fivethirtyeight--2020-11-10--What Happens If the Supreme Court Overturns Obamacare?

The Supreme Court mostly stayed out of the spotlight during the frenzied week after Election Day .
But on Tuesday , the justices are hearing a case that could upend the country ’ s health care system in the midst of a pandemic and leave tens of millions of people without health insurance .
In California v. Texas , a group of 18 Republican-led states and two individuals who live in Texas are challenging the constitutionality of a key component of the Affordable Care Act : the “ individual mandate , ” which required all Americans to obtain health insurance @ @ @ @ @ @ @ — that is , before the penalty was reduced to $ 0 by congressional Republicans in the 2017 tax bill .
The law ’ s challengers are backed by the Trump administration .
Of course , this isn ’ t the first time the 10-year-old law has been challenged .
It ’ s outlasted years of Republican-led efforts in Congress to repeal it .
And it ’ s twice survived scrutiny at the Supreme Court , in 2012 and 2015 ( although both times the law was upheld by relatively slim margins ) @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the law ’ s favor , but it ’ s going up against a more conservative slate of justices now , including Amy Coney Barrett , who has criticized Chief Justice John Roberts ’ s decisive vote to save the law in 2012 .
As a result , the fate of the ACA is more uncertain than it seemed just a few months ago .
If the Supreme Court guts the ACA , though , it could face a steep backlash in the court of public opinion .
The law wasn ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has steadily grown a lot more popular , with most Americans supporting key elements like protections for people with preexisting conditions .
What ’ s more , the entire health care system has reorganized itself around the ACA , which means that nearly everyone in the country could feel the impact if the law were struck down .
And with control of the Senate in doubt , there are serious questions about Congress ’ s ability to quickly preserve the most popular parts of the law — much less replace it with new @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all these reasons and more , many legal experts think that even with the Supreme Court ’ s new conservative tilt , the justices are likely to keep most , if not all , of the law in place .
But the stakes are high — for the court and the country — if a majority of justices do decide to strike the law down .
The most obvious consequence of overturning the ACA would be that more than 20 million people would be at serious risk of losing their health insurance , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the law to sell private plans , or through the expansion of Medicaid in many states .
But there would be myriad other effects , too .
Not only would protections for preexisting conditions be lost , but preventive care — like flu shots , a COVID-19 vaccine and mammography screenings for women over 40 — would no longer have to be covered .
Health care plans also wouldn ’ t be required to cover as many types of care .
And many young adults under age 26 could be booted off their @ @ @ @ @ @ @ question that is now before the court , though , is that a key piece of the law ’ s structure has changed since 2012 , when it was first upheld , in ways that call its constitutionality into question .
Back in 2012 , one of the key issues before the Supreme Court was the legality of the “ individual mandate ” — a component of the ACA that required all Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty .
In a narrow 5-4 vote , the justices ruled that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s taxing power .
But then , in 2017 , the Republican-controlled Congress tweaked that provision , setting the penalty for not obtaining health insurance to $ 0 .
Now , the GOP-led coalition that has brought the ACA back to the high court is contending that the mandate is unconstitutional since the “ tax ” attached to not having insurance is nonexistent — and that the mandate can ’ t be separated , or in legal parlance “ severed , ” from the rest of the law , meaning that the entire @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an ambitious legal argument , to say the least .
Separate from the question of the constitutionality of the individual mandate , striking down an entire law because of one defective part may not be an especially popular move among some of the conservative justices .
Just this summer , in a 5-4 decision involving the constitutionality of the structure of the Obama-era Consumer Financial Protection Bureau , Roberts summarized what he called the “ settled ” doctrine of severability , writing , “ [ W ] e try to limit the solution @ @ @ @ @ @ @ portions while leaving the remainder intact.
” The assumption , he explained , should be — unless there ’ s “ strong evidence ” to the contrary — that Congress didn ’ t intend for one faulty provision to doom the rest of the law .
In her confirmation hearings in October , too , Barrett seemed to suggest that the individual mandate — if unconstitutional — wouldn ’ t necessarily mean the rest of the ACA would be invalid .
One counterargument against the GOP-led coalition ’ s case is that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mandate .
A friend of the court brief submitted by a group of economists argues that the individual mandate isn ’ t crucial to the functioning of the ACA from an economic perspective since the law has remained fully operational even without a penalty for not buying insurance .
Some health insurers , meanwhile , have argued that invalidating the entire law along with the individual mandate would have scores of “ serious consequences in disparate areas wholly untethered to the mandate.
” There are other legal arguments against the case , too @ @ @ @ @ @ @ states even have the ability to bring the lawsuit to court in the first place .
But , so far , lower courts have sided with the law ’ s opponents in varying degrees .
A federal district court judge in Texas struck down the mandate and the rest of the law in late 2018 , and an appeals court partially upheld that decision a year later , ruling that the mandate was unconstitutional .
( However , beyond the ruling on the mandate , it wasn ’ t a clear victory for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ appeals court asked the lower court to reconsider the extent to which the mandate could be separated from the ACA . )
But let ’ s say a majority on the Supreme Court do rule that the entire ACA is unconstitutional .
The big question , from a political perspective then , is what Congress could do to deal with the chaos that would inevitably ensue .
The answer is complicated , as control of the Senate most likely hangs on two runoff elections in Georgia in January .
So if Democrats managed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ try to preempt the Supreme Court by changing the penalty to a nominal sum like $ 1 , or repealing the individual mandate entirely .
Or if the Supreme Court did strike down the law with Democrats in control of both houses of Congress and the White House , they could use the decision as an excuse to push for broader health care reform .
But if Republicans maintain control of the Senate , none of those fixes seem likely to happen , leaving the health care system in real jeopardy .
In @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the entire ACA is overturned by the time the current Supreme Court term ends in June seems somewhat unlikely , but understanding the risks of that scenario is important .
The ACA has grown increasingly popular since Obama left office , and even a majority ( 66 percent ) of Republicans want to maintain its protections on people with preexisting conditions , according to an October poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation .
As I ’ ve written before , the Supreme Court can face serious backlash if it gets too far outside @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , at least last term , Roberts seemed studiously determined to avoid .
So , as the justices hear oral arguments today , they may not be thinking only about the legal issues in the case — but about what might happen to the court as an institution if a popular health care law were upended by a handful of unelected judges in the middle of a pandemic .

The Supreme Court mostly stayed out of the spotlight during the frenzied week after Election Day. But on Tuesday, the justices are hearing a case that could upend the country’s health care system in the midst of a pandemic and leave tens of millions of people without health insurance.
In California v. Texas, a group of 18 Republican-led states and two individuals who live in Texas are challenging the constitutionality of a key component of the Affordable Care Act: the “individual mandate,” which required all Americans to obtain health insurance or be subject to a financial penalty — that is, before the penalty was reduced to $0 by congressional Republicans in the 2017 tax bill. The law’s challengers are backed by the Trump administration.
Of course, this isn’t the first time the 10-year-old law has been challenged. It’s outlasted years of Republican-led efforts in Congress to repeal it. And it’s twice survived scrutiny at the Supreme Court, in 2012 and 2015 (although both times the law was upheld by relatively slim margins). That might seem like a point in the law’s favor, but it’s going up against a more conservative slate of justices now, including Amy Coney Barrett, who has criticized Chief Justice John Roberts’s decisive vote to save the law in 2012. As a result, the fate of the ACA is more uncertain than it seemed just a few months ago.
If the Supreme Court guts the ACA, though, it could face a steep backlash in the court of public opinion. The law wasn’t always well liked, but it has steadily grown a lot more popular, with most Americans supporting key elements like protections for people with preexisting conditions. What’s more, the entire health care system has reorganized itself around the ACA, which means that nearly everyone in the country could feel the impact if the law were struck down. And with control of the Senate in doubt, there are serious questions about Congress’s ability to quickly preserve the most popular parts of the law — much less replace it with new, comprehensive health care reform.
For all these reasons and more, many legal experts think that even with the Supreme Court’s new conservative tilt, the justices are likely to keep most, if not all, of the law in place. But the stakes are high — for the court and the country — if a majority of justices do decide to strike the law down.
The most obvious consequence of overturning the ACA would be that more than 20 million people would be at serious risk of losing their health insurance, either through the marketplaces set up under the law to sell private plans, or through the expansion of Medicaid in many states. But there would be myriad other effects, too. Not only would protections for preexisting conditions be lost, but preventive care — like flu shots, a COVID-19 vaccine and mammography screenings for women over 40 — would no longer have to be covered. Health care plans also wouldn’t be required to cover as many types of care. And many young adults under age 26 could be booted off their parents’ health care plans.
A question that is now before the court, though, is that a key piece of the law’s structure has changed since 2012, when it was first upheld, in ways that call its constitutionality into question.
Back in 2012, one of the key issues before the Supreme Court was the legality of the “individual mandate” — a component of the ACA that required all Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty. In a narrow 5-4 vote, the justices ruled that the individual mandate was permissible under Congress’s taxing power. But then, in 2017, the Republican-controlled Congress tweaked that provision, setting the penalty for not obtaining health insurance to $0.
Now, the GOP-led coalition that has brought the ACA back to the high court is contending that the mandate is unconstitutional since the “tax” attached to not having insurance is nonexistent — and that the mandate can’t be separated, or in legal parlance “severed,” from the rest of the law, meaning that the entire ACA is now unconstitutional.
This is an ambitious legal argument, to say the least.
Separate from the question of the constitutionality of the individual mandate, striking down an entire law because of one defective part may not be an especially popular move among some of the conservative justices. Just this summer, in a 5-4 decision involving the constitutionality of the structure of the Obama-era Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Roberts summarized what he called the “settled” doctrine of severability, writing, “[W]e try to limit the solution to the problem, severing any problematic portions while leaving the remainder intact.” The assumption, he explained, should be — unless there’s “strong evidence” to the contrary — that Congress didn’t intend for one faulty provision to doom the rest of the law. In her confirmation hearings in October, too, Barrett seemed to suggest that the individual mandate — if unconstitutional — wouldn’t necessarily mean the rest of the ACA would be invalid.
