Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.

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.

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.

https://twitter.com/mcimaps/status/1323781464836755464?s=20

One justification Trump is giving for his confidence going into today are his campaign rallies. Recent research suggests that these rallies produce a short-lived increase in support for Trump. At the same time, research also suggests that these same rallies have led to more COVID-19 cases (which could depress turnout for Trump). We should take caution in over-interpreting these findings since they have not yet undergone peer review yet.

You will see a lot of election maps in the next few days, and cartograms are becoming more and more popular to show differences in scale. As CityLab explained today, rural counties represent a lot of land, but urban counties are more densely populated, which is why choropleth maps might be misleading. Land doesn’t vote! The Wall Street Journal is tracking results using both types of maps, including the cartogram shown here, although Bloomberg’s bodies of water serve as better visual cues.

In the past four years, political observers have often talked about three states — Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — in a single breath. They were the three so-called Blue Wall states that had traditionally backed Democratic presidential candidates but put Trump over the top in 2016. But now, polls — and FiveThirtyEight’s final forecast — suggest that Trump’s chances may be better in Pennsylvania than in Wisconsin or Michigan.

Why is that?

It’s actually not all that clear. Take election evening 2018. Pennsylvania reelected a Democratic senator and governor by double digits, while Wisconsin’s Republican Gov. Scott Walker nearly won a third term. Pennsylvania also has, in many ways, an electorate that would seem to be friendlier to Democrats, given that it has more college-educated voters than Wisconsin. So before 2020, it seemed that if Wisconsin — not Pennsylvania — was a little more likely to lean GOP this year.

But is Pennsylvania the more competitive state tonight? That’s something I’ll be watching closely. One possibility to keep in mind is that Pennsylvania is a state with party registration, while Wisconsin (and Michigan) are not. That might make those other states harder to poll — and so might make polling in Pennsylvania more accurate.

Pinellas County in Florida, home to Tampa, looks promising for Biden so far. He leads by about 37,000 votes with 75 percent reported. That number so far includes very little Election Day vote, which will help Republicans. But Republicans led the Election Day vote by around 21,000. So if the vote matches party registration — which it may not! — Biden would win a county that Clinton lost by 1 point in 2016.

To Nate’s point about ABC’s being conservative about projections tonight: There’s a long history here, one that’s rooted in election night 2000. The TV networks all competed that night to get the scoop, to call the race early, and they all later had to retract their calls. As CBS’s Dan Rather said that night on air, “If you’re disgusted with us, frankly, I don’t blame you.” So, yeah, networks have a responsibility to be cautious! They learned their lesson the hard way.

In response to Lee’s earlier question about whether the Democrats might be able to persuasively claim an election mandate for reforms to the system if they win big tonight, the answer is, well, it’s complicated. Let’s start with the obvious — it’s hard to expect a party coming off of a big victory to invest its energy in, or rally its supporters around, changes to the rules they just won under.

On the other hand, the reforms in H.R. 1 (that Democratic-sponsored House bill to expand voting rights) are likely to be quite popular — even beyond Democrats. Americans want to see campaign spending reined in, and their growing sense of dissatisfaction with the political system might make the public more amenable to structural improvements in our democracy.

That said, it’s worth noting that when we have seen major expansions of enfranchisement and democracy, as with the 19th amendment or the Voting Rights Act, these changes came about because of decades of work by activists, with elected officials coming in toward the end of the process. I say that because Democratic officeholders might want to be careful in claiming a mandate for such changes and taking credit for them.

ABC News projects Republican wins in KY-2, KY-5 and VA-9.

Note that ABC News is being more conservative with its projections than some other news organizations, which I think is a good move. You just want to be doubly sure you’re getting everything right when people are voting by all these different means.

Well, I know there was a lot of doubt about this race, but Indiana Republican Gov. Eric Holcomb is projected to win. (There wasn’t any doubt.)

ABC News projects a Republican win in IN-3.

One warning … don’t make too many inferences about which states get called when polls close and which do not. A lot of it has to do with which states have exit polls, because the networks will be more cautious in states that don’t have them.

It’s now 7 p.m. Eastern, which means the last polls have closed in Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina, Vermont and Virginia. Here’s what our forecast says about the races in those states.

With polls closing, networks are starting to talk about making projections. I found this piece about the changes The Associated Press is making this year really fascinating — they are going to be more transparent about how they make these decisions and why they might hold back on some calls. These changes are partly in response to the complicated environment in 2020, but they also seem to reflect longer-term shifts — the evolving media environment has made people expect more transparency, not just a few authoritative networks making calls, and polarization has increased attention to these processes as well.

Hey! It’s me, Fivey! Your friendly neighborhood data fox!

Tonight, whenever ABC News’s Decision Desk projects a winner in a presidential, Senate or House race, I’m going to be sharing those projections on our live blog. It’s going to keep me busy: I’ll be checking for new presidential and Senate projections every minute, and for new House projections every five minutes. (The Decision Desk “projects” a winner in a particular contest when enough of the vote has been counted in enough of the state or district to be as certain as possible about who will win — for more about how that process works, listen to this episode of the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast.)

But there’s something else you should know about how I report projections. I’ll let you in on a little secret: I’m a bit of an emotional fox — at least as it concerns probability. That’s why I use FiveThirtyEight’s final forecast to contextualize the results — is this what we anticipated or were we surprised? And if we were surprised, based on our final forecast, I might react as such. For example:

• If our final forecast listed a candidate as “slightly favored,” meaning that the forecast gave them somewhere between a 55 and 70 percent chance of winning, but one of their opponents wins, I will be surprised (😮) when I share the projection.
• If our final forecast listed a candidate as “favored,” giving them between a 70 and 90 percent chance of winning, but one of their opponents is projected as winning, I will be shocked (😲).
• And finally, if our final forecast listed a candidate as either “clearly favored” or “very likely” to win, meaning they had over a 90 percent chance of winning, but they still are projected to lose, my little fox mind will be completely blown (🤯).

Now if the election goes as my human data-journalist counterparts expected, based on the forecast, then you may not see many emojis from me. But if the night takes a completely different turn, you can bet your bushy tail I’m going to have a hard time containing my reactions.

To Amelia’s point about young people, the last time we saw really notable youth turnout was in 2008 when young people turned out in droves for Obama. I think one of the most fascinating things about the past four years is how much politics has permeated pop culture. Gen Z (the TikTok generation) seems particularly tuned in (says an Elder Millennial jealously).

Well, one thing we know, Sarah, is that lots of young voters seem to be turning out, especially in battleground states like Texas. And that’s potentially a big deal, since turnout is usually quite low among young people.

Over 100 million Americans voted early this year, which is record-breaking turnout, as this map from The Washington Post helpfully illustrates. What do we know at this point, if anything, about the vote that has already been cast?

Even without full results, we can look at the differential in how the top of the ticket is doing versus down-ballot races. So far in Kentucky, it does look like McGrath, who is challenging McConnell for his Senate seat, is running ahead of Biden. That is not surprising. We expect other Senate candidates like Cornyn in Texas and Kelly in Arizona to run ahead of the top of the ticket. There are still ticket splitters!

Wow, Julia, that is really clever!

Election night data viz will always hold a special spot in my heart, particularly the cartograms. Maps that size states by their electoral votes are notoriously difficult to produce, and you almost always have to make some … strange geographic choices to pull it off (yes, we know that South Dakota is above North Dakota on the one on our House forecast. But I am especially in love with Bloomberg’s cartogram tonight. They got the Mississippi River in there!

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.