FiveThirtyEight - Politics

What To Watch For During The Final Presidential Debate

Fri, 23 Oct 2020 00:04:57 GMT

The FiveThirtyEight politics crew discusses how the last presidential debate might affect the election. Is there still time to shift opinions, or have voters already made up their minds?

Will We Know The Winner On Election Night? Pay Attention To These States.

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 21:58:46 GMT

In this forecast update, Galen Druke explores whether we’ll have a good idea of who won on election night. Which states do we expect results from? And what could those results mean for who will win the presidency?

Where The Presidential Race Stands Before The Last Debate

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 14:28:41 GMT

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s Election Update for Thursday, Oct. 22, 2020! As President Trump and Joe Biden prepare to take the stage tonight for the final presidential debate, Trump has just a 12 in 100 chance of winning the presidency, while Biden has an 88 in 100 chance, according to our presidential forecast.¹ And according to national polls, Biden leads Trump by an average of 9.9 percentage points.

This is lower than Biden’s peak 10.7-point lead as of Monday, but still higher than his 7.1-point lead over Trump before their first debate on Sept. 29. In the last few days, national polls have tightened a bit, something our forecast was anticipating in the home stretch. But, to be clear, Biden is still well ahead overall in our forecast.

But of course, the national popular vote doesn’t pick the president — states do, via the Electoral College. And we got a flurry of state polls yesterday that were still good for Biden. Take Pennsylvania, the state with the highest chance of deciding the election, according to our forecast’s tipping-point odds. Yesterday, no fewer than four high-quality polls of Pennsylvania were released. Biden garnered 50 percent support and Trump garnered 45 percent in a Fox News poll; Biden led by 6 points in a Suffolk University poll; Biden led by 8 points in a Quinnipiac University poll; and CNN/SSRS even put Biden ahead by 10 points among likely voters. Though these ran the gamut from being OK to great polls for Biden, together they were pretty well in line with other polls we’ve seen this month — in other words, Biden has a solid, though not insurmountable, lead in Pennsylvania.

This is, however, still an improvement from where he stood before the first debate, when the winner of Pennsylvania was more uncertain. Since Sept. 29, Biden’s odds of winning Pennsylvania have increased from 79 in 100 to 87 in 100.

It’s a similar story in Florida, another important potential tipping point state; Trump has a less than 1 percent chance of winning the White House without it. Biden’s average lead in Florida polls is currently 3.8 points — not much lower than Biden’s October high of 4.5 points, achieved for a few days last week. And yesterday, Reuters/Ipsos, CNN/SSRS and Civiqs/Daily Kos all released surveys of Florida that gave Biden either a 4- or 5-point lead among likely voters. These numbers are a bit better for Biden than they were before the last debate, when he led by an average of 2 points or less in the Sunshine State. That early-October increase brought his chances of winning Florida from about 3 in 5 to around 7 in 10, but that number has barely changed in the last couple weeks.

What’s more, states like Iowa, Ohio and Georgia all now have almost exactly 50-50 odds in our forecast. Take the several Iowa polls we got yesterday: Emerson College found Trump and Biden tied at 48 percent; Siena College/The New York Times Upshot put Biden at 46 percent and Trump at 43 percent; and depending on the turnout model used, Monmouth University gave Biden either a 3- or 5-point lead among likely voters. With these polls, Biden actually improved his position in our Iowa polling average. He went from a 0.4-point lead on Monday to a 1.1-point lead currently — the opposite of the tightening we’ve seen elsewhere. And although our forecast doesn’t think Biden is favored to win Iowa, he does now have a 48 in 100 shot — the highest his odds have been all year. And that’s bad news for Republicans, since in worlds where Biden carries Iowa, he wins the presidency more than 99 percent of the time.

Meanwhile, in Georgia, two pollsters — Siena College/The New York Times Upshot and Morning Consult — both found Trump and Biden in a dead heat in Georgia this week. And appropriately enough, our forecast now finds that both Trump and Biden have exactly a 50 in 100 shot of carrying the Peach State.

According to Morning Consult, Biden also garnered 48 percent support and Trump 47 percent support in Texas, another fairly red state that is a must-win for Trump. And a Quinnipiac University poll of the Lone Star State released yesterday found a tied race, although Quinnipiac has tended to have good results for Biden this year relative to other pollsters. Accordingly, our forecast is not yet convinced that Texas is a toss-up, although it’s not safely red by any means. Trump has just a 64 in 100 chance of winning.

I could go on, but you get the picture. Biden is still ahead in all the states he needs in order to win — and is a real threat to win some that would just be icing on the cake for him. Trump still has a path to victory, but he needs to turn things around in all of these states fast — and the debate could be his last opportunity to do so.

Is Tonight’s Presidential Debate Too Late To Shake Up The Race?

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 11:00:58 GMT

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

sarah (Sarah Frostenson, politics editor): This is it — the last presidential debate — and, as we’ve said in our presidential forecast for a while now, President Trump is running out of time. Joe Biden has a double-digit lead in national polls and has gotten a number of good state polls in the past few days.

We still expect the race to tighten here in the home stretch, and a debate is a great way for that to happen. But it’s also true that the last two weeks before an election don’t necessarily change the race all that much.

The final two weeks usually don’t change much

How much the national polling margin changed between 15 days before the presidential election and Election Day, since 1972

	Leader in FiveThirtyEight national polling average
Year	15 days before ELECTION		Election Day		Change
2016	Clinton	+6.9	Clinton	+3.8	3.1
2012	Romney	+1.2	Obama	+0.4	1.6
2008	Obama	+6.8	Obama	+7.1	0.3
2004	Bush	+2.4	Bush	+1.6	0.8
2000	Bush	+2.7	Bush	+3.5	0.8
1996	Clinton	+14.9	Clinton	+12.8	2.1
1992	Clinton	+14.1	Clinton	+7.1	7.0
1988	Bush	+11.8	Bush	+10.4	1.4
1984	Reagan	+16.7	Reagan	+18.0	1.3
1980	Reagan	+2.3	Reagan	+2.1	0.2
1976	Carter	+2.0	Carter	+0.8	1.2
1972	Nixon	+25.5	Nixon	+24.1	1.4

So, let’s start there. How big are the stakes going into tonight?

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, elections analyst): The stakes are kind of big but also kind of not?

On the one hand, it’s the last obvious opportunity for Trump to win voters over and for Biden to screw up. On the other hand, I think the writing is on the wall for Trump.

Granted, our presidential forecast still gives him a 13-in-100 chance of staging a comeback. But Trump just hasn’t shown any inclination to change his base-first strategy. He’s also been behind Biden for a while now in our forecast:

I guess I’m just not counting on seeing a different Trump tonight from the one who bombed in the first debate.

kaleigh (Kaleigh Rogers, tech and politics reporter): It’s rare for debates to have large, lasting impacts on the polls at the best of times, so it’s hard to imagine a scenario where this debate upends things in a dramatic way.

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, elections analyst): Given how rare live events are in the COVID-19 era, though, it’s not impossible that something could come out that reflects poorly on Biden. So, in that sense, it is a big deal.

At the same time, a national poll from The Economist/YouGov found this week that Biden led 52 percent to 43 percent among likely voters, and that only 4 percent of those voters said they might change their minds. So, unless Trump can win over the incredibly small number of voters who genuinely are unsure — there are a lot fewer undecided voters this year — it’s going to be tough to win the election. And I’m not sure much can happen that’s going to shift public opinion sharply.

kaleigh: Like Nathaniel, I’m curious to see whether Trump changes his strategy at all. Obviously, the muted mics will limit how much he can talk over Biden, but arguably, that tactic didn’t work so well. At least one poll found the majority of respondents disapproved of Trump’s behavior in the last debate, and even some Republicans said it made them support him less afterward.

nrakich: I’m not so sure the muted mics will make a big difference, Kaleigh. Maybe we won’t be able to hear Trump’s interruptions, but Biden will. And that could trip Biden up or stop him mid-answer.

sarah: Saying Trump bombed is a bit harsh, though, Nathaniel. After all, Clinton “won” the 2016 debates, and we saw how that turned out.

It’s easy to get obsessed with comparisons to 2016, and as we’ve written, you shouldn’t make too much of one election — after all, it’s a sample size of one. That said, there are some pretty big differences from 2016, yes?

kaleigh: Well, there’s the pandemic. That’s a pretty stark contrast. It has changed how we vote, how candidates campaign, how the economy is doing and so much more.

I wonder how different this election would be compared with 2016’s if COVID-19 hadn’t happened.

geoffrey.skelley: Well, as that Economist/YouGov survey and others have shown, this election has far fewer undecided or third-party voters, which makes it harder for the debates to move mountains.

In FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average, Biden and Trump’s combined support adds up to about 94 percent. But at the same point in 2016, Trump and Clinton totaled just about 86 percent — a lot more voters were in play even in the late stages of the campaign. The same is true in state-level polls as well. For example, around 95 percent of voters in Wisconsin are backing Biden or Trump in our polling average, whereas 86 percent of voters there said they supported Trump or Clinton at this point in 2016.

nrakich: Not to mention, Biden’s lead is simply bigger than Clinton’s was at this stage of the 2016 campaign.

As of Wednesday afternoon, Biden led by 9.9 points in our national polling average; 13 days before Election Day in 2016, Clinton would have led by an average of 6.4 points, using the same methodology.

