fivethirthyeight--2020-11-05--The Bills Haven’t Been AFC East Champs In Josh Allen’s Lifetime. Odds Are, That Changes This Year.

What started as a reasonable — but far from certain — possibility has become quite likely : After beating the New England Patriots at home in Week 8 , the Buffalo Bills now have an 85 percent chance of winning the AFC East .
If it ends up happening , it would mark the first time the Bills took first place in their division since 1995 , a 25-year gap that trails only the Browns and Lions among active droughts .
After making the playoffs for the first time in 18 years in 2017 , a division-title bid is the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had the NFL ’ s second-best record during the 1990s but fell on hard times over most of the next two decades — before rising again .
To bump that 85 percent up to 100 percent , Buffalo still has some work to do .
According to our Elo ratings , the Bills have the league ’ s fifth-toughest set of remaining opponents over the rest of the season , with Sunday ’ s contest versus Seattle ( 1626 Elo ) and Week 14 ’ s game against the Steelers ( 1635 ) @ @ @ @ @ @ @ left .
Those games are not necessarily the most consequential for Buffalo ’ s division chances , however .
In our simulations , the games that swing Buffalo ’ s division odds the most come in Week 16 against the Patriots and ( especially ) Week 17 against the Miami Dolphins , who might be the biggest real obstacle left to the Bills ’ division-title hopes .
It makes sense : The Patriots and Dolphins are the only divisional opponents left on Buffalo ’ s schedule after it faced either Miami , New @ @ @ @ @ @ @ four of its first eight contests .
But both New England and Miami have concerns at quarterback , and in simulations where the Bills sweep those games , they win the division 98.5 percent of the time .
If Buffalo does end up finishing the job , it would be the culmination of a very long journey back to the NFL ’ s upper echelon after decades in exile .
The Bills ’ near-dynasty ( which produced four consecutive AFC championships from 1990 through 1993 ) started gaining steam in the 1987 and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Levy , DE Bruce Smith , QB Jim Kelly and WR Andre Reed settling in as franchise cornerstones , eventually joined by Hall of Fame RB Thurman Thomas .
That group first reached an Elo level as high as the current Bills ’ 1554 mark in the middle of 1988 , peaking at 1642 that season and then rising as high as 1705 — a bit below the current Kansas City Chiefs , for context — a few years later , after blowing out the Raiders in the 1990 AFC title game .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ stayed above 1550 every week until the middle of 1994 , a season in which Buffalo slipped to 7-9 after suffering a big regression on defense without several key starters .
The team rallied to finish first in the AFC East once more in 1995 , cracking a 1550 Elo again before the end of the 1996 season ( Kelly ’ s last year in the NFL ) .
Buffalo even eclipsed that mark again in 1999 and 2000 , with a QB carousel that swung between veteran fan favorite Doug Flutie and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ retrospect , the Music City Miracle — which ended the Bills ’ 1999 season — represented the beginning of the end for Buffalo ’ s time as a contender , as the team fell into a deep slump over the many seasons that followed .
After going 8-8 and missing the playoffs with Johnson and Flutie at QB in 2000 , Buffalo moved on from coach Wade Phillips — embarking on a 17-season stretch that would see the Bills go through six different general managers , nine head coaches and nine primary quarterbacks @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a lack of team success is a bit of a chicken-or-egg dilemma : How much does the tumult cause the team to play worse , and how much is simply the byproduct of a team already playing poorly ?
But our research shows that there is some disadvantage to constant shakeups , even after controlling for how bad a team was to begin with .
And it was no coincidence that our CHAOS ( Cumulative High-Activity Organizational Strife ) Score found the Bills to be the NFL ’ s third-least-stable franchise from 2000 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the Browns and Dolphins in that span .
As the Bills burned through personnel , they became mired in a cycle of sub-.500 seasons all too familiar for fans of perennial bottom-feeders .
Buffalo ’ s Elo dipped below 1400 by the end of 2001 , and while the Drew Bledsoe era ( from 2002 to 2004 ) offered a few glimpses of decent play , the Bills finished with a losing record every season from 2005 through 2013 .
Over that span , Buffalo ’ s Elo would reach 1500 — i.e.
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ 34 out of a possible 144 weeks ( 24 percent ) and hit the 1550 mark in just four weeks ( 3 percent ) .
What had been a consistently good — sometimes great — franchise for much of the late 1980s and 1990s turned into one of the worst teams of the 2000s .
Things started to turn around for the Bills in 2014 , when journeyman passer Kyle Orton led a late-season run that powered a surprising 9-7 finish .
Then a few years spent hovering around .500 with Tyrod Taylor @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ended Buffalo ’ s long playoff drought — led to the team ’ s current era , with coach Sean McDermott and the enticing , perplexing Josh Allen at QB ( who wasn ’ t even born the last time Buffalo won the division ) .
Those current Bills are not going to be confused with the Levy/Thomas/Kelly/Smith powerhouse , at least not yet .
An Elo of 1554 would qualify as a below-average week for the 1990s Bills ; that team was also consistently a staple at or near the top of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ System rankings in the early ’ 90s ( while Buffalo ranks just 16th on offense this year ) .
The Bills ’ title odds of 3 percent mean they ’ re not especially likely to do what their predecessors couldn ’ t — especially in the same conference as many other top contenders , including the Chiefs ( 24 percent ) , Steelers ( 14 percent ) and Ravens ( 5 percent ) .
But their likely AFC East crown is yet another signpost along Buffalo ’ s long , winding path back @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Looking ahead : Buffalo-Seattle is just one of several intriguing games in Week 9 , but the best and most meaningful might be Thursday night ’ s contest between the Green Bay Packers and San Francisco 49ers .
Yes , Niners QB Jimmy Garoppolo ( and TE George Kittle ) are out with injuries ( among a number of absences for San Francisco ) , but backup Nick Mullens isn ’ t rated too much lower than Jimmy G. in our QB Elo metric — meaning S.F .
should still play relatively close @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , the Packers are coming off a surprise loss to the Vikings , but they still rank as one of the better teams in the league in our ratings , tied with the Ravens for the league ’ s sixth-best Super Bowl odds .
In our simulations , this game swings the playoff odds for its teams more than any other in Week 9 ; Green Bay ’ s playoff odds ( currently 83 percent ) would either rise to 94 percent with a win or fall to 73 percent with a loss @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ) could either play itself back into the picture ( 46 percent with a win ) or fall almost completely out ( 16 percent with a loss ) .
Although the 49ers are playing host , our odds have the Packers as the slimmest of favorites , with a 52 percent chance of avenging last year ’ s NFC title game defeat .
Elo ’ s spread : Green Bay -½

