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Do You Buy That … We Could See A Delay In Election Results?

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 14:48:53 GMT

There Have Been 38 Statewide Elections During The Pandemic. Here’s How They Went.

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 11:00:15 GMT

In mid-March, as businesses shuttered, hospitals filled up and Americans hunkered down at home, election officials faced a difficult question: Was it even possible to hold safe and accessible elections in the age of COVID-19? More than four months later, we’re not that much closer to answering that question.

Since the World Health Organization declared an official pandemic on March 11, 37 states plus Washington, D.C., have held statewide primaries¹ for president or state-level office. And while those that have gone poorly have tended to grab the headlines, there have been success stories too. Ultimately, it’s been hard to assess how well our democracy has adapted to the pandemic. So here’s a snapshot of all 38 statewide elections since the pandemic started and what macro trends we’ve been able to observe so far.

First, most states — and almost all those that actually made an effort to do so — were wildly successful at getting people to vote by mail (or at least vote before election day). In 24 out of 35 states for which we have this data, a majority of ballots were cast absentee.² In addition, every state but one³ made more use of absentee ballots than it did in the equivalent election in 2016.⁴ Considering what a massive logistical undertaking it is to switch to a predominantly mail election, this is an impressive achievement by election officials. (Of course, as we’ll cover below, it didn’t always go off without a hitch.)

Like it or not, most states are now holding mail elections

Share of ballots cast absentee in statewide elections held during the pandemic, and how much that share increased since 2016

Jurisdiction	Mail Ballot Access	Absentee	Change from 2016
Alaska	Mailed ballots	100%	+100
Wyoming	Mailed ballots	100	+100
Kansas	Mailed ballots	100	+100
Oregon	Mailed ballots	100	0
Hawaii	Mailed ballots	100	+100
Idaho	Mailed ballot applications	100	+86
Montana	Mailed ballots	100	+30
Nevada	Mailed ballots	100	+89
North Dakota	Mailed ballot applications	100	+73
Utah	Mailed ballots	100	—
Ohio	Mailed instructions for requesting ballot	99	+85
Colorado	Mailed ballots	99	—
Maryland	Mailed ballots	97	+93
Arizona	Anyone could vote absentee	89	+8
Nebraska	Mailed ballot applications	84	+63
Rhode Island	Mailed ballot applications	83	+79
Iowa	Mailed ballot applications	78	+59
Wisconsin	Anyone could vote absentee	75	+65
Kentucky*	Mailed instructions for requesting ballot	73	+70
Washington, D.C.	Mailed ballot applications	71	+64
New Mexico	Mailed ballot applications	63	+56
South Dakota	Mailed ballot applications	58	+44
Indiana*	Anyone could vote absentee	51	+35
Pennsylvania	Mailed instructions for requesting ballot	51	+48
West Virginia*	Mailed ballot applications	50	+49
Georgia	Mailed ballot applications	48	—
Florida	Anyone could vote absentee	46	+16
Delaware	Mailed ballot applications	45	+42
South Carolina	Anyone could vote absentee	22	+10
Virginia	Anyone could vote absentee	21	+20
Louisiana	Excuse required	19	+16
Texas*	Excuse required	17	+3
Oklahoma	Anyone could vote absentee	14	+10
Illinois	Anyone could vote absentee	9	+6
Alabama*	Anyone could vote absentee	5	—

Unsurprisingly, states that mailed every voter a ballot saw the highest share of their votes cast absentee, although it’s hard to definitively say that was the reason, as these states also offered few polling places — or, in Alaska, Hawaii, Kansas, Utah and Wyoming, no polling places at all.

However, other ways of encouraging mail voting had more mixed results. For instance, in the states that just mailed voters absentee-ballot applications or instructions for how to apply for an absentee ballot, there was anywhere from 45 percent absentee participation in Delaware to 84 percent in Nebraska. (But don’t read too much into the 100 percent absentee rates in Idaho and North Dakota — they, too, eliminated in-person voting.)

What we do know is the states that did not mail voters anything to nudge them toward voting absentee (such as Illinois, with 9 percent absentee participation, and Oklahoma, with 14 percent absentee participation) tended to have the lowest shares of absentee voters, and the smallest increases from 2016. The same was true of states like Louisiana and Texas, which still required voters to provide an excuse to vote absentee. A notable exception was Wisconsin, where 75 percent of votes were cast absentee despite nothing being mailed to them. Most likely, the intense news coverage predicting doom and gloom for Wisconsin’s primary caused Wisconsinites to heed the state government’s advice and request absentee ballots; both Joe Biden’s and Bernie Sanders’s campaigns also encouraged their supporters to vote by mail.

Of course, just because a state conducted its primary predominantly by mail does not mean it will be able to turn the same trick in November. For starters, as the next table makes clear, most of these elections were low-turnout affairs: Anywhere from 3 percent to 46 percent of the voting eligible population turned out to vote in them, while presidential general elections have VEP turnout rates around 60 percent. (And, needless to say, processing mail ballots for 60 percent of the population is a lot more challenging than processing mail ballots for 20 or 30 percent.) But the good news is that the coronavirus doesn’t seem to be putting a dent in turnout rates. Just as turnout in the presidential primaries before the pandemic hit was a bit above 2016 levels, 22 of the 34 elections for which we have the relevant data actually saw their VEP turnout race increase over the equivalent election in 2016.

Despite the pandemic, turnout is up in many states

Turnout as a share of the voting eligible population in statewide elections held during the pandemic versus turnout in the same election in 2016

Date	Jurisdiction	2016 Turnout	2020 Turnout	diff
June 30	Colorado	16%	38%	+21
July 14	Alabama*	2	17	+15
June 2	Iowa	9	23	+14
May 12	Nebraska	23	36	+13
June 30	Oklahoma	12	24	+12
June 2	Idaho	15	26	+11
June 30	Utah	16	27	+10
June 9	Nevada	12	22	+10
June 23	Kentucky*	21	31	+10
June 2	Montana	37	46	+9
June 9	South Carolina	11	20	+8
June 23	Virginia	2	9	+7
July 14	Texas*	3	10	+6
May 2	Kansas	2	7	+5
June 2	New Mexico	23	28	+5
June 2	South Dakota	20	24	+4
June 9	North Dakota	24	28	+4
April 10	Alaska	2	4	+2
April 17	Wyoming	2	4	+2
June 2	Washington, D.C.	20	22	+2
May 19	Oregon	41	42	+1
May 22	Hawaii	3	3	0
June 2	Maryland	34	32	-1
June 9	West Virginia*	34	32	-2
July 11	Louisiana	19	16	-3
June 2	Pennsylvania	34	30	-4
July 7	Delaware	24	17	-6
June 2	Rhode Island	24	16	-8
March 17	Florida	28	20	-9
March 17	Arizona	24	12	-12
March 17	Illinois	40	25	-14
April 7	Wisconsin	50	35	-14
June 2	Indiana*	36	22	-15
April 28	Ohio	38	21	-17
June 9	Georgia	—	30	—

Admittedly, turnout did plummet in many states this year — but for most of them, there is a compelling reason unrelated to the coronavirus. States like Delaware, Indiana, Louisiana, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Wisconsin went from hosting contested presidential primaries on both sides (Democratic and Republican) in 2016 to being virtually irrelevant to the delegate math this year (both President Trump and Joe Biden sewed up their respective nominations by the end of March). And Arizona did not even hold a Republican presidential primary this year, which explains its huge drop-off in turnout.

But if the pandemic significantly suppressed turnout, it was probably in Illinois, where VEP turnout went from 40 percent in the 2016 primary to 25 percent in the 2020 primary. The pandemic seems like a good explanation for at least part of the drop-off: Illinois experienced long lines and other problems on election day (see below), and because the primary was held just days after the country locked down, voters didn’t really have time to request absentee ballots — nor did the state have time to mail them anything. (The lack of a competitive GOP presidential primary this year also explains a lot of the drop-off but not all.)

Similarly, there were non-pandemic-related reasons for the turnout increases in many states. For instance, Colorado opened its primaries up to unaffiliated voters; Oklahoma and Utah simply had more interesting races on the ballot in 2020 than in 2016. There were also states like Kentucky and Nebraska that didn’t hold one party’s presidential primary in 2016, and states like Alabama, Texas and Virginia, where there were no statewide races in 2016 (so many residents just didn’t have an election to vote in).

But there were several elections — in states like Idaho, Montana (on the Democratic side), Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota and South Dakota — where turnout did increase even though those states held equally or less competitive primaries in 2020 than in 2016. You could arguably add Iowa to that list too; its 2020 down-ballot primaries were pretty competitive, but not enough to explain a 14-percentage-point turnout increase from 2016.

It’s plausible that these states’ embrace of mail voting helped expand the electorate; all of them either mailed ballots or sent absentee-ballot applications to voters. In addition, Kansas also saw turnout spike after the Kansas Democratic Party, spurred in part by the coronavirus, switched from a caucus in 2016 to an all-mail primary in 2020 (caucuses are notorious for their low turnout).

There’s an important caveat here, though: Just because the coronavirus did not lower turnout overall does not mean it didn’t disenfranchise individual voters. We know that at least some voters were unable to vote because of the pandemic. Indeed, the primaries conducted during the pandemic have been far from the smooth sailing suggested above. Instead, an unusual number of problems have occurred — some serious enough that they have made it harder for people to vote and even put them at a heightened risk for infection.

Two specific problems have come up again and again. At least 16 jurisdictions⁵ saw long lines at polling places, which had often been consolidated due to a shortage of poll workers. The unluckiest voters in Milwaukee waited two and a half hours to vote; in Washington, D.C., five; in Las Vegas, seven.

And some voters in at least 12 places⁶ reported never receiving the absentee ballots they had requested — sometimes weeks in advance. In some states not used to a heavy volume of mail voting, understaffed election offices were receiving ballot requests faster than they could respond to them. In six Ohio counties, about 4,500 people who requested an absentee ballot were not sent one because their request lacked essential information. In one Pennsylvania county, officials simply ran out of time to fulfill 400 ballot requests and sent out 6,000 ballots the day before the primary, when they had little chance of being received in time to be voted. In Maryland, 1 million ballots were delivered either late or not at all.

Other problems were less rampant — but no less concerning. In Illinois, multiple polling places lacked the proper voting equipment or cleaning supplies. In Georgia, new voting machines did not work correctly, either because they malfunctioned or poll workers were not adequately trained. In Florida, Illinois and New York, truant poll workers caused some polling places to open late. In Idaho, the state’s online absentee-ballot request portal got overloaded and crashed right before the deadline (which was extended as a result). In Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C., police wrongly told voters waiting in line to disperse because of a curfew even though voters were exempt from it. In South Carolina, polling-place consolidation and new, untrained poll workers apparently led to some voters being given the wrong ballots. In Texas, some poll workers walked off the job after other poll workers refused to wear face masks.

The coronavirus has put American democracy to the test — and by our reckoning, election officials have made big strides in a short period of time. But a lot of work must still be done.

Some states, like Idaho, Iowa, Nebraska, New Mexico, North Dakota and South Dakota, have risen to the challenge, greatly expanding their use of absentee voting and reporting few problems at the polls. These states also saw increases in turnout relative to the equivalent election in 2016. However, it may be hard to replicate their success nationally, as they all are mostly rural and sparsely populated, so their task may be easier than a state like New York or Michigan. Similarly, Arizona, Colorado, Montana, Oregon and Utah also scored highly because they already conduct their elections mostly via absentee ballot and thus were able to avoid major problems.

On the other hand, states like Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin bungled the execution of their primaries. They did little to expand mail voting (although many voters cast absentee ballots anyway), and their turnout fell (which may or may not be related to the first two points). Georgia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., are also guilty of ineptitude that surely disenfranchised some voters, although their turnout rates didn’t reflect it — perhaps because their efforts to expand mail voting also brought new people into the electorate.

