ABC News projects Republican wins in 14 House races — AL-5, AL-6, FL-2, FL-4, FL-6, FL-8, FL-11, FL-12, FL-15, FL-16, FL-17, FL-18, FL-19 and MS-4.
ABC News also projects Democratic wins in 13 House races — DE-AL, FL-5, FL-7, FL-13, FL-20, FL-21, FL-22, FL-23, FL-24, IN-7, OH-9, OH-11 and VA-8.
The Senate and presidential results are very similar so far in South Carolina, which is probably bad news for Jaime Harrison.
ABC News projects that Democrats will win three Senate races — Delaware, Massachusetts and New Jersey; and Republican Jim Inhofe will win the Senate race in Oklahoma.
With 24 percent of the expected vote already reporting in Ohio, per the Associated Press, Biden leads 60 percent to 39 percent … but those are all probably absentee votes, which counties were told to report by 8 p.m. The Election Day vote should trickle in over the next few hours, swinging things back toward Trump.
While we are on the subject of Vermont, two fun political facts about the Green Mountain State, that longstanding bastion of Yankee Republicanism: 1) Vermont was one of only two states to go Republican in FDR’s 1936 landslide (Maine was the other), and 2) Jeffords’s seat, now held by Sanders, had been Republican almost 150 years — longer than any other in the country. In 1850, lawyer Solomon Foot won that Vermont Senate seat as a Whig. In 1854, Foot helped found the Republican Party. It stayed Republican until Jeffords switched in 2001.
8 p.m. Poll Closures
It’s 8 p.m. Eastern, and a bunch of places are now done voting: Alabama, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Tennessee and Washington, D.C.
Our forecasts for the many, many races in those states that could soon be called:
Our final forecasts for the 8 p.m. races
The final numbers from FiveThirtyEight’s forecast for races where the last polls close at 8 p.m. Eastern
ABC News projects that Joe Biden will win Delaware.
ABC News projects a Republican win in OH-6 and a Democratic win in VT-AL.
Miami-Dade County has gotten bluer in every successive presidential election since 2004, but it looks like that trend may be over this year, thanks to Trump’s strength among its Cuban American population.
Presidential elections are always about political geography. Many of the states that we think of as solid red or blue — like Vermont, which ABC News just projected for Biden — haven’t been that way for all that long. Vermont went red fairly often before 1988, including in 1976, when Democrat Jimmy Carter had a narrow national victory. In 2001, Republican Sen. Jim Jeffords left his party, costing the GOP control of the Senate. And in 2004, it looked like New Hampshire was going to trend red while Vermont went blue. How much states that border each other vote together is my other recent obsession, so depending on how tonight goes, stay tuned for more about that. And for what it’s worth, New Hampshire seems to be trending Democratic more recently.
ABC News projects a Republican win in GA-14.
According to The New York Times’ precinct analysis, Biden is outperforming Clinton among some types of demographic groups in Florida, but it’s not enough to offset his underperformance among Hispanics.
There remains a lot of disagreement in polls and among political scientists about the level of Latino support for Trump. But most surveys have shown Trump rising among Latinos from the level the same poll showed in 2016. Given that the national electorate is projected to move 5 or 6 points toward Democrats, that would be a significant divergence in need of explanation. It could change a lot of narratives about a rising Democratic majority based on demographic change.
Speaking of South Florida, it looks like the GOP may get a pickup in Florida’s 26th District. Right now, Democratic Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell trails Republican Carlos Gimenez by about 4 points, with 86 percent reporting per ABC News. Gimenez may be further helped by more GOP-leaning Election Day votes to come.
A national AP survey of more than 127,000 voters and nonvoters found that COVID-19 was the top issue on voters’ minds as they took to the polls today. Four in 10 voters named it their top issue — the economy was in second place — and about half of voters said the pandemic was very much NOT under control. This could matter to the election outcome, given that the Trump and Biden voters have been heavily divided on the COVID-19 issue. Back in October, for instance, Pew found that 55 percent of all voters called the pandemic a “very important” issue, but the partisan split on that question was more like a canyon — with 82 percent of Biden voters and 24 percent of Trump voters taking that stance. Meanwhile, more than half of Americans have disapproved of Trump’s handling of the pandemic for months.