Something else that I think makes tonight’s debate less important: At least a quarter of voters have probably already cast their ballots. According to statistics collected by political scientist Michael McDonald, more than 41 million early or absentee votes have already been cast, or 30 percent of 2016 turnout (although 2020 turnout could be much higher if voter enthusiasm is any indication). So, even if something big happens tonight, a lot of people will have already voted.

geoffrey.skelley: That’s true, Nathaniel, but it could be that those early voters would have voted already anyway, as studies have shown that voters who vote early are more likely to be very partisan. Or, put another way, maybe those people weren’t going to change their minds anyway.

sarah: Those are all really good points — especially Kaleigh’s, about what this election would have looked like if COVID-19 hadn’t happened. What could we be missing, though? (And one big reason why comparisons to 2016 have their limitations!)

nrakich: Well, it’s always possible there will be a polling error.

So, if the debate budges the polls just enough — say, to where Biden has a 4-point national lead instead of a 10-point one — that makes it significantly more likely that Trump could win.

If Biden stays at +10 nationally, though, it would take a truly bonkers polling error to save Trump.

kaleigh: There are also more conventional differences. For example, this election has an incumbent candidate.

geoffrey.skelley: Speaking of polling error — and whether we could have a “Dewey Defeats Truman” on our hands — pollsters have tried to account for some of the things that led to problems with state polls in 2016. For example, some are weighting their samples by education, or even education and race, to avoid underrepresenting white voters without a college degree, voters who went so strongly for Trump in 2016.

So, some state polls could be better this time — although, of course, it’s impossible to predict the direction of a polling error before an election.

Polling bias is not very consistent from cycle to cycle

Weighted-average statistical bias of polls in final 21 days of the election, among polls in FiveThirtyEight’s Pollster Ratings database

Cycle	Governor	U.S. Senate	U.S. House	Pres. General	Combined
1998	R+5.7	R+4.8	R+1.5		R+4.2
1999-2000	D+0.6	R+2.9	D+0.9	R+2.6	R+1.8
2001-2002	D+3.0	D+1.4	D+1.3		D+2.2
2003-2004	R+4.2	D+1.7	D+2.5	D+1.1	D+0.9
2005-2006	D+0.3	R+1.3	D+0.2		R+0.1
2007-2008	D+0.5	D+0.8	D+1.0	D+1.1	D+1.0
2009-2010		R+0.7	D+1.7		D+0.6
2011-2012	R+1.3	R+3.3	R+2.6	R+2.5	R+2.6
2013-2014	D+2.3	D+2.5	D+3.7		D+2.7
2015-2016	D+3.3	D+2.8	D+3.7	D+3.1	D+3.0
2017-2019	R+0.9	D+0.1	R+0.3		R+0.3
All years	D+0.3	D+0.1	D+0.7	D+0.2	D+0.3

sarah: OK, back to the debate. The rules have changed, as Kaleigh and Nathaniel were mentioning earlier, and now the moderator can mute the candidates if they speak out of turn. Here’s a snapshot of the six issues they are expected to stick to:

Fighting COVID-19
American families
Race in America
Climate change
National security
Leadership

What do we think might be covered by these issues? What plays to Biden’s strengths? And Trump’s?

geoffrey.skelley: Well, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that “fighting COVID-19” is not going to go well for Trump because Americans generally think he’s done a poor job handling the pandemic. That leaves Biden with a lot of material to work with.

nrakich: Yeah — according to our poll with Ipsos before the last debate, respondents said 78 percent to 20 percent that Biden was better on the issue of COVID-19. And that was before Trump announced he had tested positive for COVID-19.

More people trust Biden to handle COVID-19

Share of people who named each issue as the most important one facing the U.S., and whether they think Trump or Biden would handle that issue better, according to a FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll

		Who’s better on the issue…
issue	share		TRUMP		biden
COVID-19	31.9%	20.1%	–	78.0%	–
The economy	22.0	79.1	–	19.2	–
Health care	9.6	27.9	–	71.8	–
Racial inequality	7.4	6.0	–	90.9	–
Climate change	4.9	4.7	–	95.3	–
The Supreme Court	4.5	61.1	–	38.4	–
Violent crime	4.2	80.6	–	18.1	–
Economic inequality	2.9	14.3	–	85.7	–
Immigration	2.8	61.3	–	38.7	–
Abortion	2.8	93.5	–	6.5	–
Other	1.7	55.3	–	41.8	–
Education	1.5	44.7	–	44.1	–
Gun policy	1.4	69.6	–	30.4	–

kaleigh: Trump has already been trying to positively spin his bout with the coronavirus — he’s been through it! He survived! But it will be pretty easy for Biden to point out that Trump didn’t take the virus seriously since he actually caught it. Not to mention, many Americans don’t think Trump took enough COVID-19 precautions, and there are signs that this hurt him electorally.

nrakich: I’m curious what the “American families” segment will touch on … does anyone have any inkling what that means?

geoffrey.skelley: Perhaps it’s a roundabout way of saying the economy. Kitchen table issues. Of course, the economy touches almost every topic to some extent.

kaleigh: That’s my bet, Geoffrey, but it’s just vague enough to be uncertain.

sarah: My money is on the suburbs.

Or, at the very least, I can imagine suburban families being mentioned by both Biden and Trump. Trump won suburban voters in 2016, but he’s in real trouble here in 2020, as many white suburban women are continuing to move away from the Republican Party, as we saw in 2018.

But, yeah, given the economy ranked as voters’ first or second issue, according to our polling with Ipsos, I think that’s right, too, Geoffrey and Kaleigh.

The economy is one issue where Trump has always had an advantage.

nrakich: “Climate change” and “race in America” also seem like good issues for Biden. According to that Ipsos poll, more than 90 percent of Americans trust Biden more than Trump on both of those issues!

On the other hand, they also said they trust Trump more than Biden, about 81 percent to 18 percent, on “violent crime.” So Trump might try to reframe the segment on race in America into one about rioting and looting.

As for national security, I think it’s fair to say that segment will move the fewest votes. American elections generally aren’t decided on foreign-policy grounds.

kaleigh: Honestly, is there anything in that lineup that isn’t well-trodden territory at this point?

sarah: Yeah, it is hard to imagine that any of the issues discussed tonight will cover new ground in a way that sways voters. They do feel like well-trodden talking points at this stage, and the reality remains that Trump really does need the polls to tighten. Otherwise, his odds in our forecast will continue to fall. But, of course, even a 5 percent chance of something happening is something you should take seriously.

OK, the stakes are high. Trump needs some movement in the polls, and Biden isn’t a safe bet. What will you be watching for tonight, and in the last week of the election — knowing, of course, we’re all kind of flying blind?

nrakich: To me, the big question is, can Biden maintain his 10-point national lead after this debate? Or will tonight “reset” the race and bring the polling average down to Biden +7 or so, which is where it has been for most of the year?

Even if that were to happen, Biden would still have a good chance of winning, but the size of his margin could determine things like whether Democrats win the Senate or the number of state legislatures Democrats flip.

geoffrey.skelley: It’s true that incumbent presidents have had a habit of struggling in first debates, only to come back stronger in later ones. This was true of Barack Obama in 2012 and Ronald Reagan in 1984. So don’t count out a much better showing from Trump tonight.

What Would Democrats Do If They Controlled Congress And The White House?

Thu, 22 Oct 2020 10:00:18 GMT

There’s a decent chance that in January 2021, Washington, D.C. will be a one-party town.

Democrats have a 72 percent chance of controlling the White House, House of Representatives and Senate, according to the Deluxe version of FiveThirtyEight’s 2020 forecast. It would be the first time they’ve had a political “trifecta” since the first two years of the Obama administration. But while that possibility has pushed some to dream big, Democratic operatives say the limitations of their party’s big-tent politics will likely determine what gets done as much as the wishes of a Biden administration.

In the closing weeks of the presidential campaign, Biden has dodged questions about a once-fringe idea for expanding the number of seats on the Supreme Court, which has let imaginations run wild. Could Democrats actually pursue structural changes on a level not seen in decades? Statehood for Washington, D.C. and Puerto Rico, an overhaul of the federal judiciary, a “Green New Deal” on the scale of what Franklin Roosevelt did during the Great Depression? The country is brutally divided by partisan affiliation, and there is some sense that politics has moved to a more Machiavellian plane; if you are guaranteed power for only two years, leverage it to the hilt.

Yet even court-expansion advocates seem dubious about whether Biden and a Democratic Congress would actually come out of the gate by adding judges to the highest court. The “wish list,” said Christopher Kang of Demand Justice, a liberal group that advocates for judicial reform, is led by “expanding the Supreme Court by adding four seats to offset the two seats that would have now been stolen from a Democratic president.” More likely, though, according to Kang, is that Democrats expand the broader federal judiciary and nominate judges with resumes outside the bounds of the typical white-shoe law firm pedigrees (civil rights activists and academics fill the Demand Justice shortlist). Kang suggested as many as 200 judgeships could be added, pointing out that the Judicial Conference (the policymaking body for the federal courts) has recommended the creation of 70 new judgeships to keep up with the pace of caseloads.

Democrats’ agenda will also be determined by their margin of victory in the Senate. Sen. Joe Manchin will still be in the caucus, after all. Ryan McConaghy, who worked for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, was circumspect when it came to the subject of court expansion. “That is definitely the type of thing that would take a long time and require very careful consideration of where the votes are,” he said. McConaghy, like other Democrats I spoke to, expected that a Democratic Congress’s first priority would be a stimulus package. He drew comparisons to Obama’s first term for what might happen next. “Democrats do not hold all three decision-making bodies often, so there’s going to be a real desire to have progress on a core priority. I think there’s a good chance that climate plays the role in 2021 that the ACA played in 2009 and 2010.”