So where does this leave us headed into November? It’s hard to say. On the one hand, it is worth keeping in mind how states handled their primaries. But on the other hand, don’t assume a state that performed competently in the primary will do so in the general, or the inverse. They may, but the general election is also a very different beast — and, with that higher turnout, one that is much more difficult to tame. States may also learn from a bad experience during the primary and resolve to do things differently in the fall; they may have more or less funding available for November than they did for the primary, and they may tweak rules surrounding absentee-ballot or in-person voting access. Unfortunately, nobody really knows what the 2020 general election will look like — and how each state will fare.

Many Americans Are Convinced Crime Is Rising In The U.S. They’re Wrong.

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 10:00:21 GMT

Will you get robbed this year? How would you rate your chances?

Over 10 years, from 1994 to 2004, the national Survey of Economic Expectations asked respondents to do just that. People estimated their risks for a whole host of bad-news life events — robbery, burglary, job loss and losing their health insurance. But the survey didn’t just ask respondents to rate their chances: It also asked whether those things had actually happened to them in the last year.

And that combination of questions revealed something important about American fear: We are terrible at estimating our risk of crime — much worse than we are at guessing the danger of other bad things. Across that decade, respondents put their chance of being robbed in the coming year at about 15 percent. Looking back, the actual rate of robbery was 1.2 percent. In contrast, when asked to rate their risk of upcoming job loss, people guessed it was about 14.5 percent — much closer to the actual job loss rate of 12.9 percent.

In other words, we feel the risk of crime more acutely. We are certain crime is rising when it isn’t; convinced our risk of victimization is higher than it actually is. And in a summer when the president is sending federal agents to crack down on crime in major cities and local politicians are arguing over the risks of defunding the police, that disconnect matters. In an age of anxiety, crime may be one of our most misleading fears.

Take the crime rate. In 2019, according to a survey conducted by Gallup, about 64 percent of Americans believed that there was more crime in the U.S. than there was a year ago. It’s a belief we’ve consistently held for decades now, but as you can see in the chart below, we’ve been, just as consistently, very wrong.

Crime rates do fluctuate from year to year. In 2020, for example, murder has been up but other crimes are in decline so that the crime rate, overall, is down. And the trend line for violent crime over the last 30 years has been down, not up. The Bureau of Justice Statistics found that the rate of violent crimes per 1,000 Americans age 12 and older plummeted from 80 in 1993 to just 23 in 2018. The country has gotten much, much safer, but, somehow, Americans don’t seem to feel that on a knee-jerk, emotional level.

“The biggest challenge really, and we’re seeing this as a society across the board right now, is that even though our organizations, our businesses, our government entities are becoming more data driven, we as human beings are not,” said Meghan Hollis, a research scholar at the Ronin Institute for Independent Scholarship.

That’s not to say that Americans are completely clueless about crime. When we spoke to John Gramlich, a senior writer with the Pew Research Center and one of the people who has been tracking and writing about this disconnect for years, he was quick to clarify that Pew didn’t like to frame Americans’ apparent inability to register their own increased safety as a product of being uninformed or misinformed. The reality, he told us, is that the nature of data collection makes it hard for the public to really assess crime rates and for experts to assess what the public knows or feels about crime rates.

Even the concept of a “crime rate” is messy. When we talk about crime rates in the context of an article like this one, what we’re actually discussing is the number of crimes, in a set of particular categories, that get reported to the police and, from there, to the Federal Bureau of Investigation — or results from a government survey about whether people have experienced crime. These stats document murder, rape, robbery and assault, among others, as well as several property crimes, including burglary, theft, car theft, and arson. That covers a lot of ground, and it gives us a pretty good idea what the crime rate truly looks like — enough that experts feel comfortable saying things like “Hey, look, the crime rate has been going down for 30 years.”

But those statistics don’t tell the whole story, and that matters in ways that become important when you’re trying to understand the difference between how people feel and what the data say. Not all crimes are reported to the police. Sexual assault, in particular, is notoriously underreported. And there are plenty of crimes we don’t really track well in data — like vandalism, drug use and sales, or public intoxication — which can affect how safe people feel in their neighborhoods, even if the crimes aren’t serious.

Wesley Skogan, professor emeritus of political science at Northwestern University, spent much of the 1990s attending neighborhood-level public meetings around Chicago and documenting the issues that residents told police were problems they wanted solved. Some of these issues weren’t even, strictly speaking, crimes, at all. In 17 percent of the meetings, residents asked police to do something about litter. Loud music or other noise-related problems were discussed in 19 percent of the meetings. Residents complained about abandoned cars more often than they complained about gang problems. Skogan thinks about these factors as measurements of social disorder, and has found evidence that these things affect how safe people feel. If violent crimes are down, but there’s still a good deal of social disorder in an area, people’s responses to a survey might reflect how they feel about litter more than how they feel about a reduced murder rate.

The way the polls are worded also don’t help. “The polling tends to be pretty generic,” said Lisa L. Miller, a political scientist at Rutgers University who studies crime and punishment, which makes it hard to capture the difference between how Americans think about murder and litter when it comes to how safe they feel. More importantly, she said, questions like “Do you think crime has gone up or down?” is not the same thing as measuring fear. “When people are genuinely worried about crime and really fearful, it tends to be in relation to violent crime. That’s the thing I’ve found really drives public pressure for the government to do something,” she said.

This whole thing is further complicated because crime is extremely localized — and estimates about the national crime rate are, well, not.

“All the homicides in Chicago occur in about 8 percent of the city’s census tracts,” Skogan said. For almost everybody, he said, that means “the crime you hear about is crime somewhere else.” And that matters because research suggests people are a lot better at estimating the crime rate in their own backyard than they are at estimating what it’s like across town, or across the country.

Finally, there’s the question of race, which permeates and complicates everything surrounding crime. It’s not just trash and loitering that make people perceive a neighborhood as more dangerous regardless of the crime rate. When Lincoln Quillian, a professor of sociology at Northwestern University, analyzed data from three surveys of crime and safety in cities across America, he found that people perceive their neighborhood as more dangerous — regardless of the actual crime rate — if more young Black men live there. That was true for both Black and white respondents of the surveys, but in some cities the effect was significantly more pronounced in white people.

This is all a long-winded way of saying the situation is messy on many levels, but it remains true that people’s personal fear of being victims of crimes and their perceptions of national crime rates are far from accurate.

So why do Americans still think crime is high?

Turns out, the local news may be responsible for convincing Americans that violent crime is more common than it really is. Researchers have consistently found that “if it bleeds, it leads” is a pretty accurate descriptor of the coverage that local television broadcasters and newspapers focus on. For years, rarer crimes like murders received a lot more airtime than more common crimes like physical assault. And that hasn’t changed as the crime rate has fallen.

Understandably, seeing stories about violent atrocities on the news every night seems to make people afraid that the same thing could happen to them. According to one study conducted in California, consumption of local television news significantly increased people’s perceptions of risk and fear of crime. “The news is not going to report on things that are going really well very often,” Hollis said. “It’s not like ‘Hey Austin, Texas doesn’t have a whole lot of crime and that’s our news for the day!'” Stories about gun violence grab attention, so you get more stories about rare, but serious, crimes. “You can have people perceiving areas of cities as much more violent than they actually are because that’s what they see in the news,” she said. “It really amplifies that view of criminal activity beyond what it really is.”

There’s a significant amount of evidence, too, that reporting on crime can prop up harmful stereotypes: Studies have found that local news media disproportionately portray Black people as perpetrators of crime, and white people as victims.

There’s also plenty of fodder for this kind of coverage because even though crime has fallen a lot over the past few decades, the U.S. is still a pretty violent country, at least compared to other developed nations. “Violence remains an American problem,” Miller said. “Just think about mass shootings. So in that sense it’s not irrational for people to be somewhat fearful of violence.”

But often, those fears can be blown out of proportion — not just by wall-to-wall murder coverage on the news, but also by politicians who bring up the crime rate in press conferences and interviews. President Trump is far from the first president to paint a dark vision of crime in American cities, but he is singularly obsessed with the topic, especially now. According to a HuffPost analysis, the vast majority of the ads his campaign aired in the month of July dealt in some way with public safety. In one ad, an elderly woman is robbed as text flashes across the screen reading, “You won’t be safe in Joe Biden’s America.”

And a recent study suggests that Trump’s words could have an effect. Researchers found that news coverage and political rhetoric — as measured by mentions of crime in presidential State of the Union speeches — were significant indicators of whether Americans thought crime was a pressing issue facing the country. The actual crime rate was not. A HuffPost poll conducted from July 22 to 24 found something similar: Only 10 percent of Americans correctly believe that crime has fallen over the past decade, while 57 percent think crime has increased.

Some Americans may be more receptive to tough-on-crime rhetoric than others, of course. Republicans are generally more apt to say that crime is a serious problem facing the country than Democrats. And although Pew analysis of polling data doesn’t uncover big racial differences in perceptions of crime, white and Black Americans likely think about crime very differently because criminal justice has become so inextricably tied to race.

Hakeem Jefferson, a political scientist at Stanford University who studies race and justice, told us that Black people’s views on criminal justice are complex, in part because they’re likelier than other demographic groups to actually live in high-crime neighborhoods and to be victims of crime. In other research, he’s found that some Black people have also internalized negative stereotypes about who commits crime, and may be more likely to embrace punitive solutions as a result. Those perceptions and experiences are hard to capture in public opinion data, but they can do a lot to shape what Black people mean when they tell a pollster that they think crime is a serious issue facing the country. And that’s important, because as the past few decades have shown, Black people are also much likelier to be mistreated by police, experience incarceration or grapple with the challenges of a criminal record.

Regardless of what’s driving fear of crime, though, the fact that it is so out of whack with reality can make it really hard to change people’s minds or reform the criminal justice system. It’s not that an out-of-proportion fear of crime automatically leads people to support more punitive policies — right now, for instance, Americans are mostly not in favor of more money for policing. But these misperceptions can make it harder for reforms to gain traction, particularly if politicians with a big national platform — like Trump — are talking about out-of-control crime at every turn.

It’s not hard, for instance, to imagine that kind of rhetoric being used as a wedge against efforts to restructure local funding for the police. Especially considering that in the past, a fear of crime has been used politically as a reason to oppose criminal justice reforms like reducing incarceration or changing the bail bond system — even though research suggests those reforms don’t increase crime in the long term.

The history of “law and order” campaigns is riddled with dog whistles, and Trump’s recent rhetoric about sending federal agents to combat crime in cities like Chicago arguably falls into this category, according to Justin Pickett, a criminologist at the University of Albany who studies attitudes toward crime and justice. Talking about the dangers of crime, he said, can turn into a cover for racist attitudes.

None of this has made us safer. And ironically, fear of crime can actually lead to other behaviors that put us at greater risk, like buying and carrying guns. If anxiety about crime keeps Americans from embracing different ways of thinking about criminal justice, that may be doing more harm than good, too. For instance, there’s no real evidence that putting more people behind bars contributed to the decrease in crime or that imprisoning fewer people will raise crime. Instead, a mountain of research points in the opposite direction to problems and inequalities linked to mass incarceration.

The trouble is that fear about crime isn’t rational, and it’s hard to convince people to think differently about a problem that they don’t experience on a day-to-day basis anyway. “You can tell Americans that the crime rate is lower today than it was in the 1990s, but it won’t feel real to them,” said Kevin Wozniak, a sociologist at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “That is, unless politicians stop drumming up the crime rate and people stop hearing about murder every night on the local news.”

And that seems unlikely to happen in 2020.

We’re Hiring A Politics Reporter

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 16:52:34 GMT

FiveThirtyEight is seeking a reporter to write about politics and elections with a particular focus on race. This person will work both independently and in collaboration with colleagues across the newsroom to produce one to two stories each week about U.S. politics, elections and how race and identity intersect with each.

Experience reporting on and writing about race and identity in America is a must. As is some experience with data — how to find it, how to ask questions of it, how to know its limits. This can take many forms, though: using Census information, polls or other statistics in your reporting, for example. Statistical skills, such as using Excel or R to analyze data, would be a plus, but are by no means required.

