2020 Election: Live Results And Coverage

So, we don’t know much at this point. But here’s one thing we do know: We are all experiencing the same snarling anxiety deep in our souls. Ninety percent of Americans agree that “the 2020 presidential election is the most important election in my lifetime.” More than 60 percent say they are “very afraid” if their candidate loses, and 80 percent say they are concerned about election-related violence. So yeah, if you are feeling a little jumpy at this point, you are definitely not alone.

Exit polls are usually a key part of election night reporting, especially before actual results come in. They can provide an early sense of who is leading and how different demographics are turning out and voting. But while it’s always a little dangerous to rely too heavily on exit polls on election night, particularly the early waves, which are released while polls are still open and generally are not representative of the electorate (skew toward older voters as many young votes vote late). But pandemic-related changes to the election mean that exit polls are even less reliable than usual this year.

That’s because the pandemic has undermined the major advantage exit polls have over other kinds of polls: Their ability to know they’re sampling actual voters. Because of how many people voted early this year, exit polls will include a phone poll component to reach these voters, and in some states there will also be exit polls of early in-person voters, but this has pretty severe limitations for two reasons. First, the phone poll will have to guess whether respondents who said they voted actually did, and second, Edison Research — the polling firm that produces the exit polls used by ABC News, CBS News, CNN and NBC News — will have to estimate how heavily to weight the traditional exit poll respondents vs. the phone respondents and early voters. That means there’s more uncertainty than usual in the election night exit polls. And that extra uncertainty means that it’s hard to make a case for relying on them tonight — though they’ll still prove useful in telling us about how key demographics voted once they’re weighted after the election to match actual results.

One barrier to interpreting early results in many states is not knowing just how many counted ballots are from early voting, but one thing we should be able to tell is whether any Senate candidates are performing substantially better than their party’s presidential candidate among the same voters. There has been almost no gap in the polls for Senate and President in many states, as those candidates have had trouble separating themselves from their party’s national reputation. Republicans would likely need a candidate-specific Senate vote in Maine and Michigan; Democrats would likely need one in Montana or Kansas. In tight races like North Carolina, even a small advantage for one party’s Senate candidate over their Presidential nominee could be enough for victory.

For the first time in U.S. history, a voter is more likely to have voted before Election Day than on the day itself. That’s the takeaway from the massive early voting numbers we’re seeing around the country, as around 100 million people have already voted, according to the U.S. Elections Project. But let’s try to put that figure in perspective. In 2016, close to 40 percent of 137 million voters cast early ballots in some way, whether by mail or in person — the highest share ever, as the chart below shows.

Yet the FiveThirtyEight presidential forecast estimates that anywhere from 147 million to 168 million people may vote in the 2020 election. So with 100 million or so votes already cast, that means that an overwhelming majority of voters will have voted before Election Day this year.

And the surge in early voting has been driven largely by Democrats, as somewhere around three-fourths of them planned to or already have voted before Election Day, whether by mail or in person, based on recent national polls. By comparison, only a little more than half of Republicans have said the same. In addition, polls suggest that early voting is up across many racial and ethnic groups, but most especially among Black voters, who lean heavily Democratic.

More complicated than what to do with voters who refuse to wear masks is the issue of what to do with election officials who refuse. In Texas, right now, an election judge and her poll workers in Dallas are refusing to wear masks, despite a GOP chair asking them to do so. According to Lauren McGaughy of the Dallas Morning News, there’s no way to remove this judge unless both the Democratic and GOP chairs agree. And while the GOP chair has said he wants mask wearing to happen, removal doesn’t seem to be on the table.

Democrats are favored to take control of the Senate in the 2020 elections, according to the final version of FiveThirtyEight’s Senate forecast. With the forecast set in stone as of early Tuesday morning, Democrats have a 75 in 100 chance of flipping the chamber. Republicans, meanwhile, have a 25 in 100 chance of keeping control — as likely as drawing a spade from a deck of cards.