As Election Day and a potential transition bears down, what seemed most on the minds of the progressives I spoke to is how a Biden White House would be staffed. There’s a worry on the left that Biden — known for hewing closely to wherever the party’s center is at any particular moment — won’t seize on a post-Trump moment to make big changes. One progressive Democratic aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of intraparty critiques during an election, told me that they were worried that recent history — the Obama administration during the financial crisis — would be a guide for how Biden might act. “Everyone was talking at the time about how Barack Obama was reading “Team of Rivals,” and he picked Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State, but you look at what they did with their economic team, and it was all the Citi Group-allied, Wall Street-sympathetic cabal.” Back in January 2019, economist Paul Krugman, who lobbied the Obama administration unsuccessfully for a bigger stimulus package following the economic collapse of 2008, joked to me that “the financial industry has so much clout and so much influence, not just because of the money but because they’re smart people, they’re persuasive, they have great tailors.” There’s a sense that Biden could choose gatekeepers who aren’t open to the sorts of broad changes that the Democratic primaries put in front of voters.

Under particular scrutiny are Biden’s choices for Chief of Staff: Ron Klain, Steve Ricchetti and Bruce Reed have all served as Biden’s chief of staff at various points in time. Progressives have carved out a favorite in Klain, and the Democratic aide I spoke to said that if Biden chose Ricchetti or Reed, “It’s a major tone-setter.” In areas like government antitrust action — the Department of Justice filed suit against Google this week for antitrust violations — the aide said they weren’t optimistic about a Biden administration. “The odds that he picks people that are allied with Amazon, Google, and Facebook to run DOJ antitrust, to run the FTC — they’re pretty high,” they said. “I’m pessimistic.”

Sean McElwee, executive director of Data For Progress, seemed hesitant to get too optimistic. “I think the big constraint for the Obama administration and not doing progressive stuff was first the deficit fearmongering,” he said. “We’re going to spend a lot of time making the case that Democrats shouldn’t allow themselves to sort of be hampered by the deficit.”

Saikat Chakrabarti, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s former chief of staff, also brought up what he saw as the misguided thinking of establishment Democrats — Biden foremost among them — on economic matters like the deficit. “I think he’s probably got some ideological hang-ups around how debt works and how deficits work and how taxes work,” Chakrabarti said. “He just needs people around him who can shake him free of those misconceptions.”

McConaghy thinks Democrats are also likely to push for the kind of reforms outlined in H.R. 1, a bill passed by the House in 2019 that proposed automatic voter registration, restoration of provisions in the Voting Rights Act and offered (non-binding) support for making Washington, D.C a state. That last item is one progressives are sure to push for. McElwee called granting D.C. statehood “morally the right thing to do.” But McConaghy said it could be tough to make a reality. “That type of thing exists in the outer ring of what the main focus will be,” he said, pointing out that the nature of the Democratic caucus is “ideologically wide and geographically diverse.” Some rural state Democrats would likely be against D.C. statehood, he said, because of a perception that it would dilute the power of their vote.

The big-tent nature of the Democratic Party is already being tested, as the Biden campaign floated the idea this week that certain Republicans could find a place in the former vice president’s cabinet.

The news was met with opprobrium from parts of the Democratic ecosystem.

“People Biden is vetting: John Kasich, Meg Whitman, Jeff Flake, Charlie Baker, Charlie Dent,” one activist tweeted.

“People Biden is not vetting: Anyone who endorsed Bernie Sanders.”

States Changed Laws To Make It Easier To Vote In 2020. It’s Resulted In Hundreds Of Lawsuits.

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 22:52:27 GMT

In this episode of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses how voting laws and procedures have changed ahead of the 2020 election and how they’re being litigated right now.

Politics Podcast: How Voting Is Going So Far In 2020

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 22:09:29 GMT

Voting laws and procedures around the country have changed to accommodate mail voting and safe in-person voting during the coronavirus pandemic. As a result, Americans are voting early and by mail more than ever before. The changes have also been accompanied by hundreds of lawsuits on both the state and federal level. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux and Nathaniel Rakich break down how the rules have changed, how it’s affecting Americans ability to vote and what kinds of arguments are still being hashed out in court.

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.

Who Will Win The Last Presidential Debate?

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 18:24:01 GMT

Before the debate

————————————————————

Header

hed: Who Will Win The Last Presidential Debate?

dek: We partnered with Ipsos to poll voters before and after the candidates take the stage.

author1: [Laura Bronner](https://fivethirtyeight.com/contributors/laura-bronner)

author2: [Aaron Bycoffe](https://fivethirtyeight.com/contributors/aaron-bycoffe/)

author3: [Elena Mejía](https://fivethirtyeight.com/contributors/elena-mejia-lutz/)

author4: [Julia Wolfe](https://fivethirtyeight.com/contributors/julia-wolfe/)

artBy: Illustrations by [Anika Orrock](https://www.anikaorrock.com/), Candidate Portraits by [Fabio Buonocore](https://fabuloworld.tumblr.com/)

see_also.readin:

[see_also.links]

[]

Lede in

[+lede]

With less than two weeks until Election Day, Thursday marks the final time President Trump and Joe Biden will face off in a presidential debate. As in previous debates, we’re partnering with [Ipsos](https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/538-final-presidential-debate-2020) to see how voters react to the candidates. The poll uses Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel to check in with the same group of people twice — before and after the debate — to see whether the debate affects their views of the candidates or the race itself.

[]

Support

[+support]

chart_hed: Most people lean toward Biden but many still think Trump has a good chance of winning

chart_dek: How likely respondents are to vote for each candidate and how likely they think each candidate is to win, on a scale from 0 (no chance) to 10 (absolutely certain)

chart_win.hed: How likely are you to vote for each?

chart_likely.hed: How likely do you think each is to win?

[+chartGroupSupport]

{.bar}

id: likelyVoters chart chart-bars chart-likely

chart_hed: How likely are you to vote for each?

{}

chart: chart chart-histogram hist-likelyVoteCand-distro

{.bar}

id: chances chart chart-bars chart-likely

chart_hed: How likely do you think each is to win?

{}

chart: chart chart-histogram hist-likelyWinCand-distro

[]

[+enthusiasm]

chart_note: Respondents were also given the option of third-party candidates or ‘someone else.’ Additionally, they could indicate that they will not vote.

Respondents are very sure of who they plan to vote for: 45 percent of respondents said they are “absolutely certain” to vote for Biden and 32 percent said the same of Trump. Very few are torn — just 2 percent said they were split 50-50 between Biden and Trump.

However, despite Biden’s commanding [lead in the polls](https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/polls/president-general/national/) and among the respondents in our survey, many remain skeptical that he can win the presidency. Overall, 37 percent of respondents said either Trump or Biden was “absolutely certain” to win, while 16 percent thought it was a total toss-up (50-50).

image: stickers

skip: Enthusiasm

chart_hed: Supporters are more certain of their vote than they are excited to vote

chart_dek: How likely and how excited respondents are to vote in the 2020 presidential election, by preferred candidate

legend: trump

chart: catLikely chart chart-waffle chart-waffle-trump chart-waffle-likely gop

chart: catExcited chart chart-waffle chart-waffle-trump chart-waffle-excited gop

legend: biden

chart: catLikely chart chart-waffle chart-waffle-biden chart-waffle-likely dem

chart: catExcited chart chart-waffle chart-waffle-biden chart-waffle-excited dem

chart_note: We grouped respondents by which candidate they gave the higher score to (out of 10). Respondents who gave both candidates the same score are not included. Respondents who already voted are included in the “absolutely certain” bucket and respondents who gave themselves a 50-50 shot of voting are included in the “not too likely” bucket.

A large share of Biden and Trump’s supporters said they were “absolutely certain” to vote, and that includes a huge chunk that has already voted: 44 percent of Biden’s backers and 24 percent of Trump’s. Enthusiasm wasn’t quite as high, with just under half of each candidate’s supporters saying they were “very excited” to vote.

[]

Favorability

[+favorability]

chart_hed: The popularity contest

chart_dek: How favorably respondents rated each candidate

chart: favorability stacked-bars chart-favorability

We’re also tracking how favorably respondents view Biden and Trump. One thing that’s immediately obvious is Biden remains a lot more popular than Trump: His net favorability (favorable rating minus unfavorable rating) is +4, while Trump’s is -24. The share that say they have a “very unfavorable” opinion of Trump is quite high, too — 52 percent, compared to 35 percent for Biden.

In the last presidential debate, the candidates’ favorability numbers changed more than their support among respondents, so we’ll see whether this debate has a similar effect — or whether the moderator’s ability to [mute the candidates](https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/19/politics/presidential-debate/index.html) means that there will be less movement than last time.

skip: Labels

[+labels]

avg: Average

likely: How likely are you to vote?

excited: How excited are you to vote?

[]

After the debate

————————————————————

Header

hed_waveTwo: Who Won The First Presidential Debate?

dek_waveTwo: We partnered with Ipsos to poll voters before and after the candidates took the stage.

skip: bylines are unchanged from above

Lede in

[+lede_wavetwo]

On Tuesday, President Trump and Joe Biden faced off for the first time, [in a rocky and, at times, tumultuous debate](https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/trump-biden-first-debate-reaction-chat/). We once again partnered with [Ipsos](https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/538-first-presidential-debate-2020) to track how the debate affected Americans’ views of the election, using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel to interview the same group of people both before and after the debate. The topline is clear: Americans were not impressed with the president’s performance. Whether that will actually lead people to change their votes remains to be seen, though it seems unlikely.

