless the result is extremely close in a battleground state. But in that situation, how the justices will rule is pretty unclear.

In the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, as the presidency hung in the balance during the Florida recount, millions of Americans learned about some of the arcane elements of election administration, like how “hanging chads” are handled. Will 2020 make “naked ballots” a permanent addition to our vocabulary?

Here in Pennsylvania and in select other states, votes sent by mail have to arrive in two envelopes — an outer envelope that allows election officials to verify who is voting, and an inner “secrecy” envelope that has no identifying information, so it conceals the voter’s choices. A “naked ballot” is one that arrives without a secrecy envelope. And according to a September ruling by Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court, naked ballots don’t count in that state. Moreover, Pennsylvania election officials cannot open mail ballots until Election Day, so there’s no process for informing voters that their ballot could be thrown out and giving them a chance to correct the problem. As of Nov. 2, Pennsylvania had rejected only 897 mailed votes, according to the U.S. Elections Project, but that’s because naked ballots won’t even be identified until Nov. 3.

This is the first general election in which Pennsylvanians can vote by mail without an excuse, so it is unclear just how many people risk being disenfranchised by this issue. Concern over naked ballots has prompted extensive efforts to educate Pennsylvania voters, including videos with naked celebrities and stories in local papers. But given that Democrats are more likely to send in a mail-in ballot than Republicans, the problem of naked ballots may disproportionately affect Democratic votes.

One of the big surprises of 2016 was just how important education turned out to be — in polls (which subsequently caused pollsters to change their weighting methodologies) and as a predictor of which party people backed. Trump outperformed Romney particularly strongly in counties with a low share of college-educated residents. In fact, in counties that were less than 20 percent college-educated, Trump’s margin was 14 points higher than Romney’s in 2012 — while in counties that were more than 40 percent college-educated, Trump’s margin was 6 percentage points lower than Romney’s.

But this year, there are some signs that Trump has actually lost his edge among white voters without a college degree, and gained among college-educated white voters, so it’s TBD if education will be the same dividing line as it was in 2016.

In the aftermath of 2016, a majority of Americans have at least some doubts about the accuracy of polls, though it’s worth noting that the presidential polls were not that off four years ago, historically speaking. Still, in 2016 some pollsters failed to account for factors that ended up being crucial, like the importance of a voter’s level of education in predicting their political preferences. So we asked a number of well-known pollsters about what they had changed since 2016 as they sought to get a better read on the electorate’s intentions.

Perhaps most importantly, close to half of the 15 pollsters we talked to told us they now weight their samples by education. This adjustment could help deal with a real problem the polling industry had in 2016, when surveys tended to underrepresent voters with little or no college education. This was especially true among white voters, and so some pollsters such as Ipsos and the Pew Research Center have gone even further to weight by education attainment within racial groups, too.

Some pollsters have also tried to make sure they have a more representative sample based on where people live, as more heavily populated areas tend to be more Democratic. Marist College has tried to account more for whether people live in a metropolitan area while NBC News/Wall Street Journal is now more exacting about the share of its sample that lives in urban, suburban and rural areas.

Lastly, pollsters are also trying out new ways of contacting people, partly because of what happened in 2016 but also because of the increasing costs of high-quality polling. Some have moved to sampling from voter registration lists instead of random-digit dialing, which can help ensure you’re talking to someone who really might vote. (Those lists can also provide additional details on respondents, such as their party registration.) Some firms have also increased the share of respondents they contact by cell phone, as 96 percent of Americans report owning one. And others are also trying new ways of reaching respondents, such as texting them questions.

We’ll have to wait to see how accurate polling is this year, but just remember: Polls are our best tool for measuring public opinion, but they’ve always had a margin of error.

The major news headlines throughout this past summer have been the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the protests in response to the police killings of Black Americans such as George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. These headlines are also likely to be key factors in shaping this year’s presidential election.

For instance, recent political science research published in Science Advances by Christopher Warshaw, Lynn Vavreck, and Ryan Baxter-King shows that areas with higher COVID-19 fatalities are less likely to support Trump and Republicans down-ballot. Other work by Warshaw and Justin de Benedictis-Kessner shows that poor economic performance hurts the president’s party across all levels of office. With the pandemic responsible for one of the largest periods of unemployment in recent history, this research suggests that the pandemic and the subsequent recession likely have pushed the odds away from Trump and toward Biden. (Indeed, the economy was one of Trump’s last remaining advantages in FiveThirtyEight’s forecast.)