We welcome applications from candidates with a history of producing high-quality journalism for digital or print audiences, as well as a desire to work closely with colleagues with different skill sets (visual journalists, for example) and a range of experience levels and journalistic backgrounds. We want someone who can help us tackle important and pressing stories, including features like: What would modern U.S. elections look like with fewer barriers to voting? How are different groups of voters reacting and processing the lead-up to November? Really, we’re open to a wide range of ideas and backgrounds and want the reporter to help define this role; candidates shouldn’t feel that they need to check every box in order to apply.

This position is full-time with benefits and can be based anywhere.

Responsibilities

Write a mix of short and longer features each month that explore how race, identity and politics intersect.
Work with the editing and interactive staff to develop and execute major projects.
Collaborate with graphics editors, as well as audio and video producers.
Work with the politics editor and other colleagues to help guide FiveThirtyEight’s political coverage in general.

Must-haves

Minimum of three years’ experience as a reporter, data journalist, visual journalist or similar position at an online or print news outlet.
Experience writing and reporting on issues of race and ethnicity.
Experience covering U.S. politics.
Experience working with data in some form.

Nice-to-haves

Experience writing and reporting on federal and state elections in an empirical or data-driven way for a wide audience.
Experience working with academic and scientific research on politics, race and ethnicity.
Statistical analysis skills.

Required Education

And if you don’t check every box, that’s OK. Please apply! Send a cover letter and resume to sarah.frostenson@fivethirtyeight.com.

Some Republicans Have Gotten More Concerned About COVID-19

Fri, 31 Jul 2020 10:00:59 GMT

This month, for the first time since April, our tracker of public opinion around the coronavirus shows that the share of Americans who say they are “very” concerned that they or someone they know will become infected with COVID-19 is higher than the share who say they are “somewhat” concerned.

That rise in concern is understandable, too, when you consider the spike in new coronavirus cases that began in mid-June, especially in the South and West. Just this past week, California, Florida and Texas, along with a handful of other states, saw record spikes in fatalities.

And the fact that the geography of the virus is changing — it’s no longer just a blue-state virus — may mean behaviors and political attitudes are shifting once again. To be clear, there are still deep political divides in how concerned people are about the virus, but there are also some signs that Republicans may be growing more concerned.

For example, as many states started lifting restrictions in April, the share of Republicans who said they were staying at home declined, while the share of Democrats saying they were staying put remained roughly the same. As you can see in the chart below, the share of Republicans who reported staying home as much as possible has ticked up by at least 10 points since the start of July. The latest poll from YouGov/Huffpost to ask this question did, however, also show a decline of 4 percentage points from the previous week, so it’s possible that the changes in Republican behavior could be plateauing — or declining again.

The YouGov/Huffpost polls show increased support for coronavirus-related restrictions, too. In early June, only 23 percent of Americans said there were not enough restrictions where they lived, but in the latest poll, that number had grown by 14 percentage points to 37 percent. That includes an increase of more than 10 points in every region except the Northeast, where the coronavirus’s spread has slowed down. And the share of Republicans who believe there are not enough restrictions, while still relatively small, has doubled from 10 percent in early June to over 20 percent in late July.

These shifts are small, as Republicans still lag behind Democrats on both of these metrics. But it’s significant because it comes at a time when public approval of the government’s handling of the pandemic has fallen to new lows.

According to our tracker, Trump’s approval rating on his response to the crisis has steadily declined since April. That even includes Republicans, whose approval of how he is handling the crisis, while still high at 78 percent, has declined roughly 5 percentage points since mid-June, when cases began spiking.

Recent polls have also shown that Republican governors are getting lower marks on how they’ve handled the pandemic, especially in hard-hit states like Texas, Florida and Arizona.

To be sure, Democrats are still more concerned about the coronavirus than Republicans, but that uptick in our tracker isn’t being driven by just Democrats. Republicans are also showing signs of increased concern around the virus. Some of that may be because as the virus spreads to different parts of the country, more Republicans are coming into contact with it, which may change their perceptions of it. Take what an Ipsos/Axios poll recently found. While only 35 percent of Republicans who had no personal experience with the virus said they are either “very” or “somewhat” concerned about COVID-19, concern over the coronavirus rose to 51 percent among Republicans who knew someone who died from it. Additionally, more than half of Republicans who knew someone who died from the virus said they always wore a mask, while only 38 percent of those who had no personal experience with the virus said they always wore a mask.

And perhaps that nuance underscores something Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux wrote about for FiveThirtyEight earlier this month. Republicans and Democrats are divided on how they see the virus. But they’re less divided on the actual steps they can take to stay safe — whether that’s social distancing, trying to stay home more or wearing masks in public places. It’s possible that partisan opinion on the coronavirus isn’t entirely baked in — yet.

Other Polling Bites

65 percent of American adults said that they supported the protests that have taken place around the country following the police killing of George Floyd, according to a Gallup poll conducted between June and July. Fifty-four percent said that the protests have changed their views on racial justice either “a little” or “a lot,” and 11 percent reported personally participating in a protest about racial justice and equality in the previous month.
On Wednesday, the CEOs of Amazon, Apple, Google and Facebook testified in an antitrust hearing in the House of Representatives. And according to a recent IBD/TIPP poll, many Americans seem supportive of breaking up these big tech companies. When asked about each company on its own, 60 percent of Americans said they either “somewhat” or “strongly” supported breaking up Google, 58 percent said the same of Amazon, 57 percent said the same of Facebook, and 55 percent said the same of Apple. This is an increase from a year ago, when a previous IBD/TIPP poll found 48 percent of Americans supported breaking up Facebook, 45 percent supported breaking up Amazon, 43 percent supported breaking up Google, and only 36 percent said they supported breaking up Apple.
According to a recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, 80 percent of American parents who have a child 11 or younger said their child watches videos on YouTube.
Another poll from Pew found that lesser-educated Americans were much more likely to believe the conspiracy theory that the coronavirus outbreak was intentionally planned by powerful people. Forty-eight percent of those with a high school education or less and 38 percent of those with some college education said this theory was either “probably” or “definitely” true, while about a quarter of college graduates and only 15 percent of those with postgraduate education said the same.
According to a new Ipsos/Newsy poll, Americans have a variety of concerns about the upcoming elections. Seventy-nine percent were concerned about the impact of COVID-19, 71 percent were concerned about the impact of fake news, 63 percent were concerned about foreign interference, 63 percent were worried about vote suppression, 58 percent were troubled by voter fraud, and 54 percent expressed concern about mail-in-ballot fraud.

A new Gallup survey found that 34 percent of Americans identified as politically “conservative” in May and June, down from 40 percent in January and February. And among those with incomes of over $100,000 or between 35 and 54 years old, the share who identified as conservative fell by 11 and 10 percentage points, respectively. Meanwhile, the share of people who said they were “liberal” rose four points, from 22 percent at the start of the year to 26 percent in May and June. Gallup has tracked these numbers since at least 1992.

Trump Approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker, 40.6 percent of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing as president, while 55.1 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -14.5 points). At this time last week, 40.3 percent approved and 55.6 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of -15.3 points). One month ago, Trump had an approval rating of 40.3 percent and a disapproval rating of 56.4 percent, for a net approval rating of -16.1 points.

Generic Ballot

In our average of polls of the generic congressional ballot, Democrats currently lead by 8.3 percentage points (49.1 percent to 40.8 percent). A week ago, Democrats led Republicans by 8.2 points (49.4 percent to 41.2 percent). At this time last month, voters preferred Democrats by 9 points (49 percent to 40 percent).

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

A Republican Congressman Who Might Not Vote For Trump

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 21:52:51 GMT

For this week’s episode of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, we interviewed Rep. Will Hurd of Texas’s 23rd Congressional District. And as you’ll hear in the podcast and read in selected excerpts below, we covered a lot of ground, including whether Hurd will vote for President Trump in November.

The transcript below has been lightly edited.

On whether Hurd will vote for Trump:

Galen Druke: I want to talk about all that strategy and what the future of the party looks like. But are you going to vote for Trump this fall?

Will Hurd: Like a lot of Americans, I wish I had different options on the ballot. And my plan is always to support a Republican and we’re going to be making those decisions over the next 98 days.

GD: So you’re going to decide whether or not to vote for him over the next 98 days?

WH: That is how I always approach my election. I’m just like everybody else.

GD: Well, you previously said that you will vote for Trump this fall. So I’m just wondering if you’re hesitant a little bit now?

WH: I think that’s accurate.

Your polling is showing that. I’m like everybody else. I don’t want to vote for a Joe Biden because in the end, some of the policies, I think that a unified Democratic Party is going to pass … would be tough for the country, and things that I don’t support, and haven’t supported during my time in Congress. And as somebody who’s represented a large, competitive district, I know something about competitive districts and what needs to be done in order to win.

GD: I understand that desire not to vote for Joe Biden, but I guess more specifically on whether or not you’ll vote for Trump, what could change your mind in the next 98 days that would make you view him and his presidency differently than what he’s shown us so far?

WH: It’s a good question and who knows. I don’t think a year ago we would have been thinking about a global pandemic that would have impacted the entire world and brought the world economy to a standstill. And so who knows what can happen over these next few weeks.

But in the end, what I think that I’ve been trying to preach to my colleagues is that we have to change as a Republican Party. We have to start appealing to broader groups of people. And if we don’t, and also if the Republican Party doesn’t start looking like America, we’re not going to have a Republican Party in America.

GD: Everything you’re saying here makes it sound like you aren’t voting for Trump. Is that the case?

WH: As I said, I don’t like either one of my choices. And in the end, we’re going to evaluate this over the next 90 days, or 96 days.

On delaying the election:

GD: President Trump suggested delaying the presidential election, which Congress has the power to do, your branch of government. Do you support delaying the election?

WH: We are not an authoritarian government where the head of state gets to decide on a whim when an election happens. So no, this is Congress’s role, as you said. It should go forward as has been established. And ultimately, look, I’m of the opinion that we should be increasing the ways for people to vote, right, the more people that vote, the better off it is. And this is something that I’ve been able to prove, during my time in Congress, that if you take a message to more people, you can get it to resonate with more people and we shouldn’t be afraid.

On the U.S. response to COVID-19:

GD: Overall, do you think the country is doing a good job combating the pandemic?

WH: No. We have increasing death rates, right? We have the most number of people that are dealing with this right? I think the impact it’s had on the United States of America versus other countries is still … we’re dealing with one of the worst cases. We’re having debates on whether you should be wearing a mask or not. Wear a mask! Right? A mask is to protect yourself but also to protect the people around you. So why are we debating that? This debate and fights around whether school should open or not — we should be talking about, ‘how do we work together in order to exceed CDC guidelines on opening schools?’, not whether or not it should happen.

And so yeah, there are all kinds of problems. But I’m always trying to work with these folks to deal with the problem as it is right now. I know in Texas, a third of the deaths of coronavirus have been in nursing homes. That’s outrageous. And then also in prisons. And so if we couldn’t handle this in nursing homes or in prisons, how are we going to be handling it in an educational environment where it is even more chaotic than those other places? So yeah, we have a long way to go.”

On the future of the Republican party:

GD: Let’s talk about where the Republican Party is headed. You said that the Republican Party needs to look more like America. And you know, right now, it doesn’t. You’re the only Black lawmaker on the Republican side in the House. Why do you think there are so few Black lawmakers in the Republican caucus in the house?

WH: Everybody asked me when I first got elected, how does a Black Republican represent a 71 percent Latino district? And I say it’s because you know, I work hard and I show up to communities that had never seen a Republican show up, and you do that multiple times. If you’re showing up 90 days before an election, that’s called pandering.

You have to be in those communities. Showing up is half the battle. And unfortunately, I think over time, professional political consultants talk about focusing on your likely “x voter” — whether that’s a Republican primary voter or Democratic primary voter — rather than trying to grow and appeal to a broader group of people. It’s hard.

GD: Do you think that part of the reason has to do with Republicans actively appealing to a white identity?

