2020 Election: Live Results And Coverage

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.

Although women have made gains in state legislatures and the U.S. Congress over the past several decades, only 44 women have ever served as the governors of their states, and 20 states have yet to have a woman serve in this role.

This cycle, just 11 governorships are up for grabs, and only three of the major-party candidates are women. In Delaware, Julianne Murray won an open Republican primary to take on the Democratic incumbent, John Carney. In North Dakota, Shelley Lenz ran uncontested in the Democratic primary to take on the Republican incumbent, Doug Burgum. And in Missouri, Nicole Galloway handily won a crowded Democratic primary to take on the Republican incumbent, Mike Parson. If Lenz or Galloway wins her race, she would be the first woman to lead her state. However, Sabato’s Crystal Ball rates Lenz’s race as “Likely R,” and Galloway’s as “Leans R.” (Murray’s race is a “Safe D.”) So, there’s a good chance that women won’t make any gubernatorial gains in 2020.

If you wear a mask today when you visit a polling place (or anywhere you might go), you are almost certainly at a lower risk of contracting COVID-19 than if you went unmasked. Let’s say that with a little less nuance for the people in the back: Wear a mask.

Look, this is definitely an issue on which scientific understanding has evolved. When the pandemic began, there wasn’t a lot of data about the effectiveness of homemade cloth masks. Scientists — including Dr. Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases — were left to make educated guesses about the balance between the benefits of mask wearing and the risks of its unintended consequences. But now we have a lot more data, and the data strongly suggests that masks matter.

Frankly, even the scientists who question the effectiveness of homemade masks, like the University of Minnesota’s Michael Osterholm, aren’t saying you should just live life like your pre-pandemic normal. Instead, those researchers think the right choice is being heavily isolated from other people, far more so than most of us are right now.

For your sake — and the sake of others around you — wear a mask to the polls.

As has been the case for every election since 1856 — well, save one — the top two vote-getting parties in this year’s election will be … the Democrats and the Republicans. And though a few of those elections have had serious third party challenges, American democracy has remained, for all these years, a two-party system — not just at the presidential level, but also at the congressional and state level.

But why?

Our two-party system is largely a consequence of how we vote. Almost all of our elections are held under rules that allow just one winner, a single round of voting and a plurality vote (whoever gets the most votes wins). Under these rules, most voters consider voting for a third party to be a wasted vote, since the third-party candidate is unlikely to win. Political resources and ambitions flow into one of the two major parties, thus starving third parties of money and talent.

The U.S. is a rare two-party democracy. Almost all other democracies are multiparty democracies, largely because they have different “proportional” voting rules that use larger voting districts or two-round voting systems that do not punish smaller parties.

Will the U.S. always remain a two-party democracy? After all, more and more Americans are dissatisfied with and feel unrepresented by the two major parties. In fact, two-thirds of Americans say that the two parties do not do an adequate job of representing the American people and they think a third party is needed. According to Gallup, the share of Americans identifying as independents has consistently been in the high 30 to low 40 percent range since the mid-2000s.

It depends on whether we change the way we vote. Some states are trying to do just that: On the ballot today are initiatives in Alaska and Massachusetts to switch to ranked-choice voting in future elections, creating more space for third parties (since third party votes would no longer be wasted). If they pass, the two states would join Maine in using ranked-choice voting — and perhaps building wider momentum to challenge the two-party system in America.

There are more elections worth paying attention to than just the ones for the White House and control of Congress. Control of state governments is at stake, too. When one party controls the governor’s office, state Senate and state House in a given state, it can pass landmark legislation that often goes further than federal legislation does (think abortion restrictions for Republicans or expansions of voting rights for Democrats).

During the Obama administration, Republicans dominated state-level elections, but this year Democrats have the chance to dig themselves out of that hole and take control of more state governments than Republicans. Specifically, the party could take full control of Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Pennsylvania, and it could also break up Republicans’ monopoly on power in Arizona, Iowa, Missouri and Texas.