One counterargument against the GOP-led coalition’s case is that the health care markets can operate without the mandate. A friend of the court brief submitted by a group of economists argues that the individual mandate isn’t crucial to the functioning of the ACA from an economic perspective since the law has remained fully operational even without a penalty for not buying insurance. Some health insurers, meanwhile, have argued that invalidating the entire law along with the individual mandate would have scores of “serious consequences in disparate areas wholly untethered to the mandate.”
There are other legal arguments against the case, too — including the question of whether these states even have the ability to bring the lawsuit to court in the first place. But, so far, lower courts have sided with the law’s opponents in varying degrees. A federal district court judge in Texas struck down the mandate and the rest of the law in late 2018, and an appeals court partially upheld that decision a year later, ruling that the mandate was unconstitutional. (However, beyond the ruling on the mandate, it wasn’t a clear victory for the law’s challengers. The appeals court asked the lower court to reconsider the extent to which the mandate could be separated from the ACA.)
But let’s say a majority on the Supreme Court do rule that the entire ACA is unconstitutional. The big question, from a political perspective then, is what Congress could do to deal with the chaos that would inevitably ensue. The answer is complicated, as control of the Senate most likely hangs on two runoff elections in Georgia in January. So if Democrats managed to win the Senate, they could try to preempt the Supreme Court by changing the penalty to a nominal sum like $1, or repealing the individual mandate entirely. Or if the Supreme Court did strike down the law with Democrats in control of both houses of Congress and the White House, they could use the decision as an excuse to push for broader health care reform. But if Republicans maintain control of the Senate, none of those fixes seem likely to happen, leaving the health care system in real jeopardy.
In other words, a world in which the entire ACA is overturned by the time the current Supreme Court term ends in June seems somewhat unlikely, but understanding the risks of that scenario is important. The ACA has grown increasingly popular since Obama left office, and even a majority (66 percent) of Republicans want to maintain its protections on people with preexisting conditions, according to an October poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation. As I’ve written before, the Supreme Court can face serious backlash if it gets too far outside the bounds of public opinion — which, at least last term, Roberts seemed studiously determined to avoid.
So, as the justices hear oral arguments today, they may not be thinking only about the legal issues in the case — but about what might happen to the court as an institution if a popular health care law were upended by a handful of unelected judges in the middle of a pandemic.


fivethirtyeight--2020-11-10--Pfizer’s Vaccine Announcement Was Always Going To Be Political

There ’ s no good time to release new information about a ground-breaking vaccine for a global pandemic in the middle of a hotly contested election .
“ It ’ s the Comey problem , right ?
” said Susan Ellenberg , professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania , laughing ruefully .
Whether the news breaks before people vote or after , it ’ s doomed to be politicized .
On Monday , Pfizer announced that the vaccine it is working on with German biotechnology company BioNTech could prevent more than 90 percent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ inherently political news .
But it has certainly become that , with the president ’ s son floating conspiracy theories and President Trump and Pfizer publicly disagreeing over how big a role the administration played in this development .
And bad timing isn ’ t the only trust problem here .
We are , after all , talking about extremely promising news from a big pharmaceutical company , in the form of a press release — no data to review , no details to double check .
If you ’ re looking at @ @ @ @ @ @ @ raised eyebrow , well … you ’ re not alone .
But the good news is that the Pfizer announcement is actually good news , experts told me .
The study is still ongoing , but at this point , there are 94 trial volunteers who have contracted COVID-19 at least seven days after receiving the second of two doses of the vaccine .
We don ’ t know how many participants in the 43,538-person study had reached that point when this evaluation was done .
Nor do we know how many of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to the placebo , although experts said we can infer it ’ s less than 10 if the vaccine efficacy really is greater than 90 percent .
That level of efficacy may not stay the same , but it ’ s a very good sign for a vaccine that would have been accepted by the Food and Drug Administration with just a 50 percent efficacy rate .
“ There ’ s efficacy .
There was no guarantee for that .
Now we know there is a vaccine that is going to work , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ vice president of Scripps Research , a nonprofit biomedical research institute .
He ’ s kept a critical eye on the research and development of COVID-19 vaccines , pressuring pharmaceutical companies for more transparency in their process and criticizing the president ’ s past attempts to claim a vaccine would be released to the public before the election .
But he ’ s cautiously hopeful now — with the caveat that there ’ s still a lot of important details we don ’ t yet know .
Topol is particularly interested in knowing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ cases .
There are no details yet on that , and that matters , Topol said , because what we really want is a vaccine that prevents the worst cases of this disease .
A vaccine that was statistically effective , but primarily only prevented mild cases , would be less useful .
Ellenberg , meanwhile , wants to know more about the vaccine ’ s safety data , because while this trial will likely be long enough to catch the most common side effects , most vaccines are tested over the course @ @ @ @ @ @ @ length of time that allows researchers to spot rare but serious complications that wouldn ’ t necessarily turn up in a shorter study .
And Dr. Paul Offit , director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children ’ s Hospital of Philadelphia , wants to know more about the demographics of the people who contracted the virus , especially their ages .
It ’ s not out of the question that you could end up with a vaccine that was very effective for healthy young people , but not so much for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ needs the protection .
We don ’ t know any of these things because what ’ s been released is not scientific data .
It is a preliminary efficacy check conducted by an independent review board outside of Pfizer itself .
Even Pfizer scientists don ’ t know the answers to the questions experts outlined to me — at least not yet — because the trial is ongoing and still blinded to them so that the knowledge of who is taking the placebo won ’ t affect final results .
And that independent @ @ @ @ @ @ @ outside perspectives are something pharmaceutical industry critics like Topol like to see , because it ’ s another layer of transparency that ensures we ’ re not just taking Pfizer ’ s word .
They ’ re also a normal part of any trial of a medicine for a serious disease , Ellenberg told me .
You don ’ t want to run a trial for years if it ’ s already clear the medication is overwhelmingly effective and could already be saving lives .
But at the same time , you don @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the lid on the pot and stop the trial when it looks good to you — that would tend to bias you towards stopping whenever things look statistically good , even if that success is a mirage that would have disappeared in a few weeks .
“ So you have these very well constructed statistical plans that say when you get to this particular point and you have this many positive findings , you can conclude it ’ s very unlikely the data are going to change , ” Ellenberg said .
Unfortunately @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , in this case , a planned external review was on a collision course with the surge in coronavirus cases that hit the nation over the last month .
Between those two things , there was almost no way to stop the timing from being very awkward .
Pfizer was originally supposed to get a peek at the efficacy after 32 volunteers had contracted the disease .
But somewhere along the line , the company and the FDA decided together to wait longer , out of concerns that positive results at 32 cases @ @ @ @ @ @ @ approval too soon .
The early look was then supposed to happen after the trial hit 62 cases .
But this is where the pandemic itself seems to have collided with the research .
We don ’ t know exactly what was going on between the 62nd case and the 94th — something Topol , for one , definitely wants more information about .
In an email , representatives from Pfizer told FiveThirtyEight there were “ absolutely no political considerations involved in this process.
” What seems to have happened is that the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ across the United States led to an equally sudden uptick in cases within the study , Offit said .
“ I think probably by the time they submitted all the data , the number had changed , ” he told me .
One reasonable choice and one pandemic surge later , you have Pfizer saying it received the preliminary efficacy rates from the independent reviewers on the Sunday after media networks projected Joe Biden as the president-elect .
Had they decided to release at 32 cases , we probably would have seen this @ @ @ @ @ @ @ pandemic been less … pandemic-y … we might not have hit 62 cases ( let alone 94 ) until late November or December .
“ I don ’ t think there was a political angle , ” Offit said .
And while Pfizer certainly could have sat on the information and left a bigger gap between the election and the announcement , that would have been , in its own way , a pretty questionable decision .
“ They could be accused of withholding data , or that the close investors know something @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Ellenberg said .
So the timing of this has not been perfect .
And the information we know is splotchy .
But it is , even so , a reason to hope .
The current surge in transmission will likely mean the study hits its preplanned end point of 164 cases within the next month , experts predicted .
The full data could be with us very soon .
And that is something the Trump administration should be proud of , Offit said .
While the Pfizer research and development wasn ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ administration ’ s Operation Warp Speed program probably provided competition that sped up Pfizer ’ s work , whether or not the first vaccine out of the gate was directly created by it .
“ Operation Warp Speed has been a phenomenal scientific enterprise that they should be proud of , ” he told me .
“ What they shouldn ’ t be proud of is dissing hygienic measures , but this was good work .
”

There’s no good time to release new information about a ground-breaking vaccine for a global pandemic in the middle of a hotly contested election. “It’s the Comey problem, right?” said Susan Ellenberg, professor of biostatistics and epidemiology at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania, laughing ruefully. Whether the news breaks before people vote or after, it’s doomed to be politicized.
On Monday, Pfizer announced that the vaccine it is working on with German biotechnology company BioNTech could prevent more than 90 percent of infections. That should not be inherently political news. But it has certainly become that, with the president’s son floating conspiracy theories and President Trump and Pfizer publicly disagreeing over how big a role the administration played in this development.
And bad timing isn’t the only trust problem here. We are, after all, talking about extremely promising news from a big pharmaceutical company, in the form of a press release — no data to review, no details to double check. If you’re looking at this announcement with a bit of a raised eyebrow, well … you’re not alone.
