2020 Election: Live Results And Coverage

Responding to Julia Azari’s point that “democracy itself is on the ballot” — would that give Democrats a mandate for major democracy reform if they win the trifecta? After all, they have a pretty significant democracy reform bill teed up already (HR 1), which would significantly defend and expand the right to vote, require independent redistricting and increase the power of small donors.

The first polls are now closed, in parts of Indiana and Kentucky. So we might start getting results from there soon. However, neither state can be projected until the rest of the polls in them close at 7 p.m. Eastern (6 p.m. Central).

There’s still some court drama over the U.S. Postal Service as Election Day draws to a close. As I mentioned earlier on the live blog, a federal judge ordered the USPS to canvass processing facilities in a number of key states, giving them until midafternoon to conduct the checks. But just before 5 p.m., federal government attorneys representing the USPS submitted a filing saying they would not abide by the order because they were unable to accelerate the schedule of the daily review process that already happens. The NAACP, which brought the lawsuit, has asked the judge for an emergency hearing to discuss the schedules. We’ll keep you posted if there are developments.

You should always take exit polls with a grain of salt. But a pandemic and the increase in mail-in voting have made exit polls even less reliable this year. Here, podcast host Galen Druke chats with quantitative editor Laura Bronner and elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich about how the exit polls will be done this year and what to make of them.

In case people are wondering what the Trump campaign is saying right now … they’re saying they’re more confident than they were in 2016! Which could well be true. In 2016, it was reported that the Trump campaign didn’t really expect to win at all. While this is certainly spin, I also find it pretty believable that many on the Trump team are in a different mindset this election night: They know that it’s going to be a high-turnout election, they know that there’s a lot of uncertainty surrounding the ultimate fate of some mail-in ballots in some states, etc. While Trump is clearly the underdog in this race, it makes sense that the Trump operation’s self-conception has evolved over the course of four years.

Building on Lee’s post about how Sanders might have done in a general election against Trump, I recently conducted a national survey of Americans over 30, whom I have been tracking for 12 years. Ninety-two percent of respondents would have stuck with the same party regardless of the Democrats’ nominee, but 4 percent who were with Biden then said “neither” when asked to choose between Trump and Sanders — and another 1 percent backed Biden and then Trump. By contrast, just 1 percent backed Sanders but not Biden. So Biden does seem to hold onto a sliver of voters who said they wouldn’t back Sanders.

There are reports that machines were down in Scranton, Pennsylvania earlier today, prompting a judge to order polling places stay open later. There have been some tweets circulating that made this out to be suspicious, but these kinds of malfunctions happen. To be clear, the machines that had problems were optical scanners, into which voters insert their hand-marked paper ballots for tabulation. As Eddie Perez, an election technology expert, explained in a tweet thread, these devices are built with an emergency slot to store ballots for later tabulation in the event they break down because, well, it happens!

In response to Clare’s comments about the unexpected nature of this campaign, the pandemic has obviously changed pretty much everything — the state of the country, the economy, and the focus of the race. I wonder how the claim that “democracy itself is on the ballot” would have played out under more normal circumstances. But the distinctions between the two parties are fairly clear on a lot of key issues, which I think actually makes it harder to define key messages and issues in a particular race.

But note that Biden has maintained his slight advantage over Sanders when comparing hypothetical head-to-head polls against Trump. Biden may have an advantage in part due to his perceived moderation.

What if Democrats had nominated Sanders instead of Biden? Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape has continued to run Sanders-Trump head-to-head polling. Biden continues to outperform Sanders, but only by 2-3 points. And as much as Trump has tried to cast Biden as a trojan horse for Sanders-style socialism, Sanders has also comfortably led Trump in every head-to-head poll going back to August 2019. So maybe that wasn’t the best strategy for Trump.

We probably won’t know all the election results tonight because so many people this year are casting mail ballots, which can take longer to count. So when can we expect results? Elena Mejía and I put together a comprehensive guide that attempts to answer that question. Here’s a general idea of how much of the vote we expect to be counted tonight in each state:

If you scroll through our guide, you can see even more details for every state, including when vote counting might be completed, when results might be released and whether there might be a “blue shift” or “red shift” in the results — which can happen if predominantly Republican Election Day votes are counted before predominantly Democratic mail ballots, or vice versa.