WH: Look, I think when you look at a person like a Steve King — and you know Steve King losing his primary is ultimately a good thing — but when you know folks that that have been elected as a Republican that say racist or misogynistic or homophobic things, that hurts all of us that identify with with being a Republican.

… But what I found is that’s not everybody. But yeah, over time, have those things been said? Yes. And Does that hurt? Yes. And that’s why we have to speak out when those things do happen.

Trump Can’t Postpone The Election, But He Can Delegitimize The Results.

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 17:11:33 GMT

Welcome to a special edition of FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarah (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): Earlier today, President Trump tweeted that the 2020 election should be delayed “until people can properly, securely and safely vote.”

Postponing the election, of course, is not something the president can legally do. But it’s also kind of besides the point. Trump has already been fighting to delegitimize the results come November, claiming that voting by mail can lead to mass voter fraud.

So let’s dive into that. How would you describe Trump’s efforts to throw November’s results into question? He did something similar in 2016 when facing Hillary Clinton. How is this different?

clare.malone (Clare Malone, senior political writer): Well, in many ways it’s exactly what Trump was doing in 2016. It’s just that he’s president now. And thus, his words are even more damaging (and they were already very damaging in 2016).

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst): There’s also a very important distinction here. Before, Trump was just a candidate casting doubt on the election, but now he’s a sitting president doing that.

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): I’d characterize this as an exercise in control and influence over his party and the news cycle. Everyone is forced to respond to what he says, even if they’re not responding positively. Trump isn’t effective at that many aspects of the job, but he’s pretty effective at agenda control.

clare.malone: I would also say that calling for the delay of the actual vote feels VERY dictatorial in nature. Like, we’ve perversely gotten used to the “fake votes,” “fake news” stuff. But encouraging a change in the election date feels sort of explicitly over a line.

sarah: And to ask a somewhat obvious question — but one that has to be asked — this is another unprecedented, norm-defying and democratic-value jeopardizing moment, right? To put it another way, has another sitting president ever done this?

julia_azari: I’m always nervous about the “never” question with past presidents, but yeah, most presidents have not been willing to take on all the formal rules, the legal system and other branches of government while in office. Congress — which has the power to change the date of an election — used to be stronger, too, and there was no Twitter. My go-to example for this is we still had a presidential election in 1864, during the Civil War.

geoffrey.skelley: And in modern times, incumbents who have lost reelection have exited office without too much of a fuss. Take George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter, or if we go further back, Herbert Hoover. Granted, incumbents don’t often lose. So it’s important to note that each of those incumbents lost decisively, meaning there wasn’t much to stand on even if they had wanted to fight the result. But it’s not like Gerald Ford created a stir in 1976 when he lost narrowly.

julia_azari: Candidates have also conceded even when the election was a mess. See Al Gore in 2000, Samuel Tilden in 1876.¹

sarah: But on this question of actually changing the election date. How much power does Trump have to do that?

clare.malone: He does not have the power to change the date of the election.

julia_azari: None. It’s up to Congress, and elections are administered by the states.

clare.malone: Here’s my question, though: What happens if Trump refuses to leave the White House on Jan. 20, and there are no official election results at that point?

Like, in that dire scenario (Trump not leaving, no clear winner) does House Speaker Nancy Pelosi become president and someone has to haul him out of the building?

geoffrey.skelley: If for some reason the Electoral College hasn’t acted or the electoral votes haven’t been certified by Congress, Trump’s term ends on Jan. 20, according to the 20th Amendment. So there’d be an acting president, who would be the Speaker of the House per the order set out by the Presidential Succession Act — assuming congressional elections occurred.

But of course, that’s how it’s written, not how it might go.

sarah: Did someone mention the 20th amendment?

julia_azari: I keep imagining this scenario, and I have to say, I have a hard time imagining that Trump refuses to leave office. I don’t want to be complacent, but like a lot of people on Twitter, Trump seems to be comfortable tweeting out bold ideas and not as great at standing firm under political pressure.

So as I see it, there would be a couple of components needed for this to actually happen. There would be the political pressure — what are advisors, including Jared and Ivanka, telling him to do? This would help us understand if there are people who have influence over Trump who have some interest in seeing the system remain intact and legitimate.

The second thing would be the actual formal power — does the Secret Service force him out? Does the military gets involved? These are wild scenarios.

I would be surprised if these institutions don’t have plans for this somewhere, even if they are not publicly known.

geoffrey.skelley: Not to take things down an even darker road, but in this scenario, I think it’s important to consider how other institutions like the military act and how the president’s supporters behave in the face of attempts to delegitimize the election results.

clare.malone: Totally. I think that’s where many people’s minds go, too. And as a country, I think we are deeply uncomfortable (and rightly so) with the military being involved with a power transition. I mean, I personally find it incredibly chilling to consider.

geoffrey.skelley: I’ve seen Seven Days In May. Great movie but, uh yeah, disturbing.

But it’s a sign of the times when you have Biden actually saying he thinks the military would escort Trump out of the White House if he refused to leave.

sarah: Because that’s the thing, as you’re all saying, there are mechanisms via the 20th amendment to ensure Trump leaves office. But there’s still a very real question of how some of this would actually be enforced if it came to this, right?

julia_azari: Exactly. The 20th amendment was ratified to shorten the period between the presidential election in November and the inauguration, which had been in March. There was growing instability around the time it was ratified, after the 1932 election, and that’s some of what it intended to deal with, but it wasn’t really designed with this problem in mind.

I’m trying to stake out the ground that acknowledges a lot of people won’t have much incentive to let Trump violate the rules in this way.

clare.malone: Julia, when you say that a lot of people won’t have incentive to let Trump act contrary to the rules, whom are you thinking of?

julia_azari: I guess I’m thinking of people who might want to run for president later.

clare.malone: Republicans?

julia_azari: Or make money off the Trump brand. This includes his kids, and yeah, other Republicans.

clare.malone: That is, people with sway over him. Got it.

julia_azari: Military leaders, too, as we saw many of them push back after the D.C. protesters incident in June.

sarah: So let’s talk about the other big doomsday scenario here: The results aren’t considered legitimate. What are the signs that that idea is already taking root?

julia_azari: That’s a good way to frame that, but I’m not sure there are signs that it’s taking root any more than it’s sorta been lurking in the conversation since 2016 — and even before.

geoffrey.skelley: In the face of COVID-19, states are expanding absentee voting and, in some cases, vote-by-mail. But the president is making the case that mailed ballots are illegitimate and highly vulnerable to fraud — this is not true, of course, but by casting aspersions, he’s setting up the potential for delegitimizing the results as they come in, on and after Election Day. And the after part is probably what really matters, especially if the election is close.

clare.malone: Yeah, I was going to say, we’ve spent the past 4 to 5 years conditioning a certain segment of the population to distrust most everything in American life, unless it comes from the president’s mouth.

Someone shared this 2017 survey that found that around half of Republicans would be ok with delaying the 2020 election. Granted, the question was framed around whether people would support delaying the election to make sure people weren’t voting illegally (a big claim of Trump’s in 2016). But I still thought that was surprising.

It’s especially striking when you get to 2020, and the questions revolve around the pandemic. I was shocked to see, for instance, the share of Republicans and Democrats who were willing to delay the election because of the pandemic (roughly 39 percent of Americans supported delaying the election, according to that survey from April).

sarah: Yeah … it is mind boggling. That finding is also at least somewhat corroborated in this paper FiveThirtyEight contributor Lee Drutman published with the Voter Study Group earlier this year. In an examination of democracy in the U.S., Drutman and his coauthors found that both Republicans and Democrats were open to their preferred presidential candidate “rejecting the legitimacy of the election if they claim credible evidence of illegal voting or foreign interference.” And in that vein, 29 percent of Republicans said it would be appropriate for Trump “to refuse to leave office because he claims that he has credible evidence of illegal voting.”

julia_azari: One quibble with that study, though, knowing I have the utmost respect for Lee and his coauthors, is that each scenario lays out a justification for delaying the election, which I think makes it harder to say no. And I think people’s willingness to tolerate this in practice is conditional on their evaluation of that evidence, the credibility of the claims and the person making the claims. (E.g., Trump, who isn’t very popular.)

clare.malone: Totally fair.

I was pretty shocked in general to see how amenable people were to changing this very foundational thing! Even with the reasonings the survey questions provided them.

julia_azari: I was, too, but I think it’s not unreasonable for people to have limits on how much they trust elections if they think those elections were not administered fairly.

geoffrey.skelley: And if the election is close and a state or two is in doubt, any questions about administration could become explosive. See: the 2000 election.

julia_azari: Right. It’s actually amazing how explosive that wasn’t. But things are different now — I wonder how this plays out if we flip it around.

Let’s say Trump wins.

(I mean, this sorta already happened in 2016. Trump won, yet he went right ahead and tried to delegitimize parts of an election he had won.)

But let’s say it happens again, and he wins narrowly once again? Who questions the results? And would that be the right thing to do?

geoffrey.skelley: Yes, I wanted to bring this up! Trump said there were at least 3 million illegal votes in an election he won — conveniently undoing Clinton’s popular vote margin. And then he set up a task force to investigate fraud after he took office. It found nothing.

julia_azari: But there will likely be this question of “credible evidence,” as they cite in that Voter Study group paper. What if Trump wins, and people were standing in hours-long lines in Black neighborhoods in Ohio?

In other words, I think there will be a question of how much skepticism about elections is reasonable, and how much is chaos?

clare.malone: I think there is just going to be skepticism about this election, full stop.

geoffrey.skelley: I would not discount opponents of Trump taking to the streets in that scenario. A recent simulation by a group of experts about what could happen in these sorts of scenarios did not bring me much comfort. They found that every scenario — Trump winning or losing but someone defying the result — ended in street-level violence and political gridlock.

sarah: Oof. It’s interesting to me, though, that the desire to delegitimize results isn’t purely a Republican thing, as that Voter Study paper found. Democrats also showed signs of also being willing to reject the legitimacy of the election if it helps their preferred candidate.

clare.malone: Stacey Abrams’s non-concession concession speech in 2018 provided an interesting template for a potential Biden response (in case of a loss to Trump).

Though I do think Biden is such a conventional politician and institutionalist that he wouldn’t respond in the same way Abrams did, justified or not.

sarah: Yeah and Biden obviously isn’t waging a campaign of disinformation in the way that Trump is either. But perhaps one unintended effect of all this is, to Clare’s point, that skepticism of the election (depending on its margin) is going to be rampant.

julia_azari: Although Biden seems like … truly angry at times about the Trump presidency. It’s not obvious what the institutionalist move is in that scenario, IMO.

clare.malone: A good point!

julia_azari: I think there’s a strong possibility that skepticism is persistent and embedded in Trumpist ideology and among his followers, but not that widespread if the election is not close.

clare.malone: I mean, let’s go back to 2016.

If Trump had lost, we were all preparing for the launch of Trump TV, a perch from which he would rail for the impeachment of President Clinton.

I can sort of see something similar happening if Trump loses (unless, of course, he’s too tired to start the Trump TV experiment!)

geoffrey.skelley: OANN would love to have him.

julia_azari: Again, I don’t want to be complacent. I spend way too much time on politics Twitter. I spend all my time on politics Twitter.

But if Biden wins by a lot and Trump tweets a bunch, most Americans will just go on about their lives. That’s sorta how 2000 played out, and that was obviously really close and subject to questions, too.

geoffrey.skelley: Thing is, I can’t imagine Trump conceding in a 2000-esque situation in the way Gore eventually did.

clare.malone: Of course, 2000 is the election that a lot of people point to as the start of mistrust in elections as institutions. And like, the era of “voter fraud” alarmism really ramped up under George W. Bush.

julia_azari: But the angry minority has demonstrated that it can drive politics and policy to a great degree. So I don’t want to be complacent, but I do want to be specific in my fears.

clare.malone: So you could say people went on with their lives, but there were corrosive effects.

julia_azari: If he loses, I sometimes imagine that people around Trump will say, “People will say nice things about you if you do a good concession speech,” and so he does. But it’s not encouraging that that’s what it might come to.

clare.malone: Right, the integrity of democratic institutions might come down to a pep talk from “Javanka?”

sarah: So at the outset of this chat, I asked how Trump’s tweet to postpone the election was different from what he’s already done to try and delegitimize November’s result. And we’ve also pointed out that there have been prior points in American history where voters have mistrusted election results.