What started as a reasonable — but far from certain — possibility has become quite likely: After beating the New England Patriots at home in Week 8, the Buffalo Bills now have an 85 percent chance of winning the AFC East. If it ends up happening, it would mark the first time the Bills took first place in their division since 1995, a 25-year gap that trails only the Browns and Lions among active droughts. After making the playoffs for the first time in 18 years in 2017, a division-title bid is the next logical step for a franchise that had the NFL’s second-best record during the 1990s but fell on hard times over most of the next two decades — before rising again.
To bump that 85 percent up to 100 percent, Buffalo still has some work to do. According to our Elo ratings, the Bills have the league’s fifth-toughest set of remaining opponents over the rest of the season, with Sunday’s contest versus Seattle (1626 Elo) and Week 14’s game against the Steelers (1635) standing out as the most difficult matchups left. Those games are not necessarily the most consequential for Buffalo’s division chances, however. In our simulations, the games that swing Buffalo’s division odds the most come in Week 16 against the Patriots and (especially) Week 17 against the Miami Dolphins, who might be the biggest real obstacle left to the Bills’ division-title hopes.
What’s left for the Bills to win the AFC East? Elo ratings and division probability swings* for the Buffalo Bills’ remaining games in the 2020 regular season Division Win%… Week Matchup Elo Rating Bills Win% w/ Win w/ Loss Diff. 9 vs. Seahawks 1626 45.6% 92.1% 78.2% +14.0 10 at Cardinals 1531 46.1 91.9 78.3 +13.6 12 vs. Chargers 1438 73.1 89.1 72.3 +16.7 13 at 49ers 1572 49.1 92.0 77.2 +14.8 14 vs. Steelers 1635 42.2 92.3 78.8 +13.6 15 at Broncos 1482 56.0 91.3 75.9 +15.4 16 at Patriots 1497 57.5 93.0 73.2 +19.7 17 vs. Dolphins 1521 71.5 94.3 61.0 +33.3 *The difference in Buffalo’s division odds depending on whether it wins or loses, according to the FiveThirtyEight NFL forecast. Sources: ESPN Stats & Information Group, Pro-Football-Reference.com
It makes sense: The Patriots and Dolphins are the only divisional opponents left on Buffalo’s schedule after it faced either Miami, New England or the New York Jets in four of its first eight contests. But both New England and Miami have concerns at quarterback, and in simulations where the Bills sweep those games, they win the division 98.5 percent of the time.
If Buffalo does end up finishing the job, it would be the culmination of a very long journey back to the NFL’s upper echelon after decades in exile. The Bills’ near-dynasty (which produced four consecutive AFC championships from 1990 through 1993) started gaining steam in the 1987 and ’88 seasons, with coach Marv Levy, DE Bruce Smith, QB Jim Kelly and WR Andre Reed settling in as franchise cornerstones, eventually joined by Hall of Fame RB Thurman Thomas. That group first reached an Elo level as high as the current Bills’ 1554 mark in the middle of 1988, peaking at 1642 that season and then rising as high as 1705 — a bit below the current Kansas City Chiefs, for context — a few years later, after blowing out the Raiders in the 1990 AFC title game.
From there, the Bills’ Elo stayed above 1550 every week until the middle of 1994, a season in which Buffalo slipped to 7-9 after suffering a big regression on defense without several key starters. The team rallied to finish first in the AFC East once more in 1995, cracking a 1550 Elo again before the end of the 1996 season (Kelly’s last year in the NFL). Buffalo even eclipsed that mark again in 1999 and 2000, with a QB carousel that swung between veteran fan favorite Doug Flutie and the younger Rob Johnson. But in retrospect, the Music City Miracle — which ended the Bills’ 1999 season — represented the beginning of the end for Buffalo’s time as a contender, as the team fell into a deep slump over the many seasons that followed.
After going 8-8 and missing the playoffs with Johnson and Flutie at QB in 2000, Buffalo moved on from coach Wade Phillips — embarking on a 17-season stretch that would see the Bills go through six different general managers, nine head coaches and nine primary quarterbacks. The relationship between such upheaval and a lack of team success is a bit of a chicken-or-egg dilemma: How much does the tumult cause the team to play worse, and how much is simply the byproduct of a team already playing poorly? But our research shows that there is some disadvantage to constant shakeups, even after controlling for how bad a team was to begin with. And it was no coincidence that our CHAOS (Cumulative High-Activity Organizational Strife) Score found the Bills to be the NFL’s third-least-stable franchise from 2000 through 2017, “trailing” only the Browns and Dolphins in that span.
As the Bills burned through personnel, they became mired in a cycle of sub-.500 seasons all too familiar for fans of perennial bottom-feeders. Buffalo’s Elo dipped below 1400 by the end of 2001, and while the Drew Bledsoe era (from 2002 to 2004) offered a few glimpses of decent play, the Bills finished with a losing record every season from 2005 through 2013. Over that span, Buffalo’s Elo would reach 1500 — i.e., the league average — for just 34 out of a possible 144 weeks (24 percent) and hit the 1550 mark in just four weeks (3 percent). What had been a consistently good — sometimes great — franchise for much of the late 1980s and 1990s turned into one of the worst teams of the 2000s.
Things started to turn around for the Bills in 2014, when journeyman passer Kyle Orton led a late-season run that powered a surprising 9-7 finish. Then a few years spent hovering around .500 with Tyrod Taylor under center — the last of which ended Buffalo’s long playoff drought — led to the team’s current era, with coach Sean McDermott and the enticing, perplexing Josh Allen at QB (who wasn’t even born the last time Buffalo won the division).
Those current Bills are not going to be confused with the Levy/Thomas/Kelly/Smith powerhouse, at least not yet. An Elo of 1554 would qualify as a below-average week for the 1990s Bills; that team was also consistently a staple at or near the top of the league’s offensive Simple Rating System rankings in the early ’90s (while Buffalo ranks just 16th on offense this year). The Bills’ title odds of 3 percent mean they’re not especially likely to do what their predecessors couldn’t — especially in the same conference as many other top contenders, including the Chiefs (24 percent), Steelers (14 percent) and Ravens (5 percent). But their likely AFC East crown is yet another signpost along Buffalo’s long, winding path back toward the top of the league.
FiveThirtyEight’s NFL Elo ratings How each team ranks through Week 8 of the 2020 season, according to our quarterback-adjusted predictions Chance To … Rk Team Starting QB QB Rk* Elo Rating Proj. Record Make Playoffs Win Division Win SB 1 Chiefs Mahomes 1 1729 13-3 >99% 92% 24% 2 Steelers Roethlisberger 13 1665 14-2 >99 82 14 3 Buccaneers Brady 10 1654 11-5 92 59 13 4 Seahawks Wilson 3 1648 12-4 95 65 12 5 Ravens Jackson 7 1632 11-5 88 15 5 6 Saints Brees 2 1619 10-6 83 40 7 7 Packers Rodgers 8 1592 11-5 83 62 5 8 Colts Rivers 17 1580 10-6 69 45 3 9 Bills Allen 11 1576 10-6 89 85 3 10 Titans Tannehill 6 1571 10-6 77 54 3 11 Cardinals Murray 4 1563 10-6 72 22 3 12 Rams Goff 15 1558 9-7 53 10 2 13 49ers Mullens 30 1541 8-8 31 3 1 14 Raiders Carr 9 1536 9-7 52 6 1 15 Bears Foles 24 1527 9-7 63 33 2 16 Browns Mayfield 22 1517 10-6 61 3 <1 17 Broncos Lock 28 1496 7-9 16 <1 <1 18 Patriots Newton 20 1489 7-9 12 5 <1 19 Vikings Cousins 23 1487 7-9 14 3 <1 20 Falcons Ryan 12 1485 5-11 <1 <1 <1 21 Eagles Wentz 25 1483 7-8-1 70 70 <1 22 Chargers Herbert 14 1470 6-10 7 <1 <1 23 Dolphins Tagovailoa 26 1454 8-8 25 11 <1 24 Texans Watson 5 1445 5-11 3 <1 <1 25 Bengals Burrow 19 1430 5-10-1 2 <1 <1 26 Panthers Bridgewater 18 1422 6-10 3 <1 <1 27 Washington Allen 27 1380 5-11 21 20 <1 28 Lions Stafford✚ 16 1360 7-9 9 2 <1 29 Giants Jones 21 1353 4-12 3 3 <1 30 Jets Darnold✚ 29 1311 2-14 <1 <1 <1 31 Cowboys Gilbert 32 1256 4-12 7 7 <1 32 Jaguars Luton 31 1198 2-14 <1 <1 <1 *Ranking among Week 9 starters, according to our QB Elo ratings. ✚ Starter is currently injured and may not play. †Starter could be replaced for performance reasons. Simulations as of Nov. 4, 2020. Source: ESPN
Looking ahead: Buffalo-Seattle is just one of several intriguing games in Week 9, but the best and most meaningful might be Thursday night’s contest between the Green Bay Packers and San Francisco 49ers. Yes, Niners QB Jimmy Garoppolo (and TE George Kittle) are out with injuries (among a number of absences for San Francisco), but backup Nick Mullens isn’t rated too much lower than Jimmy G. in our QB Elo metric — meaning S.F. should still play relatively close to its usual Elo level. Meanwhile, the Packers are coming off a surprise loss to the Vikings, but they still rank as one of the better teams in the league in our ratings, tied with the Ravens for the league’s sixth-best Super Bowl odds. In our simulations, this game swings the playoff odds for its teams more than any other in Week 9; Green Bay’s playoff odds (currently 83 percent) would either rise to 94 percent with a win or fall to 73 percent with a loss, while San Francisco (31 percent) could either play itself back into the picture (46 percent with a win) or fall almost completely out (16 percent with a loss). Although the 49ers are playing host, our odds have the Packers as the slimmest of favorites, with a 52 percent chance of avenging last year’s NFC title game defeat. Elo’s spread: Green Bay -½
Check out our latest NFL predictions.


fivethirthyeight--2020-11-06--Can You Make An Unfair Coin Fair?

Can You Make An Unfair Coin Fair?

