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But in 2020, in the swing state that crowned past presidents by small margins, much in this country is riding on the all-important question of who flies what flag on which Jeep

The population of Pinellas County, about three-quarters of which is white, includes a good number of older retirees and suburban women, two groups shown by polling to significantly favor Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic presidential nominee

Among registered voters, about 256,000 are registered as Democrats and about 252,000 as Republicans.

Broockman and Kalla surveyed over 40,000 people — far more than a typical poll — about head-to-head presidential matchups

when they weight their numbers to reflect the demographic makeup of the population rather than the likely electorate, as many polls do, Sanders beats Trump, often by more than other candidates.

Sanders loses a significant number of swing votes to Trump, but he makes up for them in support from young people who say they won’t vote, or will vote third party, unless Sanders is the nominee.

The first polls will close at 6 p.m. Eastern time in parts of Indiana and Kentucky. Then there will be a steady stream of poll closings, every hour and sometimes every 30 minutes, until the last polls in Alaska shut down at 1 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday.

But this is not a normal year. Because so many Americans are voting by mail, it’s very possible that we won’t know who won on election night, or even Wednesday morning.

The keywords here are patience and caution. Do not expect states to be called quickly, and do not draw conclusions from partial results, which are likely to be misleading.

How Donald Trump captures the White House

The Republican Party is too badly divided. His rhetoric is too incendiary. Republican voters may be "idiots", but the general public is wiser. The US electoral map, which places a premium on winning key high-population "swing" states, is tilted against the Republican Party.

Those states - which account for 67 electoral votes - all went for Democrat Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. Add them to the states Republican Mitt Romney carried in 2012, and it delivers 273 electoral votes - three more than the 270 necessary to win the presidency.

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Britain could have lived with a German victory in the first world war, and should have stayed out of the conflict in 1914, according to the historian Niall Ferguson, who described the intervention as "the biggest error in modern history".

Britain could indeed have lived with a German victory. What's more, it would have been in Britain's interests to stay out in 1914,

Donald Trump — dismissed by GOP elders for months as an entertaining fringe figure who would self-destruct — has staged a hostile takeover and rebranded the party in his own image. What is being left by the wayside is any sense of a Republican vision for the country, or a set of shared principles that could carry it forward.

“The main pendulum in American politics is no longer swinging from left to right. It’s swinging between insiders and outsiders,” said Sen. David Perdue (R-Ga.). “It’s those in the political class against those who are not — that’s the divide in the country, in the party.”

“Financial crises take 15 to 20 years to clear, as a historical matter, and after two or three years, wealthy people have recovered, but working people haven’t,” he said. “So the result is they turn to populist solutions, and that’s exactly what we’re seeing.”

Europe hates Trump. Does it matter?

This is America's choice, not anyone else's. How would British voters feel if Texans weighed in on Brexit? This time, however, the international reaction to Donald Trump is so forceful and so unanimous in its condemnation that it is worth drawing attention to.

Back in 2004, Europeans assumed that their own well-publicised opposition to President Bush's Iraq war would make it harder for him to get re-elected. In fact, anti-Americanism had the opposite effect

President Obama won re-election thanks in part to a 52-percentage-point spread among Latino voters, the nation's fastest-growing electorate, according to election eve polling. In the America coming over the horizon, it is practically impossible to overcome such a number and win the race for president.According to the polling by Latino Decisions, Hispanic voters nationally and across every battleground state swung heavily to Democrats.

Nationwide, the margin was 75% to 23%. And there were remarkable spreads in the tightest of swing states: 87% to 10% in Colorado, 82% to 17% in Ohio, 66% to 31% in Virginia. (CNN's own poll showed a smaller but still significant spread nationwide -- 71% to 21% -- and in the swing states).

law enforcement and business leaders have worked with immigrant leaders across the political spectrum to forge a new consensus on immigrants and America.

To my understanding, the Green New Deal is pretty clearly written as (and meant as) a rallying cry, “This is what we care about. Let’s move the ‘Overton Window’ kind of stuff.” So why are people treating it like it is (or was meant to be) a detailed policy proposal? It feels like going to an auto show to see “Car of the Future” designs, and then being pissed that you’re not looking at a 2017 Taurus.

I think it has a lot to do with the presidential campaign. Democratic candidates want to be able to point out that they’re on board with the new left-leaning litmus tests without having to get pinned down by policies that might prove controversial. I think that’s a learned behavior from the 2016 campaign: people don’t vote on detailed policy proposals, they vote on the good feelings evoked by broad goals.

I do think there’s an implicit critique of Obama in there. That he was naive to think the Republicans would go along with his agenda. And that taking half-measures doesn’t really get you anywhere. In fact, it might weaken your bargaining position relative to demanding a ***lot*** and then settling for half of what you get.