But the good news is that the Pfizer announcement is actually good news, experts told me. The study is still ongoing, but at this point, there are 94 trial volunteers who have contracted COVID-19 at least seven days after receiving the second of two doses of the vaccine. We don’t know how many participants in the 43,538-person study had reached that point when this evaluation was done. Nor do we know how many of those 94 got the vaccine as opposed to the placebo, although experts said we can infer it’s less than 10 if the vaccine efficacy really is greater than 90 percent. That level of efficacy may not stay the same, but it’s a very good sign for a vaccine that would have been accepted by the Food and Drug Administration with just a 50 percent efficacy rate.
“There’s efficacy. There was no guarantee for that. Now we know there is a vaccine that is going to work,” said Dr. Eric Topol, executive vice president of Scripps Research, a nonprofit biomedical research institute. He’s kept a critical eye on the research and development of COVID-19 vaccines, pressuring pharmaceutical companies for more transparency in their process and criticizing the president’s past attempts to claim a vaccine would be released to the public before the election. But he’s cautiously hopeful now — with the caveat that there’s still a lot of important details we don’t yet know.
Topol is particularly interested in knowing more about the severity of those 94 cases. There are no details yet on that, and that matters, Topol said, because what we really want is a vaccine that prevents the worst cases of this disease. A vaccine that was statistically effective, but primarily only prevented mild cases, would be less useful.
Ellenberg, meanwhile, wants to know more about the vaccine’s safety data, because while this trial will likely be long enough to catch the most common side effects, most vaccines are tested over the course of years, not months — a length of time that allows researchers to spot rare but serious complications that wouldn’t necessarily turn up in a shorter study.
And Dr. Paul Offit, director of the Vaccine Education Center at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, wants to know more about the demographics of the people who contracted the virus, especially their ages. It’s not out of the question that you could end up with a vaccine that was very effective for healthy young people, but not so much for the elderly, high-risk population that really needs the protection.
We don’t know any of these things because what’s been released is not scientific data. It is a preliminary efficacy check conducted by an independent review board outside of Pfizer itself. Even Pfizer scientists don’t know the answers to the questions experts outlined to me — at least not yet — because the trial is ongoing and still blinded to them so that the knowledge of who is taking the placebo won’t affect final results.
And that independent review is a good thing. These outside perspectives are something pharmaceutical industry critics like Topol like to see, because it’s another layer of transparency that ensures we’re not just taking Pfizer’s word. They’re also a normal part of any trial of a medicine for a serious disease, Ellenberg told me. You don’t want to run a trial for years if it’s already clear the medication is overwhelmingly effective and could already be saving lives. But at the same time, you don’t want to just randomly lift the lid on the pot and stop the trial when it looks good to you — that would tend to bias you towards stopping whenever things look statistically good, even if that success is a mirage that would have disappeared in a few weeks.
“So you have these very well constructed statistical plans that say when you get to this particular point and you have this many positive findings, you can conclude it’s very unlikely the data are going to change,” Ellenberg said.
Unfortunately, she and other experts told me, in this case, a planned external review was on a collision course with the surge in coronavirus cases that hit the nation over the last month. Between those two things, there was almost no way to stop the timing from being very awkward.
Pfizer was originally supposed to get a peek at the efficacy after 32 volunteers had contracted the disease. But somewhere along the line, the company and the FDA decided together to wait longer, out of concerns that positive results at 32 cases could lead the company to apply for approval too soon. The early look was then supposed to happen after the trial hit 62 cases. But this is where the pandemic itself seems to have collided with the research.
We don’t know exactly what was going on between the 62nd case and the 94th — something Topol, for one, definitely wants more information about. In an email, representatives from Pfizer told FiveThirtyEight there were “absolutely no political considerations involved in this process.” What seems to have happened is that the sudden increase in the spread of coronavirus across the United States led to an equally sudden uptick in cases within the study, Offit said. “I think probably by the time they submitted all the data, the number had changed,” he told me.
One reasonable choice and one pandemic surge later, you have Pfizer saying it received the preliminary efficacy rates from the independent reviewers on the Sunday after media networks projected Joe Biden as the president-elect. Had they decided to release at 32 cases, we probably would have seen this announcement back in October. Had the pandemic been less … pandemic-y … we might not have hit 62 cases (let alone 94) until late November or December. “I don’t think there was a political angle,” Offit said.
And while Pfizer certainly could have sat on the information and left a bigger gap between the election and the announcement, that would have been, in its own way, a pretty questionable decision. “They could be accused of withholding data, or that the close investors know something the public doesn’t,” Ellenberg said.
So the timing of this has not been perfect. And the information we know is splotchy. But it is, even so, a reason to hope. The current surge in transmission will likely mean the study hits its preplanned end point of 164 cases within the next month, experts predicted. The full data could be with us very soon.
And that is something the Trump administration should be proud of, Offit said. While the Pfizer research and development wasn’t funded by the U.S. government, the administration’s Operation Warp Speed program probably provided competition that sped up Pfizer’s work, whether or not the first vaccine out of the gate was directly created by it. “Operation Warp Speed has been a phenomenal scientific enterprise that they should be proud of,” he told me. “What they shouldn’t be proud of is dissing hygienic measures, but this was good work.”
Good work, even if bad timing.


fivethirtyeight--2020-11-11--Georgia’s Runoffs Will Determine Control Of The Senate. Here’s What We Know So Far.

Election Day 2020 has come and gone , and we still don ’ t know which party will control the Senate next year .
As of Tuesday at 10 p.m. Eastern , it looks as though Democrats will have 48 seats in the next Senate , while Republicans will have 50 .
( We don ’ t yet know who won Alaska , but at this point , it will be very difficult for Democrats to make up their current vote deficit there . )
So that leaves the two Senate seats from Georgia to determine control of the chamber @ @ @ @ @ @ @ two months from now .
So how did one state with fewer than five million voters throw the entire race for control of the Senate into overtime ?
Georgia has an unusual requirement that candidates must receive a majority of the vote to win an election , and if no one does so , the top two finishers advance to a runoff .
We were expecting this to happen in Georgia ’ s special election for Senate , in which 20 candidates were on the ballot .
( In that race , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , who has received 32.9 percent of the vote so far , and Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler , who has received 25.9 percent . )
But it also happened in Georgia ’ s regularly scheduled Senate election : Returns currently show Republican Sen. David Perdue at 49.7 percent of the vote and Democrat Jon Ossoff at 48.0 percent .
( Libertarian Shane Hazel took the remaining 2.3 percent . )
So now both races will be decided in a runoff election on Jan. 5 .
If Democrats win both seats , they would @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Jan. 20 , as Vice President-elect Kamala Harris would have the power to break ties in the chamber .
But just how likely is a double Democratic victory ?
Until recently , it would have looked like a pipe dream , as Georgia went into 2020 with a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean of R+13 .
But the state may be undergoing a transformation .
Democrats came within 1 or 2 percentage points of winning more votes than Republicans in the first round of both elections .
( In the special election , if you @ @ @ @ @ @ @ shares by party , Republicans got 49.4 percent of the votes cast , while Democrats got 48.4 percent . )
And at the top of the ticket , Joe Biden appears to have become the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry Georgia since 1992 .
What ’ s more , pollsters — expecting a runoff in the special election — have been asking voters their preference in a Warnock-Loeffler runoff for months , and Warnock has consistently led in those polls .
( We haven ’ t yet seen any polling of the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s true that the polls were significantly off in some states this election , they were actually quite accurate in Georgia .
But as promising as those numbers look for Democrats , there are probably more reasons for them to be pessimistic .
First , most of those rosy polls for Warnock were measuring support among the universe of likely voters for the general election , not the runoff .
( Monmouth was an exception , however ; it still found Warnock ahead , by 6 points , among likely runoff voters @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are an accurate snapshot of the runoff right now , a lot can change in two months .
For example , supporters of Rep. Doug Collins , Loeffler ’ s main Republican rival in the first round , may not have told pollsters they would support Loeffler amid the fall ’ s incredibly bitter campaign , but they probably will come around to her now that she is the only Republican candidate on the ballot .
Remember , partisanship is a powerful indicator of vote choice .
Another reason Democrats might do worse @ @ @ @ @ @ @ an off-cycle election that will no longer share the ballot with the presidential race .
Now that Biden is the president-elect , many Democratic voters may feel that their mission has been accomplished and not bother to vote in the runoff .
This is exactly what happened in previous Georgia runoffs — whether for Senate or other statewide offices .
Since the late 1960s , the state has seen eight runoffs between a Democrat and a Republican for statewide office , and as you can see in the table below , in seven @ @ @ @ @ @ @ share margins improved , sometimes substantially so , as turnout fell sharply from the general election vote in November .
So to win one or both Senate runoffs , Democrats will have to do something unusual : improve their vote margin in the runoff .
That ’ s happened only once , in a low-key 1998 race for a seat on the Georgia Public Service Commission .
Otherwise , the GOP advantage after the general election has always grown , notably in high-profile races for Senate and secretary of state .
Take the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ similarities with the 2020 election .
Then , Democrat Bill Clinton narrowly carried the state in the presidential race ( much like Biden appears to have done ) ; the Georgia Senate race was also extremely close and moved into runoff territory .
In that race , incumbent Democratic Sen. Wyche Fowler fell just short of a majority in the general , winning 49 percent to Republican Paul Coverdell ’ s 48 percent .
But the runoff ( which was three weeks after Election Day that year ) saw enough of a shift @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Coverdell won by about 1 point .
And in 2008 , the Senate runoff saw an even larger swing toward Republicans , as incumbent Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss led Democrat Jim Martin by 3 points in the general election but won the runoff by a whopping 15 points .
Why have Republicans had such an edge in Georgia runoffs ?
Beyond the state ’ s overall Republican lean , lower turnout and the makeup of the runoff electorate have been major pluses for Republicans .
Runoff turnout has always fallen quite a bit @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the only runoff was for a less notable office like a seat on the Georgia Public Service Commission .
