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The 21 Ballot Measures We’re Watching This Election

Sat, 31 Oct 2020 11:00:32 GMT

People who say that the U.S. is a republic and not a democracy apparently haven’t heard of ballot measures. Every year, some states¹ allow citizens to bypass their elected representatives and weigh in directly on an issue — bringing policy to the forefront of the campaign in a way it often is not in candidate elections.

After all, it is through ballot measures that we’ve gotten laws that were either too bold or too partisan to pass legislatively, such as Colorado and Washington becoming the first states to legalize recreational marijuana, California restricting undocumented immigrants’ access to public education and health care and five red states expanding Medicaid.²

But this year, the pandemic has made it difficult for ballot-measure campaigns to collect enough signatures to make the ballot. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, there are only 121 statewide ballot measures being decided in the 2020 general election — the fewest in a presidential or midterm year since 1986. (By contrast, there were 154 in 2016 and 174 in 2012.) But the ones that did make the ballot are as interesting as ever. Here are 21 ballot measures we’ll be watching closely on Nov. 3.

Any conversation about ballot measures naturally starts in California, a state with a long history of direct democracy. There are 12 initiatives on the general-election ballot there this year, and four deserve special attention:

Proposition 22 is likely to go down as the first battle in a nationwide war over regulating the gig economy. In 2019, California passed a major law designed to give protections to gig workers by reclassifying them as employees, but in response, companies like Uber, Lyft and DoorDash quickly filed a ballot measure to exempt themselves from the law. Under Prop 22, app-based drivers or delivery people would be classified as independent contractors and guaranteed certain benefits like a guaranteed hourly wage and access to health care (just not as many benefits as if they were classified as employees). More money has been spent on this ballot measure than any other in California history, with supporters (mostly the gig companies that would be affected) outraising opponents (mostly labor unions) by nearly $200 million to $20 million. Perhaps presaging a new frontier of campaigning, they’ve also controversially used their apps to push pro-Prop 22 messages to customers and drivers alike. All that advertising may be having the desired effect, though: Prop 22 has appeared to gain support over the course of the fall. Recent surveys show the measure leading, but they disagree about whether it’s a close race.
Elsewhere on the ballot, Proposition 15 takes direct aim at a staple of California politics: an anti-tax proposition passed in 1978 that capped property taxes at a property’s purchase price, leading to a steep drop in county revenues. Prop 15 would undo that law for commercial properties only, allowing them to be taxed at their market value. That could increase funding for county governments and schools by as much as $12.5 billion per year. Prop 15 has been another expensive battle between business groups and labor unions, but this one is more evenly matched: Supporters have raised $67 million, opponents $72 million. Polling has generally shown Prop 15 in the lead, although support has hovered around only 50 percent. The latest survey, from the University of California Berkeley, showed the measure passing 49 percent to 42 percent.
Proposition 16 seeks to repeal another conservative California ballot measure of yore: the state’s 1996 ban on the use of affirmative action in public college admissions and government hiring decisions. But despite California’s liberal leanings and the endorsement of several prominent Democrats, the measure is struggling in the polls: UC Berkeley showed it trailing by 11 points, and even a survey sponsored by its supporters found only a 45-45 tie.
Finally, Proposition 25 is a referendum on a law the legislature passed in 2018 that would make California the first state to pass legislation to end cash bail, a leading goal of progressive criminal justice reformers. However, many advocates are equally suspicious of the proposed alternative, which would give judges wide discretion to decide whether to continue to hold detainees.

Several ballot measures up for election this year deal with elections themselves. For example, if Question 2 passes, Massachusetts could join Maine in switching to ranked-choice voting.³ And if Florida’s Amendment 3 passes, traditional partisan primaries for state (but not federal) office could be replaced with top-two primaries,⁴ like those currently used in California, Louisiana and Washington. Alaska’s Ballot Measure 2 is a unique combination of both of these reforms: It would implement a jungle primary from which the top four finishers advance — and then use ranked-choice voting to decide among them in the general election.

And those who want to abolish the Electoral College will be watching Proposition 113 closely in Colorado. Last year, Colorado became the first swing state to sign onto the National Popular Vote interstate compact, whose signatories pledge their electoral votes to the winner of the national popular vote (but only after states worth a majority of electoral votes agree to do so). But opponents quickly gathered enough signatures to put the law before a public vote; if voters reject it, Colorado will become the first state to withdraw from the compact. Polls have shown a tight race.

Mississippi will also vote on Ballot Measure 2, which would repeal the state’s own version of the Electoral College: a requirement that candidates for statewide office carry a majority of state House districts as well as a majority of the popular vote. Part of the state’s 1890 Jim Crow constitution, the law was designed to make it harder for Black voters to elect their preferred candidates, and even today, it makes it extremely difficult for Democrats to win.

Voters in two states will also decide who draws new electoral maps after the 2020 census. Amendment #1 in Virginia would take that power away from the current Democratic legislature and governor and invest it in a bipartisan commission; legislators would still have to approve the map, but if they failed to do so, responsibility for redistricting would fall to the courts. Meanwhile, in Missouri, the passage of Amendment 3 would defang the redistricting reform initiative that 62 percent of voters approved in 2018. Instead of a nonpartisan state demographer drawing state-legislative districts,⁵ a governor-appointed committee of both Republicans and Democrats would draw them. Polls of both proposals contain good news for fans of less partisan redistricting: the Virginia measure is passing, while the Missouri one is failing.

Since Colorado and Washington in 2012, it’s become a budding tradition for states to vote on ballot initiatives to legalize recreational marijuana. That continues in 2020 with Proposition 207 in Arizona, Constitutional Initiative 118 and Initiative 190 in Montana,⁶ Public Question 1 in New Jersey and Constitutional Amendment A in South Dakota. (South Dakota, as well as Mississippi, is also voting on whether to allow medical marijuana.) Polls suggest all five measures are on track to pass, which would make recreational marijuana legal in a total of 15 states plus Washington, D.C. However, one drug-policy ballot initiative this year is very much a first: Measure 110 in Oregon would decriminalize possession of all drugs in small amounts (although manufacturing and sales would still be illegal) and use the money not spent on drug enforcement to fund addiction and recovery programs.

Another contentious measure is Proposition 115 in Colorado, which would ban abortions after 22 weeks of pregnancy unless the mother’s life is in imminent danger. One of the states with the fewest restrictions on abortion access, Colorado has voted on three anti-abortion ballot measures in the past 12 years and rejected them all. Proposition 115 may meet a similar fate, as the latest poll shows it losing 51 percent to 42 percent. Previous surveys were within the margin of error, but the Vote No on 115 campaign says it received a surge of volunteers and donations after the death of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

Other measures could put more money in people’s pockets — or take it out of them. In Florida, Amendment 2 would raise the state’s minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2026. Based on polling, it’s a close call whether it garners the 60 percent of the vote necessary to pass. Meanwhile, Illinois will vote on whether to amend the state constitution to allow for a graduated income tax (right now, all Illinois income is taxed at the same 4.95 percent rate). The amendment is a top priority of Gov. JB Pritzker, who has proposed raising taxes on people making more than $250,000 per year to help close the state’s roughly $3 billion deficit. And the wealthy Pritzker is putting his money where his mouth is: He’s donated nearly all of the $60 million raised in support of the amendment. Meanwhile, fellow billionaire Ken Griffin is responsible for most of the $50 million that has been raised to oppose it.

But the 2020 referendum that could have the biggest impact on the future of the United States isn’t even in a state at all: Puerto Rico will vote on a nonbinding referendum asking simply, “Should Puerto Rico be admitted immediately into the union as a state?” Although the vote is purely symbolic (it takes an act of Congress to admit new states), it’s something to keep an eye on given that our forecast ⁷ gives Democrats a 75 in 100 chance of winning full legislative and executive power in Washington, and Democrats have repeatedly tossed around the idea of granting Puerto Rico statehood if its residents want it.

Although this is the sixth time that Puerto Rico has voted on statehood since 1967, previous results have been inconclusive: The vote has either been split between multiple alternatives (as happened in 2012), or there was even a boycott of the election by statehood opponents (as in 2017). By contrast, this year’s referendum is the first time it’ll be asked as a straight up-or-down vote, and there is no organized effort to boycott the vote. However, polls suggest a fair number of Puerto Ricans may still sit it out. One recent poll found roughly equal support for and opposition to the referendum, but 17.5 percent of respondents said they would not participate in the election.

11 States Are Choosing Their Governor On Tuesday. Here Are The Races To Watch.

Sat, 31 Oct 2020 09:58:21 GMT

On Tuesday, voters will cast the last ballots in the Nov. 3 races for president, the U.S. House of Representatives and, in 34 states, the U.S. Senate. But in 11 states, voters will also pick their next governor. It’s more common to hold governors’ races during midterm elections, so the few gubernatorial contests held in presidential election years sometimes get overlooked while the spotlight is trained on races for federal office. But these elections will affect states’ policies and other important political matters, including the congressional and state legislative redistricting that will take place after the 2020 census.

This year, though, it’s possible that these contests are being overlooked in part because only a handful look competitive, and in most cases voters are expected to reelect sitting governors rather than usher in a new state executive. Still, in some contests, the lack of competitiveness is fascinating because the likely winner comes from the party that’s weaker in that state’s federal elections. Plus, a few other races have popped up on the national radar despite their potential for lopsided outcomes.

As you can see in the table below, election handicappers’ ratings suggest that the incumbent governor — or party — looks likely or almost certain to hold onto power in nine states, while two other races are closer and could see the out-of-power party flip control.

Few gubernatorial races look competitive

States electing governors on the Nov. 3, 2020, by median race rating and partisan lean of the state

State	Democrat	Republican	Race Rating*	Partisan lean
ND	Shelley Lenz	Doug Burgumi	Safe R	R+34
WV	Ben Salango	Jim Justicei	Safe R	R+33
UT	Chris Peterson	Spencer Cox	Safe R	R+30
MO	Nicole Galloway	Mike Parsoni	Lean R	R+21
MT	Mike Cooney	Greg Gianforte	Toss-up	R+18
IN	Woody Myers	Eric Holcombi	Safe R	R+17
NC	Roy Cooperi	Dan Forest	Likely D	R+4
NH	Dan Feltes	Chris Sununui	Likely R	R+1
DE	John Carneyi	Julianne Murray	Safe D	D+12
WA	Jay Insleei	Loren Culp	Safe D	D+15
VT	David Zuckerman	Phil Scotti	Safe R	D+24

The most competitive race looks to be Montana, which is the only one that election handicappers label a toss-up. It’s an open-seat contest because Democratic Gov. Steve Bullock can’t serve again due to term limits (he’s running for Senate instead), so Republican Rep. Greg Gianforte and Democratic Lt. Gov. Mike Cooney are each seeking to take over the governor’s mansion in Helena. Gianforte lost a previous attempt at this seat — failing to unseat Bullock in 2016 by 4 percentage points, 50 percent to 46 percent — and then won a 2017 special election to the House, where he’s been serving since. For his part, Cooney became lieutenant governor in 2015 because of a vacancy and then was elected as Bullock’s running mate in 2016.