[]

Support

[+slope]

chart_hed_waveTwo: Biden may have gained a little support, but many still think Trump has a good chance of winning

chart_dek_waveTwo: How likely respondents are to vote for each candidate and how likely, they think each candidate is to win, on a scale from 0 (no chance) to 10 (absolutely certain)

chartHed_likelyVoters: How likely are you to vote for each?

chartHed_chances: How likely do you think each is to win?

before: Before

after: After

[+chartGroupSlope]

chart: likelyVoters chart chart-slope chart-likely

chart: chart chart-histogram hist-likelyVoteCand-distro

chart: chances chart chart-slope chart-chances

chart: chart chart-histogram hist-likelyWinCand-distro

[]

[+table]

chart_note: Respondents were also given the option of third-party candidates or ‘someone else.’ Additionally, they could indicate that they will not vote.

Most respondents started out firmly in either Biden or Trump’s camp, and the debate didn’t change that: In fact, very few people changed their minds at all about how likely they were to vote for each candidate.

That said, the debate did have a bit more of an effect on who people think will win the presidency. Slightly more respondents now think both candidates have some chance of winning, although those respondents gave Biden a slightly better chance of winning than Trump.

chart_hed_waveTwo: Biden got higher marks for his performance — and his policies

chart_dek_waveTwo: How respondents rated each candidate’s debate performance and their answers on policies

table_performance: Performance

table_policies: Policies

table_good: good

table_poor: poor

table: table table-performance

chart_note_table: Only among respondents who said that they had watched some or all of the debate.

Debate watchers were pretty decisive in their verdict of last night’s performances: Only about one-third said Trump’s performance was “somewhat good” or “very good,” and 50 percent said it was “very poor.” Biden’s performance was more positively received, with around 60 percent saying they thought he performed well. Respondents gave more mixed grades on how they thought the candidates outlined their policies, but Biden received better marks here, too: Almost 60 percent said they thought his policies were “somewhat good” or “very good,” compared to about 40 percent who said the same for Trump.

[]

Enthusiasm, post-debate

[+enthusiasmWavetwo]

image: stickers

chart_hed_waveTwo: Most voters are definitely still planning to vote

chart_dek_waveTwo: How likely respondents are to vote in the 2020 presidential election, by preferred candidate

legend: trump

legend: biden

chart: catLikely chart chart-waffle chart-waffle-trump chart-waffle-likely gop

chart: catExcited chart chart-waffle chart-waffle-trump chart-waffle-excited gop

chart: catLikely chart chart-waffle chart-waffle-biden chart-waffle-likely dem

chart: catExcited chart chart-waffle chart-waffle-biden chart-waffle-excited dem

chart_note: Respondents were asked to rate how likely they were to vote for each candidate on a scale of 0-10, and their preferred candidate is the one who received the higher score. Respondents who gave both candidates the same score are not included. Respondents who already voted are included in the “absolutely certain” bucket and respondents who gave themselves a 50-50 shot of voting are included in the “not too likely” bucket.

Going into the debate, each candidate’s supporters were already overwhelmingly likely to say they were going to vote, and last night’s debate didn’t change that. Both candidates saw some movement among their supporters, but don’t read too much into these shifts. Any change was within the poll’s margin of error.

[]

Favorability

[+slopeFav]

chart_hed_waveTwo: The popularity contest

chart_dek_waveTwo: How favorably respondents rated each candidate

before: Before

after: After

chart: favorability chart chart-slope chart-favorability

Americans’ negative opinion of the president’s debate performance did not improve an already poor impression of Trump. Going into the debate, more people had a negative opinion of Trump, but after the debate, the gap between Biden and Trump’s net favorability (favorable rating minus unfavorable rating) grew even larger, from 26 points to 33 points.

[]

Methodology

————————————————————

[+methodology]

wave_one: All the data presented here comes from polling done by Ipsos for FiveThirtyEight, using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, a probability-based online panel that is recruited to be representative of the U.S. population. For this study, the same group of respondents is interviewed before and after the debate to track whether and how their answers changed. An initial wave of polling was conducted before the debate began, with a follow-up wave after the debate. The first wave of the poll was conducted from Oct. 15 to Oct. 21 among a general population sample of adults, with 3,263 respondents. The poll has a margin of error of +/- 1.9 percentage points.

wave_one: All Wave 1 respondents were weighted according to general population benchmarks from the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey [March 2020 Supplement](https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/techdocs/cpsmar20.pdf). Adults are the respondent base for all charts except where otherwise noted. The respondent pool is subject to some amount of attrition from Wave 1 to Wave 2, which our weights account for.

[]

notes.link:

sources:

:ignore ———————————————————————–

Metadata

title: Who Will Win The Final Trump-Biden Debate?

description: How voters feel about President Donald Trump and Joe Biden before and after the final 2020 presidential debate on October 22.

twitter text: Who will win the final presidential debate of 2020, Biden or Trump?

url slug: trump-biden-final-debate-poll

primary tag: Politics

news tags: 2020 Election, Joe Biden, Donald Trump

Why A Surge In Republican Voter Registration Might Not Mean A Surge In Trump Support

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 11:00:37 GMT

In the past couple of weeks, key battleground states like Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania have received a lot of attention because Republicans have seen a spike in voter registration numbers. This is often cited as a counterpoint to Joe Biden’s sizable lead over President Trump in the polls, as all these Republican registrations must be a sign of support for Trump that the polls are missing, right?

Well, it’s hard to say what’s happening exactly. Dave Wasserman, the House editor for The Cook Political Report and an NBC News contributor, found in early October that Republicans had made much larger gains in voter registration than Democrats in key states since the presidential primaries earlier this year, perhaps in part due to Republicans’ efforts to knock on doors and Democrats’ reluctance to do the same.

But the problem is party registration numbers can be a hard way to get a read on what’s happening in the election. Like early voting numbers, there are all kinds of pitfalls in how you should think about this data. Here are three of the biggest problems:

Party registration is often a lagging indicator

A voter’s party registration is a strong indicator of who they’ll support, but it’s not a guarantee. In fact, many voters registered with one party have actually been voting for the other party in recent elections but haven’t necessarily switched their registration to reflect the party they actually support.

Take Pennsylvania, for example. The once-Democratic southwestern part has shifted sharply toward the GOP over the past couple of decades. However, party registration figures haven’t necessarily reflected that movement as much as you might expect. For instance, Greene County along the West Virginia border voted for Trump by 40 percentage points in 2016, yet preelection registration figures ¹ show that party identification is split almost evenly, with registered Republicans and Democrats each making up 45 percent of the county’s voters.

Part of what’s going on is that many older voters in that region are still registered as Democrats, even if they back Republicans for most federal offices. Conversely, the suburban counties around Philadelphia in the eastern part of the state used to form the base of the state Republican Party, but even though that area has moved toward the Democrats in recent elections, some Democratic-leaning voters haven’t changed their party registration. In other words, big shifts in party registration sometimes tell us something we already know, and aren’t a signal of a new shift in attitudes.

Registration surges follow the campaign calendar

The election calendar also influences party registration trends, as key dates and campaign events drive interest in participation. For instance, a presidential primary or the registration deadline ahead of the general election can spark a flood of registrations. But sometimes this can create a disproportionate number of registrations from one party.

Consider the 2020 presidential primary. Democrats had a competitive race, which drove interest in voting in 2019 and early in 2020 among Democrats and voters who wanted to have a say in the party’s nomination contest. Meanwhile, Trump was practically unopposed in the GOP nomination contest, so there wasn’t the same motivation among Republican-leaning voters to register ahead of the primaries in the spring until we got closer to the general election.

Florida provides a clear example of this. Much has been made of the GOP registering about 147,000 more voters than the Democrats in the roughly eight months since the February registration deadline for the state’s March 17 presidential primary. Yet in the eight months before the primary deadline (so, going back to the end of June 2019), Democrats registered about 42,000 more voters than the GOP due to the high interest in the Democratic presidential race. Now, that might still be a net win for the GOP — because if we subtract the two, Republicans registered 105,000 more voters — but it’s not as simple as that. Not only is party registration sometimes a lagging indicator as we mentioned above, but there are also a lot more people registering as independent now, and more of those voters may lean Democratic.

Independent voters complicate things

In recent years, a growing number of voters don’t want to be associated with either of the two major parties, and instead register as independent. After hovering in the low- to high-30s from the late 1980s to the late 2000s, the share of Americans who identify as politically independent has now reached or even topped 40 percent in recent years, according to Gallup. And in the states where there is party registration data available, the share of registered independents has grown to more than a quarter of the electorate while the percentage of registered Democrats and Republicans has decreased.

That, in turn, makes it harder to know which party has an advantage in a given state because there’s this big block of voters who won’t tell us which party they prefer. The reality, of course, is that most independents lean toward one party, but their preferences are still masked at the voter registration level. This is especially tricky in battleground states such as Florida, North Carolina and Pennsylvania that have seen major upticks in the share of voters who have registered with no party affiliation.

But we’re not completely in the dark when it comes to who registers as an independent voter. For instance, younger voters are more likely to identify as independent than older voters. And importantly, younger voters of color are also more likely to register as independents, as Florida’s registration figures have shown. Both of these groups tend to lean Democratic which means that even if many of these voters don’t openly identify as Democrats, they’re more likely to vote for Democrats than not. More broadly, polls show Biden ahead of Trump among voters who identify as independent. That means even if Republicans are winning the registration battle in some key states, it might not be enough to offset the number of registered Democrats and independents who may back Biden in the end.

In other words, despite the surge in GOP registrations in a few swing states, it’s hard to read that as a clear sign of success for the GOP in November. It could be a good sign, but it could also be a lot of noise, and you’re better off looking at the polls instead.