Welcome to The Riddler .
Every week , I offer up problems related to the things we hold dear around here : math , logic and probability .
Two puzzles are presented each week : the Riddler Express for those of you who want something bite-size and the Riddler Classic for those of you in the slow-puzzle movement .
Submit a correct answer for either , and you may get a shoutout in next week ’ s column .
Please wait until Monday to publicly share your answers !
If you need a hint or have a favorite puzzle collecting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on Twitter .
Last weekend ’ s New York City Marathon was canceled .
But runners from Des Linden — one of the top American marathoners — to FiveThirtyEight ’ s own Santul Nerkar — my number one editor — still went out there and braved the course .
Santul finished in a time of 3:41:43 ( 3 hours , 41 minutes , 43 seconds ) , which averaged to 8 minutes , 27 seconds per mile .
Suppose , while training , Santul completed two 20-mile runs on a treadmill .
For @ @ @ @ @ @ @ treadmill to a constant speed so that he ran every mile in 9 minutes .
The second run was a little different .
He started at a 10 minute-per-mile pace and accelerated continuously until he was running at an 8-minute-per mile pace at the end .
Moreover , Santul ’ s minutes-per-mile pace ( i.e.
, not his speed ) changed linearly over time .
So a quarter of the way through the duration ( in time , not distance ) of the run , his pace was 9 minutes , 30 seconds @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 9 minutes per mile , etc .
Which training run was faster ( i.e.
, took less time ) overall ?
And what were Santul ’ s times for the two runs ?
Mathematician John von Neumann is credited with figuring out how to take a biased coin ( whose probability of coming up heads is p , not necessarily equal to 0.5 ) and “ simulate ” a fair coin .
Simply flip the coin twice .
If it comes up heads both times or tails both times , then flip it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ll get two different flips — either a heads and then a tails , or a tails and then a heads , with each of these two cases equally likely .
Once you get two different flips , you can call the second of those flips the outcome of your “ simulation.
” For any value of p between zero and one , this procedure will always return heads half the time and tails half the time .
This is pretty remarkable !
But there ’ s a downside to von Neumann ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ know how long ( i.e.
, how many flips ) the simulation will last .
Suppose I want to simulate a fair coin in at most three flips .
For which values of p is this possible ?
Extra credit : Suppose I want to simulate a fair coin in at most N flips .
For how many values of p is this possible ?
Congratulations to 👏 Nilesh Shah 👏 of Seattle , Washington , winner of last week ’ s Riddler Express .
Last week , while waiting in line to @ @ @ @ @ @ @ between election officials .
Apparently , there was a political sign within 100 feet of the polling place , against New York State law .
This got me thinking .
Suppose a polling site was a square building whose sides were 100 feet in length .
An election official took a string that was also 100 feet long and tied one end to a door located in the middle of one of the building ’ s sides .
She then held the other end of the string in her hand .
What was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the building she could reach while holding the string ?
Had there been no building , but if she were still constrained to be within 100 feet of a fixed point , then the region she could have reached was anywhere within a 100-foot circle , whose area was 𝜋 ( 100 ) 2 , or about 31,416 square feet .
Due to the building , that area served as an upper bound , meaning the answer had to be less than that .
At this point , there were two approaches .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ between the building and the 100-foot circle .
The geometry here was a little involved , but it yielded an answer of ( 5𝜋/6−√3/4 ) ·1002 , or about 21,849 square feet .
However , this wasn ’ t quite right either .
Why was that ?
Because this assumed that the string was able to pass through the building .
While it was Halloween last week , that sort of “ ghostly ” string behavior would simply have been too paranormal .
So whenever the election official lost line of sight with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , 50 feet of string were taut against the wall of the building , leaving her with a 50-foot radius with which to move around .
The red region on the right was a semicircle with a radius of 100 feet , meaning its area was 𝜋 ( 100 ) 2/2 , or about 15,708 square feet .
Meanwhile , the two blue regions were both quarter-circles with a radius of 50 feet .
Together , these quarter-circles formed a semicircle whose area was 𝜋 ( 50 ) 2/2 , or about 3,927 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ area of the region the election official could reach was 6,250𝜋 , or about 19,635 square feet .
This riddle was a version of what are known as goat problems , in which a goat is tethered to part of a fence and you are tasked with calculating its grazing area .
If you thought the square shape of the building wasn ’ t challenging enough , try re-running the problem for a circular building .
It ’ s tricky !
Congratulations to 👏 Brian Corrigan 👏 of Los Angeles , California , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Classic .
Last week , you and 60 of your closest friends decided to play a socially distanced game of hot pumpkin .
Before the game started , you all sat in a circle and agreed on a positive integer N. Once the number had been chosen , you ( the leader of the group ) started the game by counting “ 1 ” and passing the pumpkin to the person sitting directly to your left .
She then declared “ 2 ” and passed the pumpkin one space to her left .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ next number in the sequence , wrapping around the circle as many times as necessary , until the group had collectively counted up to N. At that point , the player who counted “ N ” was eliminated , and the player directly to his or her left started the next round , again proceeding to the same value of N. The game continued until just one player remained , who was declared the victor .
In the game ’ s first round , the player 18 spaces to your left was the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the next player in the sequence , began the next round .
The second round saw the elimination of the player 31 spaces to Ricky ’ s left .
Zach began the third round , only to find himself eliminated in a cruel twist of fate .
( Woe is Zach . )
What was the smallest value of N the group could have used for this game ?
A good first step was to nail down the important information from the problem .
In the first round , when there were 61 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ circle some number of times ( it could have been zero times , once , twice , etc . )
and then 18 more spaces .
In other words , N had to be some multiple of 61 ( one multiple for each time the pumpkin went around the circle ) plus 19 .
In modular arithmetic notation , this meant that N ≡ 18 ( mod 61 ) .
Why did you have to add 19 , and not 18 ?
Because after the pumpkin had finished going around the circle , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ left of you all counted off .
And you plus the 18 others made 19 people in total .
In the second round , when there were 60 players , the pumpkin again went around some number of times and then 31 more spaces .
That told you that N ≡ 32 ( mod 60 ) .
And in the third round , when poor Zach took himself out of the competition , you learned that N was a multiple of 59 , i.e.
, N ≡ 1 ( mod 59 ) .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ 61 were all relatively prime , the Chinese remainder theorem told you that there was a single value of N between 1 and 59·60·61 , or 215,940 , that satisfied all three of the aforementioned modular relations .
But while it was one thing to prove there was a solution , finding it was another matter entirely .
One way to do this was through brute force coding — searching for the one number less than 215,940 that had a remainder of 19 when divided by 61 , 32 when divided by 60 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ That smallest number was 136,232 .
Thanks to the wonders of modular arithmetic , any multiple of 215,940 plus 136,232 would also have resulted in the same sequence of eliminations .
For extra credit , you had to play this game to its conclusion , where you were identified as Player No .
1 , the player to your left as Player No .
2 and so on .
Once again , your computer was your friend .
If you simulated the rest of the game , it was Player No .
58 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for extra extra credit , you had to find the smallest value of N for which you , Player No .
1 , won the game .
This question was ambiguous as to whether you simply wanted the smallest value of N or the smallest value of N that also resulted in the eliminations listed in the original problem .
The answer to the former was 140 , while the answer to the latter was a whopping 42,892,352 .
Only five solvers found this latter result : Angela Zhou , Peter from Hanover @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Waters and Asha O ’ Shaughnessy .
They will each be winning an imaginary hot pumpkin !
Finally , hats off to those who attempted this not with code , but by hand or with spreadsheets .
One such solver , Shane Tilton , said he was content with simply having been invited to play a game of hot pumpkin in the first place .
Who needs to play a game that requires 42 million turns to win when , more importantly , you have 60 good friends to play it with ?
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ ?
There ’ s a whole book full of the best puzzles from this column and some never-before-seen head-scratchers .
It ’ s called “ The Riddler , ” and it ’ s in stores now !

Welcome to The Riddler. Every week, I offer up problems related to the things we hold dear around here: math, logic and probability. Two puzzles are presented each week: the Riddler Express for those of you who want something bite-size and the Riddler Classic for those of you in the slow-puzzle movement. Submit a correct answer for either, and you may get a shoutout in next week’s column. Please wait until Monday to publicly share your answers! If you need a hint or have a favorite puzzle collecting dust in your attic, find me on Twitter.
Riddler Express
Last weekend’s New York City Marathon was canceled. But runners from Des Linden — one of the top American marathoners — to FiveThirtyEight’s own Santul Nerkar — my number one editor — still went out there and braved the course. Santul finished in a time of 3:41:43 (3 hours, 41 minutes, 43 seconds), which averaged to 8 minutes, 27 seconds per mile.
Suppose, while training, Santul completed two 20-mile runs on a treadmill. For the first run, he set the treadmill to a constant speed so that he ran every mile in 9 minutes.
The second run was a little different. He started at a 10 minute-per-mile pace and accelerated continuously until he was running at an 8-minute-per mile pace at the end. Moreover, Santul’s minutes-per-mile pace (i.e., not his speed) changed linearly over time. So a quarter of the way through the duration (in time, not distance) of the run, his pace was 9 minutes, 30 seconds per mile, halfway through it was 9 minutes per mile, etc.
Which training run was faster (i.e., took less time) overall? And what were Santul’s times for the two runs?
Submit your answer
Riddler Classic
Mathematician John von Neumann is credited with figuring out how to take a biased coin (whose probability of coming up heads is p, not necessarily equal to 0.5) and “simulate” a fair coin. Simply flip the coin twice. If it comes up heads both times or tails both times, then flip it twice again. Eventually, you’ll get two different flips — either a heads and then a tails, or a tails and then a heads, with each of these two cases equally likely. Once you get two different flips, you can call the second of those flips the outcome of your “simulation.”
For any value of p between zero and one, this procedure will always return heads half the time and tails half the time. This is pretty remarkable! But there’s a downside to von Neumann’s approach — you don’t know how long (i.e., how many flips) the simulation will last.
Suppose I want to simulate a fair coin in at most three flips. For which values of p is this possible?
Extra credit: Suppose I want to simulate a fair coin in at most N flips. For how many values of p is this possible?
Submit your answer
Solution to last week’s Riddler Express
Congratulations to 👏 Nilesh Shah 👏 of Seattle, Washington, winner of last week’s Riddler Express.
Last week, while waiting in line to vote early, I overheard a discussion between election officials. Apparently, there was a political sign within 100 feet of the polling place, against New York State law.
This got me thinking. Suppose a polling site was a square building whose sides were 100 feet in length. An election official took a string that was also 100 feet long and tied one end to a door located in the middle of one of the building’s sides. She then held the other end of the string in her hand.
What was the area of the region outside of the building she could reach while holding the string?
Had there been no building, but if she were still constrained to be within 100 feet of a fixed point, then the region she could have reached was anywhere within a 100-foot circle, whose area was 𝜋(100)2, or about 31,416 square feet. Due to the building, that area served as an upper bound, meaning the answer had to be less than that.
At this point, there were two approaches. A few readers subtracted the overlapping area between the building and the 100-foot circle. The geometry here was a little involved, but it yielded an answer of (5𝜋/6−√3/4)·1002, or about 21,849 square feet. However, this wasn’t quite right either.
Why was that? Because this assumed that the string was able to pass through the building. While it was Halloween last week, that sort of “ghostly” string behavior would simply have been too paranormal. So whenever the election official lost line of sight with the door where the string was tied, 50 feet of string were taut against the wall of the building, leaving her with a 50-foot radius with which to move around.
Solver Tamera Lanham sketched out the accessible area:
The red region on the right was a semicircle with a radius of 100 feet, meaning its area was 𝜋(100)2/2, or about 15,708 square feet. Meanwhile, the two blue regions were both quarter-circles with a radius of 50 feet. Together, these quarter-circles formed a semicircle whose area was 𝜋(50)2/2, or about 3,927 square feet.
All together, the area of the region the election official could reach was 6,250𝜋, or about 19,635 square feet.
This riddle was a version of what are known as goat problems, in which a goat is tethered to part of a fence and you are tasked with calculating its grazing area. If you thought the square shape of the building wasn’t challenging enough, try re-running the problem for a circular building. It’s tricky!
Solution to last week’s Riddler Classic
Congratulations to 👏 Brian Corrigan 👏 of Los Angeles, California, winner of last week’s Riddler Classic.
Last week, you and 60 of your closest friends decided to play a socially distanced game of hot pumpkin.
Before the game started, you all sat in a circle and agreed on a positive integer N. Once the number had been chosen, you (the leader of the group) started the game by counting “1” and passing the pumpkin to the person sitting directly to your left. She then declared “2” and passed the pumpkin one space to her left. This continued with each player saying the next number in the sequence, wrapping around the circle as many times as necessary, until the group had collectively counted up to N. At that point, the player who counted “N” was eliminated, and the player directly to his or her left started the next round, again proceeding to the same value of N. The game continued until just one player remained, who was declared the victor.
In the game’s first round, the player 18 spaces to your left was the first to be eliminated. Ricky, the next player in the sequence, began the next round. The second round saw the elimination of the player 31 spaces to Ricky’s left. Zach began the third round, only to find himself eliminated in a cruel twist of fate. (Woe is Zach.)
What was the smallest value of N the group could have used for this game?
A good first step was to nail down the important information from the problem. In the first round, when there were 61 players, the pumpkin went around the circle some number of times (it could have been zero times, once, twice, etc.) and then 18 more spaces. In other words, N had to be some multiple of 61 (one multiple for each time the pumpkin went around the circle) plus 19. In modular arithmetic notation, this meant that N ≡ 19 (mod 61).
Why did you have to add 19, and not 18? Because after the pumpkin had finished going around the circle, you and the 18 people to the left of you all counted off. And you plus the 18 others made 19 people in total.
In the second round, when there were 60 players, the pumpkin again went around some number of times and then 31 more spaces. That told you that N ≡ 32 (mod 60). And in the third round, when poor Zach took himself out of the competition, you learned that N was 1 more than a multiple of 59, i.e., N ≡ 1 (mod 59).
Because the numbers 59, 60 and 61 were all relatively prime, the Chinese remainder theorem told you that there was a single value of N between 1 and 59·60·61, or 215,940, that satisfied all three of the aforementioned modular relations. But while it was one thing to prove there was a solution, finding it was another matter entirely.
One way to do this was through brute force coding — searching for the one number less than 215,940 that had a remainder of 19 when divided by 61, 32 when divided by 60 and 1 when divided by 59. That smallest number was 136,232. Thanks to the wonders of modular arithmetic, any multiple of 215,940 plus 136,232 would also have resulted in the same sequence of eliminations.
For extra credit, you had to play this game to its conclusion, where you were identified as Player No. 1, the player to your left as Player No. 2 and so on. Once again, your computer was your friend. If you simulated the rest of the game, it was Player No. 58 who emerged as the winner.
And for extra extra credit, you had to find the smallest value of N for which you, Player No. 1, won the game. This question was ambiguous as to whether you simply wanted the smallest value of N or the smallest value of N that also resulted in the eliminations listed in the original problem. The answer to the former was 140, while the answer to the latter was a whopping 42,892,352. Only five solvers found this latter result: Angela Zhou, Peter from Hanover, Germany, Emma Knight, Jim Waters and Asha O’Shaughnessy. They will each be winning an imaginary hot pumpkin!
Finally, hats off to those who attempted this not with code, but by hand or with spreadsheets. One such solver, Shane Tilton, said he was content with simply having been invited to play a game of hot pumpkin in the first place.
Who needs to play a game that requires 42 million turns to win when, more importantly, you have 60 good friends to play it with?
Want more riddles?
Well, aren’t you lucky? There’s a whole book full of the best puzzles from this column and some never-before-seen head-scratchers. It’s called “The Riddler,” and it’s in stores now!
Want to submit a riddle?
Email Zach Wissner-Gross at riddlercolumn@gmail.com