But Republicans have some opportunities too. The GOP could seize full power in Alaska, Montana, New Hampshire and North Carolina, and it has an outside shot of ending Democratic control of Maine. For full details on which legislative and gubernatorial races will be decisive, check out my article from October.

The last jobs report before the election came in early October (we’ll get the next report on Friday). That final snapshot of the economy before voters head to the polls is important, but historically not the one with the strongest correlation to the results.

Instead, Americans seem to care most about how that last report looks compared to the report six months prior to the election. To put it simply: Americans appear to care more about getting better than doing well. But this time around, it’s more likely that the largest thing determining your outlook on the economy is the party you identify with.

What would Biden, if elected, do as president? Obviously it’s hard to predict the agenda of an entire four-year presidency before it starts. We don’t know if his party will have control of the Senate, though it will almost certainly control the House. We don’t know which of Biden’s campaign proposals were just for show and which he really cares about. We don’t know where he and Democrats in Congress might disagree. Most importantly, we don’t know what might happen in the U.S. or abroad that we can’t foresee right now but that would force Biden to dramatically change course. (For example, the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks reshaped George W. Bush’s tenure.)

But it’s worth thinking about Biden’s potential policies in five general buckets:

The immediate crises. It’s almost certain that Biden’s first major policy initiatives would be aimed at stemming the spread of COVID-19 and helping the nation deal with the economic fallout of the virus. Policies would likely include increased funding for COVID-19 testing and contract tracing and also aid to states and localities to make up for budget shortfalls they are facing. A Biden administration might also take immediate steps to address climate change, another issue Democrats view as an immediate crisis. For example, an economic stimulus bill with state aid and COVID-19 testing funds could also include some kind of program that hires people for clean-energy jobs.

The Pelosi agenda. Since they won control of the House in 2018, Democrats have passed a ton of legislation in that chamber that the GOP-controlled Senate has not moved forward and that Trump would probably have vetoed anyway. But if Democrats control the House, the Senate and the presidency, expect these bills to be revived — after all, they are already fully written pieces of legislation that the overwhelming majority of House Democrats supported. These provisions include a $15 minimum wage, a path to citizenship for people who came to the country illegally as children, automatic voter registration, D.C. statehood, barring police from using chokeholds and no-knock warrants, background checks for virtually all gun sales and anti-discrimination protections for LGBQT people.

The left’s wing’s ideas. These are things House Democrats didn’t adopt in 2019-2020 — in part because they are divisive within the party, complicated to execute, or both. Examples include a public health insurance option, the Green New Deal, adding federal judges and/or Supreme Court justices, or making other major changes to the federal judiciary. These ideas are likely to create some division between the party’s more left-wing and more centrist blocs — with Biden likely to try to find some compromises between them.

The executive branch. There are lots of policies that Trump implemented through federal agencies that Biden can unwind — and the former vice president is likely to use executive power to implement some of his own agenda, particularly if Democrats don’t control the Senate. For example, I would expect Biden to reverse basically all of Trump’s immigration policies and insert the U.S. back into the Paris climate change accords and other international agreements. Some liberals are pushing for Biden to use executive power to forgive up to $50,000 of student loan debt for many Americans, a step that would be a bold and probably controversial use of executive power.

Race and identity. Biden, an older white man leading the major party that is most closely aligned with America’s younger voters and those of color, has suggested he wants to really push the nation forward on racial issues in particular. So he might try to make some historic moves on this front. For example, if Biden wins and Democrats are in control of the Senate, I expect to see 82-year-old Justice Stephen Breyer retire early in Biden’s tenure (to avoid any immediate possibility that Republicans could block filling his seat with a Democrat or leave it open). Biden could then implement his campaign promise of putting the first Black woman on the Supreme Court.

We’ll hear a lot about the Electoral College tonight. If you know your history, you know that it emerged as a last-minute compromise during the writing of the Constitution in 1787. And since 1800, people have been trying (and failing) to either reform the Electoral College or get rid of it altogether.