It appears that Gianforte may have a slight edge in his second bid for the office, as he leads by an average of about 5 points in October polling of this contest.

The GOP has an edge in Montana’s governor race

Montana gubernatorial candidates’ margin in polls conducted in October 2020

Pollster	Date	Gianforte (R)	Cooney(D)	Margin
Montana State Univ. Billings	Oct. 19-24	45%	45%	EVEN
Siena College/NYT Upshot	Oct. 18-20	48	44	R+4
RMG Research	Oct. 15-18	48	45	R+3
Strategies 360	Oct. 15-20	48	41	R+7
Emerson College	Oct. 5-7	54	41	R+12
October average		49	43	R+5

Now, a 5-point lead is far from safe, but Gianforte also has a notable fundraising — and self-funding — advantage in the contest, which may be boosting him as well. As of late October, Gianforte had raised $11.2 million, $7.6 million of which came from his own pocket. By comparison, Cooney had raised only $3.5 million through late October, with no self-funding.

Still, Cooney’s not out of it, thanks to Montana’s recent preference for Democrats in gubernatorial races — Democrats have held the office for 16 years — and an openness to splitting tickets to back down-ballot Democrats while voting for a Republican presidential candidate. That’s why the state has relatively competitive contests for governor, Senate and House even though President Trump is likely to carry Montana in the national race.

Beyond Montana, the only other gubernatorial race that handicappers view as pretty competitive is in Missouri, where Republican Gov. Mike Parson has an edge over Democratic State Auditor Nicole Galloway, who is the lone Democrat to hold statewide elected office in Missouri. Although Parson is the incumbent, he’s seeking his first full term — he took over the governorship in 2018 after then-Gov. Eric Greitens resigned amid a scandal.

We don’t have quite as much recent polling in Missouri, but Parson appears to have a lead — it’s just a question of how big. The last nonpartisan pollster to look at the race was St. Louis University/YouGov, which found Parson up 6 points, 50 percent to 44 percent, in early October. That isn’t too different from what we’ve seen in surveys by Republican pollsters such as Cygnal and Remington Research, which this month found Parson ahead by about 7 points and 8 points, respectively. The point is, the race could be close enough that Galloway might surprise, but Parson will be favored heading into Election Day. Galloway’s hopes may rest on the public’s mixed views of Parson’s handling of the pandemic: The SLU/YouGov survey found that 48 percent approved of how he’s dealt with COVID-19, while 48 percent disapproved.

Just two other races aren’t viewed as safe for one party or the other in 2020, but both look likely to reelect their incumbent governors. In New Hampshire, most polling this month has shown Republican Gov. Chris Sununu with a double-digit lead — sometimes more than 20 points — over Democratic state Sen. Dan Feltes, and Sununu enjoys a very high approval rating, in part because many New Hampshire voters have positive views of his handling of COVID-19. And Sununu’s clear advantage is notable because it belies New Hampshire status as a purplish state that has recently been pretty close in presidential elections.

In North Carolina, meanwhile, Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper looks favored to win reelection despite North Carolina’s slight Republican tilt. In 2016, Cooper managed to defeat an unpopular incumbent governor by the skin of his teeth, even as Trump narrowly carried the state. But this time around, he looks to be in better shape against Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Forest. (North Caroline elects its governor and lieutenant governor separately, occasionally leading to members of different parties serving at the same time.) Although polls don’t give Cooper as big a lead as the one Sununu enjoys, recent surveys have regularly given Cooper an edge in the high single digits or low double digits. Here, too, an incumbent’s COVID-19 response may be affecting the race and giving Cooper a boost. A WRAL/SurveyUSA poll released on Thursday found that 57 percent of North Carolinians approved of Cooper’s handling of the coronavirus.

The seven remaining contests are all viewed as safe for one party or the other, but there are a few interesting tidbits worth mentioning. In Utah, an open-seat contest to succeed Republican Gov. Gary Herbert may hold the title of the friendliest election in 2020. Republican Lt. Gov. Spencer Cox and Democratic nominee Chris Peterson recently ran a series of ads in which they appeared together to call on Utahns to promote civility and put aside partisanship to accept election outcomes. Now, the fact that the race isn’t close — Cox has led by at least 24 points in every poll — is certainly a contributing factor behind the cordiality on display in Utah, but the ads still garnered a lot of attention in a time of sharp political polarization.

Meanwhile, Vermont’s contest demonstrates how gubernatorial elections don’t always operate like federal elections, because incumbent Republican Gov. Phil Scott appears on track to handily defeat Democratic Lt. Gov. David Zuckerman¹ in a state that Joe Biden will probably carry by more than 30 points. While governors’ contests have become more closely aligned with national politics in recent years, states like Vermont (and Montana, for that matter) show that there can still be some separation between state and national politics.

So when you’re reading up on the races for president and Congress on Nov. 3, remember that these gubernatorial contests are on the ballot, too. While only a handful appear to be relatively competitive, even some of the uncompetitive ones have quirks to follow as the results come in.

What Are The Chances We’ll Know The Next President On Election Night?

Fri, 30 Oct 2020 23:07:43 GMT

FiveThirtyEight editor-in-chief Nate Silver discusses the race in Pennsylvania, when we’ll know the outcome of the general election, and the chances that the Supreme Court will need to step in to determine the winner of the presidency.

Why Trump Has A Better Chance Of Winning Pennsylvania Than Wisconsin Or Michigan

Fri, 30 Oct 2020 22:14:48 GMT

In this installment of Model Talk, editor-in-chief Nate Silver and Galen Druke discuss how the latest polling has shifted in some of the key battleground states and whether there is reason to believe that “shy Trump voters” could give the president an upset win.

Politics Podcast: There Just Isn’t Good Evidence That ‘Shy’ Trump Voters Exist

Fri, 30 Oct 2020 21:03:02 GMT

This is the final(!) pre-election installment of “Model Talk” on the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast. Nate Silver and Galen Druke discuss how the latest polling has shifted in some of the key battleground states. They also address whether there is any reason to believe that “shy Trump voters” could provide the president with an upset win on Election Day. (The evidence suggests there isn’t.)

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Biden Doesn’t Have A Popularity Problem. That Might Help Him Win.

Fri, 30 Oct 2020 21:02:09 GMT

From the start of the Democratic primary, many Democratic voters prioritized electability, with plenty believing that Joe Biden was the most electable Democratic candidate in a general election against President Trump. Not everyone bought that argument: Some argued that Trump would easily caricature Biden and make him less popular with voters. Even FiveThirtyEight was skeptical of Biden’s electability argument.

Sure, Biden was well-known and perceived as moderate, not to mention experienced. But it was hard to evaluate the accuracy of Democratic primary voters’ sense of Biden’s electability. There was the possibility that Democrats were just scaring themselves into backing a white, moderate and male candidate in reaction to Hillary Clinton’s loss in 2016.

But it is increasingly looking like Democractic primary voters might have been right about Biden’s electability argument. In the face of relentless attacks from the Trump campaign, Biden hasn’t dipped in the polls; in fact, he’s actually become better liked, and has built a formidable favorability advantage over Trump.

One way we can see this is if we compare the results of presidential polls asking voters to choose between Biden and Trump with generic ballot polls that ask voters whether they support a Democrat or Republican for Congress. Initially, Trump led on this metric, performing better than the generic Republican congressional candidate by approximately 3 percentage points earlier in 2020, but Biden’s popularity has steadily ticked upward since mid-April. And since August, Biden has led Trump on this metric (although Trump has ticked up in October).

Even though Democrats have long led on the generic ballot — they have a nearly 8 point advantage, on average — Biden is not just ahead because voters prefer Democrats. He’s ahead because voters support Biden more than they support the average Democrat running for Congress.¹

In fact, when asked if they have a favorable or unfavorable attitude toward Biden, voters have either remained positive or split. That is a big contrast with 2016, when voters had consistently negative attitudes toward Clinton (and Trump).

One possible reason Biden might have a popularity edge? General election voters still perceive Biden as relatively moderate, and historically, more moderate presidential candidates generally do better in general elections. They generate less opposition when it comes to voter turnout and are perceived as less extreme by swing voters — though that advantage is declining. In fact, Trump benefited from this dynamic in 2016, when he was perceived as more moderate than most Republican candidates. (Although when we compare the current cycle to 2016, there is the separate question of gender, which is difficult to entangle but shouldn’t be discounted as a possible factor.)

Further testament to Biden’s strength as a general election candidate, though, is the fact that he continues to do better than Democratic primary runner-up Sen. Bernie Sanders in head-to-head matchups against Trump. He held a consistent advantage during the primaries and that has continued in hypothetical polls afterward. Republicans have still been trying to tie Biden to “socialists” and “the radical left,” by linking him to Sanders, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, and Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ilhan Omar. But if Republicans’ plan was to run against Biden largely the same way that they would have against Sanders, it has not worked.

Additionally, Biden’s supposed lack of enthusiasm among small donors never really materialized. Despite struggling with online donations in the primary, Biden is now raising 1,000 times as much online per day as he was last year. He’s also outraising Trump, which suggests that maybe in fundraising, partisanship matters more than excitement around the nominee or even ideology. Likewise, voter turnout estimates remain very high. So despite concerns around young voter turnout in the primary, voters may not need a younger or more liberal candidate to be inclined to participate.

So if Biden wins, those who argued that his “electability advantage” was unreal or was based on a voter misunderstanding may need to revisit those takes. Sometimes the conventional wisdom, even among voters, is right.

The Dodgers’ Championship Machine Took A Decade — And A Lot Of Money — To Build

Fri, 30 Oct 2020 17:03:25 GMT

The Los Angeles Dodgers’ championship-clinching victory in Tuesday’s World Series Game 6 was a long time coming. That was true literally — before this week, the Dodgers hadn’t lifted the trophy since 1988, one of the longest droughts in baseball — but also figuratively. Over the past decade or so, no team has made more of a concerted effort to win a title than Los Angeles. Since 2012, the Dodgers have won more regular-season games than any other club, spent more money on payroll than all but one team¹ and consistently built one of the game’s strongest farm systems. They hired one of the largest analytics staffs in sports — under the direction of Andrew Friedman, president of baseball operations — went star-hunting in the trade market and pressed every other advantage they could think of. After years of falling short, everything came together for L.A. in 2020 with the best team in franchise history — and one of the best baseball has ever seen.

The Dodgers have long been one of MLB’s glamour franchises, with a rich history, an iconic stadium, top-notch uniforms and a sizable fanbase in a massive media market. (And, of course, they had the great Vin Scully on the mic until a few years ago.) All that was missing through the 1990s and into the 2000s was a championship, which eluded Los Angeles across seven managers, seven general managers and three ownership changes. It wasn’t for lack of trying; the team has long attempted to leverage its big-market status into perennial contention. But it often struggled to get the formula quite right.

From 1999 to 2003, the Dodgers spent a staggering $478,360,432 (again, second only to the Yankees) on zero playoff appearances. Shortly thereafter, they overhauled their prospect pipeline and hired a proto-Friedman of sorts in general manager Paul DePodesta, of “Moneyball” fame. But then-owner Frank McCourt pulled the plug on DePodesta’s tenure after barely two seasons. The immediate post-DePodesta Dodgers under Ned Colletti were more successful, with three postseason berths in his first four seasons, though that was followed by another multi-year playoff drought with an aging roster.