But even in the two Senate runoffs , both of which took place in presidential years , turnout fell more than 40 percent from the general election .
And what this has meant practically is that the runoff electorate in Georgia is more Republican-leaning .
Take Black voter turnout , which leans heavily Democratic .
It has been disproportionately lower in runoffs , and is actually one reason why Georgia ’ s majority requirement @ @ @ @ @ @ @ argue that the system makes it harder for nonwhite candidates to win , and there ’ s been litigation over its use in Georgia ’ s primaries .
Additionally , more affluent voters , who are already more likely to vote , are more likely to be white , and white voters in Georgia and elsewhere in the South are still pretty Republican-leaning , even though white college-educated voters have trended Democratic nationally .
That said , Georgia has never seen a runoff like this one .
Not only are two high-profile races @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the entire Senate is at stake .
For the next eight weeks , Georgia will be the center of the political universe ; expect both parties to spend tens of millions of dollars and dispatch big-name surrogates to get out the vote .
That could minimize the drop-off in turnout , which in turn could minimize the drop-off in Democratic support .
There ’ s also never been a Black candidate in a Senate runoff , either , which could help keep turnout high among a key part of the Democratic base .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ t know whether the usual playbook for Georgia runoffs still applies .
Until we get more data ( and we will be releasing a polling average for both runoffs ) , it ’ s best to treat both a Democratic or Republican victory as a serious possibility .
Who knows — maybe even the parties will win one seat each !

Election Day 2020 has come and gone, and we still don’t know which party will control the Senate next year. As of Tuesday at 10 p.m. Eastern, it looks as though Democrats will have 48 seats in the next Senate, while Republicans will have 50. (We don’t yet know who won Alaska, but at this point, it will be very difficult for Democrats to make up their current vote deficit there.) So that leaves the two Senate seats from Georgia to determine control of the chamber in a rare double-barreled runoff election nearly two months from now.
Georgia Senate runoffs are in full swing | FiveThirtyEight
So how did one state with fewer than five million voters throw the entire race for control of the Senate into overtime? Georgia has an unusual requirement that candidates must receive a majority of the vote to win an election, and if no one does so, the top two finishers advance to a runoff. We were expecting this to happen in Georgia’s special election for Senate, in which 20 candidates were on the ballot. (In that race, the top two vote-getters were Democrat Raphael Warnock, who has received 32.9 percent of the vote so far, and Republican Sen. Kelly Loeffler, who has received 25.9 percent.) But it also happened in Georgia’s regularly scheduled Senate election: Returns currently show Republican Sen. David Perdue at 49.7 percent of the vote and Democrat Jon Ossoff at 48.0 percent. (Libertarian Shane Hazel took the remaining 2.3 percent.)
So now both races will be decided in a runoff election on Jan. 5.
If Democrats win both seats, they would take control of the Senate starting on Jan. 20, as Vice President-elect Kamala Harris would have the power to break ties in the chamber. But just how likely is a double Democratic victory? Until recently, it would have looked like a pipe dream, as Georgia went into 2020 with a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean of R+13. But the state may be undergoing a transformation. Democrats came within 1 or 2 percentage points of winning more votes than Republicans in the first round of both elections. (In the special election, if you add up all the candidates’ vote shares by party, Republicans got 49.4 percent of the votes cast, while Democrats got 48.4 percent.) And at the top of the ticket, Joe Biden appears to have become the first Democratic presidential candidate to carry Georgia since 1992.
[Related: Democrats Needed A Big Blue Wave To Win The Senate, And It Looks Like They Didn’t Get It]
What’s more, pollsters — expecting a runoff in the special election — have been asking voters their preference in a Warnock-Loeffler runoff for months, and Warnock has consistently led in those polls. (We haven’t yet seen any polling of the Perdue-Ossoff runoff.) And while it’s true that the polls were significantly off in some states this election, they were actually quite accurate in Georgia.
In one of Georgia’s runoff races, Democrats lead Polls of Georgia’s special Senate election runoff conducted since Oct. 1 Dates Pollster Warnock Loeffler Margin Oct. 23-27 Monmouth University 51% 45% D+6 Oct. 23-26 Civiqs/Daily Kos 51 37 D+14 Oct. 17-19 Emerson College 47 42 D+5 Oct. 13-19 Siena College/NYT Upshot 45 41 D+4 Oct. 8-12 Quinnipiac University 52 44 D+8 Oct. 8-11 Data for Progress/Indivisible* 44 40 D+4 *Internal Democratic poll. Source: Polls
But as promising as those numbers look for Democrats, there are probably more reasons for them to be pessimistic. First, most of those rosy polls for Warnock were measuring support among the universe of likely voters for the general election, not the runoff. (Monmouth was an exception, however; it still found Warnock ahead, by 6 points, among likely runoff voters.) But even if these polls are an accurate snapshot of the runoff right now, a lot can change in two months. For example, supporters of Rep. Doug Collins, Loeffler’s main Republican rival in the first round, may not have told pollsters they would support Loeffler amid the fall’s incredibly bitter campaign, but they probably will come around to her now that she is the only Republican candidate on the ballot. Remember, partisanship is a powerful indicator of vote choice.
Another reason Democrats might do worse in the runoff: It’s an off-cycle election that will no longer share the ballot with the presidential race. Now that Biden is the president-elect, many Democratic voters may feel that their mission has been accomplished and not bother to vote in the runoff. This is exactly what happened in previous Georgia runoffs — whether for Senate or other statewide offices. Since the late 1960s, the state has seen eight runoffs between a Democrat and a Republican for statewide office, and as you can see in the table below, in seven of the eight runoffs, Republican vote share margins improved, sometimes substantially so, as turnout fell sharply from the general election vote in November.
The GOP usually gains ground in Georgia runoffs Shift in vote margin and percentage change in turnout from the general election to the runoff for statewide races in Georgia Margin Change Year Office General Runoff Turnout Margin 1992 U.S. Senate D+1.6 R+1.3 -44% R+2.9 1992 Public Service Commissioner R+0.7 R+13.6 -43 R+12.9 1998 Public Service Commissioner* D+15.8 D+31.4 -91 D+15.6 2006 Public Service Commissioner D+2.6 R+4.4 -89 R+7.0 2008 U.S. Senate R+2.9 R+14.9 -43 R+12.0 2008 Public Service Commissioner D+0.6 R+13.0 -44 R+13.7 2018 Secretary of State R+0.4 R+3.8 -62 R+3.4 2018 Public Service Commissioner R+2.1 R+3.5 -62 R+1.4 *Special election Georgia rules require a candidate to win a majority of the vote in general elections or special elections; otherwise, there is a runoff between the top-two finishers in the initial vote. If a special election took place on a regular general election date, it is included. In these cases, the Democratic and Republican totals are based on all candidates from the party running. Source: Georgia Secretary of State
So to win one or both Senate runoffs, Democrats will have to do something unusual: improve their vote margin in the runoff. That’s happened only once, in a low-key 1998 race for a seat on the Georgia Public Service Commission. Otherwise, the GOP advantage after the general election has always grown, notably in high-profile races for Senate and secretary of state.
Take the 1992 general election, which shares some similarities with the 2020 election. Then, Democrat Bill Clinton narrowly carried the state in the presidential race (much like Biden appears to have done); the Georgia Senate race was also extremely close and moved into runoff territory. In that race, incumbent Democratic Sen. Wyche Fowler fell just short of a majority in the general, winning 49 percent to Republican Paul Coverdell’s 48 percent. But the runoff (which was three weeks after Election Day that year) saw enough of a shift in the GOP’s direction that Coverdell won by about 1 point. And in 2008, the Senate runoff saw an even larger swing toward Republicans, as incumbent Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss led Democrat Jim Martin by 3 points in the general election but won the runoff by a whopping 15 points.
[Related: Democrats Aren’t Sure Why They Didn’t Do Better In The House And Senate. It Might Not Be Clear For Weeks.]
Why have Republicans had such an edge in Georgia runoffs? Beyond the state’s overall Republican lean, lower turnout and the makeup of the runoff electorate have been major pluses for Republicans. Runoff turnout has always fallen quite a bit from the general election, especially if the only runoff was for a less notable office like a seat on the Georgia Public Service Commission.
But even in the two Senate runoffs, both of which took place in presidential years, turnout fell more than 40 percent from the general election. And what this has meant practically is that the runoff electorate in Georgia is more Republican-leaning. Take Black voter turnout, which leans heavily Democratic. It has been disproportionately lower in runoffs, and is actually one reason why Georgia’s majority requirement is controversial: Opponents of the provision argue that the system makes it harder for nonwhite candidates to win, and there’s been litigation over its use in Georgia’s primaries. Additionally, more affluent voters, who are already more likely to vote, are more likely to be white, and white voters in Georgia and elsewhere in the South are still pretty Republican-leaning, even though white college-educated voters have trended Democratic nationally.
That said, Georgia has never seen a runoff like this one. Not only are two high-profile races on the ballot, but control of the entire Senate is at stake. For the next eight weeks, Georgia will be the center of the political universe; expect both parties to spend tens of millions of dollars and dispatch big-name surrogates to get out the vote. That could minimize the drop-off in turnout, which in turn could minimize the drop-off in Democratic support. There’s also never been a Black candidate in a Senate runoff, either, which could help keep turnout high among a key part of the Democratic base.
In short, we just don’t know whether the usual playbook for Georgia runoffs still applies. Until we get more data (and we will be releasing a polling average for both runoffs), it’s best to treat both a Democratic or Republican victory as a serious possibility. Who knows — maybe even the parties will win one seat each!
Where the rest of the 2020 races stand | FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast


fivethirtyeight--2020-11-11--The Polls Weren’t Great. But That’s Pretty Normal.