In 1800, Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party called for allocating electoral votes by congressional district — as Maine and Nebraska currently do, in part — to eliminate the winner-take-all aspect of the Electoral College. But Democratic-Republicans instead used their supermajority in Congress to pass the 12th Amendment, separating the votes for president and vice president, in order to help Jefferson’s reelection prospects in 1804. (Originally, electors’ two votes all went into the same tally, and the person with the second-most votes became VP.)

But as national parties began to develop, state legislatures began changing their allocation formulas to help their preferred candidate win (generally moving to more winner-take-all formats), sometimes even appointing electors to bypass the state’s voters altogether. Changing or eliminating the Electoral College was a perpetual topic of debate in Congress from 1813 to 1826, with several constitutional amendments getting close, and two passing one chamber but not the other.

Calls for reform continued to pop up intermittently, but the next big push came in 1950, when the Senate approved an amendment to allocate states’ electoral votes proportionally, according to the percentage of votes won by each candidate. That amendment failed to get the requisite two-thirds support in the House. A national popular vote amendment passed the House in 1969, with the support of President Richard Nixon, but failed in the Senate.

The Electoral College may be, as Hubert Humphrey once called it, like a “human appendix” (“useless, unpredictable and a possible center of inflammation”). But because it’s in the Constitution, and at least a third of the country always seems to benefit from it, it remains with us still — and probably will for a while longer. (If you want to read more about all this, check out this article I wrote for Washington Monthly.)

Asian Americans make up roughly 5 percent of eligible voters in the U.S., but they’re a rapidly growing group in the U.S. electorate. According to one of the only polls that provides detailed crosstabs on Asian Americans — the Asian American Voter Survey, conducted July 15 to Sept. 10 — a majority of Asian Americans surveyed planned to vote for Biden this year.

That’s not surprising given that the group leans Democratic overall. But Asian American voters aren’t a monolith. While Indian Americans are much more likely to vote for Biden, Filipino Americans are more split. And Vietnamese Americans, who have historically leaned more Republican, are more likely to vote for Trump than they are for Biden.

This is not the first election to take place during the pandemic this year. There were actually a total of 56 statewide primaries (or primary runoffs) between mid-March and mid-September, giving election officials in most states a practice run of sorts for holding an election under these difficult conditions — and giving us a glimpse of what to expect in the general election.

There were a few clear patterns. First and least surprisingly, mail voting was way, way up in almost every state. Second, the pandemic doesn’t appear to have hurt turnout; every primary after July 14 saw higher turnout than the equivalent election in 2016. Third, the growing pains — namely, long lines at polling places and some voters not receiving absentee ballots they requested — tailed off in the late summer and fall, suggesting that states have improved their processes.

Last week, elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich spent some time looking at how much money Democrats and Republicans have spent on TV ads in swing states. TL;DR: It’s “googobs,” to use Nathaniel’s word.

Why don’t young people vote? Apathy and disillusionment about politics often get the blame. But according to our recent survey with Ipsos, low turnout among young adults may have more to do with the fact that our electoral system makes it genuinely difficult for them to vote. That could make the high turnout we’re seeing from young voters so far this year even more noteworthy — because in many parts of the country, barriers to voting are even higher because of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In general, young adults (ages 18-34) were much likelier than older adults (particularly those ages 65 and older) to say that they or someone in their household couldn’t get off work to vote in a previous election, didn’t receive their ballot in time, missed the registration deadline or had trouble finding or accessing their polling place.

This year, though, young people seem highly motivated to vote — just like Americans as a whole. According to our survey, they’re slightly less likely than older voters to say the outcome of the 2020 election really matters (75 percent compared with 91 percent of people 65 or over). But a high share (78 percent) of young people told us they’re planning to vote this year (although, of course, the number who actually cast a ballot will almost certainly be lower).

The pandemic has turned voting from a dull-if-important civic duty into a potentially risky activity. But exactly how risky is it?