We’re Letting You Mess With Our Presidential Forecast, But Try Not To Make The Map Too Weird

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 10:00:18 GMT

The 2020 election might feel like either a dream or a nightmare, depending on who you’re rooting for. But with our new interactive, you’ll at least be able to choose your own election adventure and explore how winning a state or a combination of states will affect President Trump’s and Joe Biden’s chances of winning the Electoral College.

When you first open the interactive, it’ll show you a map that’s shaded based on our presidential forecast and the 40,000 simulations we run each time we update the model. Deep-blue California, for example, is almost certain to go to Biden, while Trump is favored but not a lock in light-red Texas given their current odds. But what happens if, say, Trump gets some swing states called for him on Nov. 3? How might the probabilities change? That’s what this interactive is all about.

Unlike other tools that explore paths to 270 electoral votes — many of which are very cool and we like a lot! — ours focuses specifically on how the states are related to one another. Click on Kentucky to turn it red, for instance, and the forecast barely budges, since Trump is almost certain to win Kentucky anyway, and that assumption is already built into the forecast.

Upset wins or decisions in states that our model considers toss-ups could matter a lot more, though. If Biden wins Florida, for instance, his chances¹ of winning the Electoral College shoot up to greater than 99 percent, which could be important on Nov. 3 because Florida generally counts its votes quickly and the networks might be able to determine who won the state on election night. But if Trump wins Florida, his Electoral College chances rise to 39 percent, making the race practically a toss-up.

Why such big swings based on just one state? It’s not simply that Florida’s 29 electoral votes are valuable, although they are. It’s also that Florida provides an indication of how other states might vote. Polling errors are correlated, so if Trump wins Florida — where he’s slightly behind right now — he could beat his polls in other states too.

You can also look at how states behave in combination with one another, according to our forecast. Say that Trump wins Florida but that Biden wins North Carolina, another state that usually tallies its votes quickly. This is a good trade for Biden, on balance. His projected number of electoral votes declines from our initial forecast — he’s averaging 345 electoral votes in our forecast as of Tuesday afternoon, and he’d drop to around 309 in this scenario — because without Florida, he won’t have any sort of runaway, landslide victory. But Biden’s probability of winning some combination of 270 electoral votes and therefore the Electoral College increases to 92 percent if he loses Florida but wins North Carolina, because it’s hard for Trump to win the Electoral College unless he wins both states.

In general, Biden has more paths to 270 than Trump, which reflects the fact that he has the polling lead in most swing states. But problems in the Upper Midwest could spell trouble for Biden, as it did for Hillary Clinton in 2016. Trump has a 75 percent chance of winning the election if he wins Wisconsin, for instance.

Another “fun” challenge is to seek out scenarios that could produce a 269-269 Electoral College tie. For instance, if Trump wins Florida, Pennsylvania and North Carolina but Biden wins Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Arizona, then we wind up with a tie about 12 percent of the time. And before you ask, yes: The interactive does let you choose the winners of each congressional district in Nebraska and Maine, states that give one of their electoral votes to the winner of each district — those single votes are sometimes important in breaking ties.

Our simulations also reflect that states that are more geographically and demographically similar are more likely to swing in the same direction. If Trump wins both North Carolina and Florida, for instance, then Biden’s chances of winning neighboring Georgia fall to just 4 percent. If Biden wins North Carolina and Florida, though, his chances in Georgia soar to 74 percent. By contrast, the candidates’ chances of winning Montana don’t go up or down much based on what you tell the interactive to do in Florida and North Carolina because Montana is so dissimilar to them.

But we’d encourage you to stick to relatively realistic scenarios. The interactive will allow you to do weird things, but only up to a point. Namely, it won’t let you call a state for a candidate if he has less than a 1.5 percent chance of winning it in our initial forecast. But say you want to see what happens if Biden wins Ohio but loses Michigan. You can test that, but be warned: Although both Ohio and Michigan are competitive, that combination of outcomes is rare, since Ohio and Michigan are similar states but Michigan is usually much bluer.

The model will still spit out an answer, but it’s hard to know how reliable it will be — very few of the 40,000 simulations we run in our forecast will have Biden winning Ohio but Trump winning Michigan. In cases like this where there are few simulations that match the map you’ve chosen, the interactive instead uses a regression-based technique and essentially runs some new simulations on the fly. Still, that could lead to a “garbage in, garbage out” problem.

The goal of our forecast is to figure out which scenarios are most plausible in the real world, and if you deliberately choose some implausible ones, it may be hard to know what to make of the output. Overall, though, we hope you’ll find the interactive both fun and informative — and if you’ve got any questions, please don’t hesitate to drop us a line.

Explore The Ways Trump Or Biden Could Win The Election

Wed, 21 Oct 2020 10:00:04 GMT

Explore The Ways Trump Or Biden Could Win The Election
Pick the winner of each state to see how FiveThirtyEight’s presidential forecast would change.

How this works: We start with the 40,000 simulations that our election forecast runs every time it updates. When you choose the winner of a state or district, we throw out any simulations where the outcome you picked didn’t happen and recalculate the candidates’ chances using just the simulations that are left. If you choose enough unlikely outcomes, we’ll eventually wind up with so few simulations remaining that we can’t produce accurate results. When that happens, we go back to our full set of simulations and run a series of regressions to see how your scenario might look if it did turn up more often.

In simplified terms, the regressions start off by looking at the margins of victory for the candidate you picked to win a state or district in every simulation. So let’s say you picked Trump to win Texas; we may have some simulations where he squeaked out a win there, others where he won the state by a landslide, and some where he lost it. For each of those simulations, we see what happened in the rest of the map. So in some simulations where Trump won Texas very narrowly, he may also have narrowly lost some toss-up states. But in simulations where he won it by a big margin, he may also have won big in toss-up states and pulled some Democratic-leaning states into his column, while the reverse may be true in simulations where he lost the state. We figure out how every other state tended to look in that full range of scenarios, tracking not just whether the candidate usually won other states but also how much he generally won or lost each one by.

After all that, we take some representative examples of scenarios that include the picks you made and use what we learned from our regression analysis to adjust all 40,000 simulations, and then recalculate state and national win probabilities. Finally, we blend those adjusted simulations with any of the original simulations that still apply and produce a final forecast.

The Most Competitive Races Aren’t In Michigan, Wisconsin or Pennsylvania

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 23:21:32 GMT

In this episode of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew keys in on the most competitive races of 2020. Spoiler: They’re not in Michigan, Wisconsin or Pennsylvania, even though those states may be the most important ones in deciding the presidential race

Politics Podcast: The Most Competitive Races In 2020

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 22:35:18 GMT

In covering the 2020 election, we’ve focused plenty on the likeliest tipping point states — or the states likeliest to give the winning candidate his 270th electoral vote. Those states include Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida and Michigan. While they may be the most important states, they are not actually the most competitive states in 2020. The contests in Georgia, Iowa, Ohio and even Texas are polling closer to a dead heat. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Micah Cohen and Sarah Frostenson discuss where the most competitive races are in 2020 in the contests for the presidency, House and Senate.

Why A Gamer Started A Web Of Disinformation Sites Aimed At Latino Americans

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 20:35:01 GMT

This article was written in collaboration with First Draft, a nonprofit organization that provides investigative research to newsrooms tracking and reporting on mis- and disinformation.

When we picture the entity behind a network of disinformation websites, a few archetypes spring to mind: shadowy figures intent on interfering with democracy, Russian agents, Macedonian teens. Not usually included: a gamer from a suburb of New York City who sells coffee beans with his wife at the local farmers market on weekends. But that’s precisely who was behind three sites that, until last week, were pumping out misleading, hyperpartisan Spanish-language content on both the left and right. They were just a few sites in a broader ecosystem of misinformation — and disinformation — that spreads such narratives to millions of Americans. But their story has something to tell us about the misinformation industrial complex overall.

Sean Reynolds, a YouTuber, gamer and entrepreneur, was the owner and operator of three websites and affiliated Facebook pages that peddled in misinformation, predominantly in Spanish. The existence of the network was first reported by Politico last week,¹ but an exclusive interview with Reynolds revealed why he started the sites.

Namely, he said, he saw an opportunity.

“These websites and the content on them do not reflect my personal political leanings,” Reynolds wrote in a direct message on Twitter. “I am non-discriminating towards opportunities where there is demand and no supply, which in this case, there was no political opinion pieces written in Spanish on Facebook, so I found writers (ghostwriters) interested to fill that demand.” Reynolds did not respond when FiveThirtyEight asked whether he speaks Spanish but did say he does not personally write the content on the sites. In a video he posted on his gaming channel, he identified as half Jamaican and half German.

Since 2017, Reynolds has operated the three websites and their affiliated Facebook pages: PoliticaVeraz.com, which published right-leaning content, AlertaPolitica.org, which published left-leaning content, and LeftOverRights.com, a left-leaning site which initially ran English-language stories but switched to publishing in Spanish this August. When all three sites were active, they would each regularly publish 5-10 stories per day and then spread those stories through Facebook, where they would typically attract thousands of shares. After FiveThirtyEight contacted him, Reynolds took all three sites and their Facebook pages offline.

A FiveThirtyEight investigation found multiple links that tied Reynolds to the sites, including a common server and IP address among his personal website and his other confirmed businesses, the same Google AdSense and Analytics code for his personal sites and these pages and corporate records listing Reynolds as a process agent for both Left Over Rights LLC and Alerta Politica LLC (there was no record of an LLC for Politica Veraz). Reynolds also confirmed to FiveThirtyEight that he ran the sites.