The tide truly started to turn for L.A. after McCourt was forced to sell the team as part of a messy divorce and bankruptcy saga. In 2012, the Guggenheim Baseball Management group purchased the Dodgers for $2 billion, at the time a record price tag for a sports franchise. With Los Angeles Lakers icon Magic Johnson among the investors, the new ownership group — helmed by veteran executive Stan Kasten — set about turning the Dodgers into the winning (and money-making) machine it always seemed like it should have been.

It started with investing a huge amount of money into upgrading Dodger Stadium — and also the on-field product. In 2013, Los Angeles set an all-time MLB record (which still stands) by spending $259,856,000 on its payroll, eclipsing even the Yankees’ notoriously spendthrift ways under former owner George Steinbrenner. That Dodgers team didn’t win it all, losing to the St. Louis Cardinals in the National League Championship Series, but it did represent the closest L.A. had come to the World Series (two wins away) since 1988. Then the Dodgers lured Friedman away from the Tampa Bay Rays to become their president of baseball operations, and they hired Farhan Zaidi — another analytics visionary from the Oakland A’s, just like DePodesta — to be general manager. From then on, the Dodgers effectively became the model MLB franchise, a big-market club that wasn’t afraid to spend but also focused on developing players and creating a constant pipeline of talent.

Of the 690 team-seasons since 1998, only 60 have seen a team rank among the top 10 in both total major-league payroll and Baseball America’s organizational farm system rankings. The two factors so seldom coexist because there is a natural push-and-pull between loading up on talent for the future and spending to win in the here and now. In the traditional cycle of rebuilding and contending, a rebuild consists of shedding payroll and focusing on the farm system, then ramping up spending (and gutting the supply of prospects in trades) when a core is in place to contend.

But the beauty of these Dodgers is that they don’t exist in that continuum between contending and rebuilding. They rebuild and they contend, all at once, which is why they have pulled off the double-top-10 feat in each of the past six seasons — the longest streak since the Atlanta Braves did it from 1998 to 2005.²

They ascend, spend … and win

Since 1998, longest streaks for MLB teams among the top 10 in both Baseball America’s farm system rankings and payroll

		Avg. MLB Ranks
Team	Years	Prospects	Payroll	streak
Braves	1998-2005	4.3	5.9	8 years
Dodgers	2015-2020	4.7	4.2	6
Yankees	1998-2002	5.0	1.2	5
Angels	2004-2007	3.0	5.8	4
Red Sox	2013-2016	4.3	3.5	4
Red Sox	2006-2008	6.3	2.7	3
Cubs	2003-2005	6.7	7.7	3
Dodgers	2006-2008	4.7	6.7	3
Rangers	2012-2014	4.3	6.3	3

Those Braves never got enough credit for being a player-development machine, but that was a crucial part of Atlanta’s dynasty-era streak of 14 consecutive division titles. Similarly, the Dodgers have used the formula to complement their big-ticket pickups — like outfielder Mookie Betts — with a constant supply of homegrown talent that includes World Series MVP Corey Seager, 2019 NL MVP Cody Bellinger and pitchers Walker Buehler and Julio Urías, who combined for a 1.50 ERA in 48 innings this postseason. (And, of course, a certain 2006 Dodgers draftee who has been through L.A.’s entire renaissance: future Hall of Fame starter Clayton Kershaw.)

The Braves never won a World Series during that streak of top 10 prospect-and-payroll seasons, a cautionary tale about the limits of machine-building in a sport as random as baseball. And Los Angeles was also looking like a warning sign for those hoping to win through sheer talent accumulation: Only two teams (one of which was that Atlanta squad) ever won more games in a seven-season span with zero titles to show for it than the 2013-19 Dodgers did.

But the 2020 Dodgers came up big where their predecessors had failed. In its previous two World Series losses, 2017 and 2018, L.A. hit fewer home runs than the eventual winners (23 to 16), struck out more (121 to 107), had an inferior batting average (.193 versus .226) and lost the on-base plus slugging battle (.728 to .617 on average). Against the Rays in 2020, though, the Dodgers flipped those numbers around, winning all of the key battles — including a commanding .819 to .672 OPS edge.

The Dodgers flipped their usual World Series script

Margins for the Los Angeles Dodgers (versus their opponents) in key statistics during the 2017, 2018 and 2020 World Series

	Dodgers Margin
World Series	AVG	OBP	BB%	SO%*	SLG	Iso. Power	OPS
2017-18	-.034	-.031	-0.8%	+3.8%	-.079	-.046	-.111
2020	+.035	+.061	+3.3	-6.6	+.086	+.051	+.147

As part of that, Kershaw overcame his reputation for postseason miscues, winning both of his World Series starts with a sterling 2.31 ERA. His story — trying again and again (and again) to convert stellar regular-season promise into championship success — was a microcosm of the whole franchise’s battle to reach the pinnacle of the sport this past decade. So too was the tale of manager Dave Roberts, who was often criticized for in-game decisions in L.A.’s previous losses but pushed all the right buttons down the stretch of the 2020 World Series (in stark contrast with his counterpart for Tampa Bay, Kevin Cash). In steering the Dodger ship to a title, Roberts did what plenty of other well-regarded skippers (such as Joe Torre, Don Mattingly, Jim Tracy and Davey Johnson) couldn’t over the past three decades.

Maybe, in the end, this team was simply too good to not win. Across the regular season and playoffs, Los Angeles went 56-22 — which works out to a 116.3-win pace per 162 games, better than the record for single-season victories set by the Seattle Mariners in 2001. They had a +136 run differential in 60 regular-season games, the fourth-best per-game margin ever.³ And according to our Elo ratings, the 2020 Dodgers finished the season with a rating of 1612.4, which makes them the seventh-best team of the entire World Series era (since 1903) in terms of final, end-of-season Elo:

The 2020 Dodgers are one of the best teams ever

Greatest teams of the World Series era (1903-2020), according to FiveThirtyEight’s final, end-of-season Elo ratings

Year	Team	Wins	Losses	Win%	Won WS?	Final Elo
1939	Yankees	110	45	.710	✓	1631.6
1906	Cubs	117	40	.745		1622.5
1927	Yankees	114	44	.722	✓	1619.7
1942	Cardinals	110	49	.692	✓	1619.3
1911	Athletics	105	52	.669	✓	1613.4
1932	Yankees	112	47	.704	✓	1612.7
2020	Dodgers	56	22	.718	✓	1612.4
1909	Pirates	115	45	.719	✓	1612.0
1998	Yankees	125	50	.714	✓	1611.8
1970	Orioles	115	55	.676	✓	1611.2
2018	Red Sox	119	57	.676	✓	1610.1
1909	Cubs	104	49	.680		1605.7
1910	Athletics	106	49	.684	✓	1604.9
1907	Cubs	112	44	.718	✓	1604.6
1937	Yankees	107	53	.669	✓	1604.0
1936	Yankees	106	53	.667	✓	1603.6
1905	Giants	109	48	.694	✓	1601.6
1908	Cubs	103	56	.648	✓	1600.3
1954	Yankees	103	51	.669		1600.0
1943	Cardinals	106	53	.667		1599.0

It may have come at the end of an imperfect season, but the 2020 Dodgers’ championship was the culmination of a long, expensive effort to create the perfect baseball machine. Along the way, L.A. proved that if a franchise invests enough, innovates enough, acquires enough talent and — perhaps most importantly — tries enough times, it can finally engineer a championship breakthrough.

Beware The Hot Pumpkin

Fri, 30 Oct 2020 12:00:53 GMT

Welcome to The Riddler. Every week, I offer up problems related to the things we hold dear around here: math, logic and probability. Two puzzles are presented each week: the Riddler Express for those of you who want something bite-size and the Riddler Classic for those of you in the slow-puzzle movement. Submit a correct answer for either,¹ and you may get a shoutout in next week’s column. Please wait until Monday to publicly share your answers! If you need a hint or have a favorite puzzle collecting dust in your attic, find me on Twitter.

Riddler Express

While waiting in line to vote early last week, I overheard a discussion between election officials. Apparently, there may have been a political sign that was within 100 feet of the polling place, against New York State law.

This got me thinking. Suppose a polling site is a square building whose sides are 100 feet in length. An election official takes a string that is also 100 feet long and ties one end to a door located in the middle of one of the building’s sides. She then holds the other end of the string in her hand.

What’s the area of the region outside of the building she can reach while holding the string?

Submit your answer

Riddler Classic

From Ricky Jacobson comes a party game that’s just in time for Halloween:

Instead of playing hot potato, you and 60 of your closest friends decide to play a socially distanced game of hot pumpkin.

Before the game starts, you all sit in a circle and agree on a positive integer N. Once the number has been chosen, you (the leader of the group) start the game by counting “1” and passing the pumpkin to the person sitting directly to your left. She then declares “2” and passes the pumpkin one space to her left. This continues with each player saying the next number in the sequence, wrapping around the circle as many times as necessary, until the group has collectively counted up to N. At that point, the player who counted “N” is eliminated, and the player directly to his or her left starts the next round, again proceeding to the same value of N. The game continues until just one player remains, who is declared the victor.

In the game’s first round, the player 18 spaces to your left is the first to be eliminated. Ricky, the next player in the sequence, begins the next round. The second round sees the elimination of the player 31 spaces to Ricky’s left. Zach begins the third round, only to find himself eliminated in a cruel twist of fate. (Woe is Zach.)

What was the smallest value of N the group could have used for this game?

Extra credit: Suppose the players were numbered from 1 to 61, with you as Player No. 1, the player to your left as Player No. 2 and so on. Which player won the game?

Extra extra credit: What’s the smallest N that would have made you the winner?

Submit your answer

Solution to last week’s Riddler Express

Congratulations to Eric Mentzell of Takoma Park, Maryland, winner of last week’s Riddler Express.

Last week, four-time WNBA champion Sue Bird and Seattle Storm teammate Breanna Stewart were interested in testing whether Bird had a “hot hand” — that is, if her chances of making a basket depended on whether or not her previous shot went in. Bird happened to know that her chances of making any given shot was always 50 percent, independent of her shooting history, but she agreed to perform an experiment.

In each trial of the experiment, Bird took three shots, while Stewart recorded which shots Bird made or missed. Stewart then looked at all the trials with at least one shot that was immediately preceded by a made shot. She randomly picked one of these trials, and then randomly picked a shot that was immediately preceded by a made shot. (If there was only one such shot to pick from, she chose that shot.)

What was the probability that Bird made the shot that Stewart picked?

At first glance, you might have thought that the answer was 50 percent. After all, Bird acknowledged that she had a 50 percent chance of making any given shot. Right?

Wrong. And Riddler Nation was not fooled. To see why the answer wasn’t 50 percent, many solvers, like Deborah Abel, listed out all eight possible shot sequences. If we let “X” represent a made shot and “O” a missed shot, then the eight possible shot sequences were: OOO, OOX, OXO, XOO, OXX, XOX, XXO, and XXX. Because Bird had an equal chance of making or missing any shot, all eight of these shot sequences were equally likely.