I ’ m not a pollster , although I ’ m often misidentified as one on TV .
I wanted to get that out of the way because while , in practice , our lives probably get easier in a year where the polls are spot-on , FiveThirtyEight ’ s mission is really to take the polls as they are — for better or worse — and understand the sources of error and uncertainty behind them .
This is true for both the probabilistic forecasts that we build and the reporting that we do .
We ’ re also interested @ @ @ @ @ @ @ media and the public and how that sometimes conflicts with the way we think polls should be viewed .
From that vantage point , the story of how polls did in 2020 is complicated — more complicated in some ways than in 2016 , which was also complicated .
And since the election was called for Joe Biden on Saturday , I ’ ve had lots of somewhat conflicting thoughts pinging around in my head .
Here are a few of them : • On the one hand , I don ’ t @ @ @ @ @ @ @ year was definitely a little weird , given that the vote share margins were often fairly far off from the polls ( including in some high-profile examples such as Wisconsin and Florida ) .
But at the same time , a high percentage of states ( likely 48 out of 50 ) were “ called ” correctly , as was the overall Electoral College and popular vote winner ( Biden ) .
And that ’ s usually how polls are judged : Did they identify the right winner ?
• On the other @ @ @ @ @ @ @ came to the actual vote share margins is a better way to judge polls , so I ’ m glad that people are doing that .
• And yet , the margins by which the polls missed — underestimating President Trump by what will likely end up being 3 to 4 percentage points in national and swing state polls — is actually pretty normal by historical standards .
• However , there are nevertheless reasons to be concerned about the polls going forward , especially if it ’ s hard to get a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ phone .
• Finally , there ’ s a slightly meta point here : Voters and the media need to recalibrate their expectations around polls — not necessarily because anything ’ s changed , but because those expectations demanded an unrealistic level of precision — while simultaneously resisting the urge to “ throw all the polls out.
” In this story , I ’ m going to tackle a little bit of everything from this list apart from No .
4 .
The question of why the polls were off — and what @ @ @ @ @ @ @ — is a vital one , but it ’ s something that deserves a longer and fuller analysis , which we ’ ll do in the upcoming days and weeks .
I ’ m also going to set aside the question of how probabilistic forecasts like FiveThirtyEight ’ s did .
If you want a quick answer , we think our forecasts did very well .
( Biden was a reasonably heavy favorite in our forecast precisely because he could withstand a normal-sized or slightly larger polling error and still come out narrowly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ much what happened . )
Our forecasts should also do well by the more rigorous methods we use to evaluate them .
But that ’ s a different question than how the polls themselves performed .
First , some good news for the polls : Assuming current results hold , the only states where presidential polling averages got the winners wrong will be Florida , North Carolina and the 2nd Congressional District in Maine .
And because Biden ’ s leads in those states were narrow to begin with , they weren ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ also two mild upsets in the Senate , where Maine ’ s Susan Collins and North Carolina ’ s Thom Tillis both won reelection despite narrowly trailing in polls . )
I ’ m starting with this point because “ calling ” the outcome right is usually the way that polls are evaluated , even if it isn ’ t the best way to evaluate their actual performance .
Polls were pilloried for “ missing ” Brexit , for instance , even though the position to remain in the European Union had , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the polling average , and the position to leave won by a narrow margin ( 52 percent leave , 48 percent remain ) .
So while I ’ m not a pollster , I ’ m going to stick up for them on this point .
If you want to criticize polls when they got the outcomes wrong even though the results were close ( within the margin of error ) — not our preference , but how the rest of the media usually covers polls — then , to be consistent , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ identify the right winners , even if the margins are fairly far off .
The better way to evaluate polls is how close they come on vote margins , and this year , polling margins will be fairly far off in several swing states as well as in national polls .
As of this writing , Biden leads by 3.4 percentage points in the national popular vote .
We expect him to improve on that some , as there are still a number of votes to be counted in blue states such as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ so he ’ ll probably finish with a lead closer to 4 points or possibly even a bit larger ; 5 points wouldn ’ t shock me .
In any event , we should expect a miss of around 4 points from Biden ’ s final margin of 8.4 points in national polls , though as I said at the outset , this is actually pretty normal by historical standards .
What about in the swing states ?
It ’ s actually a pretty similar story , at least among the competitive states @ @ @ @ @ @ @ polling errors in noncompetitive states , especially red states , which I ’ ll touch on more in a moment . )
Between the 18 states and congressional districts that we considered to be competitive this cycle , it looks as though the final FiveThirtyEight polling averages will have underestimated Trump by around 3.7 percentage points , on average .
Although , as you can see in the table below , the error was much bigger in some places than others : Note that this analysis is preliminary .
In the estimates above @ @ @ @ @ @ @ instance , that Biden gains about 2 additional points in Ohio and 1 further point in Pennsylvania based on ballots that remain to be counted in those states .
There may be a point or so to be had for Biden in some other states , too , given that provisional ballots and other late-counted ballots generally help Democrats .
Still , it looks like we ’ ll end up with swing state polls having missed Trump by 3 or 4 points , overall .
The errors were a little weird , though @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more in Wisconsin than in neighboring Minnesota , for instance .
Meanwhile , polls slightly overestimated Trump in Maine ’ s 1st Congressional District , but considerably underestimated him in the more rural , 2nd Congressional District .
But this isn ’ t entirely unexpected .
State polling errors are often correlated with one another , but it can also get really complicated .
Sometimes , there ’ s a “ uniform swing ” that affects nearly all states .
Sometimes , there ’ s a group of states that share geographic and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out of line .
And sometimes , states behave idiosyncratically .
The 2020 election looks as though it featured some combination of all three types of errors .
Trump clearly outperformed his polls overall , but he did so more in some regions ( say , the Midwest ) than others ( say , the Southwest ) .
Even within these regions , though , there were quirks , like Biden winning Georgia but losing Florida .
The error may be somewhat larger in congressional races , too , as Republicans are running @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lead in the U.S. House popular vote total is 1 or 2 points smaller than Biden ’ s ) .
And in deeply red states with supposedly competitive Senate races such as Montana , Kansas and South Carolina , the polls look to have considerably overestimated how well Democrats would do .
Then again , down-ballot races typically feature more polling error than the presidency .
Next question : Are polls becoming less accurate over time ?
The answer is basically no , although it depends on what cycle you start measuring from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ set .
Polls were quite accurate in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections , for instance , and this was also a time when polling received increased media attention .
The 2012 election was undoubtedly also good for polling ’ s reputation since polls identified the winner correctly in almost every state , although they did underestimate then-President Barack Obama ’ s margin of victory by a few points .
Polls have had a rougher go in the past , however .
Take what the final FiveThirtyEight national polling average ( calculated retroactively @ @ @ @ @ @ @ election since 1972 : On average , the final national polls were off by 2.3 points .
That ’ s pretty close , but there are also several examples of polling error comparable to this year .
There were 4-point polling misses in 1996 and 2012 ( as mentioned , the national polls weren ’ t so good that year ) , a 5-point error in 2000 and a whopping 8-point miss in 1980 , when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter by far more than polls predicted .
There were also a lot @ @ @ @ @ @ @ mid-20th century .
There aren ’ t enough polls to calculate a FiveThirtyEight-style average prior to 1972 , but we can look at what Gallup ’ s final poll said dating back to 1936 .
Oftentimes , it wasn ’ t much good : The final Gallup poll missed by 5.6 percentage points on average between 1936 and 1968 .
That includes a somewhat infamous 9-point miss in 1948 , when Thomas Dewey didn ’ t actually defeat Harry Truman .
Gallup also lowballed FDR ’ s margin of victory by 12 points @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , our model estimates that the final national polls will miss by about 3 percentage points in an average year .
( That ’ s why we call a 3-point miss a “ normal-sized polling error.
” ) In other words , a 4-point polling error is somewhat par for the course , although maybe you could call it a bogey .
So if all of this is fairly normal , why has there been so much consternation about the polls this year ?
To put my media critic hat on for a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ here .
One is the “ blue shift ” that occurred in states such as Pennsylvania , where mail-in ballots were counted after in-person ballots .
As predictable as the blue shift was , if you didn ’ t know that Biden was eventually going to win Pennsylvania , Wisconsin , Michigan and Georgia , once these mail-in ballots were factored in , the polls looked much worse than they wound up being .
But narratives about what happened in an election tend to form early on in the evening on election night @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that this election could take weeks and that there was a real possibility that neither Trump nor Biden would reach 270 electoral votes on election night .
These narratives also aren ’ t usually formulated by more data- and empirically-driven reporters , who know to wait until more votes are counted .
Next , there ’ s the fact that the polls have missed in the same direction in the last two presidential cycles .
The conventional wisdom trends to treat whatever happened in the most recent election as a new Iron Law @ @ @ @ @ @ @ two times in a row … oh boy , you ’ re never going to hear the end of it .
But what ’ s important to stress here is even though the polls have now missed in the same direction twice in a row , this isn ’ t necessarily indicative of how polls will behave going forward .
In the long run , while polls can be biased , the bias isn ’ t predictable from cycle to cycle .
Sometimes , they do miss in the same direction for a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Other times , the bias flips around — in 2012 , polls underestimated Obama and Democrats before underestimating Trump and Republicans in 2016 .
It ’ s probably worth mentioning that polls had a very good and unbiased year in the 2018 midterms before their problems this year , too .
The reason there ’ s no long-running polling bias is because pollsters try to correct for their mistakes .
That means there ’ s always the risk of undercorrecting ( which apparently happened this time ) or overcorrecting ( see the 2017 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ all sorts of dodgy things in an effort to not underestimate Conservatives … and wound up underestimating the Labour Party instead ) .
This sets up an especially big challenge for pollsters moving forward because some of the plausible explanations for the polling miss have to do with the COVID-19 pandemic or other factors specific to 2020 , while some do not .