fivethirthyeight--2020-11-06--Biden Appears On The Verge Of Overtaking Trump In Pennsylvania

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast , the crew shares an update on where votes are still coming @ @ @ @ @ of the overall results at this point .

In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew shares an update on where votes are still coming in and what to make of the overall results at this point.


fivethirthyeight--2020-11-06--Is The Presidential Election Over?

Is The Presidential Election Over?

Managing editor Micah Cohen joins Galen Druke to talk about whether the remaining votes being counted , particularly in Pennsylvania @ @ @ @ @ ’ s lead nationwide .
They also discuss the significance of the outcomes in Arizona @ @ @ @ @ Biden wins Pennsylvania .

Managing editor Micah Cohen joins Galen Druke to talk about whether the remaining votes being counted, particularly in Pennsylvania, could shake Joe Biden’s lead nationwide. They also discuss the significance of the outcomes in Arizona and Nevada, even if Biden wins Pennsylvania.


fivethirthyeight--2020-11-07--This Was A Pretty Good Map For Biden

This Was A Pretty Good Map For Biden

In this episode of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast , the crew reacts to the news that Joe Biden and Kamala @ @ @ @ @ the next president and vice president , respectively , of the United States .

In this episode of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew reacts to the news that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are set to become the next president and vice president, respectively, of the United States.


fivethirthyeight--2020-11-07--Politics Podcast: Biden Is Set To Be President. What Comes Next?

On Saturday , the major networks declared that Joe Biden is set to be the next president of the United @ @ @ @ @ of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast , the crew reacts to the news , breaks down @ @ @ @ @ discusses what comes next .

On Saturday, the major networks declared that Joe Biden is set to be the next president of the United States. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew reacts to the news, breaks down trends within the electorate and discusses what comes next.


fivethirthyeight--2020-11-07--What Trump Revealed About America

What Trump Revealed About America

Now that Joe Biden is set to become the 46th president of the United States , politics writer Clare Malone @ @ @ @ @ reflect on what the Trump era laid bare about American life and American exceptionalism .

Now that Joe Biden is set to become the 46th president of the United States, politics writer Clare Malone and deputy editor Chadwick Matlin reflect on what the Trump era laid bare about American life and American exceptionalism.


fivethirthyeight--2020-11-07--How Joe Biden And Kamala Harris Won A Historic Election

As multiple news outlets report that Joe Biden has won the presidency , managing editor Micah Cohen and politics editor @ @ @ @ @ Druke about this historic election .

As multiple news outlets report that Joe Biden has won the presidency, managing editor Micah Cohen and politics editor Sarah Frostenson talk with Galen Druke about this historic election.


fivethirthyeight--2020-11-07--Biden May Have Won The Election — But The Deep Partisan Divide In America Remains

Joe Biden is the apparent winner of Pennsylvania .
On Saturday morning , the major networks declared that he had won there , giving him enough electoral votes to become the president-elect .
But let ’ s go back to late Tuesday night for a moment … Once it was fairly clear that Biden would likely win the presidential election but in more of a drawn-out nail-biter than many polls had suggested , and that Democrats would keep their majority in the U.S. House but lose seats and perhaps not win control of the U.S. Senate , people in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of the 2020 race .
Many of these arguments focused on flaws or shortcomings in the Democratic approach to 2020 — even though they had just pulled off the somewhat rare feat of unseating an incumbent president .
Some analysts argued that Democrats are too liberal , particularly on racial issues ; others argued that Democrats are insufficiently liberal , particularly on economic issues .
There is renewed criticism that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are bad at crafting a narrative for the party and recruiting candidates for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the party is not doing enough to appeal to Hispanic voters .
There are also questions about why polls appeared to understate the depth of Trump ’ s support ( again ) .
And , finally , there are questions once again about whether the broader political media is missing something in telling the story of American politics .
After all , the media has often cast Trump as an ineffective president , particularly in dealing with the outbreak of the novel coronavirus , and yet nearly half of the country ’ s @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of these arguments could be true .
All of them could be true ( except the mutually exclusive ones ) .
But here ’ s another take , or perhaps an anti-take : At the least , the unique nature of the vote in 2020 — in particular , that the counting is taking and will take longer than usual — means we won ’ t know many of these answers for some time .
And , moreover , Tuesday wasn ’ t particularly unusual , at least in the context of modern @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Americans , including the vast majority of Asian , Black and Hispanic voters , backed the Democratic Party ’ s presidential candidate .
A slightly smaller bloc , including the majority of white Americans and the overwhelming majority of white evangelical Protestants , backed the Republican Party ’ s candidate .
Democrats carried states on the West Coast and in the Northeast , the GOP was dominant in the South and the Great Plains .
Democrats were very strong in cities , the GOP in rural areas ; the suburbs were somewhat more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it appears that a majority of voters in only one state chose a senator from a different party than in the presidential race ( Republican Sen. Susan Collins won in Maine , which Biden carried easily . )
In short , what made Tuesday surprising to observers was that the pre-election polls may have understated the size of Red America by a few percentage points nationally and overstated Biden ’ s standing in some swing states .
But an election where Democrats won the popular vote by several million votes but fairly narrowly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ 2016 .
The list of states that Biden won but Barack Obama lost in 2012 ( maybe Arizona and maybe Georgia ) is short , as is the list of states that Obama won in 2012 but Biden lost ( Florida , Iowa , Ohio ) .
The election being decided by Pennsylvania , Michigan and Wisconsin was probably what we expected in January 2020 , even though it looked as though Biden could expand the map far beyond that in November 2020 .
Obviously , there were some big shifts in 2020 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ lost Georgia by 8 percentage points in 2012 ; Biden is slightly ahead there ( he leads by about 7,000 votes ) .
Four years ago , Trump won about 34 percent of the vote in Miami-Dade County , but around 46 percent this year , a huge increase .
Most importantly , it is very notable , if not surprising , that Trump managed to get nearly universal support from Republican voters and win over nearly half of the total electorate despite his history of breaking with democratic values and his being @ @ @ @ @ @ @ more than 235,000 Americans died of COVID-19 .
So , I ’ m not arguing that people should have expected what happened on Tuesday .
I did not .
I expected it to be somewhat clear by 11 p.m. on election night that Biden had won .
I expected Democrats would gain control of the Senate and win House seats .
None of that happened .
I want to know more about what polls may have gotten wrong ( though we ’ ll have to wait for all the votes to be counted @ @ @ @ @ @ @ I want to know how the strategies of each party may have affected the results and other factors that may have shaped the election .
Some of the initial post-election criticisms of Democrats and the political media may be right .
But the most obvious conclusion from the 2020 elections is that we are still divided between two entrenched political coalitions in America .
This has basically been true since at least the 2000 elections .
Those two coalitions show up in polling on a ton of issues .
I am not suggesting @ @ @ @ @ @ @ size ( Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections ) .
Nor am I suggesting that these coalitions are permanent and unchanging , or that the parties and candidates can ’ t do things to shift these dynamics .
Maybe Democrats would have done better at the congressional level with different candidates or a different message .
Perhaps Republicans will dominate elections in the future without the unpopular Trump weighing down the party .
Alternatively , perhaps Trump is a uniquely talented politician and Democrats will @ @ @ @ @ @ @ he isn ’ t on the ballot .
But I do know that at least 42 states and the clear majority of Americans voted for the same party at the presidential level in 2020 as they did in 2016 .
The most important story may be not what changed electorally in 2020 , but how and why so much did not change .