During her analysis, Stewart first looked at shots that were “immediately preceded by a made shot.” This didn’t occur for sequences OOO and OOX, so we know that Stewart was limiting her analysis exclusively to the remaining six sequences, and that each had a one-in-six chance of being selected.

Next, Stewart “randomly picked a shot that was immediately preceded by a made shot.” Here’s what happened if you looked at the six possible sequences one at a time:

OXO: Stewart looked at the last shot. For this sequence, Bird made zero percent of the shots Stewart could have picked.
XOO: Stewart looked at the second shot. For this sequence, Bird made zero percent of the shots Stewart could have picked.
OXX: Stewart looked at the last shot. For this sequence, Bird made 100 percent of the shots Stewart could have picked, which gives a 1/6 chance of selecting a made shot in this sequence.
XOX: Stewart looked at the second shot. For this sequence, Bird made zero percent of the shots Stewart could have picked.
XXO: Stewart could have looked at the second or third shots. For this sequence, Bird made 50 percent of the shots Stewart could have picked, which gives a 1/12 chance of selecting a made shot in this sequence.
XXX: Stewart could have looked at the second or third shots. For this sequence, Bird made 100 percent of the shots Stewart could have picked, which gives a 1/6 chance of selecting a made shot in this sequence.

Putting this all together, the probability Bird had made the shot that Stewart picked was 1/6 + 1/12 + 1/6, or 5/12 — the solution!

So while Bird had a 50 percent chance of making any given shot, Stewart’s methodology for selecting a shot was somehow biased toward shots that Bird missed. What was going on here?

Solver Madeline Argent of Launceston, Australia offered an explanation. Among the six shot sequences listed above, there were eight cases in which Bird made one of her first two shots. Of these eight, Bird made four of the next shots and missed four of them. So if Stewart had selected among all shots that were immediately preceded by a made shot, Bird would have made half the selected shots. But because Stewart first randomly selected a trial, the last two shot sequences — XXO and XXX, in which Bird made most of her shots — were unfairly weighted equally alongside the other four sequences, even though they had twice as many made shots for Stewart to choose from.

That was what happened when Bird took three shots per trial. Meanwhile, solver Dean Ballard found similar results when Bird took more shots. The probability she had made a selected shot approached 50 percent as the number of shots increased, but it never quite reached 50 percent.

Clearly, this methodology for determining whether a basketball player had a “hot hand” was flawed. It may surprise some readers that this was precisely the methodology used in an attempt to debunk the “hot hand” back in 1985 — a debunking that itself was later debunked. If you’d like to read more on this, check out this 2019 article that connects all of this to the Monty Hall problem. (Kudos to submitter Drew Mathieson for the link!)

So if Stewart performed the experiment as outlined, and found that Bird had made half the selected shots (rather than 5/12 of them), she would have rightfully concluded that Bird did have a “hot hand.”

Solution to last week’s Riddler Classic

Congratulations to Lucas Robinson of Oakwood, Ohio, winner of last week’s Riddler Classic.

Last week, four-time NBA champion LeBron James was playing a game of sudden-death, one-on-one basketball with Los Angeles Lakers teammate Anthony Davis. They flipped a coin to see which of them had first possession, and whoever made the first basket won the game.

Both players had a 50 percent chance of making any shot they took. However, Davis was the superior rebounder and would always rebound any shot that either of them missed. Every time Davis rebounded the ball, he dribbled back to the three-point line before attempting another shot.

Before each of Davis’s shot attempts, James had a probability p of stealing the ball and regaining possession before Davis could get the shot off. What value of p made this an evenly matched game of one-on-one, in which both players had an equal chance of winning before the coin was flipped?

Suppose James’s probability of winning when he had possession was J, while James’s probability of winning when Davis had possession was D. We can write an equation for J: For James to win when he had possession, he either had to score (with probability 1/2) or, upon missing (also with probability 1/2), he’d have to somehow win after Davis got the rebound and gained possession. In other words, J = 1/2 + 1/2·D. We can similarly write an equation for D: For James to win when Davis had possession, he either had to steal the ball (with probability p) and regain possession, or, upon not getting the steal (with probability 1−p), he needed Davis to miss (with probability 1/2) so James could have another chance at victory. In other words, D = pJ + (1−p)D/2.

That gave you two equations with three unknowns. What was missing? Based on the coin flip, James started with possession half the time, and Davis started with possession the other half the time. James’s probability of winning was therefore J/2 + D/2, which the problem stated this was to equal 1/2, so the third equation was J/2 + D/2 = 1/2, or J + D = 1.

Solving this system of three equations gave you the result that J = 2/3 (James had a two-thirds chance of winning when he had possession), D = 1/3 (James had a one-third chance of winning when Davis had possession) and p = 1/3. In other words, for the game to be fair, James had to have a one-third chance of stealing the ball.

Solver Quoc Tran extended the puzzle, simulating how James’s fortunes changed in the more realistic scenario where Davis didn’t nab every rebound. For the game to be fair, we already saw that James needed to steal one-third of the time when Davis rebounded every shot. Meanwhile, if James and Davis had had equal chances of getting a rebound, then to maintain parity, James couldn’t steal at all. But when Davis had a rebounding edge, interesting mathematics was happening, as shown below:

How fitting that this game was fair where purple met gold.

Want more riddles?

Well, aren’t you lucky? There’s a whole book full of the best puzzles from this column and some never-before-seen head-scratchers. It’s called “The Riddler,” and it’s in stores now!

Want to submit a riddle?

Email Zach Wissner-Gross at riddlercolumn@gmail.com

Americans Say They’re Fired Up To Vote — Especially Democrats

Fri, 30 Oct 2020 10:30:52 GMT

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

Poll(s) of the week

American voters are fired up to cast their ballots. And many already have, in record numbers.

According to the latest Gallup poll, released this morning, 69 percent of registered voters say that they are more enthusiastic to vote this year compared to previous elections. That is a stark contrast to the 2016 election, when enthusiasm to vote was relatively low. According to Gallup, which has asked voters about how enthusiastic they are to vote for at least the last two decades, only about half of registered voters said they were more enthusiastic to vote in 2016 than they had been in previous elections.

And regardless of who Americans plan to vote for, other polls also show that they think this election is important. Ninety-four percent of registered voters said in a YouGov/The Economist poll conducted earlier this week that voting for president this year is “very important.”

Members of both parties seem more enthusiastic to vote, too. According to the party crosstabs of the Gallup poll, the share of voters who said that, compared to previous elections, they were more excited than usual to vote is about 15 percentage points higher among Republicans and about 27 points higher among Democrats than it was four years ago. Although, as you can see in the chart below, Democrats have an advantage in terms of voter enthusiasm this year.

Democratic enthusiasm this year is higher relative to past presidential elections. The share of Democrats who say they’re more enthusiastic to vote this year is about 9 percentage points higher than the share of Republicans who say the same. That’s not as large as the 14-point enthusiasm gap we saw in 2008, when Barack Obama was first elected president, but that’s not because Democrats aren’t just as enthusiastic. The difference is that Republicans are a bit more enthusiastic in 2020 than they were in 2008.

But this enthusiasm doesn’t necessarily mean voters are excited about the candidates. There’s long been this idea that Biden’s backers just aren’t as enthusiastic as Trump’s, and when YouGov asked voters if they were enthusiastic about each candidate, they did find that fewer of Biden’s supporters (48 percent) said they were enthusiastic about him, while far more of Trump’s supporters (77 percent) said they were enthusiastic about him. However, 42 percent of Biden’s supporters said that they were “satisfied but not enthusiastic” about voting for him, while only 18 percent of Trump’s supporters said the same.

As we’ve written before, that “enthusiasm” gap might not matter all that much for Biden. One source of voter enthusiasm is hatred of the other political party. And on that metric, Biden has the upper hand. While Trump may enjoy more enthusiastic support from his base, Biden’s voters are charged up to vote against Trump. In that YouGov poll, for example, 52 percent of Biden voters said they were mostly casting a ballot against Trump rather than for Biden, while only 17 percent of Trump’s supporters said they were casting a vote primarily against Biden.

That said, when it comes to who will be sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office come January, it doesn’t much matter how enthusiastic someone was to vote, only that they did.

Other polling bites

Americans are split on whether children should be allowed to trick-or-treat on Halloween this year and whether they will hand out candy, given the coronavirus pandemic. According to a YouGov poll, 30 percent of Americans say they plan to hand out treats to trick-or-treaters, while 26 percent say they usually do but won’t this year. Another 35 percent, who I can only surmise are either unable to give out treats or just extremely grumpy, said they never give out treats. Nevertheless, a majority (69 percent) seem to agree that children who trick-or-treat should be required to wear face masks.
For those of you fed up with the horse race, a poll from Echelon Insights reimagined what the 2020 election might look like if the U.S. were a multi-party democracy. Respondents were read descriptions of five hypothetical political parties, without the name of the party or its leader. And among these hypothetical parties, the Labor and Conservative Parties collectively led with 26 and 25 percent of the vote respectively, followed by the Nationalist Party, which got 16 percent, and then Acela and Green Parties, which got 11 percent each. The hypothetical Green Party, which the pollster said would advocate for socialist policies and would be “the political home of the Squad,” got support from 45 percent of Gen Z voters (those born after 1997).
Speaking of young people, a survey of about 2,000 18- to 29-year-olds from the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics found that the level of enthusiasm to vote among that demographic was about 16 percentage points higher than it was in 2016. In fact, this level of enthusiasm mirrored what Harvard found in 2008. Respondents were also asked about whether their opportunities to succeed were better than their parents’ generation, and responses were split, with 36 percent saying they were better, 34 percent saying they were worse, and 29 percent saying their opportunities were about the same.
BOO! Twenty percent of American adults say that ghosts definitely exist, according to a YouGov poll conducted last week. About a quarter say they probably exist, 39 percent say they probably or definitely do not exist, and 16 percent said they don’t know.
Seventy percent of Americans now support same-sex marriage while only 28 percent oppose it, according to a poll conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute. That’s the highest level of support the institute has ever recorded for same-sex marriage.
Citizens in Georgia, the Eurasian country (not the U.S. state), will vote Saturday to elect a new parliament. October polls from Edison Research, Ipsos and European Georgia show the ruling Georgian Dream party, which won control of parliament decisively in 2016, ahead in the polls. These polls give the party anywhere from 25 to 36 percent of the vote and have the United National Movement party — led by former Georgian president Mikheil Saakashvili, who is campaigning for the election remotely from self-exile in Ukraine — in second place with about 17 to 18 percent of the vote. However, the polls also show a high number of undecided voters, and according to Georgian electoral rules, if a party doesn’t receive at least 40 percent of the vote, it may not hold a majority of seats in parliament and would have to rule as part of a coalition.

Trump approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker,¹ 44.0 percent of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing as president, while 52.9 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -8.9 points). At this time last week, 42.6 percent approved and 53.6 percent disapproved (for a net approval rating of -11.0 points). One month ago, Trump had an approval rating of 43.7 percent and a disapproval rating of 52.5 percent, for a net approval rating of -8.8 points.