Imagine that , in an effort to correct for the bias it showed in 2020 , a pollster adopts a new technique that results in shifting its margins toward Republicans @ @ @ @ @ @ @ out that the bias was because of something 2020-specific .
Then , the pollster may wind up with polling that underestimates Democrats in 2022 and 2024 .
But if the pollster chalks the error up to COVID-19 and doesn ’ t change anything when it was something lasting , they may underestimate Republicans once again .
Finally , there ’ s the fact that the election comes at a time of exceptionally high anxiety for the country .
Between the pandemic and the election — and in an era when the media and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ challenged in both constructive and unconstructive ways — there ’ s not a lot to feel certain about .
On that front , I ’ m afraid I have some bad news .
If you want certainty about election outcomes , polls aren ’ t going to give you that — at least , not most of the time .
It ’ s not because the polls are bad .
On the contrary , I ’ m amazed that polls are as good as they are .
Given that response rates to polls @ @ @ @ @ @ @ that there are so many other things that can go wrong , from voters changing their minds after you poll them to guessing wrong about which voters will turn out — plus the unavoidable issue of sampling error — it ’ s astonishing that polls get within a couple of points the large majority of the time .
And yet , if a poll projects the outcome at 53-47 and it winds up being 51-49 ( a 4-point miss ) , it will probably receive a lot of criticism — even , as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ if it “ calls ” the winner right .
It ’ s a fairly thankless task .
Nor is the reason to recalibrate your expectations about polls because polls are getting worse , necessarily .
Empirically , after a somewhat worse than average but still fairly normal year in 2016 , a very good year in 2018 , and a 2020 polling error that will likely be a bit worse than 2016 but is still well within the realm of historical precedent , there ’ s not really a basis for coming to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ there may be reasons to expect polls will be worse going forward , but that depends on identifying the reasons for the 2020 error first .
And remember , everybody is just getting started on that process .
The main reason that polls aren ’ t going to provide you with the certitude you might desire is because polls have always come with a degree of uncertainty .
In a highly polarized era , most elections are going to be close — close enough as to exceed the ability of polls to provide @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the final polling averages miss by a bit more than 3 points on average , as our forecast assumes .
That means the margin of error is closer to 7 or 8 points .
And every presidential election so far this century has fallen within that range .
So if you ’ re coming to the polls for strong probabilistic hints of what is going to happen , they can provide those — and the hints will usually lead you in roughly the right direction , as they did this year .
But @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , you ’ ll have to look elsewhere .

I’m not a pollster, although I’m often misidentified as one on TV. I wanted to get that out of the way because while, in practice, our lives probably get easier in a year where the polls are spot-on, FiveThirtyEight’s mission is really to take the polls as they are — for better or worse — and understand the sources of error and uncertainty behind them. This is true for both the probabilistic forecasts that we build and the reporting that we do. We’re also interested in how polls are perceived by the media and the public and how that sometimes conflicts with the way we think polls should be viewed.
Where the rest of the 2020 races stand | FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast
From that vantage point, the story of how polls did in 2020 is complicated — more complicated in some ways than in 2016, which was also complicated. And since the election was called for Joe Biden on Saturday, I’ve had lots of somewhat conflicting thoughts pinging around in my head.
Here are a few of them:
On the one hand, I don’t entirely understand the polls-were-wrong storyline. This year was definitely a little weird, given that the vote share margins were often fairly far off from the polls (including in some high-profile examples such as Wisconsin and Florida). But at the same time, a high percentage of states (likely 48 out of 50) were “called” correctly, as was the overall Electoral College and popular vote winner (Biden). And that’s usually how polls are judged: Did they identify the right winner? On the other hand, evaluating how close the polls came to the actual vote share margins is a better way to judge polls, so I’m glad that people are doing that. And yet, the margins by which the polls missed — underestimating President Trump by what will likely end up being 3 to 4 percentage points in national and swing state polls — is actually pretty normal by historical standards. However, there are nevertheless reasons to be concerned about the polls going forward, especially if it’s hard to get a truly representative sample of people on the phone. Finally, there’s a slightly meta point here: Voters and the media need to recalibrate their expectations around polls — not necessarily because anything’s changed, but because those expectations demanded an unrealistic level of precision — while simultaneously resisting the urge to “throw all the polls out.”
So, yeah, it’s complicated.
In this story, I’m going to tackle a little bit of everything from this list apart from No. 4. The question of why the polls were off — and what that means for the polls going forward — is a vital one, but it’s something that deserves a longer and fuller analysis, which we’ll do in the upcoming days and weeks. I’m also going to set aside the question of how probabilistic forecasts like FiveThirtyEight’s did. If you want a quick answer, we think our forecasts did very well. (Biden was a reasonably heavy favorite in our forecast precisely because he could withstand a normal-sized or slightly larger polling error and still come out narrowly ahead — and that’s pretty much what happened.) Our forecasts should also do well by the more rigorous methods we use to evaluate them. But that’s a different question than how the polls themselves performed.
First, some good news for the polls: Assuming current results hold, the only states where presidential polling averages got the winners wrong will be Florida, North Carolina and the 2nd Congressional District in Maine. And because Biden’s leads in those states were narrow to begin with, they weren’t huge upsets. (There were also two mild upsets in the Senate, where Maine’s Susan Collins and North Carolina’s Thom Tillis both won reelection despite narrowly trailing in polls.)
[Related: Democrats Aren’t Sure Why They Didn’t Do Better In The House And Senate. It Might Not Be Clear For Weeks.]
I’m starting with this point because “calling” the outcome right is usually the way that polls are evaluated, even if it isn’t the best way to evaluate their actual performance. Polls were pilloried for “missing” Brexit, for instance, even though the position to remain in the European Union had, at best, a tiny advantage in the polling average, and the position to leave won by a narrow margin (52 percent leave, 48 percent remain).
So while I’m not a pollster, I’m going to stick up for them on this point. If you want to criticize polls when they got the outcomes wrong even though the results were close (within the margin of error) — not our preference, but how the rest of the media usually covers polls — then, to be consistent, you ought to praise them if they identify the right winners, even if the margins are fairly far off.
The better way to evaluate polls is how close they come on vote margins, and this year, polling margins will be fairly far off in several swing states as well as in national polls. As of this writing, Biden leads by 3.4 percentage points in the national popular vote. We expect him to improve on that some, as there are still a number of votes to be counted in blue states such as New York, California and Illinois, so he’ll probably finish with a lead closer to 4 points or possibly even a bit larger; 5 points wouldn’t shock me. In any event, we should expect a miss of around 4 points from Biden’s final margin of 8.4 points in national polls, though as I said at the outset, this is actually pretty normal by historical standards.
What about in the swing states? It’s actually a pretty similar story, at least among the competitive states. (There were some fairly bad polling errors in noncompetitive states, especially red states, which I’ll touch on more in a moment.) Between the 18 states and congressional districts that we considered to be competitive this cycle, it looks as though the final FiveThirtyEight polling averages will have underestimated Trump by around 3.7 percentage points, on average. Although, as you can see in the table below, the error was much bigger in some places than others:
There were big misses in some swing states Joe Biden’s final FiveThirtyEight polling average in each battleground race compared to his vote share margin in each race Biden’s lead or deficit Polling Average Actual result Diff ME-2 +3 -8 -11 Wisconsin +8 +1 -7 Iowa -1 -8 -7 Florida +3 -3 -6 Michigan +8 +3 -5 Ohio -1 -6* -5 Texas -1 -6 -5 New Hampshire +11 +7 -4 Maine (statewide) +13 +9 -4 Pennsylvania +5 +2* -3 Arizona +3 +0 -3 North Carolina +2 -1 -3 Virginia +12 +10 -2 Minnesota +9 +7 -2 Nevada +5 +3 -2 Georgia +1 +0 -1 Colorado +13 +14 +1 NE-2 +4 +7 +3 * In Ohio and Pennsylvania, actual results reflects expected changes once all votes are counted. Sources: Polls, ABC News, the Cook Political Report, State Websites
Note that this analysis is preliminary. In the estimates above, I’m guesstimating, for instance, that Biden gains about 2 additional points in Ohio and 1 further point in Pennsylvania based on ballots that remain to be counted in those states. There may be a point or so to be had for Biden in some other states, too, given that provisional ballots and other late-counted ballots generally help Democrats. Still, it looks like we’ll end up with swing state polls having missed Trump by 3 or 4 points, overall.
The errors were a little weird, though. Trump beat his polls by considerably more in Wisconsin than in neighboring Minnesota, for instance. Meanwhile, polls slightly overestimated Trump in Maine’s 1st Congressional District, but considerably underestimated him in the more rural, 2nd Congressional District. But this isn’t entirely unexpected. State polling errors are often correlated with one another, but it can also get really complicated. Sometimes, there’s a “uniform swing” that affects nearly all states. Sometimes, there’s a group of states that share geographic and demographic similarities in which the polls are out of line. And sometimes, states behave idiosyncratically. The 2020 election looks as though it featured some combination of all three types of errors. Trump clearly outperformed his polls overall, but he did so more in some regions (say, the Midwest) than others (say, the Southwest). Even within these regions, though, there were quirks, like Biden winning Georgia but losing Florida.
Biden is set to be president. What comes next? | FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast
The error may be somewhat larger in congressional races, too, as Republicans are running slightly ahead of Trump (Democrats’ lead in the U.S. House popular vote total is 1 or 2 points smaller than Biden’s). And in deeply red states with supposedly competitive Senate races such as Montana, Kansas and South Carolina, the polls look to have considerably overestimated how well Democrats would do. Then again, down-ballot races typically feature more polling error than the presidency.
Next question: Are polls becoming less accurate over time?