Perry Bacon Jr. (perry.bacon@fivethirtyeight.com)

Joe Biden is the apparent winner of Pennsylvania. On Saturday morning, the major networks declared that he had won there, giving him enough electoral votes to become the president-elect. But let’s go back to late Tuesday night for a moment …
Once it was fairly clear that Biden would likely win the presidential election but in more of a drawn-out nail-biter than many polls had suggested, and that Democrats would keep their majority in the U.S. House but lose seats and perhaps not win control of the U.S. Senate, people in the political world started offering their deeper analyses of the 2020 race.
How Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won a historic election | FiveThirtyEight
Many of these arguments focused on flaws or shortcomings in the Democratic approach to 2020 — even though they had just pulled off the somewhat rare feat of unseating an incumbent president. Some analysts argued that Democrats are too liberal, particularly on racial issues; others argued that Democrats are insufficiently liberal, particularly on economic issues. There is renewed criticism that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer are bad at crafting a narrative for the party and recruiting candidates for key races. There is frustration that the party is not doing enough to appeal to Hispanic voters.
There are also questions about why polls appeared to understate the depth of Trump’s support (again). And, finally, there are questions once again about whether the broader political media is missing something in telling the story of American politics. After all, the media has often cast Trump as an ineffective president, particularly in dealing with the outbreak of the novel coronavirus, and yet nearly half of the country’s votes were cast for him.
Some of these arguments could be true. All of them could be true (except the mutually exclusive ones). But here’s another take, or perhaps an anti-take: At the least, the unique nature of the vote in 2020 — in particular, that the counting is taking and will take longer than usual — means we won’t know many of these answers for some time. And, moreover, Tuesday wasn’t particularly unusual, at least in the context of modern American electoral politics.
A plurality of Americans, including the vast majority of Asian, Black and Hispanic voters, backed the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate. A slightly smaller bloc, including the majority of white Americans and the overwhelming majority of white evangelical Protestants, backed the Republican Party’s candidate. Democrats carried states on the West Coast and in the Northeast, the GOP was dominant in the South and the Great Plains. Democrats were very strong in cities, the GOP in rural areas; the suburbs were somewhat more split. As of right now, it appears that a majority of voters in only one state chose a senator from a different party than in the presidential race (Republican Sen. Susan Collins won in Maine, which Biden carried easily.)
In short, what made Tuesday surprising to observers was that the pre-election polls may have understated the size of Red America by a few percentage points nationally and overstated Biden’s standing in some swing states. But an election where Democrats won the popular vote by several million votes but fairly narrowly won the Electoral College almost happened in 2016. The list of states that Biden won but Barack Obama lost in 2012 (maybe Arizona and maybe Georgia) is short, as is the list of states that Obama won in 2012 but Biden lost (Florida, Iowa, Ohio). The election being decided by Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin was probably what we expected in January 2020, even though it looked as though Biden might expand the map far beyond that in November 2020.
Obviously, there were some big shifts in 2020 compared with past election cycles. Obama lost Georgia by 8 percentage points in 2012; Biden is slightly ahead there. Four years ago, Trump won about 34 percent of the vote in Miami-Dade County, but around 46 percent this year, a huge increase.
Most importantly, it is very notable, if not surprising, that Trump managed to get nearly universal support from Republican voters and win over nearly half of the total electorate despite his history of breaking with democratic values and his being in charge of the U.S. government while more than 235,000 Americans died of COVID-19.
So, I’m not arguing that people should have expected what happened on Tuesday. I did not. I expected it to be somewhat clear by 11 p.m. on election night that Biden had won. I expected Democrats would gain control of the Senate and win House seats. None of that happened. I want to know more about what polls may have gotten wrong (though we’ll have to wait for all the votes to be counted before really diving into that). I want to know how the strategies of each party may have affected the results and other factors that may have shaped the election. Some of the initial post-election criticisms of Democrats and the political media may be right.
But the most obvious conclusion from the 2020 elections is that we are still divided between two entrenched political coalitions in America. This has basically been true since at least the 2000 elections. Those two coalitions show up in polling on a ton of issues. I am not suggesting that these coalitions are of exactly equal size (Democrats have won the popular vote in seven of the last eight presidential elections). Nor am I suggesting that these coalitions are permanent and unchanging, or that the parties and candidates can’t do things to shift these dynamics. Maybe Democrats would have done better at the congressional level with different candidates or a different message. Perhaps Republicans will dominate elections in the future without the unpopular Trump weighing down the party. Alternatively, perhaps Trump is a uniquely talented politician and Democrats will be able to win more elections if he isn’t on the ballot.
I. Don’t. Know.
But I do know that at least 42 states and the clear majority of Americans voted for the same party at the presidential level in 2020 as they did in 2016. The most important story may be not what changed electorally in 2020, but how and why so much did not change.
What Trump revealed about America | FiveThirtyEight


fivethirthyeight--2020-11-07--How Trump Changed America

How Trump Changed America

At 10:37 p.m. on Tuesday , November 8 , 2016 , I wrote myself an email : I ’ d been watching the 2016 vote returns in our office .
At 9:35 p.m. Donald Trump ’ s chance of winning the election was 26 percent according to our model ; by 10:09 p.m. it had moved to 44 percent .
At 10:31 p.m. a blog post of mine went up about the radical shifts among voters without a college education in Michigan .
Still , it took someone saying it out loud to arrange all those particulate results and blog @ @ @ @ @ @ @ just one direction : Trump was going to win the election .
The few minutes before and after I sent that email are caught in amber for me .
I collected my thoughts in the copier room and then went back out to the lobby where my co-workers were seated and quietly typing .
Along with the rest of America , I would spend the next four years trying to make sense of that night .
Trump changed our conception of what was possible in American democracy and American institutions .
Unless democracy @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a second term .
On Saturday morning , the major networks declared that Joe Biden had won Pennsylvania , giving him enough electoral votes to become the president-elect .
But I have no doubt that the effects of Trump ’ s presidency will ripple through American life for years , if not decades .
Trump didn ’ t create partisanship or the idea that racism is a decent electoral strategy , but he elevated both .
He revealed fundamental weaknesses in the way Americans consume politics , and he seemed to make everyone @ @ @ @ @ @ @ is difficult to imagine that history will look favorably on Donald John Trump after he leaves office on January 20 , but I feel certain that history won ’ t be able to stop looking .
Trump changed politics .
But how exactly ?
Yes , there were the rallies , the calls for swamp-draining , and all the broken political norms .
But at the root , I think , Trump revealed how very hollow we are willing to let things get .
Over the course of the past five years , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of honesty or intellectual heft — and tens of millions of us were relatively unbothered by that .
Take the major political happenings of 2017 , for instance .
When the Republican House passed a bill to “ repeal and replace ” substantial parts of Obamacare — the phrase was repeated ad nauseam by Trump and others — Republicans held a celebration in the Rose Garden .
They rolled cases of beer into the halls of Congress .
But there was and never has been a Republican plan to “ replace ” Obamacare @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ repeal and replace.
” So did seemingly every Republican .
Then every cable show .
I ’ m certain I ’ ve uttered it professionally .
We repeated the phrase so much it would be easy to think Trump had some sort of plan .
He didn ’ t .
Of course , Trump wasn ’ t the first politician to serve rhetoric instead of substance .
But the lack of even an attempt at some concrete policy was remarkable .
My high school English teacher used to say , “ Image @ @ @ @ @ @ @ image or idea ( and make it vague enough ) and people will project onto it what they will .
This is the heart of many a savvy PR strategy — just ask Beyoncé .
The great lesson politicians of all stripes have taken from the Trump era is that you can have all the policy ideas in the world but they don ’ t matter if you can ’ t convey a resonant enough message to a broad enough swath of people .
Of course Mexico wasn ’ t going to pay @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a triumphant idea to grasp onto .
What a succinct articulation of a set of cultural , racial , economic and political values !
The hollowness of the Trump era also required him to obfuscate the plain facts of things happening before our eyes .
When Trump ordered the travel ban in early 2017 — a thinly veiled attempt to cloak his much-touted campaign plan for a “ Muslim ban ” in something like respectability — his staff insisted that it was not what we all thought it was .
“ It ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ’ s not a Muslim ban , ” the White House ’ s then-press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters .
The seven countries singled out were all majority-Muslim , and during the campaign Trump had said : “ Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country ’ s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.
” Trump had only called it a “ ban , ” Spicer said , because that ’ s what the press had called @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of truth ensued , just one battle in the country ’ s four-year war of semantics .
Trump perfected the strategy of retrofitting facts to one ’ s preferred narrative .
Up until the Trump era , partisans had made studious attempts to craft their arguments in at least a simulacrum of fact .
Trump didn ’ t bother much with that , and it turned out , the vast majority of Republican voters didn ’ t mind .
The rest of the country got angry but grew accustomed to his new rules @ @ @ @ @ @ @ faces were pushed down into a steaming bowl of fact , evidence and expert testimony during Trump ’ s 2019 impeachment trial , “ Republicans raged against the process and sought to offer benign explanations for Mr. Trump ’ s conduct , ” as The New York Times wrote .
Judging by the loss of the presidency , it seems that Trump ’ s strategy of optimism-despite-the-dire-facts ran aground as the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the country .
The crisis required the government to make difficult choices , and perform its most basic duty @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , everything broke .
You can ’ t rally or spin your way out of a pandemic .
In the 3 a.m. hour of November 9 , 2016 , I watched Trump ’ s victory speech .
“ Now it ’ s time for America to bind the wounds of division .
[ We ] have to get together , ” Trump intoned after congratulating Clinton for a “ hard-fought campaign , ” sounding a note of uncharacteristic grace .
I rolled over and slept for a couple of hours .
I watched @ @ @ @ @ @ @ before this year ’ s election .
This time , I found myself staring at Mike Pence , standing to Trump ’ s right , smiling beatifically .
Somehow he reminded me of Hans Holbein the Younger ’ s dour Thomas Cromwell .
Maybe there ’ s something about the jowls of the 20th-century Indiana native that recalls the 16th-century Putney boy turned consigliere to England ’ s King Henry VIII .
More likely it ’ s the conversations I had with my father about Henry and Cromwell .
During the summer we @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Light , ” the final book in Hilary Mantel ’ s trilogy about Cromwell , and for a while , it came up often in our phone calls .
Henry , my father pointed out , was an incredibly strange man .
Most historians cloak the king ’ s wild decisions to marry , divorce , and behead his various wives — not to mention change the state religion ( resulting in the deaths of countless others ) — in the distancing language of realpolitik .
But I think Dad sort of cut @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ strange.
” Power does things to your brain ; the tyrant is usually an odd duck .
As Henry ’ s most powerful adviser , Cromwell was cannily attuned to the king ’ s capricious moods and to the dynamics of the palace — never taking too much credit for the king ’ s “ work.
” Yet Cromwell was never at ease , even as his wealth and influence grew .
Not to spoil the ending , but the guy was eventually executed .
Pence , however , survived at the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ could say the same for the rest of the Republican Party , at least for now .
Control of the Senate remains unclear , and the president found more supporters in 2020 than in 2016 — he even made inroads with Cuban American voters and seems to have picked up support from Black voters , particularly men , though we won ’ t know for sure for some time .
But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell expressed dismay at his party ’ s loss of college-educated , suburban and female voters , a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ GOP are worried the party is headed in a bad direction .
The results of the election don ’ t change the reality that the Republican Party and its ideals have been subsumed by Trump the individual , and have taken on his shallow contrarianism as its North Star .
But Trump ’ s great insight was understanding and accepting that the GOP ’ s base didn ’ t care all that much about the party elite ’ s core ideology : taxes , small government , free trade .
Rather , they @ @ @ @ @ @ @ had so cleverly carved out : guns , political incorrectness , anti-abortion sentiment , etc .
Trump won the GOP primaries by giving the people what they wanted .
He blamed Mexicans for woes that were better attributed to the changing nature of the world economy , which left some places in America far behind , the result of complex decisions and electoral choices over decades .
The GOP under Trump embraced the conspiracy theory as campaign rhetoric , reversed platform positions and generally abandoned its ideological core .
What was left was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ ; the Republicans had “ repeal and replace.
” The mainstream press had facts ; the GOP had a retort of “ fake news.
” And scientists had proof of climate change , while the GOP called efforts to reverse it “ extremism ” without offering an alternative solution .
The contrary impulses of Trump ’ s GOP revealed its full impotence when COVID-19 struck .
As health professionals worked to discover best practices in the midst of a pandemic , Trump and his party succumbed to their default instincts of questioning “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ genius has always been in the PR department , realizing the seductive power of thumbing your nose at authority .
The doctors said masks were good , but Trump and other Republicans called them an impingement on liberty .
Increasing scientific evidence showed the simple act of wearing a mask is a way to help control the pandemic , but Trump ’ s chief of staff Mark Meadows said , “ We ’ re not going to control the pandemic , ” just before the election .
More than 230,000 Americans have died @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and beat the novel coronavirus , he told the country that it wasn ’ t such a bad disease after all .
Contrarianism has real-world effects .
Deadly ones .
When the crisis finally hit with full force ( the president having known about its lethal potential for months despite publicly playing down its potential impact ) , Pence was charged with heading up the White House ’ s COVID-19 task force , a group now inextricably linked to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans .
Like the GOP at large @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a president , abandoning his responsibilities to the American public in the process .
Cromwell had to deal with some unpleasantness too , overseeing the executions of friends and innocents .
He did so in the name of king and country , the deaths a necessary cleansing .
On October 27 , the White House released its “ science and technology accomplishments from the first term.
” The top accomplishment ?
“ ENDING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC.
” That day alone , 983 Americans died .
So what is America after Trump ?
We @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , that ’ s for certain .
Estimates vary , but all signs point to the 2020 election having the highest voter participation rate in over 100 years .
It ’ s easy to see that participation simply as electoral .
But the Trump era has also brought a lot of politics into our daily lives .
That ’ s in part because of how many issues have been caught up in the net of partisanship .
Addressing racism and sexism is not necessarily the purview of one party or another .
Yet @ @ @ @ @ @ @ After the # MeToo movement upended the silence surrounding America ’ s endemic sexism and the normalization of sexual misconduct , Trump said it was “ a very scary time for young men in America.
” After Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players knelt during the national anthem in protest of police violence and social injustice , Trump said team owners should say , “ Get that son of a bitch off the field right now.
” As some Americans feared that cancel culture had run amok , Trump said it was “ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ are different ways to look at those changes in American life that Trump has decried , though .
The # MeToo movement awakened men and women alike to the pervasiveness of sexism in American life .
Protests against police violence went from the streets of America ’ s cities to its sporting arenas and its suburbs .
And the looming threat of “ cancel culture ” pushed many Americans to rethink what they and their loved ones say , and how they should say it .
So now our political engagement is often @ @ @ @ @ @ @ why-don ’ t-we-kidnap-the-governor-of-Michigan kind of engagement .
People speak in the vapid vernacular of the partisan internet .
We are quicker to see enemies than we are to see persuadable minds or future allies .
We are a cynical bunch , not very sure that we ever had much in common in the first place .
At 1 a.m. on November 9 , 2016 , I wrote yet another email to myself : “ Prayer of St. Francis is really the journalist ’ s prayer and the prayer of our time.
” I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ [ G ] rant that I may not so much seek … to be understood as to understand.
” I think I knew things would only continue to be ugly and cynical , but I think I had hoped that the world would surprise me .
Mostly , it has not .
Seeking to understand rather than be understood requires a suppression of ego that takes practice .
Lots of us are out of practice .
And this election has given us more information that we still need to process and understand .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ s relatively simple to reveal the ugly truths of the world — and to develop anger around them .
It can be painful to realize your brother is a chauvinist , your cousin is bigoted toward religious people , or your mother is a racist .
And that pain can drive us into the harbors of the like-minded .
It ’ s harder to grapple with how to convince people to change the way they think about things , or to just go on letting them think what they think , not allowing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ worst beliefs .
That ’ s a radical act of acceptance , and some might say a radical act of love .
It ’ s not an easy thing .
It might actually be the hardest thing .
So what is America after Trump ?
A nation figuring out how — and whether — to engage and whom to love : the stranger or the self ?
I know the cynic ’ s prediction of which we ’ ll choose , but pure cynicism is boring .
I ’ m rooting for a @ @ @ @ @ @ @