However, as I wrote in our final forecast overview, “a ton of seats are still competitive; in 80 percent of our model’s simulations, Democrats wind up with anywhere between 48 and 55 seats.” And remember that’s a big range! The exact number of seats here matters, too, because it’s not just about control of the chamber. Winning 50 seats (plus the tie-breaking vice presidential vote) is a very different outcome for Democrats from winning 55 seats, as the size of their majority would affect how likely they are to pass their ambitious agenda. Not to mention, there are still a number of plausible outcomes in which Republicans retain control.

Since we were talking about the potential changes to absentee voting in a post-pandemic election, a reader just reminded me of one creative workaround to the “excuse” requirement: In Tennessee, one excuse you can use to vote absentee is observing a religious holiday. So a 27-year-old from Nashville started the Church of Universal Suffrage, an officially registered, nonprofit religious institution that observes every Election Day as a religious holiday.

Here’s something for folks watching the courts: Republicans in Nevada and the Trump campaign filed an emergency motion asking the state Supreme Court to stop processing some mail-in ballots in Clark County while they appeal issues related to observer access and the signature-checking system that’s being used. We’ll keep you posted on what happens next. Clark County, of course, is the home of Las Vegas and there have already been several unsuccessful attempts by the Trump campaign and the state GOP to delay counting of mail-in votes in the county over these issues.

In press conferences and at rallies, Trump has cast doubt on the accuracy of the 2020 election results and has refused to commit to peaceful transfer of power should he lose. So, what will happen if the race is tight and Trump disputes the results in a key state? Here, elections analyst Geoffrey Skelley explores some real-world scenarios that could lead us to a constitutional crisis.

Earlier in the live blog, Lee Drutman wrote about rising partisan animosity. And while reducing partisan polarization is a huge topic, I do suspect that election night can exacerbate it. Here’s why: One well-known aspect of animosity toward other groups is perceiving those groups to be monolithic, rather than recognizing that they are made up of individuals with varying motivations. Election night encourages this tendency, as people only see the numbers of votes for the other side, and not the individuals casting those ballots.

That’s one of the reasons I always leave exit polling more upbeat about American democracy: Talking to specific voters on their way out of the polls reminds me that there are people and stories behind the numbers.

It’s dismaying to have to write this sort of blog post, since it doesn’t say great things about the health of our democracy, but: Trump could misleadingly declare victory tonight, even if the final vote count is uncertain and there is no clear winner.

In fact, reporting from Axios from over the weekend indicates that this is a possibility Trump has been discussing with his team for some time. “For this to happen,” the report said, “his allies expect he would need to either win or have commanding leads in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Iowa, Arizona and Georgia.”

Of course, as we at FiveThirtyEight and many other outlets have emphasized repeatedly over the past few weeks, this year’s vote count is expected to take longer than usual because of the high number of mail-in ballots. Keep in mind that what matters is the final vote count, not who looks “ahead” at the end of election night. In other words, the Trump campaign might be counting on early returns to create a mirage of a “red wave” on election night that, in reality, would soon ebb. Republicans are expected to vote in person more often than Democrats, and in-person votes will be counted first in some states, which could give the impression of Trump being “ahead” even if he ends up losing in the final count (which includes mail-in votes).

Given the high volume of ballots and the fact that some states don’t allow ballot counting to begin until Election Day, it’s entirely expected and entirely legal that some ballots will be counted after midnight on Nov. 3. This has taken on particular importance in Pennsylvania, which has already been the subject of lawsuits over which ballots can be counted. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that ballots postmarked by Nov. 3 can be counted as long as they’re received by Nov. 6, but conservative members of the highest court left open the possibility that they could return to the issue after Election Day (their ruling last week indicated that there wasn’t enough time to weigh in before Election Day). Trump said on Monday that he will pursue aggressive litigation in Pennsylvania over the issue of ballot counting.

On Biden’s end, his campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon said that, “Under no scenario will Donald Trump be declared a victor on election night.”

We at FiveThirtyEight will do our best to clearly convey the state of the race throughout the night, including the very real possibility that there is no winner at the end of the night. Pace yourselves, people.

What does it look like when patients who tested positive for COVID-19 go to the polls? Here are some photos out of St. Louis.

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.

If Trump loses reelection, we may look back and conclude the coronavirus pandemic was partially to blame. He downplayed the severity of the disease at the outset and was a major contributor to misinformation about the virus and its treatment. Trump is generally perceived to have mishandled the pandemic. According to our tracker of polling data about the coronavirus, 57.2 percent of Americans, on average, disapprove of the president’s response to the crisis, while 39.8 percent approve.

