2020 Election: Live Results And Coverage

Another thing about democracy being on the ballot (can you tell I’m a bit obsessed?) is that under Trump, the Republican Party has moved to a very illiberal place, at least as judged by global democracy experts, who place the GOP at about the same place as the AfD in Germany, and approaching Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party in Hungary. So given Trump’s long list of attacks on the principles of democracy, the argument that democracy really is on the ballot kind of rings true.

I’m watching CNN at the moment and I am seeing a lot of coverage of partial results. For example, they just highlighted that Biden is leading in Kentucky with 8 percent of the vote in. They are also running through a slew of counties reporting 20 percent of the vote or less. They have heavily caveated these numbers, but this kind of coverage is probably just not necessary. While we’ve talked a lot about the risks of partial results at FiveThirtyEight, most viewers are probably not familiar with all the differences in what types of votes get reported when. These very-partial-vote analyses are ripe for manipulation by partisans as well. We need to hold off on drawing any real conclusions until full counties are reporting. We can indeed look at small counties in Kentucky to give us a sense of the shift from 2016, but in order to do that, we need all the vote in.

The initial results from Kentucky, while unrepresentative, are consistent with a nationalized presidential election. According to the Decision Desk, the minimal early vote results from a few counties show the same partisan vote shares for the presidential and Senate race, suggesting few split-ticket voters. All those Democratic donors trying to defeat McConnell yielded a lot of advertising, but might not have persuaded many Trump voters to support McGrath.

Last week on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen Druke interviewed Dan Merkle, the executive director of elections at ABC News. They talked about how the ABC News Decision Desk will be projecting the winner of races this year, including the presidential election in individual states and the Electoral College.

It looks as though Republicans will wind up with around a net +2 percent on party registration in Florida. That’s not terrible for them, and they reversed a slight Democratic disadvantage based on early and absentee voting. But it’s also not great. Based on the partisan splits in recent polls of Florida, I estimated that — because Biden is doing better among independents in most polls of the state and gets somewhat more crossover voters — the breakeven point for a Trump win was about R +3.5 in Florida. That is, if Republicans led in turnout by 3.5 points or more, Trump would be the favorite to win; otherwise Biden would be. We’ll probably end up just to the Biden side of the line. With that said, there’s a lot of uncertainty. Some polls in Florida showed Biden with big leaders among independents in Florida, while in others he was running evenly with Trump.

While we’re waiting for results … on today’s episode of Hot Takedown — FiveThirtyEight’s sports podcast — we discussed a great collaboration we did with ESPN on political donations by sports team owners. I was surprised by how some owners spend their political money.

Matt, one thing political scientists do know is that when elections are competitive and high-stakes, more people vote because they feel like it matters. So driving us to existential angst is certainly one way to increase turnout. But even if we get to 65 percent turnout this year (conceivable), which would be the highest since 1908, we’d still be in the middle of the pack among advanced democracies, many of which regularly have turnout in the 70 or even 80 percent range.

Our politics editor, Sarah Frostenson, helps us set the scene for tonight as we get closer to results.

As I mentioned earlier today on the live blog, I’m anticipating a big gender gap in the vote this year. But it’s not simply Trump’s candidacy that is driving diverging party support between men and women (although it probably explains some of the gap).

A recently published paper by several political scientists suggests that the growing divide between men and women in their vote choice is due to factors that extend beyond each election cycle. They argue that differences in policy preferences have existed for decades (e.g., support varies between men and women on issues like social welfare and criminal justice), but only more recently has issue-based polarization at the elite level (like among members of Congress) more clearly crystalized.

So voters are simply better sorting into the parties that represent their policy interest than they used to be. And according to this paper, the gender gap is widest among more educated Americans, who are more aware of their elite status.

We just got a big dump of votes from the Lexington, Kentucky, area. However, they are probably early and absentee votes, which as we know skew Democratic. So I’m not sure this tells us much.

Political scientists and popular analysts used to talk a lot about cultural explanations for low voter turnout in the 1990s and early 2000s. But it’s now looking like polarization and the high stakes of today’s campaigns are driving high turnout. We have not revived league bowling or increased social trust, but we are still voting at very high levels.