I’m settling in here for the night, and during this dinnertime (on the East Coast) lull, before we start to get a bunch of results coming in, I’ve been thinking about what a strange campaign this has been. Back in the winter, during the primaries, there was a point in time when a lot of people didn’t think Biden was even going to be the Democratic nominee! (And while we’re being nostalgic, remember the Iowa caucuses??) And the pandemic has changed the contours of the race more than anyone could have imagined.

A Trump vs. Biden campaign was always going to be different than 2016’s Trump vs. Clinton: Sexism hasn’t been talked about a ton during this race, despite the fact that the Democrats have a woman vice presidential nominee; Trump is now president, and it’s more difficult to run as an outsider/disrupter when you’re in the highest echelons of power. I think the Trump campaign had planned to run more on the economy and had planned to focus more on Hunter Biden and charges of nepotism. COVID-19 changed a lot of that. The economy is no longer in the optimistic place it was, and 230,000 Americans have died during this pandemic, which means even if voters don’t like the perception of nepotistic tendencies in the Biden family, they might not care as much about that storyline now.

The very nature of the way we vote has become the biggest storyline of this election. It’s very meta, but also very fundamental to democracy. Anyhow, this is just my way of saying: This is not the campaign I thought I’d be covering. But here we are. Onward.

Most states improved their wait times between 2012 and 2016, with no state averaging more than 20 minutes. The large increase in early voting this year may reduce voting waits even further.

I mean, mostly, Chad, I think it’s a testament to the really hard work of election administrators across the country, combined with the lower traffic that a lot of polling places are seeing because of the massive surge in early voting. The couple of lawsuits that have stood out to me today — in Pennsylvania and Nevada, in particular — are the kinds of fights that I think we could see more of in the post-election litigation, as the campaigns and parties start fighting over which ballots are counted. So things could definitely get messy in the coming days. But while it’s still Election Day, I think it’s okay to pause and appreciate the tremendous amount of work that’s made today so uneventful.

Amelia, what does the relative calm in election administration tell you about so many of the fears leading into today? Misplaced? Or are we far from out of the woods on mail ballots being counted, etc.?

As the day winds down, I just want to underscore how remarkably problem-free it’s been so far. Of course, there were scattered reports of voting machines malfunctioning, some late polling place openings and some lawsuits filed. But those are routine snafus, and it mostly looks like when tens of millions of people vote early, it makes things a lot easier come Election Day.

Philadelphia is the largest source of net Democratic votes in Pennsylvania, the most likely tipping-point state in the Electoral College. But it’s critical to state that today’s election is not the only major issue here in Philadelphia right now. On Oct. 26, Philadelphia police officers shot and killed Walter Wallace Jr., a 27-year-old Black man. That shooting triggered two nights of protests as well as a citywide curfew.

In the 2018 midterm elections, the central question was whether Democrats would be able to take back the House. And the end result was Democrats flipped 41 seats, riding a big blue wave right through America’s suburbs. Now the question is, can they hold onto that majority?

The answer here is: Yes. Democrats are clear favorites, according to the final version of FiveThirtyEight’s House forecast, which gives them a 97 in 100 chance of winning control of the House.

House Republicans face stiff odds. They need a net gain of 17 seats to reach a majority, which is a lot of House seats to pick up in a presidential cycle. And in addition to that, the overall national environment just doesn’t favor Republicans. That’s maybe the biggest reason why Democrats are favored to keep control of the House — as well as maybe win the White House and even the Senate.

Our forecast shows Biden with a considerable lead. But what would happen if 2020 saw the same type of polling error as we saw in 2016? Galen Druke guides us through the electoral map:

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, mail-in ballots are going to make up a significant chunk of ballots cast this election. One particular concern that some have with the integrity of mail-in voting is the potential for voter fraud from ballots harvested from deceased voters. Recent research from political scientists at Stanford University shows that ballots cast by deceased people are extremely rare. Over the course of 2011-18, the study’s authors found that only 14 of these sorts of ballots have been cast in the state of Washington (where the authors have unique data suitable to test this claim, since the state regularly conducts all-mail elections). This is consistent with other work showing that double-voting is extremely low, and that measures commonly used to address it mistakenly throw out 300 legitimate votes for each double vote detected.

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.