But I think given the abnormal aspects of Trump’s presidency, it’s easy to point to historical comparisons without really probing whether the moment we’re in doesn’t have a historical comparison, as historian Rick Perlstein did in his tweet, telling the media he didn’t want to do more interviews on how this moment might compare to 1968.

julia_azari: I think Perlstein is right, but I also think that we should be precise about how abnormal politics interacts with normal politics, because that has been the story of the Trump presidency IMO.

clare.malone: So, I mean, I take Rick’s point in this tweet; there’s this instinct that we have to comfort ourselves with history (i.e., American democracy has weathered much worse) but I do think that we sometimes dwell a bit in history without facing the new challenges that Trump presents us.

We sort of have to respect the new paradigm that’s been created and understand that there are limits to what history can teach us in this particular case; i.e., Twitter, plus Trump, plus 20 years of diminishing electoral trust.

geoffrey.skelley: It’s interesting that people would comfort themselves with history — I take little comfort from it. We’ve been on the brink before with the 1876 election, for instance.

julia_azari: I think that’s absolutely true. I don’t see history as a comfort but rather as a guide to how much luck and skill it takes to maneuver through this stuff.

I also think history is helpful because it shows what’s not normal. (And what shouldn’t be, but is.)

Gun Sales Are Surging, But Background Checks Aren’t Keeping Up

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 15:07:06 GMT

Gun sales were so slow earlier this year that in February, The New York Times ran a piece on how some gun manufacturers were looking to rebrand to make up for the “Trump slump.”

But then the pandemic hit. And on Friday, March 13, when President Trump declared a national emergency, the number of background checks went through the roof, according to the FBI system that vets gun buyers.

In March, the FBI received almost 1.5 million requests for background checks, according to data the bureau released to FiveThirtyEight in response to a public records request. On Friday, March 20 alone, 104,084 background check requests were sent to the bureau; according to a slightly different measure that includes checks run by state systems, that day saw the highest daily number of background checks on record.² In fact, by that broader measure, five of the gun background check system’s 10 busiest days were in March 2020. While March is usually a busy month for background checks, it was off the charts this year.

But the number of background checks didn’t just go up. As you can see in the chart below, as the number of background checks sent to the FBI rose, so did the percentage that were delayed more than three business days — a critical deadline after which federal law allows dealers to legally sell a gun without a completed background check.

This is significant because it means that it may have been easier for guns to get into the hands of people who cannot legally own them.

The danger here isn’t theoretical. Dylann Roof was able to buy the gun he used to kill nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015 because of this loophole. Roof had a record for drug possession that meant he couldn’t legally own a gun, but after the three-day period passed, the gun dealer sold him a gun anyway.

To be sure, these numbers aren’t a perfect portrait of gun sales: They don’t include data from 20 states that process some or all of their background checks themselves rather than through the FBI. And not every background check represents a gun sale — many checks are run when people apply for gun permits, when states check on the status of gun permit holders, or for other purposes. A single background check can also represent multiple gun sales.

We also don’t know how many background checks from March the FBI never completed. When a background check drags on for 88 days, the bureau stops researching the potential buyer and purges the background check request from its systems to comply with federal regulations. The bureau hasn’t yet released data on purged requests made in March.

We do know that the bureau never completes the overwhelming majority of background checks that take longer than three business days. For instance, 79 percent of such checks were never completed in 2019. This year, it purged over 80 percent of such checks from January and 78 percent from February.

Still, Jurgen Brauer, chief economist at Small Arms Analytics and Forecasting, and other experts agree that the spike in background checks in March represented a real surge in retail gun sales. For instance, Brauer’s consulting firm analysed FBI data and found that retail gun sales drove the surge in March, along with a second surge in June that was likely tied to Black Lives Matter protests. In total, the firm estimated that gun sales rose year-over-year by 85 percent in March and 145 percent in June.

And a team of researchers at the University of California, Davis’s Violence Prevention Research Program compared FBI data on gun background checks to gun violence data compiled by the Gun Violence Archive, finding a nearly 8 percent increase in gun violence over expected levels from March through May 2020. This study hasn’t yet been peer reviewed, but if it’s accurate, that’s 776 additional fatal and nonfatal injuries, not including suicides and accidents.

This surge in gun sales during the pandemic has meant that an already brittle background check system is getting overloaded, causing massive delays, according to Brauer. He compared background checks to a drainage system that backs up during a big storm. “There’s a massive flow of rainwater, and the systems can’t handle it,” he said.

The FBI, however, disputed that characterization in a statement to FiveThirtyEight.

Holly Morris, a spokesperson for the bureau, said the agency hasn’t found a relationship between the rise in the share of delayed background checks and the increased volume of requests. “The influx in the percentage of delayed transactions and any extended processing times can be attributed to a number of variables,” Morris wrote via email, adding that staffing levels for the background check system have remained the same throughout the pandemic.

There are signs that the influx in gun sales might not be slowing anytime soon. The initial spikes in gun sales in March lined up closely with events related to the pandemic, including Feb. 26, when the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention first confirmed that the virus was spreading within the U.S. and not just being brought back by travelers, and Trump’s national emergency declaration on March 13. But as the pandemic has worn on, the reasoning driving the spike in gun sales has changed, too. By the time gun sales soared even higher in June, research suggests it was no longer the coronavirus on buyers’ minds but the protests over the police killing of George Floyd.

Phillip Levine and Robin McKnight of Wellesley College compared the FBI’s state-by-state background check data with data on Google searches for the N-word to see if states with more searches for the racist slur saw a larger increase in gun sales. They found what Levine described as a “modest correlation” in June, suggesting that at least some of those sales were driven by concerns over Black Lives Matter protests.

“As the pandemic settled down, gun sales settled down too, until it got to June,” Levine said in an interview. “In the aftermath of the George Floyd killing, there was another very dramatic spike.”

It’s hard to know how gun sales in the U.S. will continue to progress, as we don’t yet have data for July. The data released to FiveThirtyEight did not include June, but less-detailed data the FBI published online shows that last month the agency ran more background checks than any other month on record. And, of course, sales rose in 2016 in part over fears that Hillary Clinton would take the White House and impose new gun regulations, so with presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden ahead in the polls, another surge in gun sales may not be far behind. Not to mention that another surge in coronavirus cases could again drive a spike in sales like the one we saw in March.

Whatever happens, more gun sales will likely mean more delays — potentially putting guns into the hands of people who can’t legally own one.

Confidence Interval: Will Biden Choose Kamala Harris As His VP?

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 14:57:48 GMT

Welcome to another episode of Confidence Interval, where we make a persuasive case for a hot take … and then reveal how confident we really feel about the idea. This time, elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich argues that Joe Biden will pick Sen. Kamala Harris as his running mate.

What Trump Could Learn From NASCAR

Thu, 30 Jul 2020 10:00:24 GMT

NASCAR is niche. A recent Morning Consult survey of the sport’s fans found that they’re much more male, white and Southern than other sports fans are. It’s a subculture status that some fans have relished but which NASCAR itself seems eager to shake — in the last two years, its TV ratings bottomed out after peaking in the mid-2000s, according to SportsBusiness Journal. They’ve declined for six years running, in fact. Since the mid-aughts, the sport has actively sought to expand its fan base — seeking race venues outside the South, for example — and in doing so, sometimes drawing the ire of its core fans. “We believe strongly that the old Southeastern redneck heritage that we had is no longer in existence. But we also realize that there’s going to have to be an effort on our part to convince others to understand that,” then-NASCAR President Mike Helton said in 2006.

Like so many institutions in American life, the sport was grappling with what its place would be in a more diverse county and culture.

So when the NASCAR Cup Series’ only Black driver, Bubba Wallace, called for a ban of the Confederate flag earlier this summer, saying “No one should feel uncomfortable when they come to a NASCAR race,” NASCAR readily complied. It had already formally asked fans to stop bringing the flags to events in 2015 following the murders of nine Black churchgoers in Charleston, S.C., by a white supremacist. President Trump weighed in on NASCAR’s decision, tweeting that its flag ban was to blame for its “lowest ratings EVER!” (ratings are actually up following the flag ban).

But according to the Morning Consult survey from June, 44 percent of NASCAR fans agree with the president and said that fans should be allowed to bring the flag to races. Only 30 percent were fine with the ban. And at NASCAR races in June and July, Confederate flags reappeared. Not in the stands, but high above them; a group called the Sons of Confederate Veterans rented planes to fly the flag over the racetracks. The group’s leader, Paul Gramling Jr., told the Columbia Daily Herald that “The Sons of Confederate Veterans is proud of the diversity of the Confederate military and our modern Southland. We believe NASCAR’s slandering of our Southern heritage only further divides our nation.”

Gramling’s statement about the “diversity” of the Confederate army and his use of the term “modern Southland” speak volumes. Enslaved men were conscripted as soldiers and servants in the Confederate Army — they were hardly volunteers for the Southern cause — and Gramling’s “Southland” conjures the image of a cohesive nation, as if the Confederacy, which existed for less than five years, had not been decimated long ago.

The SCV and NASCAR’s oblique tussling might seem like a fringe issue in an election year when a pandemic and an economic crisis imperil millions of lives, but their divergent visions of what the culture of the American South is — who it’s for and of — embodies much about the political and cultural climate in which we find ourselves. Trump and NASCAR are in similar positions: overly reliant on a slowly shrinking, mostly white base. NASCAR is trying to expand its audience in order to stay relevant; Trump is not. The sport has realized something that the president can’t seem to grasp, which is that overt shows of racism turn most Americans off.

Electoral politics has played a role in normalizing on a national level the kind of neo-Confederate views that the SCV — and Trump — have condoned and promoted in recent weeks. You don’t have to have grown up in the American South to have thought that the Confederate flag was inextricably tied to what the SCV calls “Southern heritage,” but which really means a particular slice of Southern white culture. Going back decades, blocks of white votes in the South have been courted aggressively by non-Southerners who have played to the culture that has grown around these symbols and a particular nostalgic language about the Confederate past. During his 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan, a California governor of Illinois birth, appeared in Neshoba County, Mississippi — where Freedom Rider activists were famously murdered in 1964 — and gave a speech about “states’ rights,” which was read by many as euphemistic in the most loaded way possible, given the context of the place. The country had gotten comfortable with delicate work-arounds like that — the Civil War wasn’t about slavery, it was about states’ rights. For decades, parts of the country have tolerated a semantic category that blandly normalized a strain of white resentment at the Confederate defeat. Sometimes the language is more blunt, of course: the War of Northern Aggression, “the South will rise again” or “It’s only halftime.”

According to the 2010 census, 55 percent of the country’s Black population live in the South. While the region is still nearly 60 percent white, its Black and Hispanic populations are significant, and while traditionally rural, diverse, growing cities like Atlanta and Charlotte have become important business hubs. North Carolina’s Research Triangle region boasts the sort of academic power and national draw often associated with the Northeast Corridor’s Ivy League. NASCAR’s bid to diversify, geographically and otherwise, is in keeping with the modern South’s changes.

But strong vestiges of the racist Confederacy have held on in the region. Mississippi removed the Confederate stars and bars from its state flag only last month, becoming the last state in the Union to do so. While the majority of Americans — 52 percent — favored the removal of Confederate statues from public spaces, according to a Quinnipiac University survey from June, 52 percent of those from the South opposed removal, the only region of the country where a majority supported keeping the statues.