Even though we’ve already told you to basically ignore exit polls … I’d say the results I’ve seen so far would make me even less confident that they’re going to tell us much of predictive value tonight. Based on what’s been publicly reported, there’s some stuff that would seem pretty good for Biden and some that would seem pretty good for Trump, but not in a way that tells an especially coherent story. That’s not meant as a criticism — the people who run the exit polls are smart, but exit polling is really hard this year. I just think we need to wait for actual votes.

Elliott County, in the coal fields of eastern Kentucky, was notable for voting Democratic in every presidential election from 1872 to 2012. But illustrating how white, working-class areas like Appalachia have moved away from the party, Trump carried Elliott by 44 points in 2016. Now, with 47 percent of the expected vote reporting, Trump is leading by 33 points in Elliott, according to The New York Times.

Pew asked in August whether significant changes in the fundamental design and structure of American government were needed. Overall, 62 percent agreed. But that goes up to 79 percent among Democrats, so I think there’s going to be tremendous pressure for Democrats to put forward a pretty big democracy reform agenda if they gain the trifecta. Pew asked the same question in 2018, and then 68 percent of Democrats supported significant changes. Republicans, however, are more divided.

In response to Sarah’s question, I’m going to be looking for signs that North Carolina and Georgia are going one way and Florida is going another. That might give us a sense of what kinds of places are driving the vote totals for each candidate.

In several states that report turnout by party registration, the share of registered voters has been getting bluer over the course of the day. In Broward County, Florida, for instance, Democrats led by 4 points in votes cast between 7 and 1030 a.m., by 8 points in votes cast between 10:30 a.m. and 12:30 p.m., by 11 points in votes cast between 12:30 p.m. and 3 p.m., by 15 points in votes cast between 3 and 4, and by 21 points in votes cast between 4 and 6. Among other things, this may make exit polls even less reliable than usual for predicting the vote, because if you’re only surveying people who have voted by a certain point in the afternoon, you’re not getting a representative sample of Election Day turnout.

In one very specific respect, though, the Trump era seems to have bolstered American democracy: We’re talking about record turnout, two years after a high-turnout midterm election.

We are starting to get the very first results in Indiana. Because they’re very sporadic, though, they don’t tell us much yet.

How could Biden get to 270 without Pennsylvania or Florida? If he were to win North Carolina plus Wisconsin, Michigan and the Clinton states, he’d be there. He could also do it by winning Arizona plus one Electoral College vote from Nebraska. That would be razor-thin, though: 270-268.

Well, it’s longer term than just the election, but I’m going to be watching final in-person voting numbers in the states that are being hardest hit by this third wave of COVID-19. Research suggests that human density at the polls has an impact on the spread of disease, so I’d expect to see an uptick in cases a couple of weeks from now in places that had the most dense voter turnout — especially if you have dense voter turnout and already high rates of COVID-19 spread.

I just want to reemphasize for people that initial results could be misleading in many states. For example, one of the bluest counties in Florida will dump a bunch of (probably very Democratic-leaning) mail ballots right after polls close there at 7 p.m. Eastern. That will make the results in Florida look really good for Biden, but the state will probably undergo a “red shift” as Election Day votes are counted.

OK, team. The first polls don’t close until 7 p.m., meaning that’s the earliest we might get a projection (projection is lingo for “call,” reader, and what we’ll be using to describe races that have been Biden or Trump have won). Let’s walk through a little what we can expect then — and as the night progresses, as in many states, the vote count will shift, depending on what ballots are counted.

We’ve taken a crack at outlining when to expect election results in every state, and expect 17 states to have nearly all of their expected vote counted tonight, but what should we be watching tonight as the vote trickles in?

Lee and Julia just mentioned the argument that “democracy is on the ballot.” In my panel, I’ve been tracking how many Americans agreed that “at present I feel very critical of our political system.” In October 2012, 54 percent of respondents agreed. But last month, that number was up to 70 percent.

We know that mail ballots are far more likely to be cast by Democrats than Republicans, who are more likely to vote on Election Day. This means that in some states — though certainly not all — more Republican-leaning Election Day votes may be counted ahead of many Democratic-leaning mail ballots, and as the latter are reported, they could swing the vote toward Biden, creating what’s known as a “blue shift.”

Take Pennsylvania, where election officials couldn’t begin processing mail ballots until 7 a.m. today. As a result, Trump could very well lead there tonight but lose that edge as the count proceeds. To get some idea about what such a shift might look like, I analyzed Pennsylvania’s June 2 presidential primary, which saw a huge surge in mail balloting that slowed counting. By 3 a.m. on election night (June 3), only 46 percent of the final Democratic vote had been reported, compared to 71 percent of the GOP total, based on data from ABC News.