The answer is basically no, although it depends on what cycle you start measuring from and how your expectations around polls are set. Polls were quite accurate in the 2004 and 2008 presidential elections, for instance, and this was also a time when polling received increased media attention. The 2012 election was undoubtedly also good for polling’s reputation since polls identified the winner correctly in almost every state, although they did underestimate then-President Barack Obama’s margin of victory by a few points.
Polls have had a rougher go in the past, however. Take what the final FiveThirtyEight national polling average (calculated retroactively) would have said in each past election since 1972:
The polls aren’t getting more inaccurate Polling error in the FiveThirtyEight national polling average compared to the national popular vote margin, 1972 to 2020 Year Final Average Result Error 1972 R+24 R+23 1 1976 D+1 D+2 1 1980 R+2 R+10 8 1984 R+18 R+18 0 1988 R+10 R+8 2 1992 D+7 D+6 1 1996 D+13 D+9 4 2000 R+4 D+1 5 2004 R+2 R+2 0 2008 D+7 D+7 0 2012 D+0 D+4 4 2016 D+4 D+2 2 2020 D+8 D+4* 4 *The 2020 result reflects Biden’s projected margin once all votes are counted. FiveThirtyEight’s polling averages are calculated retroactively for years prior to 2020.
On average, the final national polls were off by 2.3 points. That’s pretty close, but there are also several examples of polling error comparable to this year. There were 4-point polling misses in 1996 and 2012 (as mentioned, the national polls weren’t so good that year), a 5-point error in 2000 and a whopping 8-point miss in 1980, when Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter by far more than polls predicted.
There were also a lot of fairly wild polling errors in the mid-20th century. There aren’t enough polls to calculate a FiveThirtyEight-style average prior to 1972, but we can look at what Gallup’s final poll said dating back to 1936. Oftentimes, it wasn’t much good:
The Gallup era was no golden era Polling error in the final Gallup presidential poll compared to the national popular vote margin, 1936 to 1968 Year Final Average Result Error 1936 D+12 D+24 12 1940 D+4 D+10 6 1944 D+3 D+7 4 1948 R+5 D+4 9 1952 R+2 R+11 9 1956 R+19 R+15 4 1960 D+2 D+0 2 1964 D+28 D+23 5 1968 R+1 R+1 0 Source: gallup
The final Gallup poll missed by 5.6 percentage points on average between 1936 and 1968. That includes a somewhat infamous 9-point miss in 1948, when Thomas Dewey didn’t actually defeat Harry Truman. Gallup also lowballed FDR’s margin of victory by 12 points in 1936.
Evaluating all this data, our model estimates that the final national polls will miss by about 3 percentage points in an average year. (That’s why we call a 3-point miss a “normal-sized polling error.”) In other words, a 4-point polling error is somewhat par for the course, although maybe you could call it a bogey.
So if all of this is fairly normal, why has there been so much consternation about the polls this year? To put my media critic hat on for a second, I see a few factors here. One is the “blue shift” that occurred in states such as Pennsylvania, where mail-in ballots were counted after in-person ballots. As predictable as the blue shift was, if you didn’t know that Biden was eventually going to win Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia, once these mail-in ballots were factored in, the polls looked much worse than they wound up being.
But narratives about what happened in an election tend to form early on in the evening on election night, even though we knew going in that this election could take weeks and that there was a real possibility that neither Trump nor Biden would reach 270 electoral votes on election night. These narratives also aren’t usually formulated by more data- and empirically-driven reporters, who know to wait until more votes are counted.
Next, there’s the fact that the polls have missed in the same direction in the last two presidential cycles. The conventional wisdom trends to treat whatever happened in the most recent election as a new Iron Law of Politics. So if something happens two times in a row … oh boy, you’re never going to hear the end of it.
[Related: Politics Podcast: Why Polls Were Off In 2020, And Why They Weren’t That Bad]
But what’s important to stress here is even though the polls have now missed in the same direction twice in a row, this isn’t necessarily indicative of how polls will behave going forward. In the long run, while polls can be biased, the bias isn’t predictable from cycle to cycle. Sometimes, they do miss in the same direction for a couple of cycles in a row. Other times, the bias flips around — in 2012, polls underestimated Obama and Democrats before underestimating Trump and Republicans in 2016. It’s probably worth mentioning that polls had a very good and unbiased year in the 2018 midterms before their problems this year, too.
The reason there’s no long-running polling bias is because pollsters try to correct for their mistakes. That means there’s always the risk of undercorrecting (which apparently happened this time) or overcorrecting (see the 2017 U.K. general election, where pollsters did all sorts of dodgy things in an effort to not underestimate Conservatives … and wound up underestimating the Labour Party instead). This sets up an especially big challenge for pollsters moving forward because some of the plausible explanations for the polling miss have to do with the COVID-19 pandemic or other factors specific to 2020, while some do not.
Imagine that, in an effort to correct for the bias it showed in 2020, a pollster adopts a new technique that results in shifting its margins toward Republicans by 3 points — but it turns out that the bias was because of something 2020-specific. Then, the pollster may wind up with polling that underestimates Democrats in 2022 and 2024. But if the pollster chalks the error up to COVID-19 and doesn’t change anything when it was something lasting, they may underestimate Republicans once again.
Finally, there’s the fact that the election comes at a time of exceptionally high anxiety for the country. Between the pandemic and the election — and in an era when the media and other forms of expertise are constantly being challenged in both constructive and unconstructive ways — there’s not a lot to feel certain about.
On that front, I’m afraid I have some bad news. If you want certainty about election outcomes, polls aren’t going to give you that — at least, not most of the time.
It’s not because the polls are bad. On the contrary, I’m amazed that polls are as good as they are. Given that response rates to polls are in the low single digits and that there are so many other things that can go wrong, from voters changing their minds after you poll them to guessing wrong about which voters will turn out — plus the unavoidable issue of sampling error — it’s astonishing that polls get within a couple of points the large majority of the time. And yet, if a poll projects the outcome at 53-47 and it winds up being 51-49 (a 4-point miss), it will probably receive a lot of criticism — even, as we’ve seen this year, if it “calls” the winner right. It’s a fairly thankless task.
Nor is the reason to recalibrate your expectations about polls because polls are getting worse, necessarily. Empirically, after a somewhat worse than average but still fairly normal year in 2016, a very good year in 2018, and a 2020 polling error that will likely be a bit worse than 2016 but is still well within the realm of historical precedent, there’s not really a basis for coming to that conclusion … yet. Theoretically, there may be reasons to expect polls will be worse going forward, but that depends on identifying the reasons for the 2020 error first. And remember, everybody is just getting started on that process.
The main reason that polls aren’t going to provide you with the certitude you might desire is because polls have always come with a degree of uncertainty. In a highly polarized era, most elections are going to be close — close enough as to exceed the ability of polls to provide you with a definitive answer. Say the final polling averages miss by a bit more than 3 points on average, as our forecast assumes. That means the margin of error is closer to 7 or 8 points. And every presidential election so far this century has fallen within that range. So if you’re coming to the polls for strong probabilistic hints of what is going to happen, they can provide those — and the hints will usually lead you in roughly the right direction, as they did this year. But if you’re looking for certainty, you’ll have to look elsewhere.
Polling 101: Should You Trust The Polls In 2020? | FiveThirtyEight


fivethirtyeight--2020-11-12--Republicans’ 2020 Gains In The House Set Them Up Well For 2022

2020 was not supposed to be a good year for House Republicans .
The polls pointed to a Democratic-leaning electoral environment , Democratic candidates were outraising Republicans in most competitive seats , and the GOP had to defend a host of open seats that Republican incumbents had abandoned .
Yet , contrary to expectations , including their own , Republicans managed to gain seats even as the Democrats held onto their majority .
Votes are still being counted , but based on contests projected by ABC News , Republicans have netted six seats so far , and they may still @ @ @ @ @ @ @ numbers about seats gained and lost can only tell us so much .
Let ’ s look at some of the major takeaways from the 2020 House elections .
Coming into the 2020 election , FiveThirtyEight ’ s forecast only gave Republicans about a 1 in 6 shot of picking up six or more seats , and if the GOP gains more as-yet-uncalled seats in the coming days , the party ’ s haul could become even more unlikely .
It ’ s not just the flipped seats that are impressive , though @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lost in the races where we know the outcomes thus far .
Among the outstanding contests , only California Rep. Mike Garcia , who won a May special election , appears to be in danger of losing .
Open-seat races have also been friendly to Republicans , despite the large number of GOP incumbents who retired or left office ahead of the 2020 election .
The GOP had to defend 35 open seats compared to the Democrats ’ 13 , but of the 33 Republican-held open seats projected so far , only three @ @ @ @ @ @ @ two of those Democratic wins were in North Carolina seats that the GOP had written off after a court-ordered redistricting made the districts heavily Democratic .
While the majority of the Republican caucus will still be men come 2021 , there will be far more Republican women in Congress than there were this year .
So far , it looks like at least 26 GOP women will be in the House next year , surpassing the record of 25 from the 109th Congress .
That ’ s thanks in part to the record @ @ @ @ @ @ @ — who ’ ve won House contests .
And it ’ s also because of how well Republican women did in tight races .
The table below shows the Republican women who ran in Democratic-held House districts that were at least potentially competitive , according to FiveThirtyEight ’ s forecast .
As of this writing , seven of them have won .
It ’ s not all bad news for Democrats While it was unquestionably a good night for Republicans , Democrats still held onto most of the seats they won in 2018 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ party in the House .
That ’ s in part because they retained most of the suburban districts they picked up in 2018 .
Of the 233 seats that Democrats held coming into the election , 186 of them were in districts that were predominantly or partly suburban in nature , according to density categorizations by Bloomberg ’ s CityLab .
( This figure excludes North Carolina because CityLab has not updated its density data to account for North Carolina ’ s court-ordered redistricting in 2019 . )
Thus far , Democrats have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they captured one GOP-held suburban seat around Atlanta .