In the midst of a floundering campaign, Trump grasped onto Southern white culture — that particular strain of it — as a way to pull his head above water. A large base of his support does indeed lie in the South, as has been the case for all recent Republican presidential candidates; Bill Clinton won Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia in 1996, but no Democrat has since. Trump ran a race-baiting campaign in 2016, and his 2020 campaign has continued to play on long-standing tropes of racial fear, like violent “liberal Democrat” cities. Ironically, his use of federal law enforcement officers in Portland, Ore., is about as far from states’ rights as you can get.

But Trump seems to be speaking to the SCV types and not the more “mainstream” white voters he actually needs to win. The SCV, for what it’s worth, is more than the “historical, patriotic, and non-political organization” that its website says it is. Its branches have donated to Republican politicians and it controversially purchased the Silent Sam Confederate statue that was torn down at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In other words, the group is representative of the types of (white) voters who are Trump’s ride-or-dies.

But Trump has misjudged — or refuses to see — that much of white America is changing how it thinks about racial issues. A Monmouth University survey from June found that 49 percent of white Americans thought police were more likely to use excessive force against a Black person, up from only 25 percent in 2016. A Morning Consult poll from May and June of this year found that 49 percent of white Americans supported the protests unfolding across the country, and 54 percent of suburbanites supported them (white people are the majority in 90 percent of America’s suburban counties, according to Pew Research Center).

Someone seems to have leaned into Trump’s ear and told him he needs these white suburbanites in order to have a fighting chance of winning in November. Last week, he called on “The Suburban Housewives of America” — as if harkening to a membership organization from 1955 — and said that presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden would “destroy” their American dream by promoting affordable housing for all in the suburbs. In Trump’s framing, by hoping to diversify the suburbs, Biden would destroy the “Suburban Lifestyle Dream.” A majority of Americans in a Pew survey conducted in 2019 said Trump had made race relations in the country worse, and while white, Black and Hispanic people still differ in their views on racial issues, it’s clear that recent events have brought greater racial awareness to the forefront of white Americans’ minds.

Republicans are increasingly worried about Trump losing a state like Ohio — once thought solidly in Trump’s camp — in large part because of the president’s diminishing support in suburban areas. (I wrote at length about this Ohio suburban phenomenon back in 2019.) His embrace of the racist totems of the white South — which large swaths of the white South itself eschews — could now potentially cost Trump with the Midwestern or Northeastern (whatever you want to call Pennsylvania) voters he needs to hold onto in order to win.

Trump, a New York City-born pol who doesn’t quite seem to “get” the ‘burbs — and has never been a particularly subtle political thinker or communicator — crucially misunderstood that the muscular Southern racism the Confederate flag has long represented doesn’t work in the white suburban realms of respectability anymore. That cohort — Republican and Democratic — absorbs and displays its biases more mutedly in 2020. Trump, who came to political power riding a wave of racist conspiracy theory — it was only fair to ask questions about whether the first Black president was actually American, wasn’t it? — now suddenly seems ill-equipped for the political times.

He forgot that most of the country requires a modicum of plausible deniability in its dog whistles.

The Senate Has Always Favored Smaller States. It Just Didn’t Help Republicans Until Now.

Wed, 29 Jul 2020 11:00:35 GMT

The fight for D.C. statehood is hardly new.

It’s been decades since Congress first introduced legislation to make Washington, D.C., a state, and 27 years since such a bill got a full (losing) vote in the House of Representatives, but in late June, a historic step was taken: A majority in the House voted in favor of legislation that would make Washington, D.C., a state for the very first time.

Of course, this bill won’t be signed into law this year given the clear partisan calculus involved — making D.C. a state would almost certainly give Democrats two additional senators thanks to the District’s deep blue hue. But it’s important we understand why the Democrats are waging this fight now and why we might see more fights over admitting states in the years to come.

The answer boils down to unequal representation.

On the one hand, the Senate has always been unequal, long giving less populous states an outsized voice relative to their population.¹ But for more than a century, this hasn’t posed much of an issue: Until the 1960s, Republicans and Democrats competed for both densely and sparsely populated states at roughly the same rate

But over the last several decades, that’s changed. The parties have reorganized themselves along urban-rural lines, and there is now a clear and pronounced partisan small-state bias in the Senate thanks to mostly rural, less populated states voting increasingly Republican. In fact, it’s reached the point that Republicans can win a majority of Senate seats while only representing a minority of Americans.

One way to observe this growing partisan bias in the Senate is to compare the party makeup of senators elected to represent the 15 most populous states (which have collectively housed about two-thirds of population since the turn of the 20th century) to the partisan makeup of senators elected to represent the 25 least populous states (which have collectively housed roughly a sixth of the population consistently since the 1960s). As the chart below shows, the partisan makeup of the Senate was fairly even until the 1960s, when Republicans started to amass a partisan advantage in less populated states.²

What happened? Much of this follows from the post-civil rights realignment of American partisan politics, in which the Democratic Party became more consistently liberal (and thus more appealing in big, largely urban states), and the Republican Party became more consistently conservative (and thus more appealing in small, largely rural states). But that gap has also widened in recent years, especially starting in 2015, when Republicans took back a Senate majority, flipping seats in small states like West Virginia, South Dakota, Arkansas, Alaska and Montana — all states that will be tough for Democrats to regain in 2020.

And what this has meant practically is that Republicans now hold a majority of Senate seats while only representing a minority of Americans, as you can see in the chart below.³

This imbalance is significant because it poses a real obstacle to Democrats taking back a Senate majority in 2020. Take Democrats’ current odds of retaking the chamber. The Cook Political Report recently said Democrats are favored to win the Senate, but considering Democrats currently lead the generic ballot for Congress by over 8 percentage points and have a similar margin nationally in the presidential race, it’s remarkable that they still are only slight favorites to control the upper chamber.

Even if D.C. or Puerto Rico were states (as some on the left advocate), Republicans would still have the advantage. It’s true that the statehoods of D.C. and Puerto Rico would help Democrats close the small-state gap, but even if both were states and elected two Democratic senators, Republicans would still have had a two-seat majority in 2019, while only representing 48 percent of the population.

The Senate has always held a contested place in America’s democratic system because of its non-proportional qualities. For the first half of the 19th century, the Senate was a bulwark for the South, with an equal balance of slave and free states despite the growing Northern population advantage. And in the second half of the 19th century, Republicans attempted to “stack” the Senate by admitting a large number of Republican states into the union, starting with Nevada in 1864 (population of just 6,857(!) in the 1860 census), Nebraska (1867), Colorado (1876), Montana, Washington, and North and South Dakota as separate states in an 1889 omnibus, and Idaho and Wyoming in 1890.

But despite rising prairie populism spreading through the Great Plains to the Mountain West in the 1890s, Republicans’ hopes for a stacked Senate didn’t work out quite as planned. And thanks to the way the American two-party system developed in the 20th century, with Democrats and Republicans both containing urban liberal and rural conservative wings, the small-state bias of the Senate never became a real partisan issue — until now. It will likely remain an issue, too, as long as one party is able to win a majority in the chamber while only representing a minority of the population.

How Biden’s VP Pick Could Shape Perceptions Of The Ticket Overall

Tue, 28 Jul 2020 19:00:33 GMT

In this week’s FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses the upsides and downsides of Joe Biden’s choices for a running mate. They also talk about the protests in Portland and President Trump’s response.

Politics Podcast: Biden’s VP Announcement Could Come Any Day Now

Tue, 28 Jul 2020 15:27:36 GMT

Presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden could announce his running mate as soon as the end of this week, according to the time frame he laid out. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast, the crew discusses the positive and negative narratives that could emerge from each of his potential choices. They also ask why President Trump is sending federal agents into U.S. cities and how this relates to his reelection message.

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.

Voters Are Starting To Doubt Trump’s Reelection Chances

Tue, 28 Jul 2020 11:00:54 GMT

For months now, President Trump has trailed Joe Biden in the polls. First, it was only a 5- or 6-percentage-point gap, but since the middle of June, that margin has widened to anywhere from 8 to 9 points, according to FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average.

But until very recently, voters didn’t seem all that convinced that Biden could win. In poll after poll, comparatively more voters said they thought Trump would win reelection in November. Now, though, that view may be shifting.

Over the past two and a half months, the share of voters who said they expect Trump to win has fallen from about 45 percent to around 40 percent in polling by The Economist/YouGov, as the chart below shows, while Biden’s share has slowly ticked up to where Trump’s numbers are. (Roughly a fifth of respondents still say they’re “not sure.”)

Trump’s decline may not seem that dramatic — and it’s not; it’s only a few points lower — but it’s notable because prior to June, he had trailed on this question only once since The Economist/YouGov first asked it in December.¹

But it’s not just the Economist/YouGov polling that supports this finding. USA Today/Suffolk University found a more substantial drop in Trump’s numbers. In late June, 41 percent of voters said they expected Trump to win, whereas 50 percent said the same in the pollster’s late October 2019 survey. Conversely, 45 percent said Biden would win in June, an improvement from the 40 percent who picked the Democratic nominee in October. Republican pollster Echelon Insights has also observed a downward trend in Trump’s numbers: In a survey completed last week, 33 percent of likely voters said they expected Trump to win, which was down from 39 percent in the pollster’s June survey. Meanwhile, the share who thought Biden would win ticked up to 43 percent in July from 40 percent in June.

On the whole, it seems voters are now less confident in Trump’s reelection chances, and the main driver of that shift may be independent voters. In USA Today/Suffolk’s June survey, 47 percent of independents picked Biden versus 35 percent who chose Trump, a reversal from the October 2019 poll, when 54 percent of independents expected Trump to win compared with 30 percent who said the Democratic nominee would win. And looking across the Economist/YouGov data since early May, the share of independents who expect Trump to win has slid as well, from the low 40s to the mid-to-high 30s.

As for Democrats and Republicans, they mostly say their respective nominee will win, although that wasn’t always the case in 2016, as many Republicans thought Hillary Clinton would win. Nonetheless, that doesn’t seem to be happening in 2020. The Economist/YouGov and USA Today/Suffolk surveys found that Democratic voters are largely confident in Biden’s chances, while most Republicans believe that Trump will win. However, since May, the Economist/YouGov polls show an increase in Democrats’ belief in Biden’s chances and a slight downtick in Republicans’ faith in Trump’s.

Betting markets also point to diminished confidence in Trump’s reelection chances. From mid-March to late May, the president usually led Biden in RealClearPolitics’ average of betting odds: Trump’s chances hovered mostly around 50 percent, while Biden’s stood in the low 40s. But in early June, Biden’s odds surged and outstripped Trump’s; now the markets give Biden about a 60 percent chance of victory, while Trump’s chances have fallen into the mid-30s.

This change isn’t necessarily surprising, as betting markets mostly follow the polling averages. But it’s also not difficult to intuit why more Americans might think Trump will lose the election now than before. The president has consistently received poor marks for his handling of the coronavirus pandemic as well as for his handling of nationwide protests precipitated by the police killing of George Floyd in late May. And Trump’s overall job approval rating has now dipped to around 40 percent in FiveThirtyEight’s tracker. Simply put, past incumbent presidents with those sorts of marks have failed to win reelection.

[Related: Our Pollster Ratings]

This is coupled with the fact that Biden’s national lead has grown, and his margin over Trump is now larger than Clinton’s edge at any point during the 2016 cycle. Looking at the Electoral College, Biden also holds sizable leads in key battleground states, which could make it difficult for Trump to win despite those states’ tending to lean more Republican than the country as a whole.

If anything, Trump’s surprise victory in 2016 is likely the biggest reason why more people don’t take a dimmer view of his reelection odds. After all, he was behind in the polls four years ago and yet went on to win, so it’s understandable that even though the margins are larger now, some Americans might be taking an attitude of “fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me.” Tellingly, a Monmouth University survey of Pennsylvania voters earlier this month found that about a quarter of respondents believe there’s a “secret” Trump vote, although there’s little evidence to support the idea that “shy” Trump voters exist.

All in all, though, voter expectations and election betting markets suggest that Americans increasingly view Biden as at least an even bet to win in November. None of this means Biden will actually defeat Trump, but these shifts do suggest that the conventional wisdom is catching up to what the state and national election polls have been telling us about the race. The electoral environment could very well change in the next three months, but these indicators are all starting to coalesce around the idea that Trump is a real underdog to win reelection.