If we apply the pattern of returns from the primary to data from FiveThirtyEight’s forecast, we can get an idea of what a blue shift could look like. On Oct. 28 — that’s when I originally did this analysis, but not much has changed — our forecast estimated that about 6.8 million votes will be cast in Pennsylvania, on average, and the average popular vote result gives Biden about a 5-point edge over Trump, 52 percent to 47 percent. If that panned out, Biden would win about 3.6 million votes to Trump’s 3.2 million (with a few additional votes for other candidates). But if the count were to mimic the primary’s trend, Trump would have about a 16-point lead at 3 a.m., 58 percent to 42 percent, based on approximately 60 percent of the total expected vote. But over the course of the next few days, Biden would win two-thirds of the remaining votes, which would precipitate a 21-point shift in the overall margin, as the chart below shows.

Now, this analysis has its limits, as it’s impossible to say just how the count will go and how much the vote may shift in Pennsylvania. However, the primary results there suggest that we should be ready for a sizable swing.

And one fear about a blue shift is that Trump could try to declare victory based on initial returns, as he’s claimed the result should be known on election night. A premature declaration of victory by Trump would have no legal bearing, but he could then point to the shift as evidence of fraud to cast doubt on Pennsylvania’s vote, as he’s made false claims about voter fraud numerous times already. But in reality, such a swing would simply be due to a prolonged count brought on by the increase in mail voting — nothing sinister at all. So we shouldn’t be surprised if Trump leads tonight but loses Pennsylvania once a lengthy count is completed after tonight.

Lee and Julia, in thinking about whether “democracy is on the ballot,” it seems important to highlight that maybe it’s really about laboratories of democracy on the ballot. For instance (as Lee pointed out), Massachusetts has ranked-choice voting on the ballot this year. My bet is that we’ll see many more of these sorts of institutional reforms at the state and local level before we see it at the federal level.

Also speaking of democracy being on the ballot this year: In several states, it literally is! Massachusetts and Alaska are deciding whether they want to use ranked-choice voting. Florida and Alaska are deciding whether they want to have open nonpartisan primaries. California is deciding on voting rights for felons on parole. Virginia is voting on independent redistricting. The Fulcrum has a helpful guide to these and more democracy issues on the ballot this year.

If he wins tonight, Biden’s plan for COVID-19 include a nationwide test and trace system, which many experts have said the U.S. should have had up and running months ago. The problem: It may now be too late for such a system to offer meaningful benefits. Test and trace — interviewing people who have tested positive for COVID-19 and tracking down their recent contacts so those people can also be tested or quarantined — works best when there are clear points of contact and people can make educated guesses about where they might have contracted the illness. Thanks to the recent surge, there are many parts of the country where this is no longer possible. Running for president this year was always going to be about how each candidate will deal with the pandemic — but at this point, it’s going to affect what options any potential Biden administration has available to get the disease under control. If he wins tonight, he has some big challenges ahead.

One county in Georgia is keeping polls open for an extra two hours after having technical problems this morning:

It’s a fine line between a landslide and a nail-biter.

As I wrote in our final forecast overview, there wasn’t a lot of change over the past 24 or 48 hours, as most of the late polling either came in close to our previous polling averages, or came from — frankly — fairly random pollsters that don’t get a lot of weight in our forecast, which means the forecast didn’t shift that much.

Our final forecast had Biden with an 89 percent chance of winning the Electoral College, as compared to a 10 percent chance for Trump. (The remaining 1 percent reflects rounding error, plus the chance of an Electoral College tie.)

But the reason I say it’s a fine line between a landslide and a nail-biter, is that it wouldn’t take that big of a polling error in Trump’s favor to make the election interesting.

Importantly, interesting isn’t the same thing as a likely Trump win; instead, the probable result of a 2016-style polling error would be a Biden victory but one that took some time to resolve and which could imperil Democrats’ chances of taking over the Senate. On the flip side, it wouldn’t take much of a polling error in Biden’s favor to turn 2020 into a historic landslide against Trump.

Biden’s standing is considerably stronger than Clinton’s at the end of the 2016 race, but a 10 percent chance of something happening isn’t a zero percent chance, and as I wrote earlier this week, Trump still has a path to the White House.

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.