Generic ballot

In our average of polls of the generic congressional ballot,² Democrats currently lead by 8.1 percentage points (49.8 percent to 41.7 percent). A week ago, Democrats led Republicans by 7.1 points (49.4 percent to 42.3 percent). At this time last month, voters preferred Democrats by 6.1 points (48.8 percent to 42.7 percent).

Check out all the polls we’ve been collecting ahead of the 2020 elections.

Why Younger Americans Don’t Vote More Often (*No, It’s Not Apathy)

Fri, 30 Oct 2020 10:00:51 GMT

Why don’t more young people vote?

We often hear how younger people are apathetic toward politics or politically disengaged. And while it’s true that they tend to vote at lower rates than older Americans, apathy is just one piece of the puzzle for young people — and maybe not even the most important piece.

According to our new survey with Ipsos of more than 8,000 Americans, people between 18 and 34 are less likely to have faith in our political system. But when we asked why they hadn’t voted in the past, we found that younger people weren’t more likely than older people to say they didn’t vote because they think the system is too broken to be fixed by voting, or because all the candidates are the same, or because they don’t believe in voting.

That cynicism doesn’t seem to be motivating them to sit on the sidelines during elections. Instead, younger people are much more likely than older people to report that they or members of their household have experienced barriers to voting, which suggests that they may genuinely find it more difficult to cast a ballot. And that problem could be compounded this year given the extraordinary challenges of voting during a pandemic.

In our survey, almost one-quarter (22 percent) of young people said that when they didn’t end up casting a ballot, they had actually wanted to but couldn’t. As the chart below shows, young people are more likely to report that they or members of their household have experienced hurdles to voting — even though most have had far fewer elections to vote in. Young people, for instance, are much more likely to say they couldn’t get off work to vote, didn’t receive their ballot in time, missed the registration deadline or had trouble finding or accessing their polling place.

Take Jordan B., 23, a nursing student living in Savannah, Georgia. Due to a mixup when she renewed her driver’s license, Jordan’s voter registration reverted to her home county, which is more than 200 miles away. “I’ll probably just drive four hours to go vote,” she said. Jordan hasn’t had problems voting in the past but said some of her friends have run into issues with mail-in ballots this year. Despite the inconvenience of not being able to cast her ballot in Savannah this year, though, she said she’s going to make voting a priority, in part because she’s unhappy with how President Trump has handled the COVID-19 pandemic.

Like many other Americans, younger voters feel a sense of urgency around this election. Admittedly, they’re slightly less likely than older voters to say the outcome of the 2020 election really matters (75 percent compared with 91 percent of people 65 or over). But a high share (78 percent) of young people told us they’re planning to vote this year, although of course, the number who actually cast a ballot will almost certainly be lower.

That could be part of the reason why so many young people are turning out to vote early — and if turnout remains high among this group, that could be very good news for Joe Biden and Democratic candidates in general. In our poll, 53 percent of adults under 35 said they planned to support Biden, while only 24 percent said they planned to support Trump. (The rest were unsure.) In general, young people tend to be more Democratic-leaning than older people: Our survey found that 62 percent of adults under 35 identify as Democrats or lean toward the Democratic Party.

But young people aren’t necessarily that passionate about supporting Biden. He struggled with young voters in the primary, and several of our survey respondents told us in follow-up interviews that they’re still lukewarm about him. Kenneth Brant, 28, who lives in Florida and voted for Sen. Bernie Sanders in the primary, was initially unhappy when Biden won the nomination but says he’s more enthusiastic about him now. Still, however, he feels pretty “resigned” about his vote.

Brant wasn’t the only young voter we spoke with who was dissatisfied with his options, or politics more generally. Andrew B., 29, said he finds politics very frustrating, because people on opposite sides of the aisle won’t admit that anything their opponents have done is good. Briana Thompson, 26, feels disappointed with her voting choices. She told us that since she lives in South Carolina, a red state, she doesn’t expect her vote to matter, which is why she’s decided to vote for the Green Party candidate instead of Biden. Thompson feels that sends a stronger message than simply voting for Biden. “[With] each [election] I am increasingly more jaded,” she said.

Other voters, like Brant, who still plans to vote for one of the two major candidates, also approached the process itself with a heavy layer of cynicism. Even though he lives in a swing state, Brant told us he still doesn’t think it will make a difference. “Honestly, Florida has never had free and fair elections,” he said.

These kinds of attitudes were common among the young voters we spoke with. That’s one reason why — particularly considering the high barriers they typically face — young voter turnout might continue to ebb and flow, even if we see record-high turnout this year. And many young people will likely continue to feel disenchanted with politics, even if they keep casting a ballot.

We asked Brant whether he’ll keep voting in 2022 and 2024, even if Trump wins, and he responded with the verbal equivalent of a shrug. “Yeah, sure, my vote won’t matter for anything, but I’ll cast it to say that I cast it.”

Tony Chow contributed reporting.

The Stories That Haven’t Gotten Enough Coverage In 2020

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 23:57:12 GMT

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses the state of the race and which important stories the press hasn’t covered as much during the 2020 campaign.

The Battleground States Where We’ve Seen Some Movement In The Polls

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 23:22:46 GMT

With apologies to The Raconteurs, the presidential race continues to be “steady as she goes,” with little sign of tightening despite a plethora of new polls. FiveThirtyEight’s presidential forecast gives Joe Biden an 89 in 100 shot at winning the election, while President Trump has just an 11 in 100 chance. This makes Biden the favorite, but still leaves open a narrow path to victory for Trump, for whom a reelection win would be surprising — but not utterly shocking.

At the same time, we also have fewer polls from live-caller surveys, which have historically been more accurate and have shown slightly better numbers for Biden, than polls that use other methodologies, such as polls conducted primarily online or through automated telephone calls. Nevertheless, while the overall picture has shifted only a little in recent days, a few battleground states have seen at least some movement in their polls, which has slightly altered the odds Biden or Trump wins in each of those places.

For instance, we’ve gotten three new high-quality polls today from Florida that were in the field through at least Tuesday, and although these polls have helped Biden a tad, they actually tell a pretty mixed tale compared to each pollster’s last look at the Florida situation. For instance, NBC News/Marist College gave Biden a 4-point lead, 51 percent to 47 percent, which was a narrow improvement for Biden from the tied race Marist found in early September. However, Quinnipiac University found Biden ahead by just 3 points, 45 percent to 42 percent, which marked a sizable slide from the 11-point edge it gave Biden in early October.

And yesterday, Reuters/Ipsos also reported a small downturn in Biden’s numbers, as their poll found him up by 2 points, 49 percent to 47 percent, a slight tick down from his 4-point lead about a week ago. Bottom line: Florida is close, like it always seems to be.

From Florida, we can slide our gaze north of the St. Mary’s River to look at Georgia, where we’ve actually seen a more sizable shift in Biden’s direction over the past few days. Biden now has a 57 in 100 chance of winning Georgia, up from 46 in 100 on Monday. This is important because Georgia is a state that Trump absolutely must win to have any chance of victory — in fact, he wins in less than 1 percent of the scenarios in which Biden carries it.

We have one new poll today that largely aligns with recent polling that has boosted Biden’s chances in Georgia. Democratic pollster Public Policy Polling put Biden ahead by 2 points, 48 percent to 46 percent, essentially the same as what the pollster found in early October. Meanwhile, Monmouth University released a Georgia survey yesterday that gave Biden a 2-point or 4-point lead, depending on projected turnout among likely voters, which marked a swing from the pollster’s mid-September poll that had Trump ahead by 2 or 5 points, again depending on turnout. But the short of it in Georgia is that results showing Biden slightly ahead or tied with Trump have become more common. In fact, Trump has only led in two Georgia surveys out of the 13 released in the past 10 days.

Ohio is another state where Trump seemed to have a slight edge, but is now more of a toss-up as our forecast has swung toward Biden and gives both candidates a 1 in 2 shot of winning it.

Two new polls out today precipitated this shift toward Biden, moving the state’s polling average from a 2-point Trump lead to a tie. Most importantly, Quinnipiac University found Biden up by 5 points, 48 percent to 43 percent, which was a fairly substantial improvement for Biden from Quinnipiac’s last survey in early October that had him up by just 1 point. That poll was the main driver of the shift today in Ohio. Because not all of the news was good for Biden in Ohio. Gravis Marketing found Trump ahead in their latest poll, 49 percent to 47 percent. (This was Gravis’s first public poll of Ohio.)

However, some other key states haven’t seen much movement despite new polling. For example, we’ve seen a couple of new polls in Pennsylvania since late yesterday that both give Biden a lead in the mid-to-high single digits, and one was even a high-quality live-caller poll, which we’ve lacked here to some extent. But they didn’t change the forecast’s outlook: Biden still has a 86 in 100 chance of winning there.

Neither new poll showed much of a change from its previous Pennsylvania survey either. The aforementioned live-caller survey from Quinnipiac University that came out today found Biden up 7 points, 51 percent to 44 percent, but that was practically identical to what it found in the middle of October. Similarly, PoliticalIQ/RMG Research’s new survey gave Biden a 6-point advantage, 51 percent to 45 percent, the same margin the pollster found in early October.

We’re watching Pennsylvania especially closely, as any movement here matters a lot in our forecast, as it’s the state currently most likely to decide the Electoral College. And the margin as it currently stands leaves room for Trump to win on Nov. 3 — or after, as it might take a bit to get the final result there.

Like Pennsylvania, North Carolina is another state where the forecast has hardly budged in the past few days. Biden now has a 65 in 100 shot of carrying the state, but it’s been around that mark since last weekend.

In fact, two new polls released today showed essentially no movement compared to each of the pollsters’ last surveys in North Carolina. The New York Times Upshot/Siena College found Biden ahead by 3 points, 48 percent to 45 percent, pretty similar to the 46 percent to 42 percent edge they gave him in mid-October, but now with fewer undecided voters. Meanwhile, UMass Lowell found the two candidates knotted at 48 percent apiece, which was pretty much the same as a late September poll that found them tied at 47 percent.

On the whole, the topline numbers in this race haven’t changed much. On the one hand, that’s good news for Biden as he remains a favorite to win the presidency. That is, if the polls mostly hold where they are, it will take a sizable polling error for Trump to win. However, Biden’s advantage would be more concrete were his position in Pennsylvania to improve in the closing days of the campaign. So we’ll just have to see if anything shifts in the final days that changes the trajectory of the race.

Politics Podcast: All The Stuff We Should Have Talked More About In 2020

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 22:25:47 GMT

There are only five days remaining until Election Day and former Vice President Joe Biden currently has a 89 percent chance of winning, according to our forecast. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses the state of the race and also considers which important stories have been under-covered by the press during the 2020 campaign.

QAnon Isn’t Going To Take Over Congress In 2020. But It’s Found A Home In The GOP.