Why Blaming China For The Pandemic Probably Won’t Help Trump Win

Tue, 28 Jul 2020 09:57:32 GMT

Last week, Fox News host Chris Wallace asked President Trump about his role in how the coronavirus pandemic has unfolded in the U.S., where case numbers and the death toll are surging even as some other countries seem to be getting things under control. But in response, Trump diverted responsibility, saying, “It came from China. They should’ve never let it escape.”

Blaming China for the pandemic isn’t a new tactic for the president. In fact, it’s become a fairly common refrain as Trump and other Republicans have doubled down on accusing China of causing the coronavirus or exacerbating its spread. And while it’s unlikely that this gambit will solve all of Trump’s problems — approval numbers for his handling of the pandemic continue to tank — there is at least some evidence that Americans may be more receptive than in the past to seeing China as the culprit, as opinions of the nation are now the worst they’ve been than any time in recent history.

In 2005, Pew Research Center started regularly asking Americans about their views on China, and at that point, Americans had a fairly positive opinion of the country (43 percent said they had a favorable view and 35 percent said they had an unfavorable one). But in March of this year, as a number of states were issuing stay-at-home orders and millions of Americans were losing their jobs, the share of Pew respondents with a favorable view of China had fallen to 26 percent, while the share with a negative opinion sat at 66 percent. Granted, public opinion of China has long been on the decline, but this was still the lowest approval rating of the country since 2005.

And it wasn’t just Pew who found Americans’ opinions of China are deteriorating. An NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that ended in early June found that the majority of Americans held negative views of China, a 12-point uptick in unfavorable opinions since 2000. And an Economist/YouGov poll from late June found that 65 percent of Americans think China is unfriendly toward — or even an enemy of — the United States.

To understand why China is so unpopular with Americans, I spoke with Susan Shirk, a political science professor focused on U.S.-China policy at the University of California San Diego, and Michael Beckley, a political science professor at Tufts University. They suggested that, even before the pandemic, China’s own actions in recent years — including its increased military presence in the South China Sea and its alleged violations of human rights and civil liberties — have been driving down Americans’ opinion of the country.

Shirk told me she traces the changes in China’s behavior to the 2008 financial crisis, as she argued that was when perceptions really started to change. At the time, the U.S. economy was in shambles, but China’s economy emerged relatively unscathed. Shirk said this contributed to China taking a more active role internationally, which hasn’t always been well-received.

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Beckley argued that Xi Jinping’s presidency has also played a significant role in creating a negative public image of China because of how he has consolidated power while in office.

Shirk told me that first and foremost, she thinks people feel increasingly negatively toward China because of “the way China’s acting.”

At the same time, though, Trump has also exacerbated tensions with China by waging a nearly two-year trade war, imposing a series of tariffs on goods U.S. imports from the country. Then, of course, the pandemic hit. “The coronavirus comes and is kind of like the final nail in the coffin,” said Beckley. And reports that China hid or downplayed severity of the pandemic in its early days are further harming the country’s global reputation. “[Unfavorability of China] has been an ongoing trend, but obviously, the current crisis makes it much, much worse,” said Beckley.

In the U.S., this has meant a rapid deterioration in public opinion toward China, with both Democrats and Republicans souring on the country. In three recent polls, all taken after the pandemic reached the U.S., about three-quarters of Republicans said they had an unfavorable opinion of China, felts negatively toward China or considered China unfriendly or an enemy. Among Democrats, the share who felt the same was anywhere from 44 percent to 62 percent.

It’s not clear, though, whether this increased negativity toward China presents a political opportunity for either Trump or presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden. Some have argued that a firm anti-China stance could benefit either or both parties, though Beckley and Shirk were pretty skeptical that this would be a top issue for voters.

As you can see in the table below, the polling picture on who Americans trust to handle China is pretty hazy. One poll shows Biden with a 8-point lead over Trump on this question, while two others give him a more modest lead, and one gives Trump a narrow advantage.

No strong consensus on who’d handle China better

Share of voters who think Biden or Trump would be better at handling U.S. relations with China

Pollster	Polling Dates	Biden	Trump
Morning Consult/Politico	June 26-29	43%	37
Harvard CAPS/Harris	June 17-18	54	46
NBC/WSJ	May 28-June 2	40	43
Fox News	May 17-20	43	37

Additionally, given that the U.S. is dealing with a major health crisis, an economic downturn and protests across the country, Beckley and Shirk both told me they were somewhat dubious of the idea that either Republicans or Democrats would be able to rally voters around China. Shirk said that unlike some other topics in the news, U.S. relations with China just aren’t as personal to voters. And Beckley said that given each candidate’s track record with China, he didn’t think either Trump or Biden would be able to use the issue much to their advantage.

“Even though the Trump administration can claim a lot of credit for altering U.S.-China policy and taking a harder-line turn, Trump has said a lot of nice things about Xi Jinping and has been willing to look the other way on China’s human rights violations,” said Beckley. And Republicans will likely paint Biden as belonging to an administration that had a “naive” approach toward China, Beckley said, “basically coddling a rising power.”

But China might play an outsized role in the election if Trump successfully uses it as a scapegoat for the pandemic, allowing him to shift some of the blame for his response onto China. Brian Reisinger, a Republican strategist who advised Sen. Ron Johnson’s and former Governor Scott Walker’s reelection campaigns, says that “there is a lot of room to blame China” because of its actions in the early days of the pandemic, but also because it plays on an existing hostility in important electoral states like Wisconsin, where almost 12 percent of the state’s jobs are in agriculture. “Farmers in rural Wisconsin have felt for years like they’re getting ripped off, whether its milk prices or any other type of commodity. And one of the biggest offenders in the global marketplace is China,” Reisinger said.

If Trump is able to shift the blame, it could help his campaign stanch the bleeding. And it might work. A Navigator poll from late April, for instance, tested multiple narratives about who’s to blame for the pandemic, asking voters which of two statements they agreed with more even if they didn’t fully agree with either. When forced to choose between a statement that placed all the blame on Trump and one that put all the blame on China, respondents were essentially evenly divided, 49 to 51, which is well within the poll’s confidence interval. A statement that blamed both Trump and China got slightly more support, at 54 percent. This suggests that at least some voters are open to an argument that gives China a significant share of the blame for the pandemic.

For Democrats, that means the party’s messaging on China will need to focus on what they see as Trump’s flawed argument on the coronavirus — arguing that he, not China, is to blame — and setting the record straight on Trump’s previous dealings with the country, said Mike Spahn, managing director of Democratic consulting firm Precision Strategies. “I think what you’ve already seen and will continue to see is the Biden campaign poking holes,” Spahn said. For example, Biden released an ad in April that criticized the president for accepting Xi’s word that the coronavirus was under control and failing to get more American experts into China.

Of course, a lot has changed since April. Now, more than 145,000 people have died from COVID-19 in the U.S. and a majority of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling the coronavirus. And who Americans believe is at fault has been shifting too. Morning Consult has been asking registered voters who is most to blame for the spread of the coronavirus, and in late March, a plurality of voters, 36 percent, blamed the Chinese government, compared to just 23 percent who blamed Trump. However, by late June, 35 percent of voters said they blamed Trump. Granted, 31 percent still blamed the Chinese government (and 20 percent said they didn’t know or had no opinion) but the fact that Trump led on this metric instead of China certainly doesn’t bode well for him.

In the coming months, Republicans will likely double down on efforts to convince the public that China is to blame for the devastation caused by the coronavirus — Trump is routinely doing so in his coronavirus press briefings and other public appearances — but it’s not clear that this will be a winning argument. But as long as some voters seem open to the idea, we can probably expect to keep seeing it come up as a diversionary tactic.

Do You Buy That … Coronavirus Will Be What Makes Or Breaks Trump’s Re-election Prospects?

Mon, 27 Jul 2020 13:19:46 GMT

Why Florida Could Go Blue In 2020

Mon, 27 Jul 2020 11:00:58 GMT

Graphics by Jasmine Mithani

This is the second in a series of articles examining the politics and demographics of 2020’s expected swing states.

Electorally, Florida bounces around like a beach ball. In 2008 and 2012, as Americans nationwide backed Barack Obama for president, Florida voted Democratic too. But in 2016, when Donald Trump reclaimed the White House for the Republicans, Florida switched its allegiance to the GOP. Indeed, the Sunshine State has voted for the national winner in each of the past six presidential elections.

But in 2018, Florida stopped following national trends. In a great year for Democrats nationwide, which saw them net 40 House seats and seven governorships, the “blue wave” stopped at Florida’s sandy beaches. Although the national political environment leaned almost 9 percentage points in Democrats’ favor, Republican Rick Scott defeated incumbent Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson by 0.1 points, and Republican Ron DeSantis defeated Democrat Andrew Gillum by 0.4 points in the open-seat race for governor. The results prompted some pundits to relabel Florida a “red state” going into the pivotal 2020 election.

They’re right, to a degree: Florida has long been a slightly red state. Since 2004, it has consistently voted 3 or 4 points more Republican than the nation as a whole in presidential elections. (Indeed, polls of Florida are currently¹ 0.9 points better for President Trump than national polls, according to FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages.) But could what happened in 2018 — when Florida was so much redder than the nation that it was out of reach for Democrats, even in a wave election — happen again in 2020?

It’s true that, on the surface, Nelson and Gillum barely improved upon Hillary Clinton’s 1.2-point loss in Florida in 2016. Accounting for the much bluer national environment, that would imply either that Florida is immune to shifts in the national mood or that the state lurched to the right sometime in the intervening two years. But as the map below shows, Nelson actually performed from 3 to 14 points better than Clinton in a majority of Florida counties, even though he lost many of her voters elsewhere in the state. (Gillum’s map told a similar story, so we’re not showing it, as of the two 2018 Democratic candidates, Nelson — a moderate white man in his 70s — is a better stand-in for the party’s presumptive 2020 presidential nominee, Joe Biden.) This is important because it underscores that the state is not “wave-proof”; instead, it’s made up of some complex coalitions that we’ll dive into more momentarily.

Ultimately, Scott (and DeSantis) won because they did significantly better than Trump in a handful of big counties, virtually erasing Democratic gains elsewhere. Most glaringly, Miami-Dade County — Florida’s most populated county — and Osceola County voted more than 8 points more Republican in the 2018 Senate race than in the 2016 presidential race. In addition, Nelson underperformed Clinton by 6 points in the much less populous Hendry County.

What’s so special about these counties? They are Florida’s three majority-Hispanic counties, and it turns out that Hispanic voters voted significantly less Democratic in 2018 than in 2016. According to exit polls, Hispanic voters voted for Nelson 54 percent to 45 percent (the gubernatorial numbers were virtually identical), two years after they supported Clinton 62 percent to 35 percent. So the big question for Democrats in 2020 is whether Biden can return to Clinton’s level of support among Hispanics.

It’s hard to say for sure, as the reasons for Democrats’ 2018 underperformance in Florida are as diverse as the state’s Hispanic population. For example, Puerto Rican Floridians (who make up 32 percent of Osceola County) strongly dislike Trump, but they actually gave Scott high marks for focusing on their community in the wake of Hurricane Maria. But with Trump back on the ballot in 2020, there’s good reason to think that their Republican sympathies will evaporate once again. According to Carlos Odio, the co-founder of data firm EquisLabs, a private poll recently gave Biden a 41-point lead among Puerto Rican voters in Florida, which would be close to the 46-point lead Clinton enjoyed in a Latino Decisions poll immediately before the 2016 election.