Back in October, COVID-19 wasn’t the top issue on voters’ minds. But if that changed in the past few weeks, it’s probably not a good thing for the president’s chances.
ABC’s first presidential race projection of the night is for Biden to win Vermont, where FiveThirtyEight’s pre-election forecast gave him a greater than 99 percent chance. Plugging that projection into our interactive forecast tells us very little, keeping Biden’s and Trump’s odds of winning the Electoral College about the same. When appropriate, we’ll be using the interactive map throughout the night to see how the forecast would have been affected by different projections, and you can do the same. Just remember that we won’t know the final vote margins in most states for a while, and different margins would give you different results from the forecast.
ABC News projects that Donald Trump will win Kentucky.
ABC News projects a Republican win in VA-6.
Cuban Americans are getting a lot of attention right now as we’re getting results coming in from Florida. Polling from Florida International University of Cuban Americans in Miami-Dade County shows that unlike in national polls, there is really little evidence of an age divide in support for Trump among Cuban Americans in Miami.
In four Indiana counties that the NYT says are more than 98 percent reported — Wabash, Cass, Martin and Wells — Trump is winning, but by considerably smaller margins than in 2016. So it’s hard to tell if any polling overperformance in Florida would translate to the Midwest.
ABC News projects that Joe Biden will win Vermont.
If Trump wins a second term, it is may well come by winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote. In that case, Trump would be the first president ever to win twice without a popular-vote victory. But what do Americans think about the Electoral College? In an August Gallup survey, 61 percent of Americans supported amending the Constitution to create a national popular vote, while 38 percent were opposed.
In the lead-up to the election, we examined data from Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape and found that Trump was doing better among Hispanics than in 2016. After losing that group by nearly 40 points in 2016, we found that he trailed by a bit more than 20 points this time around. That might point to why we’re seeing him perform better in South Florida. Additionally, we especially found Trump performing better among Hispanics with a college degree. While it’s not a big group nationally, 24 percent of Hispanic Floridians have a college degree, compared to 16 percent of Hispanic adults nationally.
While we’re thinking about Florida voters and waiting for more votes to come in, the book “The New Americans?” really changed how I think about Latino voters. It’s focused on the issue of immigration, but it has a lot of data and insight about the variation within demographic groups — really fascinating.
The Times needle is not really budging as more votes are reported in Florida, and still projects Trump to win by 3 points. If this holds, there are going to be a lot of questions about whether the polls were appropriately capturing the Cuban vote there.
There was also a lot of Spanish-language disinformation targeting Latinos in Florida this year. Some of the key messages were trying to link Biden with socialism, which has a very strong impact with some communities, given its history in authoritarian Central and South American governments. And Trump played into the same narrative with his Spanish-language ads in the state.
ABC News projects a Republican win in KY-4.
Yeah, Clare, the silver lining for Democrats if Trump is in fact appealing to Florida Latinos is that the same won’t necessarily be true for Latino voters in other parts of the country. As Nathaniel and I wrote earlier this year, the Latino electorate is very diverse, and they certainly don’t vote as a single bloc. Biden could find a much friendlier audience among Latinos in states like Texas and Arizona.
Democrats also had a lot of trouble among Cubans in 2018 in Florida. So maybe Trump’s messaging about socialism is indeed resonating there.
We’ve now gotten many votes from Broward County, one of the anchors of the Democratic Party in Florida. Biden leads by 33 points with 83 percent of the expected vote in, but that’s not the greatest number for him — Clinton won it by 35 points in 2016.
An early narrative I’m seeing is that Biden is weak with Florida Latinos, in Miami-Dade County but maybe also in other parts of the state. This could be because Trump is speaking particularly well to those Florida Latino communities, which tend to be more conservative than Latinos in other parts of the country. Trump has done a lot to talk about the evils of “socialism” and to tie the Democrats to that worldview. Perhaps that’s what we’re seeing here playing out now?
ABC News projects a Democratic win in NC-12.
ABC News projects a Republican win in IN-8.
Where Polls Close At 7:30 p.m.
Our final forecasts for the 7:30 p.m. races
The final numbers from FiveThirtyEight’s forecast for races where the last polls close at 7:30 p.m. Eastern
There are also issues here for Biden in a heavily Latino county in Florida, although note that Democrats did lead the Election Day vote in Osceola.