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 20:00:12 GMT

Marjorie Taylor Greene has not been shy about her support for QAnon — a conspiracy theory that alleges the existence of a widespread child sex trafficking ring run by a cabal of satanic and cannibalistic elites, whom only President Trump can stop. She has tweeted “#GreatAwakening” to Alex Jones, called Q “a patriot” and has even hosted videos detailing the evidence she believes proves Q is “the real deal.” When she won the Republican nomination for Georgia’s 14th District, academics called her win a “bellwether” for the movement and for American politics, and media outlets wondered if Greene’s win signified a wider trend. Was there about to be a Qaucus in Congress?

Not likely. Greene, who has since tried to distance herself from the conspiracy theory, may very well be the only candidate with ties to QAnon who actually wins her race, according to FiveThirtyEight’s election forecast. But the dozens of Republicans who have voiced support for at least some elements of QAnon show how GOP leadership has allowed QAnon to become a part of the party, even if the GOP hasn’t explicitly embraced it.

Fringe candidates with unusual beliefs can be found in every election, of course, but this cohort of QAnon followers on the ballot is somewhat unique.

“People with crazy beliefs run for Congress all the time, it’s just a question of whether there’s a unifying force among candidates of their crazy beliefs,” said Kyle Kondik, the managing editor at Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

There’s no master list of QAnon-linked candidates, but some organizations and news outlets have compiled running tallies. Media Matters, a liberal media watchdog group, has put together a list of 31 candidates with active campaigns for Congress whom it links to QAnon, but a “link” is a term with broad interpretation. Some candidates, like Derrick Grayson, a Republican running in Georgia’s U.S. Senate special election, have simply tweeted the #WWG1WGA hashtag.¹ Others, like Jo Rae Perkins, the Republican nominee for U.S. Senate in Oregon, have been more explicit about their QAnon beliefs.

“Some of those links are somewhat tenuous,” said Joseph Uscinski, a political scientist at the University of Miami who studies conspiracy theories. “I would prefer my candidates to have no connections or links at all to QAnon, but that phrase ‘linked to QAnon’ is often taken to mean that they’re true believers. Some of them are true believers, but not all of them.”

Few of the candidates Media Matters identified have any chance of winning their races. Of the 31 candidates identified by Media Matters, 26 of them have measurable odds according to the FiveThirtyEight forecast. Aside from Greene, only two other candidates of the 26 have better than a 1 in 100 chance of taking their races (and one of those two, Erin Cruz, who’s running in California’s 36th district, has just a 3 in 100 shot), according to our model.² Greene is running against a Democrat who has withdrawn from the race but remains on the ballot. And another Republican candidate, gun rights activist Lauren Boebert, who’s running in Colorado’s third district, is currently slightly favored to win her race (she has a 59 in 100 shot of winning the seat). She previously appeared on two different YouTube shows hosted by QAnon believers, and said she was “very familiar” with Q and that she “hoped it is real.” More recently, Boebert has said she does not follow QAnon and does not believe in conspiracy theories.

Still, 19 candidates who have at some point expressed support for QAnon have won nominations around the country, exclusively for the Republican Party. For its part, the GOP has done little to distance itself from its QAnon-adjacent candidates, instead rejecting the fact that multiple Republican candidates for Congress have links to the group. Ronna McDaniel, the chair of the Republican National Committee, told ABC News it’s “a fringe group. It’s not part of our party.”

President Trump, meanwhile, has been repeatedly asked about whether he denounces QAnon, and he consistently demurs, claiming ignorance of the movement and saying its followers “fight” against pedophilia and are people who “love our country.”

“Trump has a track record for a decade where all he does is traffic in conspiracy theories,” Uscinski said. “Trump built a coalition on conspiracy theories. He started 10 years ago with birtherism, he pushed anti-vaxx ideas. This is his modus operandi.” Regardless of how many explicit allies QAnon has in Congress next term, a conspiratorial mindset has already taken root in the GOP.

Democrats And Republicans Are Spending Millions On TV Advertising. Will It Even Make A Difference?

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 18:29:54 GMT

The Trump and Biden campaigns are both spending hundreds of millions of dollars nationally on broadcast TV advertisements. FiveThirtyEight elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich looks at which states are seeing the biggest ad buys.

Trump Is Losing Ground With Some — But Not All — White Christians

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 16:32:58 GMT

For the past few months, Joe Biden has been courting a key segment of President Trump’s base: conservative white Christians. That’s a bold move, to say the least — because they made up a huge share of the Republican coalition in 2016.

[Live Updates: We’re Tracking The Vote And Voting Problems]

So is Biden’s plan working? Are white Christians, including white evangelical Protestants, who have been among Trump’s most loyal supporters, actually abandoning the president for Biden?

The answer depends on which white Christians you’re looking at.

Despite Biden’s claims that he can appeal to white evangelical Protestants, there really aren’t any signs that Trump is losing support among this group. But Trump may have reason to worry about his level of support among white Catholics. Politicians and the media typically pay less attention to these voters during election season, but white Catholics are especially important to watch this year because they’re a sizable group — and they’re concentrated in Rust Belt swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania.

Trump won white Catholics handily in 2016, but there are signs that his hold on this group is slipping. That’s doubly worrisome for the president because white Christians are declining as a share of the population overall. And if overall turnout is high and he loses some support from white Catholics without making up the difference among other groups, Trump could be in trouble — even if he overwhelmingly wins white evangelicals again.

Trump’s white evangelical support is still solid

Earlier this month, Biden announced he had the support of a new group of evangelical leaders, but this doesn’t seem to be trickling down to white evangelical voters, who are still firmly in Trump’s camp. According to a Pew Research Center poll conducted in late September and early October, 78 percent of white evangelical Protestant voters support Trump, while only 17 percent support Biden, which is right in line with Trump’s 2016 support.

White Christians are more supportive of Trump

Share of registered voters who say they support Trump or Biden, by religious affiliation and race/ethnicity

	Trump	Biden	Margin
White evangelical Protestant	78%	17%	+61
White non-evangelical Protestant	53	43	+10
Black Protestant	9	90	+81
White non-Hispanic Catholic	52	44	+8
Hispanic Catholic	26	67	+41
Jewish	27	70	+43
NET Unaffiliated	22	71	+49
Atheist	7	88	+81
Agnostic	15	79	+64
Nothing in particular	31	62	+31

It’s possible that Trump has gained even more support among white evangelicals this cycle. Polling by PRRI, a nonpartisan public-opinion research organization, has tracked white evangelical support for Trump since he was a presidential candidate and found that it’s been consistently much higher than among Americans as a whole. Trump’s approval rating among white evangelicals did dip very slightly in August, but his numbers rebounded in September as the campaign moved into gear. And according to PRRI’s American Values Survey, conducted in September, 79 percent of white evangelical likely voters are supporting Trump — which is actually 9 percentage points higher than his support among this group at a comparable point in the 2016 election cycle. “The conservative thing to say is that they are as strongly behind the president as they were in 2016,” said Robert P. Jones, PRRI’s founder and CEO. “But we might even have evidence that they’re even more strongly behind Trump than they were four years ago.”

One possible reason for this consistent support, even amid all the turmoil of 2020, is that white evangelical Protestants just don’t see COVID-19 — and Trump’s handling of the pandemic — as a big issue for their vote. According to PRRI, every major religious group ranked COVID-19 as one of their top three critical issues — except for white evangelical Protestants. Instead, abortion was their most critical issue. They also ranked concerns about crime highly, which has been a key part of Trump’s campaign message to voters. Jones told me he saw white evangelicals’ lack of concern about COVID-19 as a sign of their loyalty to Trump.

“Day in and day out, they’ve supported this president at extraordinarily high levels, so when he says, ‘We’re rounding a corner [with COVID-19],’ they believe him,” Jones said.

Trump’s white Catholic support has slipped

Among white Catholics, another important — but often overlooked — religious demographic group, however, Trump seems to have lost a significant amount of support. Back in 2016, he won 60 percent of white Catholics’ support, according to exit polls. That’s about where Trump was polling back in late July and early August, according to Pew. But between August and October, his support fell to 52 percent, while Biden’s rose a bit, shrinking Trump’s overall margin among white Catholics by 11 points.¹ And in a recent PRRI survey, it was actually Biden who had majority support (54 percent) among Catholic likely voters, while Trump had only 41 percent support from this group.

Either way, those polls put Trump in a precarious position, given how crucial white Catholic support could be for his reelection prospects. This group is particularly key because there are a lot of white Catholics in Rust Belt swing states like Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, which Trump won narrowly in 2016. And although white Catholics have been moving steadily into the Republican column over the past decade, they’re more politically moderate than white evangelicals.

Moreover, said Ryan Burge, a political science professor at Eastern Illinois University who studies religion and politics, white Catholics in that region might be especially drawn to Biden because he is also a white Catholic from a Rust Belt state. Over the course of the campaign, Biden has actively woven his Catholic faith and identity into his pitch to voters — and Burge thinks it may be working. “Biden has a pull, which is that white Catholics can look at him and see someone who reminds them of their father, their uncle,” he said.

One thing is clear, too — white Catholics were a lot more concerned than white evangelical Protestants about the COVID-19 pandemic, and a lot more critical of Trump’s response to the virus. According to PRRI’s polling, 60 percent of white Catholics disapproved of Trump’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic, and 65 percent believed the spread of the virus could have been controlled better. White Catholics were also fairly critical of Trump’s handling of the racial justice protests that cropped up this summer in response to the killing of Black people by police: More than half (56 percent) disapproved of Trump’s handling of the protests, and nearly half (49 percent) agreed that his decisions and behavior as president have encouraged white supremacist groups to be more active. In other words, Trump’s focus on “law and order” politics in the campaign may not resonate as much with white Catholics, and their perceptions of how he’s mismanaged the pandemic may make it impossible for him to win back many of these voters.

Some eroding support among white Catholics might not seem like such a big deal for Trump, but it just compounds a challenge that he — and Republicans more broadly — has faced for a while now: White Christians are shrinking as a share of the total population, and have been for years. This demographic shift isn’t always reflected in the electorate, because white Christians are more apt to turn out to vote than other groups — in 2016, for instance, white evangelical Protestants made up 26 percent of Americans who cast a ballot, even though they accounted for only 17 percent of the total population, according to PRRI.

But if voter turnout is high this year, their impact could be diluted. “The reality is that Trump could win the same high share of white evangelical Protestants that he did back in 2016 and still lose the election, because that slice of the population is in decline,” Burge said. A tighter margin among white Catholics just exacerbates the problem, because those are more votes that Trump has to make up elsewhere.

The Republicans’ reliance on white Christians isn’t just a problem for Trump, of course — it’s an issue for any GOP candidate in a country where the voting population is becoming less white and less Christian overall. But white Christians’ shrinking numbers could be an especially big issue for Trump this year, if he’s also losing some of the white Catholics in the Rust Belt who voted for him four years ago.

How To Vote Safely In A Pandemic

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 15:39:29 GMT

On this week’s episode of PODCAST-19, Anna Rothschild talks with FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich and Maggie Koerth about how states are trying to make it safe to vote in person this Election Day, and what you should keep in mind as you go to the polls.

Don’t want to miss an episode of PODCAST-19, FiveThirtyEight’s weekly look at what we know — and what we know we don’t know — about COVID-19? Subscribe on your favorite podcasting app. For example, here’s where to do it on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.