Much of the content these sites published was misleading and hyperpartisan. A recent story on Politica Veraz, for example, claimed that Joe Biden had “forgotten the words to the Pledge of Allegiance,” when in actuality he quoted part of the pledge for emphasis in a speech. Meanwhile, recent stories published on Left Over Rights deployed spin from a left-leaning perspective, such as a story about the vice presidential debate declaring Sen. Kamala Harris had “destroyed” Vice President Mike Pence by asking him not to interrupt her.

The disinformation on Politica Veraz, in particular, often echoed messaging that was already circulating in far-right communities online and among followers of the QAnon conspiracy theory, pushing it towards a more mainstream audience. One article claimed that President Trump’s life was in mortal danger after he gave a speech at a Whirlpool Corporation Manufacturing Plant in Clyde, Ohio, where he said he had many enemies and that “this may be the last time you see me for a while” when discussing lower prices for pharmaceuticals. And while Reynolds said the sites’ content had minimal reach, that story was shared more than 6,000 times on Facebook, according to social media data tool BuzzSumo, and received nearly 40,000 interactions (reactions, shares, and comments combined). Similar messaging had been amplified by right-leaning users on Twitter before the Politica Veraz piece was published, including a tweet from an account that regularly shares theories associated with QAnon that was retweeted or quote tweeted more than 12,000 times.

Reynolds’s sites are far from the only source of misinformation targeting the Latino community. There are sites, Facebook pages and YouTube channels that operate on the margins, attracting little mainstream notice while garnering audiences in the hundreds of thousands. Their stories — rife with misleading spins on the news and outright falsehoods — are shared across social media and privately in messaging apps. They target communities that have fewer trusted sources that cater directly to them, according to media experts we spoke to, and amplify misinformation originating from extremist communities. And experts say this kind of misinformation can lead to voters not only being misinformed, but also feeling disillusioned by the political process.

Nevertheless, Reynolds said his goals weren’t necessarily to inform, misinform or disinform, but to make a little bit of money. So little money that he didn’t think twice about taking the sites down as soon as he was contacted by a reporter.

“I will say, though, that these websites (all three) were scheduled to be fully closed after the months of not posting and not generating any income to keep them running,” Reynolds wrote. (Two of the sites stopped uploading new posts in August and September, respectively.) “But now I’m getting contacted about them, and I just don’t have time for anything else, so I will have their closings sped up.”

Reynolds’s sites represent a brand of misinformation fueled by the ease and profitability of building an audience on social media, according to Joan Donovan, a researcher of disinformation at Harvard University.

“Social media companies have incentivized disinformation by rewarding it with financial dollars,” Donovan explained. “The fact that he was targeting Latinos with Spanish-language disinformation or misinformation from either side of the aisle shows a kind of willingness to create chaos so long as it makes money.”

It’s not as if the content was simply a translated version of English-language misinformation, either. It clearly targeted the Latino community, playing into existing fears such as worries about socialism, given its history in authoritarian Central and South American governments.

“Some of the key narratives are around the perceived threat of socialism coming into the United States, and connecting that to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris,” said Jacobo Licona, a disinformation researcher for Equis Labs, a Latinx voter research group. “Another one we often see is trying to discredit Black Lives Matter and paint them as violent. Since the murder of George Floyd, we’ve seen an increased effort by these bad actors in Latinx spaces to fuel racial tension in Black and brown communities.”

Politica Veraz regularly posted stories that played into these threads, like one that called the Obamas “Marxists” or another that inaccurately reported two Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputies shot in Compton were “ambushed by Black Lives Matter.”

This misinformation is being seeded in the midst of an election where Latino voters represent a powerful voting bloc. While Trump is trailing Biden among Latino voters in national polls, the margin is narrower in the key battleground state Florida. In a Univision poll released on Sept. 28, 52 percent of Latino voters nationally said they planned to cast a ballot for Biden, compared to 19 percent who were committed to Trump. But in Florida, 36 percent of Latino voters said they favored Trump.

Reynolds said his content was not effective and that the sites were not profitable or popular, and that he had been planning to shut them down before he was contacted by FiveThirtyEight. But data tells a different story. Combined, the three site’s Facebook pages had nearly 1 million likes and followers, and Politica Veraz alone attracted more than 500,000 interactions on its Facebook posts since July, according to data from Crowdtangle.

The allure of sensational, emotionally provocative misinformation is well documented. But this content was also able to appeal to an audience facing a dearth of targeted media, according to Randy Pestana, the assistant director of research at Florida International University’s Institute for Public Policy.

“The media outlets that appeal to Hispanics are limited. There are not a lot of them out there, and the ones that are out there more recently have been called fake news,” Pestana said. “There’s this movement where everything is ‘fake news’ if it doesn’t align with your opinion.”

He also noted that many Latino Americans consume news through social media, including Facebook and WhatsApp, making it easier for this kind of content to spread. The share of Latino Americans who get their news from the internet is higher than that of the U.S. population overall, according to surveys from the Pew Research Center. In a 2016 survey, Pew found that 74 percent of Latino respondents got their news online on a typical weekday, whereas a 2017 Pew survey found that 43 percent of the total population “often” got their news online. And while social media platforms have been cracking down on English-language misinformation to a certain degree, Spanish-language disinformation doesn’t always receive the same treatment, Pestana said.

Reynolds’s sites are now shut down, but there are plenty of other misinformation sources targeting Latino Americans. As we head into the final weeks of an election, many members of one of the most influential voting blocs continue to be bombarded with false information.

“The worst examples of the potential consequences of this is what we saw in 2016: People felt so disenfranchised by the political process that they opted not to participate in it,” said Steven Renderos, the executive director of MediaJustice, a nonprofit that focuses on racial inequality in communications. “That’s the risk we’re facing here today, that people will just opt out of engaging.”

Could Democrats Win Full Control Of More State Governments Than Republicans?

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 11:00:53 GMT

According to the FiveThirtyEight forecast,¹ Democrats have a 72 percent chance of winning a federal government trifecta: that is, control of the presidency, Senate and House. But the 2020 election could also usher in a number of new trifectas on the state level.

Single-party control of the governor’s office, state Senate and state House can enable that party to pass its agenda unencumbered, as Democrats showed after the 2018 midterms. The party used the six state-government trifectas it gained that year to pass major liberal legislation like funding full-day kindergarten in Colorado, raising the minimum wage in Illinois and setting ambitious renewable-energy goals in New Mexico. Democrats also broke up total Republican control of four other states, allowing them to take a hard line in negotiations with the GOP and bend legislation to their will.

However, thanks to their dominance of state-level elections during the Obama administration, Republicans still enjoy more state-government trifectas than their rivals: They have full control of 21 state governments, while Democrats have full control of 15. Going by population, that means roughly 40 percent of Americans live in states under complete Republican control, while 37 percent live in Democratic trifecta states.

Which party controls state government?

Control of the governorship, state Senate and state House in all 50 states

State	Governor	State Senate	State House	Trifecta?
Alabama	R	R	R	✓
Alaska*	R	R	D
Arizona	R	R	R	✓
Arkansas	R	R	R	✓
California	D	D	D	✓
Colorado	D	D	D	✓
Connecticut	D	D	D	✓
Delaware	D	D	D	✓
Florida	R	R	R	✓
Georgia	R	R	R	✓
Hawaii	D	D	D	✓
Idaho	R	R	R	✓
Illinois	D	D	D	✓
Indiana	R	R	R	✓
Iowa	R	R	R	✓
Kansas	D	R	R
Kentucky	D	R	R
Louisiana	D	R	R
Maine	D	D	D	✓
Maryland	R	D	D
Massachusetts	R	D	D
Michigan	D	R	R
Minnesota	D	R	D
Mississippi	R	R	R	✓
Missouri	R	R	R	✓
Montana	D	R	R
Nebraska†	R	R		✓
Nevada	D	D	D	✓
New Hampshire	R	D	D
New Jersey	D	D	D	✓
New Mexico	D	D	D	✓
New York	D	D	D	✓
North Carolina	D	R	R
North Dakota	R	R	R	✓
Ohio	R	R	R	✓
Oklahoma	R	R	R	✓
Oregon	D	D	D	✓
Pennsylvania	D	R	R
Rhode Island	D	D	D	✓
South Carolina	R	R	R	✓
South Dakota	R	R	R	✓
Tennessee	R	R	R	✓
Texas	R	R	R	✓
Utah	R	R	R	✓
Vermont	R	D	D
Virginia	D	D	D	✓
Washington	D	D	D	✓
West Virginia	R	R	R	✓
Wisconsin	D	R	R
Wyoming	R	R	R	✓

Now, with another Democratic wave election looming in 2020, the balance of power in state governments could finally flip. Thanks to the more than 5,800 state legislative seats and 11 governorships on the ballot on Nov. 3, control of at least 11 state governments is up for grabs in 2020. That means Democrats have at least eight chances to either break up a Republican trifecta or gain one of their own. But don’t count Republicans out either — the GOP also has quite a few opportunities of its own.

Where Democrats could break Republican trifectas

Of all the states where Republicans are in danger of losing their grip on state government, Texas would be the most consequential. Democrats would gain a seat at the table in not only policymaking that affects 27.9 million people, but also the drawing of almost 40 congressional districts in the upcoming redistricting process. (More on that next week.)