As for the other major news story — this summer’s wave of Black Lives Matter protests in response to Black Americans killed by police — data collected by political scientists Erica Chenoweth and Jeremy Pressman demonstrates that less than 5 percent of these protests had any associated property damage or protester/police injuries. This is significant because prior research has found that peaceful protests around issues of racial justice tend to benefit Democrats at the office. Of course, we don’t know how voters perceived the protests, but there doesn’t seem to have been evidence that a backlash against the BLM movement hurt Biden earlier this summer. If anything, it boosted his numbers in the polls for a bit.

Moreover, these protests have made issues of structural racism and police accountability more salient — even if support among white Americans has dipped back down. Among Biden supporters, at least, racial inequality is seen as one of the most important issues facing the U.S.

Prepare yourself for the inevitable commentary, likely no matter who wins in 2020: Independent voters decided the election. Or better yet, moderate voters decided the election.

These tropes conjure up a particular image of a pivotal bloc of “reasonable” and “independent” voters sick of the two major parties, just waiting for a centrist candidate to embrace a “moderate” policy vision. And there’s a reason this perception persists. Topline polling numbers show 40-plus percent of Americans refusing to identify as either Democratic or Republican and close to 40 percent calling themselves moderate.

But topline polling numbers mask an underlying diversity of political thought that is far more complicated. (We looked at this in depth in late 2019.)

Some self-identified independents are market-oriented and anti-immigration. More are the opposite. Many are consistent liberals on economic and immigration policy questions. Some are consistent conservatives. Others are somewhere in the middle.

So, next time anybody says that some policy position will win over genuine independent voters, they aren’t addressing an obvious question: Which independent voters?

And are independents also moderate? It depends how you define “moderate.” If you define moderates based on self-identification, then the answer is: sort of. More than half (58 percent) of self-identified independents also identify as moderate, compared to 27 percent who identify as conservative and just 15 percent who identify as liberal, according to data from the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, a research consortium that works with YouGov to conduct large-scale surveys. But many people who call themselves “moderate” do not rate as moderate on policy issues.

Just like self-identified independents, moderates come from all over the ideological space, including moderates who also identify as independent.

So the bottom line is this: If you hear a pundit talking about how independent voters or moderate voters decided the election, you have it on good authority that you should ask which independents and which moderates.

The White House celebrated third-quarter GDP growth last week, claiming that we’re witnessing a V-shaped recovery only Trump can maintain. But the reality is not quite that rosy for many Americans. We might actually be facing a K-shaped recovery, where economic conditions improve for select groups while worsening for others.

For example, the unemployment rate among Black Americans is dropping at a far slower rate than it is for white Americans.

There’s also growing concern that the lack of childcare and in-person education is forcing women out of the workforce in far greater numbers than men.

So if we hear Trump brag tonight about major economic gains, don’t forget to ask: for who?

The economy has kind of taken a back seat in the lead-up to the 2020 election, which might seem a little surprising, given that the COVID-19 pandemic caused a historically large spike in unemployment just a few months ago, and the labor force (and much of the rest of the economy) is still very far from normal. But even though it hasn’t been the preeminent campaign issue, repairing the economy will almost certainly be a major challenge for whichever candidate wins today’s election — not to mention for both houses of Congress.

That’s because even though unemployment has been falling, it’s still quite high. And in a recent round of our survey of economic forecasters, the panel collectively thought there was a 66 percent chance that GDP won’t return to its pre-pandemic level until 2022 or later.

Congress did, of course, pass a large economic stimulus bill back in March. But since then, the House and the Senate have been deadlocked over a second round of relief, with Trump oscillating between cutting off negotiations and calling for Republicans and Democrats in Congress to make a deal. The debate over financial assistance to Americans facing a new wave of COVID-19 cases as winter approaches has mostly been overshadowed in recent weeks by the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett and the final stages of the campaign. But it’s sure to emerge again as a crucial issue once the election is over — and the type of relief that’s offered could vary a lot depending on whether Democrats emerge from the 2020 election with a trifecta (the presidency, Senate and House), or if control of the federal government remains split between the parties.

Some Americans today will be voting on touch screen machines. Others will vote by marking a paper ballot and feeding it into a scanner. Others still will have a paper ballot, but then feed that into a touch screen machine to mark it. America’s election system is a patchwork of different pieces of technology, with each jurisdiction combining its own elements. Naturally, some things might go wrong.

This is somewhat unavoidable and happens to some extent in every election: including electronic pollbooks crashing, touchscreens registering the wrong vote, or optical scan devices — which are used to tally votes — dropping ballots. The vast majority of polling stations won’t have any issues, but the ones that do could end up with long lines and lengthy waits to cast a ballot.