At 10:37 p.m. on Tuesday, November 8, 2016, I wrote myself an email:
“Nate [Silver] and Micah [Cohen] just told me Clinton is probably going to lose, that she’s an underdog … collapse in the Midwest.”
I’d been watching the 2016 vote returns in our office. At 9:35 p.m. Donald Trump’s chance of winning the election was 26 percent according to our model; by 10:09 p.m. it had moved to 44 percent. At 10:31 p.m. a blog post of mine went up about the radical shifts among voters without a college education in Michigan. Still, it took someone saying it out loud to arrange all those particulate results and blog posts in a line that pointed in just one direction: Trump was going to win the election.
The few minutes before and after I sent that email are caught in amber for me. I collected my thoughts in the copier room and then went back out to the lobby where my co-workers were seated and quietly typing. Along with the rest of America, I would spend the next four years trying to make sense of that night. Trump changed our conception of what was possible in American democracy and American institutions. Unless democracy is perverted, he will not serve a second term. On Saturday morning, the major networks declared that Joe Biden had won Pennsylvania, giving him enough electoral votes to become the president-elect.
But I have no doubt that the effects of Trump’s presidency will ripple through American life for years, if not decades. Trump didn’t create partisanship or the idea that racism is a decent electoral strategy, but he elevated both. He revealed fundamental weaknesses in the way Americans consume politics, and he seemed to make everyone in America care about it. It is difficult to imagine that history will look favorably on Donald John Trump after he leaves office on January 20, but I feel certain that history won’t be able to stop looking.
Trump changed politics. But how exactly?
Yes, there were the rallies, the calls for swamp-draining, and all the broken political norms. But at the root, I think, Trump revealed how very hollow we are willing to let things get. Over the course of the past five years, Americans were exposed to few political conversations of honesty or intellectual heft — and tens of millions of us were relatively unbothered by that.
Take the major political happenings of 2017, for instance. When the Republican House passed a bill to “repeal and replace” substantial parts of Obamacare — the phrase was repeated ad nauseam by Trump and others — Republicans held a celebration in the Rose Garden. They rolled cases of beer into the halls of Congress. But there was and never has been a Republican plan to “replace” Obamacare. Trump just kept repeating the phrase “repeal and replace.” So did seemingly every Republican. Then every cable show. I’m certain I’ve uttered it professionally. We repeated the phrase so much it would be easy to think Trump had some sort of plan. He didn’t.
Of course, Trump wasn’t the first politician to serve rhetoric instead of substance. But the lack of even an attempt at some concrete policy was remarkable. My high school English teacher used to say, “Image evokes emotion.” Convey a powerful enough image or idea (and make it vague enough) and people will project onto it what they will. This is the heart of many a savvy PR strategy — just ask Beyoncé. The great lesson politicians of all stripes have taken from the Trump era is that you can have all the policy ideas in the world but they don’t matter if you can’t convey a resonant enough message to a broad enough swath of people. Of course Mexico wasn’t going to pay for the border wall, but what a triumphant idea to grasp onto. What a succinct articulation of a set of cultural, racial, economic and political values!
The hollowness of the Trump era also required him to obfuscate the plain facts of things happening before our eyes. When Trump ordered the travel ban in early 2017 — a thinly veiled attempt to cloak his much-touted campaign plan for a “Muslim ban” in something like respectability — his staff insisted that it was not what we all thought it was. “It’s not a travel ban. It’s not a Muslim ban,” the White House’s then-press secretary Sean Spicer told reporters. The seven countries singled out were all majority-Muslim, and during the campaign Trump had said: “Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what the hell is going on.” Trump had only called it a “ban,” Spicer said, because that’s what the press had called it. Circular arguments about the nature of truth ensued, just one battle in the country’s four-year war of semantics.
Trump perfected the strategy of retrofitting facts to one’s preferred narrative. Up until the Trump era, partisans had made studious attempts to craft their arguments in at least a simulacrum of fact. Trump didn’t bother much with that, and it turned out, the vast majority of Republican voters didn’t mind. The rest of the country got angry but grew accustomed to his new rules of politics. When congressional Republicans’ faces were pushed down into a steaming bowl of fact, evidence and expert testimony during Trump’s 2019 impeachment trial, “Republicans raged against the process and sought to offer benign explanations for Mr. Trump’s conduct,” as The New York Times wrote.
Judging by the loss of the presidency, it seems that Trump’s strategy of optimism-despite-the-dire-facts ran aground as the COVID-19 pandemic ravaged the country. The crisis required the government to make difficult choices, and perform its most basic duty of protecting the public. But instead, everything broke. You can’t rally or spin your way out of a pandemic.
In the 3 a.m. hour of November 9, 2016, I watched Trump’s victory speech. “Now it’s time for America to bind the wounds of division. [We] have to get together,” Trump intoned after congratulating Clinton for a “hard-fought campaign,” sounding a note of uncharacteristic grace. I rolled over and slept for a couple of hours.
I watched that same speech again a few days before this year’s election. This time, I found myself staring at Mike Pence, standing to Trump’s right, smiling beatifically. Somehow he reminded me of Hans Holbein the Younger’s dour Thomas Cromwell. Maybe there’s something about the jowls of the 20th-century Indiana native that recalls the 16th-century Putney boy turned consigliere to England’s King Henry VIII. More likely it’s the conversations I had with my father about Henry and Cromwell. During the summer we each read “The Mirror & the Light,” the final book in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy about Cromwell, and for a while, it came up often in our phone calls. Henry, my father pointed out, was an incredibly strange man. Most historians cloak the king’s wild decisions to marry, divorce, and behead his various wives — not to mention change the state religion (resulting in the deaths of countless others) — in the distancing language of realpolitik. But I think Dad sort of cut through the mess when he called it “strange.” Power does things to your brain; the tyrant is usually an odd duck.
As Henry’s most powerful adviser, Cromwell was cannily attuned to the king’s capricious moods and to the dynamics of the palace — never taking too much credit for the king’s “work.” Yet Cromwell was never at ease, even as his wealth and influence grew. Not to spoil the ending, but the guy was eventually executed. Pence, however, survived at the elbow of his strange king.
You could say the same for the rest of the Republican Party, at least for now. Control of the Senate remains unclear, and the president found more supporters in 2020 than in 2016 — he even made inroads with Cuban American voters and seems to have picked up support from Black voters, particularly men, though we won’t know for sure for some time. But Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell expressed dismay at his party’s loss of college-educated, suburban and female voters, a sign that the highest levels of the GOP are worried the party is headed in a bad direction. The results of the election don’t change the reality that the Republican Party and its ideals have been subsumed by Trump the individual, and have taken on his shallow contrarianism as its North Star.
But Trump’s great insight was understanding and accepting that the GOP’s base didn’t care all that much about the party elite’s core ideology: taxes, small government, free trade. Rather, they connected with the cultural signifiers the party had so cleverly carved out: guns, political incorrectness, anti-abortion sentiment, etc. Trump won the GOP primaries by giving the people what they wanted. He blamed Mexicans for woes that were better attributed to the changing nature of the world economy, which left some places in America far behind, the result of complex decisions and electoral choices over decades. The GOP under Trump embraced the conspiracy theory as campaign rhetoric, reversed platform positions and generally abandoned its ideological core.
What was left was that contrarianism. The Democrats had Obamacare; the Republicans had “repeal and replace.” The mainstream press had facts; the GOP had a retort of “fake news.” And scientists had proof of climate change, while the GOP called efforts to reverse it “extremism” without offering an alternative solution.
The contrary impulses of Trump’s GOP revealed its full impotence when COVID-19 struck. As health professionals worked to discover best practices in the midst of a pandemic, Trump and his party succumbed to their default instincts of questioning “the establishment”; Trump’s genius has always been in the PR department, realizing the seductive power of thumbing your nose at authority. The doctors said masks were good, but Trump and other Republicans called them an impingement on liberty. Increasing scientific evidence showed the simple act of wearing a mask is a way to help control the pandemic, but Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows said, “We’re not going to control the pandemic,” just before the election. More than 230,000 Americans have died of COVID-19, but after Trump contracted and beat the novel coronavirus, he told the country that it wasn’t such a bad disease after all.
Contrarianism has real-world effects. Deadly ones. When the crisis finally hit with full force (the president having known about its lethal potential for months despite publicly playing down its potential impact), Pence was charged with heading up the White House’s COVID-19 task force, a group now inextricably linked to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans. Like the GOP at large, Pence bolstered the fragile self-image of a president, abandoning his responsibilities to the American public in the process. Cromwell had to deal with some unpleasantness too, overseeing the executions of friends and innocents. He did so in the name of king and country, the deaths a necessary cleansing.
On October 27, the White House released its “science and technology accomplishments from the first term.” The top accomplishment? “ENDING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC.” That day alone, 983 Americans died.
So what is America after Trump?
We are more engaged with politics than ever, that’s for certain. Estimates vary, but all signs point to the 2020 election having the highest voter participation rate in over 100 years. It’s easy to see that participation simply as electoral. But the Trump era has also brought a lot of politics into our daily lives. That’s in part because of how many issues have been caught up in the net of partisanship. Addressing racism and sexism is not necessarily the purview of one party or another. Yet partisanship lives loud within us now. After the #MeToo movement upended the silence surrounding America’s endemic sexism and the normalization of sexual misconduct, Trump said it was “a very scary time for young men in America.” After Colin Kaepernick and other NFL players knelt during the national anthem in protest of police violence and social injustice, Trump said team owners should say, “Get that son of a bitch off the field right now.” As some Americans feared that cancel culture had run amok, Trump said it was “driving people from their jobs.”
There are different ways to look at those changes in American life that Trump has decried, though. The #MeToo movement awakened men and women alike to the pervasiveness of sexism in American life. Protests against police violence went from the streets of America’s cities to its sporting arenas and its suburbs. And the looming threat of “cancel culture” pushed many Americans to rethink what they and their loved ones say, and how they should say it.
So now our political engagement is often a seething, partisan sort. A why-don’t-we-kidnap-the-governor-of-Michigan kind of engagement. People speak in the vapid vernacular of the partisan internet. We are quicker to see enemies than we are to see persuadable minds or future allies. We are a cynical bunch, not very sure that we ever had much in common in the first place.
At 1 a.m. on November 9, 2016, I wrote yet another email to myself: “Prayer of St. Francis is really the journalist’s prayer and the prayer of our time.” I was thinking of this part: “[G]rant that I may not so much seek … to be understood as to understand.” I think I knew things would only continue to be ugly and cynical, but I think I had hoped that the world would surprise me.
Mostly, it has not. Seeking to understand rather than be understood requires a suppression of ego that takes practice. Lots of us are out of practice. And this election has given us more information that we still need to process and understand.
Once we get rolling, it’s relatively simple to reveal the ugly truths of the world — and to develop anger around them. It can be painful to realize your brother is a chauvinist, your cousin is bigoted toward religious people, or your mother is a racist. And that pain can drive us into the harbors of the like-minded.
It’s harder to grapple with how to convince people to change the way they think about things, or to just go on letting them think what they think, not allowing their humanity to be defined by their worst beliefs. That’s a radical act of acceptance, and some might say a radical act of love. It’s not an easy thing. It might actually be the hardest thing.
So what is America after Trump? A nation figuring out how — and whether — to engage and whom to love: the stranger or the self? I know the cynic’s prediction of which we’ll choose, but pure cynicism is boring. I’m rooting for a change but planning for a stasis.
Biden is set to be president. What comes next? | FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast


fivethirthyeight--2020-11-07--Biden Wins — Pretty Convincingly In The End

Even if you knew in advance about the “ blue shift ” that would occur in states like Pennsylvania — and we did know in advance about it !
— it ’ s been hard to make enough of a mental adjustment for it this week .
Numbers flashing across a TV ticker have a certain magnetic power and certitude to them .
It was easy to forget that Joe Biden would gain ground once mail votes were added to the tallies because such votes were overwhelmingly Democratic this year in Pennsylvania and most other states .
But just because @ @ @ @ @ @ @ red shift that occurred in states where mail votes were counted first — that doesn ’ t mean the presidential race was all that close in the end .
Joe Biden ’ s win was on the tighter side of the likely range of outcomes suggested by polls , but it was a thoroughly convincing one judged on its own merits .
So put aside your anxieties of the past few days and the premature media narratives that have been circulating since Tuesday night .
Suppose , instead , that you ’ d @ @ @ @ @ @ @ trips in the Grand Canyon ( sounds pleasant , doesn ’ t it ? )
and woke up to this map : It ’ s not a landslide , by any means , but this is a map that almost any Democrat would have been thrilled about if you ’ d shown it to them a year ago .
Biden looks to have reclaimed the three “ blue wall ” states — Pennsylvania , Michigan and Wisconsin ( ABC News has announced that Biden is the “ apparent winner ” in Pennsylvania and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Hillary Clinton ’ s loss .
He may also win Arizona ( he would become the first Democrat to do so since 1996 ) and , in the opposite corner of the country , Georgia ( the first Democratic winner there since 1992 ) .
Additionally , Biden easily won Nebraska ’ s 2nd Congressional District , which could be a thorn in the side of Republicans going forward .
He also ran far ahead of Clinton in rural northern states such as Maine , Minnesota and New Hampshire .
Extrapolating out from @ @ @ @ @ @ @ winning the popular vote by 4.3 percentage points and getting 81.8 million votes to President Trump ’ s 74.9 million , with a turnout of around 160 million .
This is significant because no candidate has ever received 70 million votes in an election — former President Barack Obama came the closest in 2008 , with 69.5 million votes — let alone 80 million .
That may also be a slightly conservative projection , given the blue shift we ’ ve seen so far and the fact that late-counted votes such as provisional @ @ @ @ @ @ @ d probably bet on Biden ’ s popular vote margin winding up at closer to 5 points than to 4 , and 6 points isn ’ t entirely out of the question either .
The margin is also a bit more impressive in the context of our highly polarized political era , which has tended to produce close elections .
If I ’ m right about the popular vote margin , Biden ’ s win would come via the second-largest popular vote margin since 2000 , exceeding Obama ’ s 3.9-point margin against @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Obama ’ s 7.3-point win over John McCain in 2008 .
Biden also defeated an elected incumbent , which is relatively rare .
Since World War II , five elected incumbents who sought reelection have won it — Dwight Eisenhower , Richard Nixon , George W. Bush , Bill Clinton and Obama .
Trump is now the third sitting president to lose his reelection bid in that time , along with Jimmy Carter and George H.W .
Bush .
What about the polls ?
Didn ’ t they show a wider margin for @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Biden led in the final national polls by around 8 points .
So we ’ re probably going to wind up with a polling error of around 3 to 4 points , both nationally and at the state level .
( Although that will reflect a combination of states like Georgia , where the polls were spot-on , and others like Wisconsin , where there were big misses . )
This is , of course , a subject on which we ’ ll have more to say in the coming days .
For @ @ @ @ @ @ @ say that pollsters will have some questions to answer , especially about how they missed in the same direction ( underestimating Trump ) in some of the same states two elections in a row .
At the same time , this election ’ s polling error may wind up being fairly normal by historical standards .
Indeed , the final polls miss by around 3 points , on average , in presidential elections .
The error this year may be somewhat wider than that , but we should wait for all the votes @ @ @ @ @ @ @ substantially in some states before results are certified .
In any case , Biden ’ s ability to survive a polling error of the size that sank Clinton was precisely the reason he was a fairly heavy favorite in our forecast .
Biden won ( or is likely to win ) several states — Georgia , Wisconsin , Pennsylvania , Arizona — by margins that will probably be between 0 and 2 percentage points , in contrast to Clinton , who lost Wisconsin , Michigan , Pennsylvania and Florida by margins of 1 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ s 89 percent chance of winning the Electoral College included the possibility of nail-biter wins in critical states — although , again , it ’ s hard to know if this race would be regarded as that much of a nail-biter if not for the timing of ballot counting and the blue shift .
The bigger problems — both for Democrats and for the polls — were in races for Congress .
There weren ’ t necessarily any huge upsets in the Senate ; it ’ s just that Democrats lost most of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ winners have been projected so far , Democrat Sara Gideon is the only Senate candidate favored in our forecast to have lost , and she had only a 59 percent chance of beating Sen. Susan Collins , according to our final forecast .
Gideon , however , is likely to eventually be joined by Cal Cunningham in North Carolina , who had a 68 percent chance , although the polling in that Senate race had tightened in the closing days of the campaign following a Cunningham sexting scandal .
Republican Joni Ernst held @ @ @ @ @ @ @ although Ernst was a narrow favorite in our forecast .
Democrats do retain a chance at a Senate majority , or more likely a 50-50 split in which Vice President-elect Kamala Harris would be the deciding vote .
Democrats currently hold 48 seats , but there are two runoffs in Georgia on Jan. 5 that are sure to attract hundreds of millions of dollars worth of advertising .
I ’ m a little too exhausted to prognosticate about the Georgia runoffs all that much , but Democrats are at least mathematically alive here @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to win .
They also retain some outside chances at winning a Senate seat in Alaska , where mail votes have not yet been counted .
But Democrats underperformed in the U.S. House , where they ’ ve lost almost every toss-up race that has been projected so far and Republicans have made a net gain of five seats and counting .
It also appears as though Democrats will underperform in the House popular vote relative to the presidential vote and the generic ballot , where Democrats led by about 7 percentage points @ @ @ @ @ @ @ miss ( although the House popular vote can take a long time to finalize ) .
In that sense , the election could be described as more of a repudiation of Trump specifically than of Republicans writ large .
Biden did have some shortcomings , however .
One major one was his apparent underperformance among key groups of Hispanic voters , especially Cuban Americans in South Florida and Mexican Americans in South Texas .
As you can see in this chart from The New York Times , there were huge shifts toward Trump @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with the addition of Georgia and Arizona in their column , Democrats ’ Electoral College coalition is somewhat fragile if it doesn ’ t contain Florida or Texas .
It ’ s not clear yet what the tipping-point state will be in this election — but mostly likely it will be Arizona or Wisconsin , where it appears as though Biden will win by around 1 percentage point .
That could mean there ’ s around a 4-point gap between the roughly 5-point popular vote victory that we eventually expect from Biden and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a bigger Electoral College disadvantage than Clinton had in 2016 ( 3 points ) .
Still , this brings up one last point : This is the seventh election out of the past eight in which Democrats have won the popular vote for president .
If American elections were contested on the basis of the popular vote , this race could probably have been called fairly early on Tuesday night , and we could all have gotten a lot more sleep the past few days .
But don ’ t let bleary eyes @ @ @ @ @ @