Just a few years ago, Republicans losing control of Austin would have been unthinkable — but in the 2018 midterms, Democrats flipped 12 seats in the Texas state House, meaning the party needs to net only nine more seats to take control of the chamber. And thanks to Texas’s recent leftward shift (especially in the suburbs), there’s a clear path for them to do it: In 2018, Democratic Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke carried exactly nine state House seats that are still held by Republicans — showing that those districts are willing to vote Democratic in the right circumstances — and he came close in several more. In total, Democrats are targeting about 22 seats in the chamber, though they also need to defend the 12 they picked up in 2018.

Democrats could also take control of the Arizona state Legislature, although the trifecta is out of reach as Republican Gov. Doug Ducey still has two years left in his term. In her successful 2018 Senate campaign, Democrat Kyrsten Sinema carried three state Senate seats currently held by Republicans — exactly the number Democrats need to now flip in order to control the chamber. And Republicans currently have an even narrower advantage in the state House (31 seats to 29), prompting one Republican consultant to tell The Arizona Republic that he thought Democrats had a good chance to win it for the first time in 54 years.

Democrats could also end the Republican trifecta in Iowa by flipping the state House, which Republicans control 53 seats to 47. However, this will be more of a challenge, as Democrats must also defend 13 of their own members who sit in districts that voted for President Trump in 2016. Based on TV spending, Democrats are targeting at least 10 Republican-held seats, while Republicans hope to flip at least five Democratic-held ones.

Finally, Democrats also have an outside shot at ending total Republican control of Missouri state government if Democrat and state Auditor Nicole Galloway defeats Republican incumbent Mike Parson in the governor’s race. However, this is probably a long shot, as Parson has led handily in most polls.

Where Democrats could take full control

Democrats already capitalized on their most realistic trifecta opportunities in 2018, but there are still a few states left where the party could take full control of government. The most obvious is Minnesota, where the local Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party lacks control of only the state Senate. The DFL has six Republican-held seats in its sights, although it needs to net just two to win a majority. Conveniently enough, Republicans currently represent two suburban Twin Cities districts that voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and are only getting more Democratic with time. However, Republicans have plenty of ways to stop a DFL trifecta even if they lose those two seats. The GOP is eyeing five DFL-held Senate seats and would love to flip the state House as well, although the math — the DFL has a 16-seat advantage in the lower chamber — makes the latter more unlikely.

If Democrats are really lucky, they could also give Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf a Democratic legislature to work with in Pennsylvania. Despite maps that were drawn to favor Republicans, Democrats steamrolled Republicans in metro Philadelphia in 2018, cutting their deficit to four seats in the state Senate and nine seats in the state House. Of course, the remaining competitive seats are the heaviest lifts for Democrats, although they do have around 15 pickup opportunities in the House (though Republicans have 12 of their own). And in the Senate, Democrats have no margin for error on their path to a majority: They must flip all four vulnerable Republican-held seats while defending two seats around Pittsburgh. It’s a tall order, but not impossible given that Biden is leading by an average of 7 points in Pennsylvania.

Where Republicans could take full control

Although their opportunities come in much less populous states, Republicans could also gain power from the 2020 election. For example, Republican Rep. Greg Gianforte is leading in polls for Montana governor, an open seat being vacated by Democrat Steve Bullock. And with both chambers of the Montana state Legislature firmly in Republican hands, a Gianforte win would produce another Republican trifecta.

Republicans could also take full control of Alaska state government simply by standing pat in the state House. (They already control the governorship and state Senate.) For the last two years, the House has been controlled by a coalition of Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans despite Republicans technically occupying 23 of the chamber’s 40 seats. However, with the defeat of two of those moderate Republicans in this year’s primaries and the defection of at least two others, Republicans appear to have the numbers to form a state House majority next year — even if no seats switch parties in the election.

Where Republicans could break a Democratic trifecta

On the other hand, Republicans have only one realistic chance of ending a Democratic trifecta: by flipping either Maine’s state Senate or state House. But although national handicappers and state experts disagree on which chamber is more endangered, all parties agree that Democrats have the upper hand in both. A recent Bangor Daily News/Digital Research poll found that Democrats led Republicans, 51 percent to 44 percent, on the generic legislative ballot, and outside Democratic groups have spent nearly four times as much as Republican ones.

Where either party could take full control

Finally, there are two states where all three components of a trifecta are competitive in 2020, meaning either party could emerge with total control of government. However, the most likely outcome in both may be a split decision.

In North Carolina, Republican legislators drew themselves very safe districts for a majority of the decade, but court-ordered redistricting has opened the door for Democrats to net the five seats they need in the state Senate and the six seats they need in the state House. However, the new maps still lean Republican overall: The tipping-point district went for Trump by 10 points in the state Senate and by 12 points in the state House. And Republicans could still seize the trifecta by defeating Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper, but virtually every poll has shown the incumbent ahead, usually by double digits.

The parties’ positions are flipped in New Hampshire, where Republican Chris Sununu sits in the governor’s office and Democrats currently control both chambers of the legislature. Although New Hampshire is likely to go blue on the presidential level, Sununu is unlikely to lose his bid for a third term. That leaves Republicans fighting to flip the three seats they need in the state Senate and 44 seats they need in the House. That second part might sound impossible — and it will definitely be a challenge — but New Hampshire’s oddly drawn, 400-member state House is known for swinging wildly back and forth between the parties depending on the mood of the electorate.²

One last competitive chamber

Finally, one state without a trifecta in play deserves an honorable mention. With neither Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer nor the Republican-held state Senate up for election in 2020, Michigan is guaranteed to still have divided government for the next two years. However, the Michigan state House is one of the most competitive legislative chambers in the country this year. Republicans hold just a 58-52 majority and are defending four seats Whitmer carried in 2018 — three of which are open seats due to term limits. If Democrats flip the chamber, it would be the culmination of a decade-long Democratic effort: According to Daily Kos Elections, Michigan Democrats won the state House popular vote in 2012, 2014 and 2018, yet fell short of the majority every time.

Why Trump Is Losing White Suburban Women

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 10:00:49 GMT

Over the past few months, President Trump has framed the 2020 election as a defense of suburbia. In a Wall Street Journal column in August, he and Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson promised to protect the suburbs from being transformed into “dysfunctional cities.” And in a tweet several days later, Trump warned that suburban women should be wary of Democrats, as they would allow crime to drift into suburban communities. More recently, the president has grown less subtle, imploring suburban women at his rally in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, last week to like him. “[C]an I ask you to do me a favor, suburban women? Will you please like me? Please. Please. I saved your damn neighborhood, OK?”

The suburbs, in Trump’s telling, are under siege — and a Joe Biden presidency would transform them beyond recognition. But it might be that Trump doesn’t actually recognize what suburbia looks like today.

Establishing what constitutes a “suburb” is hard; there is no single definition, and what’s more, in the past 40 years, the suburbs have become much more diverse. This is bad news for Trump, as his vision of suburbia seems largely stuck in the 1950s — a manicured lawn, a husband heading into the city to work at a white-collar job, and a “housewife” tending to the children and preparing dinner. Only this version of suburbia doesn’t really exist anymore.

It wasn’t that long ago, though, that Trump had an edge among suburban voters. In 2016, Trump won them, 47 percent to 45 percent, according to an analysis of validated voters by the Pew Research Center. But by 2018, 52 percent of suburban voters supported Democratic candidates for Congress, compared with 45 percent who supported Republican candidates. And according to our analysis of polling data from Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape, Trump is losing suburban voters to Biden, by 54 percent to 44 percent.¹

What is driving this move away from Trump and Republicans in the suburbs? According to our analysis of Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape data, beyond the diversification of the suburbs, it’s mostly because of white suburban women: 54 percent of them support Biden, while just 45 percent support Trump (very few are undecided).² Meanwhile, white suburban men haven’t stopped backing Trump — he’s winning them 57 percent to 41 percent. (The reason we’re zooming in on white suburban voters is that nonwhite voters in the suburbs are much more likely to say they’ll back Biden — 83 percent of Black, 69 percent of Asian/Pacific Islander, and 57 percent of Hispanic likely voters said they supported Biden, according to our analysis.)

There is, of course, still a significant share of white women in the suburbs who are on Trump’s side (45 percent), but as you can see in the chart above, white men support Trump much more overall. And Trump may actually be reaching those men with pleas ostensibly geared toward women, according to Jane Junn, a political science professor at the University of Southern California. “When he talked about suburban housewives, I think the message was as much to men as it was to women,” Junn said. “It was a shoutout to their masculinity.”

One reason why white suburban men might be more receptive to Trump’s racially coded appeals and callouts to traditional gender roles is that white suburban men tend to score higher than white suburban women on questions of racial resentment and hostile sexism, even among Democrats.³The one exception to this, as the chart below shows, is among white suburban Republicans. In this case, men’s and women’s racial resentment scores are basically the same, which is somewhat expected as partisanship is a big driver of issues like racial discrimination and sexism.

However, white suburban Republican women were less likely to score high on the question we used to measure gender resentment, about whether women who complain of harassment often cause more problems than they solve. This signals that, compared with white men, they may be less receptive to Trump’s rhetoric concerning women this time around. And that could be a big problem for Trump since sexist attitudes strongly correlated with support for him in 2016.

The same is true of some of Trump’s core campaign issues, like immigration, which don’t seem to resonate as much with white suburban Republican women as with white suburban Republican men. Of the five issues we looked at, white Republican women in the suburbs were far less hard-line than their male counterparts. On some issues, like support for building a wall along the southern U.S. border with Mexico, there wasn’t much difference, but on the question of separating a child if their parents could be prosecuted for entering the U.S. illegally, the gap in support was huge: Just 25 percent of white suburban Republican women supported that policy compared with 46 percent of white suburban Republican men. There was also a sizable gap on support for the deportation of all undocumented immigrants.