A plurality of Americans also named the coronavirus (or diseases more generally) as the biggest issue facing the country, according to a recent Gallup poll. That’s not exactly a recipe for Trump’s electoral success. Indeed, there was some evidence to suggest Trump’s own diagnosis of COVID-19 hurt him in the polls. And Biden has gotten particularly strong polling numbers lately in Wisconsin, a key swing state that has been hit hard by the coronavirus in recent weeks.

As I mentioned earlier today on the live blog, we will be watching races featuring female Republicans. Currently, 26 women serve in the U.S. Senate, and of those just nine are Republicans, six of whom are up for reelection this cycle. According to our forecast, the number of GOP women in the Senate will likely shrink when all the votes are counted. That’s because of the six women up for reelection, four are in precarious positions — Sen. Martha McSally in Arizona, Sen. Susan Collins of Maine, Sen. Joni Ernst of Iowa and Sen. Kelly Loeffler of Georgia. (Sen. Shelley Moore Capito’s seat in West Virginia is safe, as is Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith’s seat in Mississippi.)

Of these four Senators in tough races, Ernst is best positioned, with our forecast giving her a 58 in 100 shot at reelection. Last month, in their profile of Ernst, The New Republic dug into some of the complications women face running for office in the party of Trump. In particular, Ernst, herself a survivor of sexual assault, gets questions about some of Trump’s alleged behavior or statements he makes. Moreover, voters in Ernst’s party are less likely than Democrats to consider gender representation important. As we’ve written, while the vast majority of Democratic voters agree that there are too few women in political office, just 33 percent of Republicans think so. To add to that, much of the progress the GOP has made in the Senate is due to appointments — Hyde-Smith, McSally, and Kelly Loeffler all first came to their Senate seats by appointment, which suggests an effort by the GOP to increase the number of women in its ranks. But appointments might not be enough to keep those numbers up.

A big reason why Trump has a small but meaningful chance of winning reelection comes down to the advantage that Republicans currently have in the Electoral College. Trump has only a 3 in 100 chance of winning the national popular vote, according to our forecast, but he has about a 10 in 100 chance of winning the election. That means in most scenarios where Trump wins, he loses the popular vote.

And this disconnect exists because the battleground states tend to lean a little bit to the right of the country as a whole. You can see this by looking at the FiveThirtyEight forecast’s average margins for each state:

The rightward tilt of the Electoral College can be defined by how the tipping-point state votes compared with the nation. This year, the most likely tipping point is Pennsylvania, which we currently forecast to vote about 3 points more Republican than the national popular vote.

We can sum up the GOP’s advantage another way, too. If you take all the states that we forecast to vote to the right of the country, they add up to 286 electoral votes, while the states to the left total only 252. So if the presidential contest proves to be closer than our average forecast expects, you can see why Trump could manage to pick off some of the swing states where Biden has a narrower advantage. Still, remember that one party’s edge in the Electoral College isn’t permanent — it has bounced back and forth over time and could help Democrats more in future elections.

According to FiveThirtyEight’s model, Pennsylvania is the most likely tipping-point state, meaning that it is the state most likely to give a candidate the 270th Electoral College vote he needs to win the presidency.

In each election, candidates put together coalitions that may help them more in the Electoral College than in the national popular vote, and Pennsylvania is estimated to be a few percentage points more pro-Trump than the country as a whole. By taking a quick look at Pennsylvania’s demographics, we can start to see why.

Pennsylvania is whiter than the nation as a whole, with 75.6 percent of residents identifying as non-Hispanic white (versus 60 percent nationally). While the Black population at 10.7 percent isn’t far below the national figure of 12.4 percent, the Hispanic/Latino population is only 7.8 percent of the state’s residents, less than half the national figure of 18.4 percent. Pennsylvania also has a smaller fraction of Asian Americans — 3.5 percent — than the national fraction of 5.6 percent. And at just 0.1 percent, its share of American Indians is also lower than the national figure of 0.7 percent.