Drew Brees Almost Never Throws Deep Anymore. Is That A Problem For The Saints?

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 15:36:46 GMT

Drew Brees of the New Orleans Saints is having one of the most interesting quarterback seasons in recent memory. Criticized harshly for a weak arm, the 41-year-old almost never throws the ball deep anymore, instead tossing short passes to running back Alvin Kamara and various receivers not named Michael Thomas. (The All-Pro has been injured since Week 1.)

Because they pose minimal danger over the top to keep defenses honest, you might think that Brees and the Saints would be struggling. And yet, New Orleans has started the season with at least four wins in its first six games for a fourth consecutive year, and Brees is seventh in the NFL in Total QBR.¹ Brees has been trending in this direction for a while, but he is now pushing the absolute limits of how much a quarterback can accomplish without having the arm to back it up.

Going back to 2006, the earliest season for which ESPN has data on air yards, only one QB threw a shorter average pass than Brees’s 5.80 mark this year: Alex Smith of the Kansas City Chiefs in 2014, whose average pass traveled just 5.58 yards through the air. And no QB in the entire sample had a season in which he threw a smaller share of passes 20 or more yards downfield than Brees’s 3.3 percent rate so far in 2020. (Even for Smith in 2014, 5.4 percent of his passes traveled at least 20 yards.)

Few QBs sling it shorter than Drew Brees

Fewest air yards per pass attempt and smallest share of attempts that went 20+ yards in the air for qualified NFL passers, 2006-2020

Fewest air yards/att.				Fewest 20+ Air yd att.
Player	Year	Team	AY/ATT	Player	Year	Team	20+ Att. %
Smith	2014	KC	5.58	Brees	2020	NO	3.3%
Brees	2020	NO	5.80	Smith	2014	KC	5.4
Da. Carr	2006	HOU	5.86	Tannehill	2020	TEN	5.9
Bradford	2016	MIN	6.24	Jones	2020	NYG	6.1
De. Carr	2019	OAK	6.24	Garoppolo	2019	SF	6.1
Jones	2020	NYG	6.26	Da. Carr	2006	HOU	6.1
Flacco	2019	DEN	6.28	Ryan	2013	ATL	6.1
Garoppolo	2020	SF	6.31	Fitzpatrick	2020	MIA	6.6
Smith	2015	KC	6.32	Bradford	2010	STL	6.9
Brees	2017	NO	6.36	Newton	2018	CAR	7.0

The success levels for other short-tossing quarterbacks have varied. Ryan Tannehill of the Titans, for instance, doesn’t go deep much more often than Brees, and he is also having a very good season. (Tannehill’s average pass travels nearly 2 yards farther than Brees’s, though, because he seldom targets receivers behind the line of scrimmage.) But Smith was mediocre in 2014 — and that’s more often been the case for the QBs who rank highly on both lists above. Excluding Brees’s 2020, the average QBR for passers with both an average air yards per attempt below 7.00 and fewer than 8 percent of passes traveling at least 20 air yards was 51.1, which is well below the overall league average of 60.4 since 2006.

Brees is a lot better than the typical short passer

Highest total QBR in a season among passers with fewer than 7.0 air yards per attempt and fewer than 8 percent of passes traveling at 20+ air yards, 2006-2020

Player	Year	Team	Air Yds/Att.	20+ AY Att. %	Total QBR
Drew Brees	2020	NO	5.80	3.3%	80.7
Drew Brees	2019	NO	6.42	7.4	73.3
Matt Ryan	2013	ATL	6.61	6.1	67.5
Derek Carr	2019	OAK	6.24	7.6	64.1
Alex Smith	2015	KC	6.32	7.7	61.1
Jimmy Garoppolo	2019	SF	6.39	6.1	60.8
Daniel Jones	2020	NYG	6.26	6.1	60.6
Jason Campbell	2008	WSH	6.76	7.7	58.5
Jon Kitna	2010	DAL	6.53	7.5	52.9
Christian Ponder	2012	MIN	6.43	7.2	52.6
Alex Smith	2014	KC	5.58	5.4	52.0
Sam Bradford	2010	STL	6.39	6.9	46.9
Joe Flacco	2017	BAL	6.37	7.3	46.7
David Carr	2006	HOU	5.86	6.1	45.8
Alex Smith	2013	KC	6.54	7.9	45.0
Cam Newton	2020	NE	6.68	7.6	42.5
Sam Darnold	2020	NYJ	6.97	7.5	41.1
Chad Henne	2013	JAC	6.46	7.4	34.9
Jimmy Clausen	2010	CAR	6.52	7.7	13.8
NFL average	2006-2020		8.23	11.6	60.4

By QBR, Brees is doing better this year than in 2019 — another very short-passing season by historical standards — despite throwing deep even less (and despite not having Thomas, who set the all-time NFL record for receptions in a season last year). New Orleans’s leading receiver this season — by no small margin — has been Kamara, who’s tracking to be one of only five primary running backs to lead a team in receiving yards since 2006, according to ESPN’s Stats & Information Group.

RB-led receiving corps are rare — and usually bad

Primary running backs to lead an NFL team in receiving yards in a season since 2006, with team ranks in expected points added (EPA)

				Team EPA Ranks
Player	Year	Team	Rec. YPG	All Offense	Pass Offense
Alvin Kamara	2020	NO	76.7	7	8
Christian McCaffrey	2018	CAR	54.2	14	17
Duke Johnson	2017	CLE	43.3	29	32
Danny Woodhead	2015	SD	47.2	14	6
Jamaal Charles	2013	KC	46.2	18	20

Similar to how most extreme short passers struggle to post efficient numbers, the other offenses whose receiving corps were led by running backs tended to grade as mediocre, according to schedule-adjusted expected points added (EPA). This is consistent with research that shows passes to running backs as being less valuable than those directed to other positions. Simply put, it’s difficult to build an effective offense around short throws that disproportionately target players coming out of the backfield.

And yet, the Saints are defying all that this season, with Brees passing well and the New Orleans offense once again ranking among the top 10 in EPA, as it has every season since Brees arrived in 2006. Some of it comes down to Kamara’s unique talent as a receiver; no other running back is even close to being as valuable a pass catcher, according to Football Outsiders’ Defense-adjusted Yards Above Replacement metric. A lot of it has to do with coach Sean Payton and offensive coordinator Pete Carmichael engineering efficient throws: According to the NFL’s Next Gen Stats, 51 percent of Brees’s passes this season have been characterized as “open” or “wide-open,” meaning no defender was within 3 yards of the pass target when it arrived; only three qualified passers (Patrick Mahomes, Josh Allen and Jimmy Garoppolo) made more of their throws to receivers so lightly covered.²

And, of course, that figure is also aided by Brees’s own vast knowledge of the Saints’ offensive system. Although Next Gen Stats estimates that Brees and Garoppolo have made the “easiest” throws of any QB this season — each has an expected completion percentage of about 71 percent based on the depth (and other characteristics) of their throws — Brees has somehow managed to exceed that expectation, completing his passes at a rate 1.9 percentage points higher than we’d expect of an average QB with the same set of throws. Despite his lack of arm strength and disinclination to throw any deeper than 20 yards downfield, Brees has added value through sheer accuracy and ability to read defenses. It has been a magic act worth appreciating.

The real question, however, will be if Brees can keep it up over the rest of the season. That’s an especially pressing issue now, with Thomas still struggling to return and leading wide receiver Emmanuel Sanders on the COVID-19 reserve list. The Chicago Bears, New Orleans’s Week 8 opponent, have the NFL’s sixth-ranked defense by EPA (and are fourth-best against the pass), so they’ll surely be a tough opponent for Brees and the Saints’ short-passing scheme. They’ll also serve as a test for whether New Orleans can live up to its solid Super Bowl odds, despite deploying such a limited passing attack.

FiveThirtyEight’s NFL Elo ratings

How each team ranks through Week 7 of the 2020 season, according to our quarterback-adjusted predictions

						Chance To …
Rk	Team	Starting QB	QB Rk*	Elo Rating	Proj. Record	Make Playoffs	Win Division	Win SB
1	Chiefs	Mahomes	2	1712	13-3	>99%	93%	20%
2	Ravens	Jackson	5	1659	12-4	94	40	10
3	Buccaneers	Brady	10	1652	11-5	87	64	12
4	Steelers	Roethlisberger	13	1646	13-3	98	54	10
5	Seahawks	Wilson	3	1625	11-5	82	43	8
6	Packers	Rodgers	11	1618	11-5	88	67	8
7	Titans	Tannehill	7	1617	11-5	90	75	6
8	Saints	Brees	1	1603	10-6	67	34	5
9	49ers	Garoppolo	26	1600	9-7	47	11	3
10	Rams	Goff	14	1598	10-6	68	23	4
11	Bills	Allen	9	1573	10-6	84	79	3
12	Cardinals	Murray	4	1563	10-6	65	23	3
13	Colts	Rivers	18	1556	9-7	52	24	2
14	Browns	Mayfield	21	1553	10-6	79	6	2
15	Bears	Foles	25	1541	10-6	68	30	2
16	Raiders	Carr	8	1513	8-8	36	5	<1
17	Patriots	Newton	22	1495	7-9	22	14	<1
18	Broncos	Lock	30	1486	7-9	13	<1	<1
19	Eagles	Wentz	19	1484	7-8-1	64	64	<1
20	Chargers	Herbert	15	1475	7-9	15	<1	<1
21	Falcons	Ryan	12	1462	4-12	<1	<1	<1
22	Panthers	Bridgewater	16	1455	7-9	8	2	<1
23	Vikings	Cousins	27	1455	5-11	4	<1	<1
24	Lions	Stafford	17	1452	7-9	15	2	<1
25	Texans	Watson	6	1445	5-11	2	<1	<1
26	Dolphins	Tagovailoa	28	1418	7-9	15	7	<1
27	Bengals	Burrow	20	1383	4-11-1	<1	<1	<1
28	Washington	Allen	29	1380	5-11	21	20	<1
29	Giants	Jones	24	1356	4-12	5	5	<1
30	Jets	Darnold✚	31	1314	2-14	<1	<1	<1
31	Jaguars	Minshew†	23	1301	3-13	<1	<1	<1
32	Cowboys	Dalton✚	32	1274	5-11	11	11	<1

Looking ahead: Among Week 8’s slate of games, we’ve got our eye on Sunday afternoon’s clash between the Steelers and Ravens. Both teams have strong playoff odds — each sits in excess of 94 percent — but the contest could have huge implications on not just the AFC North derby but also the all-important race for the AFC’s top overall seed. Pittsburgh is undefeated and has dominated with its defense, though Ben Roethlisberger (Elo’s 13th-ranked QB) may be starting to show his age after below-average games in three of his past four starts. On Baltimore’s side, it has recovered from a 14-point loss to Kansas City in Week 3 to win three straight, with QB Lamar Jackson playing more like himself in the recent win over Philadelphia — though the Eagles’ late comeback against what is (on paper) one of the NFL’s top defenses was concerning. Elo likes the Ravens at home here, giving them a 60 percent chance at the victory, but the teams are pretty evenly matched, and it should be an excellent defensive battle. Elo’s spread: Baltimore -3

Check out our latest NFL predictions.