I can’t tell you. Nobody can, in fact. One of the difficulties of COVID-19, in general, is that quantifying the risks of specific activities is more an art than a science. We know some of the basics: Outdoors is safer than indoors, smaller groups are safer than larger, wearing a mask is safer than not. But applying that to actual activities is complicated by the nuance of culture, social norms and individual choice. For example: The risk level of dining outdoors with friends is different at a picnic in New England than at a summertime barbecue in Texas.

The same sort of challenges affect attempts to assess the safety of voting. Even the variable most likely to make a difference — whether you can wait outdoors — may be entirely out of your control. Our best advice if you haven’t already voted: Wear a mask, do what you can to avoid peak crowd times and stake out some distance between yourself and other people in line. Maybe time to get creative with a fun and practical distancing device?

Whatever happens tonight and in the following days, The Atlantic’s Ronald Brownstein does a great job in this thread of summarizing some of the top-line political trends we’ve seen over the last four years — in particular, the growing urban-rural divide:

Gallup has been asking Americans for years about how enthusiastic they are to vote — and this year, Americans are fired up! Sixty-nine percent of registered voters said they are more enthusiastic to vote in this election than in previous years. That’s a departure from 2016, when only about half of Americans said they were more enthusiastic to vote than usual.

According to the Gallup poll, conducted Oct. 16-27, overall enthusiasm levels — and enthusiasm levels among Democrats in particular — are about where they were in 2008 when President Obama was elected to his first term. However, in 2008, the share of registered Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents who said they were more enthusiastic to vote than usual was about 15 percentage points higher than the share of registered Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who said the same. This year, Democrats have a 9-point lead in enthusiasm, according to the poll.

Some voters who are also sports fans might find themselves casting their ballots in a familiar place today: their favorite team’s home stadium. Since this summer’s racial-justice protests, there has been a movement among sports teams to volunteer their facilities as polling places. And with the coronavirus pandemic forcing the relocation of many polling places to bigger sites that allow for more social distancing, election officials have generally jumped at the opportunity (although some declined the teams’ offers).

In total, at least 39 major-league sports venues — including iconic venues like Madison Square Garden, Dodger Stadium and Lambeau Field — are being used as voting locations this fall. Seventeen of those are NBA arenas, thanks in large part to the activism of basketball players. In late August, NBA players (led by the Milwaukee Bucks) staged a wildcat strike in protest of the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The strike ended two days later after, among other things, the league agreed to convert its arenas into polling places wherever possible.

I visited one such sports-stadium-turned-polling-place, Fenway Park, during early voting in Boston, and voter interest was off the charts, with a 45-minute line curling around the block. Inside, voters checked in at a desk in front of the concession stands and voted at booths scattered throughout the third-base concourse. Upon exiting, voters were given an “I voted at Fenway Park” sticker and the chance to take a photo in front of the empty field.

“Imagine someone who is infected as a smoker.” This is a great analogy I heard from Linsey Marr, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Virginia Tech.

She was describing the risks of COVID-19 transmission indoors versus outdoors. Just as it’s harder to get away from cigarette smoke inside, it’s harder to get away from infected air inside. There’s no fresh breeze to carry it away, and particularly in smaller spaces, there’s a greater likelihood of just sitting in an invisible pool of the stuff for long periods. The difference in indoor versus outdoor transmission is so stark that a database of more than 20,000 COVID-19 cases found only 6 percent that could be traced to outdoor transmission.

Just something to keep in mind if you’re standing out in the cold today, waiting to vote and feeling crabby about it. You may be chilly, but you’re definitely safer.

Have you voted yet? If you haven’t, make sure you either get to your local polling place or drop off your absentee ballot ASAP! Our voting guide can help. Check the “In-person voting” section for your state to look up the location of your polling place. It’s too late to mail in your absentee ballot in most states, but check the “Submitting an absentee ballot” section to see whether you can drop off your ballot at a local election office, a polling place or a nearby drop box. In some states, if you’re not registered to vote, you can also simultaneously register and vote in person at a polling place up through Election Day.