One of the age-old questions about elections is whether changes from year to year are driven more by persuasion or turnout. Trump has said that he thinks his base is large enough that he doesn’t need to focus on persuasion — and his campaign strategy has clearly followed that base-first logic. But in a new working paper I wrote with Seth Hill and Gregory Huber, we examine the relative role of turnout and persuasion in explaining the pro-Republican shift in presidential voting between 2012 and 2016. Both turnout and persuasion matter; states like Florida shifted toward the GOP primarily because of changing turnout patterns. That said, the changes in the states that shifted most between 2012 and 2016 — states like Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan — were driven by persuasion. There’s a mathematical reason for that: When you persuade a voter, you not only gain a vote but also pull a vote out of your opponent’s column.
Seeing those Miami-Dade numbers does make me think about the fairly perennial criticism of Biden’s campaign that they weren’t doing enough outreach to Latino voters — obviously it’s early still, but that critique definitely stands out as a potential factor.
I’m sure that some of our readers have seen some tweets about poor early numbers for Biden out of Miami-Dade County. This Politico piece from a few days ago noted that “one particular area of concern is the relative share of ballots cast by young voters of color and less-reliable Democratic voters,” and quoted Democrats who were worried about the Biden campaign’s get-out-the-vote effort there.
What Are Pollsters Worried About In 2020?
In the wake of the 2016 election, some pollsters have adjusted their methodologies, such as by weighting by education. But as we found out earlier this fall when we talked to 15 well-known polling firms, pollsters still have concerns about how well the polls may do in comparison to the final results this year — especially because of the unprecedented circumstances around holding a presidential election in the midst of a pandemic.
For one thing, pollsters are concerned that the pandemic could complicate pollsters’ turnout models and lead to polling misses. Some respondents who say they plan to vote might not because a spike in coronavirus cases in their area kept them from going to the polls or voting early in-person. Conversely, increased access to mail voting might increase the chances that a less-likely voter will participate this year. On top of this, the polls could look off if something goes awry with the counting of votes. For example, some mail-in ballots may be discarded if they arrive after the receipt deadline in their state, or if the deadline was moved forward in time due to litigation, which has created uncertainty in states such as Minnesota and Pennsylvania.
But pollsters have other concerns, too. Some worried that the industry is too beholden to traditional live-caller polling techniques that have low response rates when it needs to embrace newer methods. Others made something of a counter-argument, wondering if the efforts to adjust methodology after 2016 might actually be obscuring problems born out from moving away from more traditional methods of polling people, such as random-digit dialing to ensure a more truly random and representative sample.
Yet at least a couple of pollsters told us they weren’t really that worried because the polls weren’t that off in 2016, and with fewer undecided voters in 2020, there’s less risk of a major last-minute shift. Moreover, they also expected more battleground state polls to be conducted in the final days of the campaign than in 2016, when some states didn’t have much last-minute data that might have shown Trump gaining.
Yeah, one thing that’s complicated about Florida is that Miami-Dade County has a pretty unique demographic makeup that may not make it terribly representative of the rest of the state or the country.
Just over 7.5 million votes in so far!
ABC News projects Republican wins in IN-6 and KY-1.
A bright spot for Biden in Florida may be Duval County, home to Jacksonville, where he currently leads by about 9 points with three-fourths of the expected vote reporting. Trump won the county by 1 point in 2016.
To add to Shom’s post about rallies, there’s some research, which has been peer reviewed, suggesting that Trump’s rallies also have a counter-mobilization effect — they mobilize his opponents as well as his supporters. In this highly partisan, increasingly negative environment, that might also make a difference.
Preelection polls have consistently shown Biden doing better than Clinton with white voters, but not with Latino voters. In Florida, that could mean a very different pattern of county advantages than we saw in 2016.
Looks like results will be delayed in Fulton County, Georgia, home of Atlanta. This is a Democratic stronghold, so that could mean tonight’s vote will be skewed toward Republicans.
Polls on Florida’s East Coast are going to start closing soon, so we’re still waiting on things, but putting this in here, from Nate Cohn at The New York Times
Indeed, The New York Times needle has Trump on track to win by 2-3 points in Florida, although there’s a lot of uncertainty.
ABC News projects a Republican win in IN-4.
Much worse news for Democrats from the early vote in Miami-Dade County, however, although they seemingly did well in the Election Day vote there.