And thanks to redistricting , they ’ ve also won two formerly Republican seats around Greensboro and Raleigh in North Carolina , which reflect the party ’ s strength in more populous areas .
( ABC News hasn ’ t projected a winner yet in 11 suburban races — eight Democratic-held districts and three Republican-held districts . )
Because of their relative success in the suburbs , Democrats kept many seats in places President Trump won in 2016 .
Coming into the election , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ carried in 2016 , and they would ’ ve lost their majority if they ’ d lost more than half of them ( assuming they didn ’ t offset the losses by gaining seats elsewhere ) .
But they ’ ve won 18 of them so far and picked up one from the GOP ( Georgia ’ s 7th Congressional District ) .
In fact , more than half of Republicans ’ gains have come in seats representing places that Trump won by a pretty sizable margin in 2016 .
We ’ ll @ @ @ @ @ @ @ can tell us how congressional districts voted in 2020 , but for now it seems many Republican gains were made by picking off the lowest-hanging fruit .
Republicans are well positioned to take the House in 2022 Although we don ’ t yet know the winners of some House races , we can already look ahead to the 2022 midterms and see a fairly straightforward path for the GOP to capture the House .
Midterm elections historically go well for the party that ’ s not in the White House , and the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ well in the House , since every seat is up for election ( the Senate is a more complicated story ) .
Since the end of World War II , the presidential party has lost an average of 27 House seats in midterm elections , as the chart below shows .
No matter how many seats Democrats end up with after 2020 ’ s election — at this point , they will probably end up somewhere in the low 220s — a loss of that magnitude would easily be enough for Republicans to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of midterms in a Democratic president ’ s first term seems especially promising for the GOP , too .
Following Bill Clinton ’ s election in 1992 , Democrats lost more than 50 seats in 1994 , and after Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 , Democrats lost more than 60 seats .
If Democrats had added five to 10 seats this year , they could have survived a 20-seat loss in the midterms .
Instead , Republicans will probably need to win fewer than 10 seats to gain a slender majority @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , Republicans could very well benefit from the new district lines that will be drawn ahead of the 2022 midterm elections .
The GOP is set to fully control redistricting for about two-fifths of all House seats , while Democrats will only hold sway over one-tenth of them , with the remaining seats are in states with divided governments or where redistricting is done by a commission system .
The Republican line-drawing advantage should help the party draw favorable maps that could help the GOP win more seats than we might otherwise expect @

2020 was not supposed to be a good year for House Republicans. The polls pointed to a Democratic-leaning electoral environment, Democratic candidates were outraising Republicans in most competitive seats, and the GOP had to defend a host of open seats that Republican incumbents had abandoned.
Yet, contrary to expectations, including their own, Republicans managed to gain seats even as the Democrats held onto their majority. Votes are still being counted, but based on contests projected by ABC News, Republicans have netted six seats so far, and they may still flip a few more.
But top-line numbers about seats gained and lost can only tell us so much. Let’s look at some of the major takeaways from the 2020 House elections.
Where the rest of the 2020 races stand | FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast
Republicans outperformed expectations
Coming into the 2020 election, FiveThirtyEight’s forecast only gave Republicans about a 1 in 6 shot of picking up six or more seats, and if the GOP gains more as-yet-uncalled seats in the coming days, the party’s haul could become even more unlikely.
It’s not just the flipped seats that are impressive, though. Not a single Republican incumbent has lost in the races where we know the outcomes thus far. Among the outstanding contests, only California Rep. Mike Garcia, who won a May special election, appears to be in danger of losing.
[Related: The Polls Weren’t Great. But That’s Pretty Normal.]
Open-seat races have also been friendly to Republicans, despite the large number of GOP incumbents who retired or left office ahead of the 2020 election. The GOP had to defend 35 open seats compared to the Democrats’ 13, but of the 33 Republican-held open seats projected so far, only three have gone for the Democrats. And two of those Democratic wins were in North Carolina seats that the GOP had written off after a court-ordered redistricting made the districts heavily Democratic.
GOP women made big gains
While the majority of the Republican caucus will still be men come 2021, there will be far more Republican women in Congress than there were this year. So far, it looks like at least 26 GOP women will be in the House next year, surpassing the record of 25 from the 109th Congress. That’s thanks in part to the record number of non-incumbent Republican women — 15 — who’ve won House contests. And it’s also because of how well Republican women did in tight races. The table below shows the Republican women who ran in Democratic-held House districts that were at least potentially competitive, according to FiveThirtyEight’s forecast. As of this writing, seven of them have won.
GOP women have flipped several Democratic seats Republican women running for potentially competitive Democratic-held House seats and the status of their race as of 4:30 p.m Eastern on Nov. 11 District Candidate Current Margin Projected GOP flip MN-07 Michelle Fischbach R+13.2 ✓ ✓ NM-02 Yvette Herrell R+7.8 ✓ ✓ OK-05 Stephanie Bice R+4.1 ✓ ✓ FL-27 Maria Elvira Salazar R+2.7 ✓ ✓ IA-01 Ashley Hinson R+2.6 ✓ ✓ CA-48 Michelle Steel R+2.0 ✓ ✓ SC-01 Nancy Mace R+1.3 ✓ ✓ NY-11 Nicole Malliotakis R+15.8 NY-22 Claudia Tenney R+11.0 CA-39 Young Kim R+1.3 IA-02 Mariannette Miller-Meeks 0 NY-18 Chele Farley D+3.0 TX-15 Monica De La Cruz-Hernandez D+2.9 ✓ AZ-01 Tiffany Shedd D+3.4 ✓ PA-07 Lisa Scheller D+3.7 ✓ IL-17 Esther Joy King D+3.8 ✓ TX-32 Genevieve Collins D+6.0 ✓ FL-13 Anna Paulina Luna D+6.1 ✓ IL-06 Jeanne Ives D+6.6 ✓ OR-05 Amy Ryan Courser D+6.7 ✓ OH-13 Christina Hagan D+7.5 ✓ NC-01 Sandy Smith D+8.3 ✓ GA-06 Karen Handel D+9.2 ✓ KS-03 Amanda Adkins D+9.7 ✓ NJ-11 Rosemary Becchi D+9.8 ✓ CA-03 Tamika Hamilton D+10.9 ✓ PA-04 Kathy Barnette D+18.8 ✓ CA-36 Erin Cruz D+22.1 ✓ Results are unofficial. Races are counted as projected only if the projection comes from ABC News. Excludes races in which the Republican candidate has either a less than 1 in 100 chance or greater than 99 in 100 chance of winning. Source: ABC News
It’s not all bad news for Democrats
While it was unquestionably a good night for Republicans, Democrats still held onto most of the seats they won in 2018 and will continue to be the majority party in the House. That’s in part because they retained most of the suburban districts they picked up in 2018.
Of the 233 seats that Democrats held coming into the election, 186 of them were in districts that were predominantly or partly suburban in nature, according to density categorizations by Bloomberg’s CityLab. (This figure excludes North Carolina because CityLab has not updated its density data to account for North Carolina’s court-ordered redistricting in 2019.) Thus far, Democrats have lost seven of those seats, but they captured one GOP-held suburban seat around Atlanta. And thanks to redistricting, they’ve also won two formerly Republican seats around Greensboro and Raleigh in North Carolina, which reflect the party’s strength in more populous areas. (ABC News hasn’t projected a winner yet in 11 suburban races — eight Democratic-held districts and three Republican-held districts.)
Because of their relative success in the suburbs, Democrats kept many seats in places President Trump won in 2016. Coming into the election, Democrats held 30 seats in districts Trump carried in 2016, and they would’ve lost their majority if they’d lost more than half of them (assuming they didn’t offset the losses by gaining seats elsewhere). But they’ve won 18 of them so far and picked up one from the GOP (Georgia’s 7th Congressional District). In fact, more than half of Republicans’ gains have come in seats representing places that Trump won by a pretty sizable margin in 2016. We’ll have to wait a bit before data can tell us how congressional districts voted in 2020, but for now it seems many Republican gains were made by picking off the lowest-hanging fruit.
Republicans are well positioned to take the House in 2022
Although we don’t yet know the winners of some House races, we can already look ahead to the 2022 midterms and see a fairly straightforward path for the GOP to capture the House. Midterm elections historically go well for the party that’s not in the White House, and the out-of-power party is especially likely to do well in the House, since every seat is up for election (the Senate is a more complicated story).
Since the end of World War II, the presidential party has lost an average of 27 House seats in midterm elections, as the chart below shows. No matter how many seats Democrats end up with after 2020’s election — at this point, they will probably end up somewhere in the low 220s — a loss of that magnitude would easily be enough for Republicans to retake the House.
The recent history of midterms in a Democratic president’s first term seems especially promising for the GOP, too. Following Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, Democrats lost more than 50 seats in 1994, and after Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, Democrats lost more than 60 seats.
If Democrats had added five to 10 seats this year, they could have survived a 20-seat loss in the midterms. Instead, Republicans will probably need to win fewer than 10 seats to gain a slender majority in 2022.
[Related: Politics Podcast: Why Polls Were Off In 2020, And Why They Weren’t That Bad]
On top of this, Republicans could very well benefit from the new district lines that will be drawn ahead of the 2022 midterm elections. The GOP is set to fully control redistricting for about two-fifths of all House seats, while Democrats will only hold sway over one-tenth of them, with the remaining seats are in states with divided governments or where redistricting is done by a commission system. The Republican line-drawing advantage should help the party draw favorable maps that could help the GOP win more seats than we might otherwise expect.
Biden is set to be president. What comes next? | FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast
CORRECTION (Feb. 18, 2021, 2:52 p.m.): The chart in this article originally showed Democrats losing four House seats in the 1998 midterms; they actually gained four seats.