Simply put, Pennsylvania is significantly whiter than the country as a whole. Since white voters are more GOP-leaning than other large racial or ethnic groups, Pennsylvania’s slight GOP tilt is partly a product of those demographics.

But other demographic factors in the state don’t cut to the Republicans’ benefit. Education has become an increasingly strong predictor of voting, too, and 30.8 percent of Pennsylvania’s adults 25 and older have a bachelor’s degree, a number almost identical to the 31.5 percent nationwide. On religion, though, Pennsylvania stands out. With 85 Evangelical Protestant adherents per 1,000 residents, Pennsylvanians are less likely to be Evangelical Protestants than are residents of most other states. That helps explain why Pennsylvania’s politics are different from those of many Southern states.

In 2016, most pollsters — nationally and in swing states — had Hillary Clinton with a small lead on Election Day. After Trump’s victory in the Electoral College, many Americans felt misled by those polls and the coverage of them. So, four years later, can we really trust the polls? Here, FiveThirtyEight database journalist Dhrumil Mehta explains what went wrong in 2016 (and what didn’t) and encourages you not to give up on polling in 2020.

Overall, women are more likely than men to vote, so it’s a coveted group — but hardly a monolithic bloc. That said, more and more women are supporting Democrats for president, while more and more men are supporting Republicans, resulting in a big gender gap. The size of that gap has varied since it emerged in 1980, but we saw the largest gap yet in 2016. According to the Pew Research Center, the gender gap four years ago was a substantial 13 percentage points — Trump won support from 52 percent of men and just 39 percent of women. That gap was even bigger among white voters: Trump won a hefty 62 percent of white men compared with 47 percent of white women, for a 15-point gender gap.

Depending on the poll you look at, Trump is doing worse among both men and women now compared with 2016, but he has lost more support among women than men, including working-class white women. All told, it’s a safe bet that we’ll see a large gender gap in 2020. And we might see the largest one yet.

Yes, Geoffrey, the theory of “shy” Trump voters first emerged even before Trump won the 2016 election. The idea was that some voters who intended to vote for Trump would decline to share that information with pollsters because of social-desirability bias — supporting Trump could be viewed negatively by the person conducting the survey. Trump’s victory, alongside a larger-than-average polling error in the Upper Midwest, only bolstered the idea that voters weren’t revealing their true intentions to pollsters.

Between the 2016 and 2020 elections, we’ve received A LOT of questions about “shy” Trump voters, most recently because of a Politico article in which two pollsters suggested these voters could play a role in 2020. The reality is that there isn’t good evidence “shy” Trump voters exist — or that they exist in any larger proportion than, say, “shy” Biden voters. We ran through many of the reasons for that in this recent episode of Model Talk on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast. If you’re looking for something to do while you wait for the vote to start coming in, give it a listen.

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.

Earlier today, I told you to wear a damn mask when you go to the polls, and reader Clinton Weir wanted to know … weren’t masks mostly supposed to be useful for preventing the spread of COVID-19 to other people? Do they actually protect the people who wear them, as well?

It’s a super interesting question! And one of those spots where the expert consensus has been shifting in recent months. A lot of this is coming from animal model studies, but researchers are starting to think masks protect the wearer more than we thought they did, initially. For example, a University of Hong Kong study using hamsters found that animals protected by mask material both caught less of the disease and also had less-severe cases of the disease. We’re not talking about perfect protection, by any means, but this is a war of inches, and every bit helps.

Well and the other question is — do voters and interest groups put pressure on lawmakers to make these changes going forward? I suspect voting rights more broadly are going to be a big issue at the federal level if Democrats win a trifecta, but it’ll be interesting to see if states controlled by Democrats make this a priority going forward too.

Yeah, Kaleigh’s exactly right. A handful of states expanded no-excuse absentee voting in response to the pandemic — Delaware, Massachusetts, Missouri, New Hampshire, New York and South Carolina, for example — and another five said the pandemic doesn’t count as a universally valid excuse.

I’d assume, just psychologically, that it’s hard to put the cat back into the bag for something that makes voting more convenient for people. Further, the norms have been trending towards more early voting in more places since the 1980s.

That’s because, hopefully, the pandemic won’t be a major factor the next time we have a national election. Hopefully.

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.”