A few places I have my eye on are jurisdictions that have introduced new technology in recent months; when poll workers and voters are less familiar with equipment, it can lead to hiccups. Georgia, for example, replaced all of its direct-reporting machines (which create a digital ballot record) with machines that mark paper ballots last year. Some voters have already used them: Six counties used the machines during local elections last fall, and the state used the machines for its primaries, but both of those pilots had some equipment malfunctions, and many Georgians have yet to use the machines. The same is true for Pennsylvania in many regions, including Philadelphia, which had a rocky rollout of its new ballot-marking devices. Don’t be surprised if a few of the long line reports we’re likely to get come from the Peach or Keystone state.

Again, some election administration mishaps are part of every election and are not, by themselves, evidence of a “botched” election. The question, as the nation votes amid a pandemic, is how many issues crop up and what is their impact.

In an unusual move, the Republican Party didn’t release a formal platform this year. Trump hasn’t said a ton about his second-term plans, either. But that doesn’t mean we have no idea what a second Trump term might look like. It’s likely Trump will move the government in these four ways in a second term:

Making the executive branch more loyal to him. Trump has spent his entire first term complaining that federal workers and agencies — the “deep state” in the president’s language — won’t carry out his agenda. (In many cases, that’s because Trump’s edicts are legally questionable.) But when Trump has tried to wrest more control of federal agencies, most notably when he fired then-FBI Director James Comey, there has often been a political backlash.

Such backlashes would likely matter less to Trump if he were elected to a second term. Indeed, according to reporting by Axios, Trump would look to replace CIA Chief Gina Haspel, FBI Director Chris Wray and Defense Secretary Mike Esper if he is reelected. Expect to see these sorts of moves throughout the executive branch if Trump is reelected — the president filling key jobs with people who will pursue his agenda and removing people who won’t, even if the rationales for these changes are essentially replacing someone who won’t violate core democratic values with someone who will. (Wray, for example, has said that there is no widespread fraud in vote-by-mail programs, a stance that is factually correct but in contradiction to the president’s rhetoric; Esper declared this summer that he was uncomfortable using the U.S. military to limit protests, a view not held by the president; Haspel hasn’t downplayed Russian attempts to interfere in the 2020 election and boost Trump electorally, even as the president has.)

A new executive order from the White House has laid out a path for the administration to designate thousands of government jobs as political posts rather than civil service ones, meaning that the president could then remove people from those posts who don’t agree with him ideologically and replace them with people who do. This might be a way for Trump to get rid of high-profile nonpartisan officials that he has clashed with, such as infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony Fauci.

Promoting his core constituencies (white people, Christians) and diminishing others (Black people, Latinos, immigrants). White identity politics largely defined Trump’s first term, and a second term would be unlikely to stray from those goals. The administration is already trying to curtail immigration, drop policies that encourage colleges and universities to use admissions policies that help increase the number Black and Latino students, and limit diversity trainings that highlight racial disparities that Black Americans in particular face. Expect more policies in this vein in a second Trump term. One major potential change: The Trump administration might issue an executive order saying that children born in the United States to parents who are undocumented immigrants are not automatically considered citizens — in effect rolling back the concept of birthright citizenship.

Reducing regulations. The Trump administration rolled back a lot of regulations on businesses when the GOP controlled Congress in 2017 and 2018. I would expect the administration to both roll back more regulations through executive power and not enforce others.

Boosting red America and weakening blue America. The administration is trying to conduct the U.S. Census in a way that results in fewer undocumented immigrants being counted as part of the population, a move that would likely result in fewer congressional seats in Democratic-leaning areas, particularly California. In a second Trump term, I would expect more moves that empower conservative-leaning areas, states and industries and weaken Democratic-leaning ones. For example, the administration might tell Twitter that it must either allow Trump to tweet whatever he wants, even if his tweets include falsehoods, or face intense federal investigations if the company tries to remove his tweets that violate Twitter’s policies.

Trump is the first president to run for reelection after being impeached, which is why it’s all the more surprising that his impeachment — which happened less than a year ago! — has barely come up during this year’s presidential campaign.

Of course, a lot has happened since last winter, when Trump’s impeachment hearings and trial were taking place — namely, a global pandemic. But even shortly after it happened, it was clear that the impeachment process hadn’t had a big impact on the way Americans thought about Trump. We know that because we tracked the same group of Americans through Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel between November 2019 and February 2020, interviewing them every couple of weeks to find out how their views on impeachment were changing.

What we found was that basically no one budged from their partisan camps. Democrats became more convinced of Trump’s guilt as the hearings and trial unwound, and Republicans became more convinced of his innocence. But Democrats in particular ended the process more concerned that Trump’s reelection chances would actually be helped by his impeachment.

That doesn’t seem to have panned out — at least, in the sense that Trump hasn’t been able to use his impeachment to fire up his base, or criticize the Democrats. More than anything, it’s a reminder of just how much has happened in this long, crazy year, and how much the pandemic has shifted the political context of the 2020 race.