This year, all signs point to record voter turnout — particularly in battleground states. But even if turnout is high, millions of Americans still won’t vote in 2020. In fact, the vast majority of Americans don’t vote regularly, as we found in a recent survey with Ipsos. And there seem to be a few reasons why:

1. Our electoral system doesn’t make it easy for many people to vote. People who only vote sometimes, or who rarely vote, were more likely than people who regularly vote to report that they or someone in their household experienced barriers like missing the voter registration deadline, not being able to get off work, or being unable to access their polling place. Those barriers could be compounded this year in the states that did not loosen voting requirements or make other efforts to ease the process of voting in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
2. Americans are disillusioned about politics. In the survey, we asked voters who have missed at least one national election why they didn’t cast a ballot that year. Thirty-one percent said that they decided not to vote because they disliked the candidates, and 26 percent said they thought nothing would change as a result of the election. We also asked respondents whether politicians have an impact on their lives. Eighty-four percent of consistent voters said yes, compared to 80 percent of occasional voters and just 68 percent of nonvoters.
3. People tend to vote when they feel a sense of urgency. This is an especially important point for this year — when the vast majority of respondents to our survey say who wins the presidential election really matters. The feeling that voting will make more of a difference than usual this year could spur many people who don’t vote as regularly to go out of their way to cast a ballot.

So if we do see record-setting turnout this year, this chart could help explain why:

I convinced Galen Druke to wake some of our staff up early on Election Day to see how they’re holding up, what they’re doing to prepare for the day and what they’ll be looking for later tonight.

Millions of Americans have been voting for weeks, but this is it: Election Day 2020 is here, and we’re here to help you make sense of it all.

Voting in the middle of a pandemic has created a number of unique challenges this year — including changing the methods we use to vote and the rules governing them — but it also means that there’s a very real possibility we won’t know who won on election night. (We at FiveThirtyEight are certainly bracing for a long night.)

The stakes of this election are high, too. Enthusiasm for voting, among both Democrats and Republicans, is much higher than it was in 2016, and poll after poll has found that many Americans think this election is very important.

Our forecasts are now frozen — in other words, we’re not collecting any new polls or updating the odds. The final forecasts: Joe Biden is favored to beat President Trump; Democrats have a good shot at taking back the Senate; and the House will very, very likely remain under Democratic control (they might even expand their majority by a few seats).

Of course, no matter your political persuasion, for many the memory of the 2016 presidential election looms large. Will the polls underestimate Trump again? We’ll have to wait and see. Systematic polling errors do occur, but it’s hard to predict their size or direction in advance.

But what we can say is that we’re past the point where a 2016-sized polling error is enough for Trump to win reelection. It would take a bigger error this year. That’s possible, and largely why there is still a pathway for Trump to win the White House. We’ll be tracking all that and more on this live blog. But as I said at the outset, we’re unsure how long it will be before we know who won — it may take days. That doesn’t mean anything is wrong, though — there’s been a huge increase in vote-by-mail this year due to the coronavirus pandemic, and mail ballots take longer to count. We’ll keep you informed until we do know who won, and we’ll continue to track any outstanding races. We’ll be taking extra care this year, too, to be clear about what the results we do have show, and what the results we don’t have yet could mean — as the vote count could change in a number of key states as more ballots are counted. That also means we won’t be afraid to say what we simply don’t know.

If you have any questions as we muddle through election night/week/month together, be sure to ping us at @538politics.

If there’s a shift in focus here, it’s that we’re sort of going from “Make inferences about Michigan/Wisconsin/Pennsylvania based on results from other states” to “It’s close enough to the end to actually try to count the votes there.”

This is especially so in Wisconsin which is faster to count than Michigan and Pennsylvania. You’d think that Biden was in pretty good shape in Wisconsin based on his winning Minnesota plus his large leads in pre-election polls. But it’s not quite exactly known what’s out there beyond a lot of Milwaukee absentees, which should make the race much closer but may or may not put Biden ahead.