Is This The Year A Team From Outside The Power Five Crashes The College Football Playoff?

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 12:01:55 GMT

Outside of Orlando, where the University of Central Florida anointed itself the 2017 national champion, college football hasn’t built much momentum toward allowing a team that isn’t in a Power Five conference¹ a chance to compete for a title. In six years of the College Football Playoff, the lower-profile Group of Five conferences have been shut out, most notably in 2017 and 2018, when UCF entered selection day at 13-0 and 12-0, respectively. When the Knights entered their bowl game at 13-0 in 2017 and never moved higher than 12th in the playoff rankings, and then went 12-0 in 2018 and still never moved higher than eighth, it was fair to wonder whether a Group of Five team would ever gain access to the four-team showdown.

So what would it take? Perhaps the answer is a season-altering pandemic. The novel coronavirus has upended the 2020 schedule, and the Power Five’s Big Ten and Pac-12 are just now beginning their seasons.² But most of the Group of Five teams have been playing for weeks, and a couple of them — BYU and Cincinnati — may have their best cases yet to join the playoff.

A look at the résumés of BYU and Cincinnati so far reveals typical profiles of mid-major teams that have been dominant against admittedly weak competition.³ On the field, both have looked like the BCS-busters of old: BYU rolled into Houston and beat a decent Cougars team by 17 points, and Cincinnati pounded a previously unbeaten SMU team on the road Saturday. In the past six seasons, no team outside the Power Five has entered the playoff selection show ranked higher than 21st in ESPN’s Football Power Index. As of Wednesday, BYU was No. 18 and Cincy was No. 31.⁴

There’s just that one significant flaw: strength of schedule. When the cancellations mounted over the summer, independent BYU scrambled for all the opponents it could find, no matter where they came from; as a result, the Cougars have played just the 87th-most-difficult schedule so far. Cincinnati, meanwhile, has only its American Athletic Conference foes plus Army and Austin Peay on its slate, for a strength of schedule ranked 84th.⁵ If UCF couldn’t get into the playoff in 2018 after winning 11 of 12 games by double-digits and beating Pittsburgh 45-14,⁶ it’s fair to wonder what chance BYU and Cincinnati have.

When the playoff selection committee members release their first ranking on Nov. 17, they’ll have quite a mess to sort out. Behind the likes of Alabama, Clemson, Notre Dame and Ohio State, there could be an 8-0 BYU team, a 7-0 Cincinnati team, a handful of 2-0 Pac-12 teams and very few unbeatens elsewhere. The SEC and ACC champions have made the playoff every year, and there’s no reason to expect that streak to end. But elsewhere in the country, postseason résumés have yet to take shape.

Using recent history as a guide, the Group of Five’s best playoff chance came in 2018, when UCF reached No. 8 in the final ranking. Even at 12-0, the Knights finished behind an 11-2 Georgia team that lost in the SEC championship and a 10-2 Michigan team whose last game was a 62-39 loss at Ohio State. In a normal year, that might be the ceiling for a Group of Five team. But what if, come December, the committee is choosing between an 11-0 AAC champion in Cincinnati, with three wins combined against Memphis and SMU, and an SEC runner-up at 8-2 or 7-3? Or a Pac-12 champion at 7-0 or 6-1? That might require some explanation.

At the very least, it might amplify calls for the playoff to expand once the current deal ends after the 2025 season. In the past, college football’s championship system has changed only when its flaws have been exposed. Michigan and Nebraska contested the 1997 national title, and that was the end of the poll system. Computer rankings produced a 2011 championship game between two SEC teams, and that was the end of the Bowl Championship Series. UCF put pressure on the new four-team playoff, and if the playoff leaves out more deserving unbeatens this December, surely those teams will join the chorus.

Any team outside the major conferences needs an influx of chaos to have any hope of the playoff. And this is 2020 — chaos is undefeated. A top-10 Florida team has not played since Oct. 10 due to a coronavirus outbreak that infected at least 26 players and halted all activities. A top-10 Wisconsin team saw its breakout starting quarterback Graham Mertz test positive for COVID-19, and the team has now canceled its Week 9 game against Nebraska because of a high number of positive tests on the team, including head coach Paul Chryst. Who knows what the next seven weeks have in store? Nothing — not even an outsider in the playoff — can be counted out.

Why Pennsylvania’s Vote Count Could Change After Election Night

Thu, 29 Oct 2020 10:00:06 GMT

Graphics by Jasmine Mithani

We know a majority of Americans plan to vote by mail or in person before Election Day, and at least 75 million have already cast ballots. This is an enormous uptick in votes cast early from 2016, and as a result, there’s a real possibility that we won’t know who won the presidency on election night.

Take Pennsylvania, arguably the most important swing state this election as it’s currently the likeliest “tipping-point state” in our forecast, or the state that could determine the winner of the Electoral College. About 2 million mail-in ballots have already been returned so far, almost one-third of the total number of votes cast in the state four years ago. But because the state can’t begin processing mail ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day, it could be awhile before we get full results in Pennsylvania. State officials have said that it could take until Friday to finish counting most ballots. And between Tuesday and Friday, there could be a pretty big shift in terms of which party is favored in the vote tally, given that Biden supporters are far more likely to vote early or absentee than Trump supporters, who are far more likely to vote on Election Day.

In other words, we need to brace ourselves for a “blue shift” in states like Pennsylvania. That is, states that primarily report Election Day results first could show Republicans with an initial lead on election night only to then shift toward Democrats as more mail ballots are counted. To be clear, this won’t be true everywhere. Some states, like Florida, are already counting early votes and will likely report a lot of its early in-person and mail votes ahead of many Election Day votes.

But it’s important to stress that this pattern — where the votes counted last shift the result in a Democratic direction — has existed in previous elections. Historically, this is in part because some Democratic-leaning voting blocs, such as young voters, are more likely to cast last-minute absentee votes as well as provisional ballots, which are counted later. But with the massive uptick in voting by mail and the strongly Democratic lean of mail votes — polls suggest Biden might win around three-fourths of Pennsylvania mail-in ballots — the blue shift could be far larger this year than in past years.

Suffice it to say, we should be ready for a sizable swing in the vote, and Pennsylvania is probably not the only battleground state where we will see such a shift. However, we’re not driving entirely blind: The results from Pennsylvania’s June 2 presidential primary give us some clues for how a blue shift might happen, and more importantly, what it might look like.

In that election, the more rural and Republican-leaning parts of the state reported a sizable majority of their results on election night, as their votes were disproportionately cast on Election Day. In the state’s more populous and Democratic-leaning areas, it took roughly two and a half weeks to report most of the vote, due to the huge influx of mail-in ballots. As a result, on election night, 3 a.m. Eastern, only 46 percent of the final Democratic presidential primary vote had been reported, compared to 71 percent of the GOP total, based on data from ABC News.

So what would this mean if something similar happened on election night in Pennsylvania? Well, if we use what our presidential forecast currently says about the race in Pennsylvania, we can game this out a little to understand what the vote count might look like on Nov. 3. We should be clear, though, that this analysis has its limits. We can’t know for sure how many Pennsylvanians will actually vote in November or the pace and trend of the count. Not to mention, counting the votes in two separate primaries is different from counting the votes in one presidential contest.

Right now, our forecast estimates 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, that means Biden would win about 3.6 million votes to Trump’s 3.2 million (with a few additional votes for other candidates). And if the vote count followed what we saw in the primary, less than half of Biden’s votes would be in by 3 a.m. on election night, whereas around 70 percent of Trump’s would be reported.

That means we could be looking at a situation where Trump has about a 16-point lead, 58 percent to 42 percent, based on approximately 60 percent of the total expected vote. But over the course of the next few days — again, assuming the same pattern we observed in the primary — Biden would win two-thirds of the remaining votes, which would precipitate a 21-point shift in the overall margin from 3 a.m. on election night to the final result, as the chart below shows.

Now, it’s entirely possible the actual shift isn’t as large as the one outlined above. After the primary, local election officials in Pennsylvania now have some experience in handling a huge number of mail ballots. The state has also made investments to expedite the vote count. Plus, a sizable share of mail ballots will have already been turned in by Election Day, so administrators could have the majority of all mail votes when they begin processing them on Election Day morning. Pennsylvania officials also want to make sure that voters aren’t surprised by a sizable vote shift so plan to be as transparent as possible. Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar has said she will call on county election officials to regularly report the progress in counting mail ballots, instead of reporting them all at once, to avoid a huge swing in the vote that might cause confusion. And she’d also like the state to share how many ballots are left to count, where they are in the counting process and the party affiliation of the voters who cast those remaining votes.

Still, we’re talking about a lot of votes that have to be processed. Just 2.7 million people cast ballots in Pennsylvania’s presidential primary, about 40 percent of the total turnout we’re expecting in the general election. In fact, more people have requested mail ballots than voted in Pennsylvania’s presidential primary, period. That means even if officials are better prepared, they will still have far more mail ballots to process than in June. And while they can begin processing at 7 a.m. on Nov. 3, that still means verifying and processing each ballot, and only then counting each vote. This could take days, which could affect how quickly we know who won the election.

And this brings us to one potential worry about a big blue shift, especially if the election is close: Trump could try to declare victory based on initial returns, as he’s claimed the result should be known on election night. Now, declaring victory doesn’t really amount to much, as it has no legal bearing. But doing so could help cast doubt on the results, especially if there is a subsequent shift toward Biden that’s accompanied by false claims of voting fraud, such as the ones the president has made numerous times already. Experts from organizations such as the Transition Integrity Project have even expressed concern that, in such a scenario, Trump could try to figure out ways to interfere with post-Election Day counting to stop a potential blue shift.

Even if Trump doesn’t question the result, Pennsylvania’s blue shift could be affected by post-election court rulings in the state. Take the fight over whether to count ballots that were postmarked by Election Day and received by Nov. 6. The U.S. Supreme Court has twice now upheld the state’s Supreme Court ruling that extended the deadline, but it’s not clear whether the court has entirely ruled out revisiting the issue. Justice Samuel Alito, joined by two of the court’s other conservative justices, wrote that while there was a “strong likelihood” that the state’s Supreme Court decision violated the U.S. Constitution, there simply wasn’t time to decide before the election. However, ballots arriving after 8 p.m. Eastern on Election Day will be separated out, so the issue can be revisited if necessary after the election. And if the Supreme Court does take up the case again after the election, deciding to not count these ballots could reduce the size of the vote shift in Biden’s favor because more Democratic votes would likely be affected, given the partisan split in mail voting. For his part, Trump said on Wednesday that he hoped the courts would stop states from counting ballots beyond Election Day.

It’s impossible to say just how much the vote may shift after election night in Pennsylvania, but the primary results in the Keystone State suggest that we should be ready for a sizable swing in the vote. And it’s probably not the only battleground state that will see a blue shift of some note. For instance, Wisconsin can’t begin processing mail ballots until Election Day, and Michigan’s count is expected to stretch on for a few days, too.

The better prepared Americans are for lengthy counts and major vote shifts because of the increase in mail-in ballots, the less likely they are to believe misinformation about what those swings mean.