White suburban Republicans are divided on immigration

Share of white suburban Republican likely voters who said they support the following immigration policies, by gender

Policy	Men	Women
The border wall	75%	72%
Child separation	46	25
Path to citizenship for all undocumented immigrants	41	37
Deportation of all undocumented immigrants	64	52
Path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants brought to U.S. as children	60	64

While not directly related to the law-and-order rhetoric that Trump has been leaning into recently, immigration is a good example of why Trump’s presidency may have had a souring effect on white women, but not on white men. Claiming that immigration and crime are threats to the suburbs is a strategy that often works to remind white Republican women why they’re Republican, according to Jessica Trounstine, a political science professor at University of California, Merced, but this might not land with voters in the same way this year. That’s because the white women most likely to find Trump’s messages appealing are probably the ones who stuck with the Republicans in 2018. In other words, according to Junn of USC, the white women who abandoned Republicans in 2018 aren’t likely to be persuaded to come back based on this messaging.

White suburban men, however, don’t seem to be as badly shaken, and because their more traditionalist gender views make that retro vision of the suburbs more appealing, their support for the president might even be reinforced by his talk about suburban women. The trouble for Trump is that simply holding onto the votes of white suburban men isn’t enough — he needs to make up for lost ground among white suburban women, too. But with only two weeks left until Election Day, there might not be much he can do to bring them back.

What Full Democratic Control Of The White House And Congress Would Look Like

Tue, 20 Oct 2020 00:33:40 GMT

In this episode of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast the crew compares Joe Biden’s lead now with Hillary Clinton’s in 2016 and considers the agenda Democrats might pursue if they win the presidency, House and Senate in November.

Politics Podcast: Why Biden’s Lead Is Different

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 23:05:26 GMT

According to our forecast, Democrats have a 72 percent chance of winning a “trifecta,” controlling the presidency, House and Senate. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses what policies Democrats would prioritize in such a scenario and what divisions might emerge. They also compare Biden’s position in 2020 to Clinton’s in 2016 and explain why their circumstances are similar or different.

The Most Vulnerable Incumbent In The House Is A Democrat, But Republicans Are Defending More ...

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 21:07:43 GMT

In the face of a whirlwind presidential campaign and massive fundraising numbers coming out of marquee U.S. Senate contests, it’s easy to overlook what’s happening in the race for the U.S. House of Representatives. That might be because Democrats look like strong bets to hold onto power there. In fact, FiveThirtyEight’s forecast is most confident about the House, as the Deluxe version of our model gives Democrats a 95 in 100 shot at retaining control of the House, better than Joe Biden’s 88 in 100 chance of winning the presidency or the Democrats’ 74 in 100 chance of capturing the Senate.¹

However, even if Democrats do hold onto the House, that doesn’t mean they’ll retain every seat they control. In fact, there are a number of seats they might lose, including that of Minnesota Rep. Collin Peterson, the most vulnerable House incumbent seeking reelection in 2020. The Deluxe version of our House forecast only gives him about a 1 in 4 shot of winning in Minnesota’s 7th Congressional District against Republican Michelle Fischbach.

Peterson’s chances come down partly to the makeup of his rural district in western Minnesota. The 7th Congressional District is 26 points more Republican than the country as a whole, according to FiveThirtyEight’s partisan lean metric,² making it the most GOP-leaning House seat held by a Democrat. Seeking his 16th term in office, Peterson has won past elections as a Democrat thanks to his moderate views, his anti-abortion stance and his focus on agricultural issues. And as the chair of the House Agriculture Committee, he’s been very attentive to farming interests, especially the sugar beet industry, which is important to his constituency. Still, the rightward shift in his district in the last decade or so narrowed his margin of victory to about 4 points in 2018.

But beyond the seat’s increasingly deep red hue, Peterson is up against his most daunting challenger in years. Fischbach served as the state’s lieutenant governor and, before that, as president of the Minnesota Senate. And unlike recent Peterson opponents, Fischbach has nearly matched his fundraising. On top of that, Republican groups have spent $5 million on her behalf, while Peterson has received a little less than $4 million in outside support. It’s no wonder then that the expert handicappers at The Cook Political Report, Inside Elections and Sabato’s Crystal Ball all rate this race as a toss-up, which factors into the Deluxe version of our forecast.

However, despite Peterson’s trying circumstances, the good news for Democrats is that his vulnerability makes him a rare bird in 2020. Of the most endangered Democratic-held House seats, Democrats are clear underdogs in just Peterson’s district. In fact, as the table below shows, Democrats are slightly favored in most competitive seats they are defending (races where they have less than a 3 in 4 shot of winning). Just two other Democratic incumbents face toss-up races: Rep. Kendra Horn in Oklahoma’s 5th Congressional District and Rep. TJ Cox in California’s 21st Congressional District.

Endangered Democrats are still mostly favored

Democratic-held seats that Democrats have less than a 75 in 100 shot of winning in the Deluxe version of FiveThirtyEight’s House forecast, as of 4:30 p.m. on Oct. 19

District	Democratic Incumbent	Partisan Lean	Win chance	Rating
MN-07	Collin Peterson	R+26	24%	Likely R
OK-05	Kendra Horn	R+13	49	Toss-up
CA-21	TJ Cox	D+9	53	Toss-up
UT-04	Ben McAdams	R+19	63	Lean D
NM-02	Xochitl Torres Small	R+10	64	Lean D
SC-01	Joe Cunningham	R+18	64	Lean D
CA-48	Harly Rouda	R+8	66	Lean D
GA-06	Lucy McBath	R+15	68	Lean D
NY-22	Anthony Brindisi	R+12	69	Lean D
NV-04	Steven Horsford	D+2	70	Lean D
IA-02	OPEN	R+3	71	Lean D
NY-11	Max Rose	R+7	72	Lean D
NJ-07	Tom Malinowski	R+6	72	Lean D
CA-39	Gil Cisneros	R+1	73	Lean D
TX-07	Lizzie Fletcher	R+12	74	Lean D

Horn’s race is particularly close, as the district is still heavily red (13 points more Republican than the country as a whole) and she won in 2018 by just 1 point. Meanwhile, Cox is defending more Democratic-leaning turf, but he’s faced scrutiny over owing back taxes and is running against former Republican Rep. David Valadao, whom Cox edged out by a slim margin in 2018 (less than 1 point). And in California’s top-two primary system back in March, Cox trailed Valadao by 11 points, which could be a poor harbinger for the freshman incumbent.

These three seats, plus the others where Democrats are marginally favored, could be especially vulnerable if things go better for Trump than currently expected. Nevertheless, Democrats are helped out by the fact that they have incumbents running in all but one of these seats, and 12 are freshmen incumbents who have raised huge sums of money.

By comparison, Republicans find themselves defending far more vulnerable seats than Democrats despite controlling fewer seats overall. This is mostly thanks to redistricting, retirements and the Democratic-leaning electoral environment. As the table below shows, GOP candidates are underdogs in three Republican-held seats, roughly 50-50 in nine others and have less than a 3 in 4 shot of winning in 13 more.

Republicans hold more vulnerable seats than Democrats

Republican-held seats that Republicans have less than a 75 in 100 shot of winning in the Deluxe version of FiveThirtyEight’s House forecast, as of 4:30 p.m. on Oct. 19

District	Republican incumbent	Partisan Lean	Win chance	Rating
NC-02	OPEN	D+20	<1%	Safe D
NC-06	OPEN	D+19	<1	Safe D
TX-23	OPEN	R+4	27	Lean D
NY-02	OPEN	R+7	43	Toss-up
CA-25	Mike Garcia	R+2	45	Toss-up
VA-05	OPEN	R+7	48	Toss-up
IN-05	OPEN	R+15	54	Toss-up
NJ-02	Jeff Van Drew	R+5	53	Toss-up
PA-10	Scott Perry	R+11	55	Toss-up
GA-07	OPEN	R+18	56	Toss-up
NE-02	Don Bacon	R+5	58	Toss-up
TX-24	OPEN	R+17	60	Toss-up
CO-03	OPEN	R+15	60	Lean R
NY-24	John Katko	D+6	60	Lean R
TX-22	OPEN	R+19	64	Lean R
OH-01	Steve Chabot	R+8	65	Lean R
AZ-06	David Schweikert	R+16	66	Lean R
IL-13	Rodney Davis	R+8	67	Lean R
NC-08	Richard Hudson	R+8	67	Lean R
TX-21	Chip Roy	R+20	69	Lean R
MN-01	Jim Hagedorn	R+12	70	Lean R
MO-02	Ann Wagner	R+17	70	Lean R
MI-06	Fred Upton	R+3	72	Lean R
AR-02	French Hill	R+11	73	Lean R
MT-AL	OPEN	R+18	73	Lean R

Two North Carolina seats are almost surefire Democratic pickups due to court-ordered redistricting, while retiring Rep. Will Hurd’s seat in Texas’s 23rd Congressional District is leaning toward the Democrats, too. Retirements and primary losses have left five of the nine GOP toss-up seats open, which helps Democrats even if the incumbency advantage isn’t what it once was. Lastly, the 13 seats that lean toward Republicans are all seats that could conceivably flip toward Democrats if 2020 is another “blue wave” election.

Put it all together and you can see why the Democrats’ chances of holding onto the House look pretty good, even if they do have the most endangered incumbent up in 2020.

Do You Buy That … Republicans Should Be Worried About The Early Voting Turnout So Far?

Mon, 19 Oct 2020 13:56:21 GMT