fivethirtyeight--2020-07-30--What Trump Could Learn From NASCAR

What Trump Could Learn From NASCAR

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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ !
” ( 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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.
” [ Related : Confederate Statues Were Never Really About Preserving History ] 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 — @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 ) .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ 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.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ t buy that Trump ’ s fate is sealed , ‘ a lot could change in 100 days ’

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.”
[Related: Confederate Statues Were Never Really About Preserving History]
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.”
[Related: Our 2020 National Polling Averages]
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.
[Related: How Popular Is President Donald Trump?]
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.
[Related: A Tale Of Two Suburbs]
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.
Nate Silver doesn’t buy that Trump’s fate is sealed, ‘a lot could change in 100 days’


fivethirtyeight--2020-07-31--Some Republicans Have Gotten More Concerned About COVID-19

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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to 26 percent in May and June .
Gallup has tracked these numbers since at least 1992 .
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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ net approval rating of -16.1 points .
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 .

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.


fivethirtyeight--2020-07-31--We’re Hiring A Politics Reporter

We’re Hiring A Politics Reporter

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 , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ : 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 .
• Write a mix of short and longer features each month that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 .
• 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 working @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 .
And if you don ’ t check every box , that ’ s OK .
Please apply !
Send a cover letter and resume to sarah.frostenson @ fivethirtyeight.com .

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
n/a
And if you don’t check every box, that’s OK. Please apply!


fivethirtyeight--2020-07-30--Confidence Interval: Biden Will Choose Kamala Harris As His VP?

Welcome to another episode of Confidence Interval , where we make a persuasive case for a hot take … and @ @ @ @ @ really feel about the idea .
This time , elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich argues that @ @ @ @ @ Kamala Harris as his running mate .

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.


fivethirtyeight--2020-08-03--There Have Been 38 Statewide Elections During The Pandemic. Here’s How They Went.

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 primaries for president or state-level office .
And while those that have gone poorly have tended to grab the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , a majority of ballots were cast absentee .
In addition , every state but one made more use of absentee ballots than it did in the equivalent election in 2016 .
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 . )
Unsurprisingly , states that mailed every voter a ballot saw the highest share @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 .
( @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 .
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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 jurisdictions 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the 2020 general election will look like — and how each state will fare .

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 primaries 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. In addition, every state but one made more use of absentee ballots than it did in the equivalent election in 2016. 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 — *2020 data is preliminary. Data in Maine, New Jersey and New York was incomplete, so they have been omitted from the table. No 2016 data was available in Alabama, Colorado or Utah. In Georgia, there was no 2016 election to make an apples-to-apples comparison to. Figures do not necessarily reflect the percentage of ballots cast by mail. Most states do not distinguish between absentee ballots cast by mail and those cast in person at a local election office. In addition, Arizona and Nebraska do not distinguish between in-person early voting and absentee voting. Source: State election offices
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 — *2020 data is preliminary. Data in Maine, New Jersey and New York was incomplete, so they have been omitted from the table. In Georgia, there was no 2016 election to make an apples-to-apples comparison to. Sources: State election offices, United States Elections Project
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 jurisdictions 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 places 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.


fivethirtyeight--2020-08-03--Many Americans Are Convinced Crime Is Rising In The U.S. They’re Wrong.

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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , 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 .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ — 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , 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 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ 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 .

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.


fivethirtyeight--2020-08-03--Politics Podcast: Can Economic Data Predict Elections?

Last week economic data revealed the largest-ever quarterly contraction of the U.S. economy .
The second-quarter GDP shrunk by an @ @ @ @ @ percent .
In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast , the crew asks how @ @ @ @ @ predict the outcome of a presidential election .
They also discuss the potential consequences of @ @ @ @ @ attempts to cast doubt on election results .
You can listen to the episode by @ @ @ @ @ button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes , the ESPN @ @ @ @ @ platform .
If you are new to podcasts , learn how to listen .
The @ @ @ @ @ Mondays and Thursdays .
Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating @ @ @ @ @ Have a comment , question or suggestion for “ good polling vs. bad polling ” @ @ @ @ @ email , on Twitter or in the comments .

Last week economic data revealed the largest-ever quarterly contraction of the U.S. economy. The second-quarter GDP shrunk by an annual rate of nearly 33 percent. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew asks how well economic data alone can predict the outcome of a presidential election. They also discuss the potential consequences of President Trump’s repeated attempts to cast doubt on election results.
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.