Democrats may not be able to solve their problems so easily with Cuban Americans, though, who make up the plurality (36 percent) of crucial Miami-Dade County. Cuban Americans are the rare bloc of Hispanic voters who truly lean Republican; in fact, they outright backed Trump in 2016. Trump is estimated to have won between 50 percent and 58 percent of Florida’s Cuban American vote in 2016, and this group has been even more Republican in past presidential elections. They still vote strongly Republican in elections for lower offices as well. For instance, the Florida International University Cuba Poll, which has measured public opinion among Cuban Americans for almost 30 years, found that Scott and DeSantis each won about 70 percent of the Cuban American vote in Miami-Dade. This was likely instrumental in Miami-Dade’s rightward shift in 2018: An analysis of the 2016 and 2018 results by Democratic data consultant Matthew Isbell found that the Miami-Dade precincts that swung hardest toward the GOP were its most Cuban American precincts.

And unfortunately for Biden, Trump’s crusades against socialism and hardline stance against Cuba and its close ally Venezuela ² may have elevated his standing among Cuban Americans. An EquisLabs poll from November 2019 found that 63 percent of Cuban American voters in Florida would vote to reelect Trump (though, of course, that was long before the pandemic started dragging down his polling numbers across the board). That wouldn’t be as bad for Democrats as 2018, but EquisLabs estimates that level of support would be worth a net of 90,000 more Trump votes in Florida than in 2016.

However, even if Trump makes inroads with Cuban Americans, some historical trends suggest that Miami-Dade will not be as red as it was in 2018. For reasons ranging from disproportionately low Democratic turnout in midterms to the Cuban American habit of voting more Republican in nonpresidential races, the margin in Miami-Dade is almost always less Democratic in midterm years than in the presidential years on either side. So Miami-Dade’s right turn in 2018 was actually completely predictable — and it might not mean anything for 2020.

The real question mark is whether Miami-Dade will follow the pattern of recent years in 2020 and be bluer than it was in 2016. For reasons ranging from generational change (Cuban Americans born in the U.S. are more likely than their immigrant parents and grandparents to vote Democratic) to the ubiquitous urban and suburban realignment, the county has voted more Democratic in every successive presidential election since 2004.

Of course, there’s always the possibility that this trend won’t continue.

One final point in Biden’s favor is Florida’s large population of older Americans. Of all the states in the union, Florida has the largest proportion of residents age 65 or older (20 percent) — and polls indicate that Biden is winning among these voters nationally. That’s unusual for a Democrat these days, too, which speaks to Biden’s current electoral strength. There is evidence that Biden isn’t doing quite as well among older Floridians (Trump was leading among them by 8 points in both a recent CBS News/YouGov poll and the latest New York Times Upshot/Siena College poll), but the former vice president is still doing better than either Clinton (who lost among voters age 65 or older by 17 points) or Nelson (who lost among them by 14) did, according to the exit polls.

If this trend holds, it has the potential to help Biden all across the state, but especially in counties with lots of retirement communities. Two of these counties are where Democrats also lost ground in the 2018 Senate race: Collier (which was 4 points redder in 2018 than in 2016) and Sumter (which was 3 points redder). Collier, on the southwest coast, is home to Naples and is 31 percent age 65 or older.³ And Sumter, the location of famously massive retirement community The Villages, is a whopping 56 percent age 65 or older. Unlike Miami-Dade and Osceola, these counties might really be drifting toward Republicans in the long term, but Biden may have what it takes to temporarily reverse that trend.

In summary, it’s not unreasonable to believe that Biden will be able to hold onto (or build upon) Nelson’s gains in the blue counties in the map above, thanks to the current pro-Democratic national environment. And with the help of Hispanic voters, older voters, or both, it’s also not hard to imagine Biden returning to Clinton’s levels of support in some of the counties that drifted red in 2018. However, Trump is fighting to build upon his 2016 support among these voters too, and without them, Biden will have a hard time winning the state — as 2018 showed.

The bottom line: The outlook is bright for Democrats in the Sunshine State. On average, polls of Florida show Biden leading Trump by a healthy 7.1 points.⁴ If that holds, it would be a blowout by Florida standards — the widest margin for a presidential candidate since George H.W. Bush won by 22 points in 1988. But, of course, if Florida does go blue again in 2020, it would put the state in a very familiar role: as a beach ball once again.

How The Pandemic Could Force A Generation Of Mothers Out Of The Workforce

Mon, 27 Jul 2020 10:00:16 GMT

For the past few months, Alicia Wertz has barely seen her husband. Since schools closed in their northern Alabama town in March, they’ve been single-mindedly focused on a single goal: making sure that someone was watching their three kids. At first, Wertz tried working from home. But she wasn’t getting anything done, so they tried splitting the hours: Wertz’s husband watches the children in the morning, then a sitter comes to relieve him in the afternoon until Wertz takes over when she returns from work.

“When we’re not working, we’re by ourselves with the children. It almost feels like you’re a single parent. All you do is go to work and care for the kids,” Wertz said.

In her mind, Wertz is counting down the days until schools reopen. But there’s a nagging worry at the back of her head — what if they don’t open at all? “The thought of [my kids] not going back in the fall is devastating,” Wertz said when we spoke in early July. “It raises this question of — if one of us has to stay home with the children, whose job is more important? I think it was something that we did have conversations about before, but COVID-19 has made it much worse.”

Wertz isn’t the only working mother for whom the thought of the fall calendar sparks both relief and dread. And what comes next could have disproportionate — and long-lasting — effects on the careers of countless women across the country. Studies have shown that women already shoulder much of the burden of caring for and educating their children at home; now, they’re also more likely than men to have lost their jobs thanks to the pandemic. And the collapse of the child care and public education infrastructure that so many parents rely on will only magnify these problems, even pushing some women out of the labor force entirely.

“We’re in danger of erasing the limited gains we’ve made for women over the past few decades, and especially women of color,” said Melissa Boteach, Vice President for Income Security and Child Care/Early Learning at the National Women’s Law Center.

The crux of the issue: Child care just isn’t as available as it was before the pandemic. Data provided to FiveThirtyEight by the job-search website Indeed shows that child-care services have been much slower to hire again (a useful proxy for re-opening) than other areas of the economy:

Combine that with the news that many schools will remain closed in the fall, and it’s easy to see the crisis at hand. If polling is any indication, the vast majority of the fallout is being weathered by mothers, who were already doing the majority of household work even before the pandemic began.

In 2015, the Pew Research Center asked parents about how they divide family responsibilities when both work full-time.⁵ Some tasks were split relatively evenly: Twenty percent of respondents said the mother disciplined children more, 17 percent said the father disciplined more, and 61 percent said that responsibility was shared equally. For every task, however, more respondents reported that the mother carried a greater amount of the load than those who said the father did — including areas involving managing children’s schedules, caring for children when they’re sick and handling household chores.

Moms usually shoulder more of the load at home

Share of parents in households with two full-time working parents who say each parent does more work in a given category, according to a Pew poll

	Share of parents who say…
Category	Mother does more	Father does more	Work split equally
Managing children’s schedules/activities	54%	6%	39%
Taking care of sick children	47	6	47
Handling household chores, etc.	31	9	59
Playing/doing activities with children	22	13	64
Disciplining children	20	17	61

Along similar lines, Pew also found in a poll from 2019 that 80 percent of women living with a partner who had children did the primary grocery shopping and meal-preparation duties for their families. And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey — which tracks the average amount of time people spend per day on different categories of activity — married mothers with full-time jobs spent 56 percent more time doing childcare and housework than corresponding fathers. By contrast, fathers spent more time on work-related tasks, travel and leisure activities.⁶

All that extra time moms spend really adds up

Daily time spent doing various activities by married parents of children under 18 who both worked full-time, according to the American Time Use Survey

	Hours spent per day
Activity	Mothers	Fathers	Diff.
Household activities	1.87	1.23	+0.64
Physical care for children	0.59	0.28	0.31
Child care – other	0.36	0.22	0.14
Child-related travel	0.25	0.13	0.12
Education-related activities	0.10	0.06	0.04
Reading with children	0.05	0.03	0.02
Playing/hobbies with children	0.27	0.29	-0.02
Total	3.49	2.24	1.25

Even under normal circumstances, it was difficult for mothers of young children to balance work against the heavy burden of child care. The BLS found that in 2019, the labor force participation rate for women with children under age 6 was 66.4 percent, well below the rate for women with children age 6 or older⁷ (76.8 percent). According to a 2014 survey by the U.S. Census Bureau, 61 percent of women who were out of a job and have young children listed “caretaking” as a reason why they were not employed. Forty-six percent of women who were out of a job and have older children said the same. To put that in perspective, only 10 percent of all respondents who were out of work gave caregiving as a reason.⁸

A similar strain is apparent in working mothers’ decisions to take unpaid leave, or even part-time jobs instead of full-time ones. According to that same census survey from 2014, 30 percent of women who were part-time workers with young children — and 19 percent of women with older children — said caretaking was a reason they worked part-time. (Among part-time workers, the overall share is just 7 percent.)⁹

Now, with schools closed and day cares struggling to remain open, even more women may conclude that the best — or perhaps the only — choice for their family and their own sanity is to reduce their hours, or even press “pause” on their career.

“Sometimes I’ll get to a point where I’m like, ‘I’m so tired, I’ll have to go part-time to make it all work,’” said Lee Dunham, a lawyer who lives in Delaware. Since the pandemic started, Dunham has been mostly responsible for her 10-month-old daughter during the day — which means her work day doesn’t start until 8 p.m. and usually wraps around 2 a.m.. “I’m just basically not getting enough sleep because I’m watching the baby 40 hours a week and doing my job 40 hours a week. It’s really rough.”

Dunham feels she’s lucky to have an understanding employer who told her earlier this year that they’d be cutting all of their employees some slack because of the pandemic. But at the time, she added, everyone was assuming day care would be up and running by mid-summer. “It might be that I have to dial back my hours, which of course means I will get paid less.”

This kind of calculus already depresses women’s wages and makes it harder for their careers to progress. According to the National Women’s Law Center, mothers are typically only paid 71 cents for every dollar paid to fathers. In fact, a lot of recent research into the gender pay gap has found that much of it is simply due to the constraints on working mothers. For instance, a 2018 analysis of data from Denmark — which offers a counterpoint to the United States in terms of social safety net, yet still has a very large and persistent gender wage gap — found that women’s earnings drop significantly after having their first child, while men’s earnings aren’t affected at all. And crucially, several studies in the U.S. and other countries have found that the trajectory of wages for women who don’t have children resembles those of men, whether they have kids or not (although some research has actually suggested that becoming a father can contribute to men’s career success).

This disparity is particularly intense for women of color. Black mothers are paid only 54 cents for every dollar paid to a white father, according to NWLC; for Latina mothers, it’s 46 cents. Low-income women of color are also among the likeliest to have lost their jobs in the current recession. And they’re disproportionately likely to be the child-care workers who are being asked to come back to work, sometimes in unsafe working conditions, for low wages. “We’re in a vicious cycle where we need child care as one of the tools to get women to equal pay, and yet unequal pay is one of the primary reasons that women are pushed into staying home,” Boteach said.

Leaving the workforce, even if it’s just for a year or two, has ripple effects that can follow a woman for the rest of her life, even depressing her earnings in retirement. Finding a new job after a few years on hiatus can be very difficult for mothers, who may be stereotyped as less serious about their careers because they took time off to be with their children. One study from 2007 found that mothers were perceived to be less competent than fathers, and their recommended salaries were also lower.

During this pandemic, you can already see the disproportionate impact taking shape. The unemployment rate for women in April was 16.2 percent, higher than it has been in any month since at least 1948, before dropping to 11.7 percent in June — a percentage point higher than the rate for men (10.6 percent). Even more striking, labor force participation for women dipped to 54.7 percent in April before rising to 56.1 percent last month. Both of those numbers are reminiscent of the rates for women from the 1980s — back when the very notion of women in the workforce was still gaining momentum.¹⁰

Wertz has no plans to leave her job — at least for now. “I worked incredibly hard to get to where I am now,” she said. “I essentially paid my way through school with no family support. For years I worked entirely too hard for not enough money.” Already, she worries that she’s perceived differently in the workplace because she’s a mother. “Even if it was just a year, I know how that gap would look on my resume,” she said. “If I had to take that step back, I just don’t know if I’d recover from it.”