Even if you knew in advance about the “blue shift” that would occur in states like Pennsylvania — and we did know in advance about it! — it’s been hard to make enough of a mental adjustment for it this week. Numbers flashing across a TV ticker have a certain magnetic power and certitude to them. It was easy to forget that Joe Biden would gain ground once mail votes were added to the tallies because such votes were overwhelmingly Democratic this year in Pennsylvania and most other states.
How Joe Biden and Kamala Harris won a historic election | FiveThirtyEight
But just because of that blue shift — and the red shift that occurred in states where mail votes were counted first — that doesn’t mean the presidential race was all that close in the end. Joe Biden’s win was on the tighter side of the likely range of outcomes suggested by polls, but it was a thoroughly convincing one judged on its own merits.
So put aside your anxieties of the past few days and the premature media narratives that have been circulating since Tuesday night. Suppose, instead, that you’d been on one of those weekslong rafting trips in the Grand Canyon (sounds pleasant, doesn’t it?) and woke up to this map:
It’s not a landslide, by any means, but this is a map that almost any Democrat would have been thrilled about if you’d shown it to them a year ago. Biden looks to have reclaimed the three “blue wall” states — Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin (ABC News has announced that Biden is the “apparent winner” in Pennsylvania and Wisconsin ) — that were central to Hillary Clinton’s loss. He may also win Arizona (he would become the first Democrat to do so since 1996) and, in the opposite corner of the country, Georgia (the first Democratic winner there since 1992). Additionally, Biden easily won Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, which could be a thorn in the side of Republicans going forward. He also ran far ahead of Clinton in rural northern states such as Maine, Minnesota and New Hampshire.
Extrapolating out from current vote totals, I project Biden winning the popular vote by 4.3 percentage points and getting 81.8 million votes to President Trump’s 74.9 million, with a turnout of around 160 million. This is significant because no candidate has ever received 70 million votes in an election — former President Barack Obama came the closest in 2008, with 69.5 million votes — let alone 80 million. That may also be a slightly conservative projection, given the blue shift we’ve seen so far and the fact that late-counted votes such as provisional ballots often lean Democratic. I’d probably bet on Biden’s popular vote margin winding up at closer to 5 points than to 4, and 6 points isn’t entirely out of the question either.
The margin is also a bit more impressive in the context of our highly polarized political era, which has tended to produce close elections. If I’m right about the popular vote margin, Biden’s win would come via the second-largest popular vote margin since 2000, exceeding Obama’s 3.9-point margin against Mitt Romney in 2012 but lagging behind Obama’s 7.3-point win over John McCain in 2008.
Biden also defeated an elected incumbent, which is relatively rare. Since World War II, five elected incumbents who sought reelection have won it — Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Obama. Trump is now the third sitting president to lose his reelection bid in that time, along with Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush.
What about the polls? Didn’t they show a wider margin for Biden? Yes, they did — Biden led in the final national polls by around 8 points. So we’re probably going to wind up with a polling error of around 3 to 4 points, both nationally and at the state level. (Although that will reflect a combination of states like Georgia, where the polls were spot-on, and others like Wisconsin, where there were big misses.) This is, of course, a subject on which we’ll have more to say in the coming days. For now, it’s safe to say that pollsters will have some questions to answer, especially about how they missed in the same direction (underestimating Trump) in some of the same states two elections in a row.
At the same time, this election’s polling error may wind up being fairly normal by historical standards. Indeed, the final polls miss by around 3 points, on average, in presidential elections. The error this year may be somewhat wider than that, but we should wait for all the votes to be counted because margins may shift substantially in some states before results are certified.
In any case, Biden’s ability to survive a polling error of the size that sank Clinton was precisely the reason he was a fairly heavy favorite in our forecast. Biden won (or is likely to win) several states — Georgia, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona — by margins that will probably be between 0 and 2 percentage points, in contrast to Clinton, who lost Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida by margins of 1 percentage point or less. Biden’s 89 percent chance of winning the Electoral College included the possibility of nail-biter wins in critical states — although, again, it’s hard to know if this race would be regarded as that much of a nail-biter if not for the timing of ballot counting and the blue shift.
The bigger problems — both for Democrats and for the polls — were in races for Congress.
What Trump revealed about America | FiveThirtyEight
There weren’t necessarily any huge upsets in the Senate; it’s just that Democrats lost most of the toss-up races. Among races where winners have been projected so far, Democrat Sara Gideon is the only Senate candidate favored in our forecast to have lost, and she had only a 59 percent chance of beating Sen. Susan Collins, according to our final forecast. Gideon, however, is likely to eventually be joined by Cal Cunningham in North Carolina, who had a 68 percent chance, although the polling in that Senate race had tightened in the closing days of the campaign following a Cunningham sexting scandal. Republican Joni Ernst held off challenger Theresa Greenfield in Iowa, although Ernst was a narrow favorite in our forecast.
Democrats do retain a chance at a Senate majority, or more likely a 50-50 split in which Vice President-elect Kamala Harris would be the deciding vote. Democrats currently hold 48 seats, but there are two runoffs in Georgia on Jan. 5 that are sure to attract hundreds of millions of dollars worth of advertising. I’m a little too exhausted to prognosticate about the Georgia runoffs all that much, but Democrats are at least mathematically alive here in a state that Biden appears likely to win. They also retain some outside chances at winning a Senate seat in Alaska, where mail votes have not yet been counted.
But Democrats underperformed in the U.S. House, where they’ve lost almost every toss-up race that has been projected so far and Republicans have made a net gain of five seats and counting. It also appears as though Democrats will underperform in the House popular vote relative to the presidential vote and the generic ballot, where Democrats led by about 7 percentage points. That looks like a significant polling miss (although the House popular vote can take a long time to finalize). In that sense, the election could be described as more of a repudiation of Trump specifically than of Republicans writ large.
Biden did have some shortcomings, however. One major one was his apparent underperformance among key groups of Hispanic voters, especially Cuban Americans in South Florida and Mexican Americans in South Texas. As you can see in this chart from The New York Times, there were huge shifts toward Trump in these areas:
Indeed, even with the addition of Georgia and Arizona in their column, Democrats’ Electoral College coalition is somewhat fragile if it doesn’t contain Florida or Texas. It’s not clear yet what the tipping-point state will be in this election — but mostly likely it will be Arizona or Wisconsin, where it appears as though Biden will win by around 1 percentage point. That could mean there’s around a 4-point gap between the roughly 5-point popular vote victory that we eventually expect from Biden and his margin in the tipping-point state, a bigger Electoral College disadvantage than Clinton had in 2016 (3 points).
Still, this brings up one last point: This is the seventh election out of the past eight in which Democrats have won the popular vote for president. If American elections were contested on the basis of the popular vote, this race could probably have been called fairly early on Tuesday night, and we could all have gotten a lot more sleep the past few days. But don’t let bleary eyes obscure Biden’s accomplishment.