Here is the central tenet of Facebook’s business: If lots of people click on, comment on, or share an ad, Facebook charges that advertiser less money to reach people. The platform is a brawl for user attention, and Facebook sees a more engaging ad as a better ad, which should be shown to more users.

Trump was a socialgenic candidate with a team that maximized—or exploited—his potential to create engagement: As dozens of stories have attested over the last two years, Trump was the “clickbait candidate.” Clinton’s posts and advertisements, for whatever basket of reasons, did not generate the same volume of likes, clicks, and shares. And in today’s electioneering, that has severe consequences.

Trump, of course, was the canny marketer, while Clinton’s team was the unengaging competitor. While most everyone covering the digital portion of the election has known this, the logical conclusion that follows can still feel startling.

Analysis: Trump, Clinton came out swinging in fiercest presidential debate in modern times

The moderator, NBC’s Lester Holt, tried with only limited success to keep control.

He portrayed her as one of the political hacks who has led the nation dangerously astray.

No one seems to trust their senses anymore. They’ve forgotten the very basics of campaigns.

Starting with this obvious point: Trump needs Republicans to win. Not just his MAGA-hat-wearing, self-avowed deplorables. He needs all of them. He needs GOP suit-and-tie Chamber of Commerce types, the suburban yoga moms, and the buttoned-up Sunday school teachers alike. Even those camped out in the farthest nooks and crannies of the most gerrymandered districts in the swingiest of swing states. Why? Because he’s never even entertained the concept of reaching out to Democratic and Independent voters.

The 2018 midterm elections showed us two important things: Trump’s historic disapproval rating is real and Democratic turnout in 2020 is going to be off the charts.

Donald Trump has a huge campaign war chest and a vast, aggressive digital operation. And the US economy has shown stubborn resilience throughout the president’s three years in office, keeping unemployment levels low and stock markets high.

hat’s the overall sentiment of Democrats based on interviews with over a dozen senior party figures – including ex-mayors and former governors – and top strategists during a chaotic month in the Democratic primary leading up to the Iowa caucuses.

Bernie Sanders surging in Iowa, to the chagrin of centrist Democratic leaders who hoped a candidate like former vice-president Joe Biden or even the young and charismatic former South Bend, Indiana, mayor Pete Buttigieg might score an early win.

We are living in a society where the long-standing injustices of racial discrimination against African Americans and Latinos are compounded by the injuries of class. These afflict all lower-income groups, but they are currently hitting white Americans particularly hard.

A well-functioning political system and bold leaders would bring us together to build a more just and socially healthy country across the board. But we find ourselves in the Trump Era, where distraction, delusion and division define public life

The 2016 Cooperative Congressional Election Study released at the beginning of the month suggested that Trump’s victories (particularly in the swing Midwestern states and Pennsylvania) were driven by white voters without a college degree who either didn’t vote in 2012 or had supported Obama.

I am obliged to argue once again that the most powerful liberal story about 2016, in which race overshadows everything and white nationalism explains the entire Trumpian universe, is an exaggeration of a partial truth.

Adam Serwer’s essay in The Atlantic, “The Nationalist’s Delusion,” which has been praised to the skies by almost every liberal in my Twitter feed, and which comes on the heels of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s similarly themed Atlantic essay, “The First White President,”

Both essays present themselves as arguing against a reductionist conventional wisdom that supposedly dismisses the role of race in Trump’s ascent; both tend toward a fatal reductionism in response, one that insists that hard truth telling matters more than hopeful politicking, but tells only enough of the truth to breed racial pessimism or despair.

The only normal event has been the presidential election.

. As strange as all the events informing the race have been, on a fundamental level, this election has been pretty much exactly like those before it. Sure, day-to-day events such as campaign rallies and the debates were different, and if President Trump contests the results, we will quickly step into uncharted territory. But in these strange times, four time-tested political patterns have held.

Neither Trump’s failures nor his supposed accomplishments have unsettled the stasis that increasingly defines our politics. Republicans like Trump, and Democrats (plus a few swing voters) don’t. Joe Biden could still win in a landslide — but even if he does, Trump will maintain the loyalty of a huge number of Americans.

The United States has vaccinated more than half of its adults against Covid-19

Exponential growth means case numbers can double in just a few days. Exponential decay is its opposite. Exponential decay means case numbers can halve in the same amount of time

Reaching herd immunity is a key goal. It drives cases toward zero by slowing the spread of the virus through a combination of vaccination and infection-acquired immunity to maintain exponential decay — even as society resumes normal activities.

If Turchin's model is right, then the current polarization and inequality in American society will come to a head in 2020. "After the last eight years or so, notice how the discourse in our political class has become fragmented. It's really unprecedented for the last 100 years," he said. "So basically by all measures, there are social pressures for instability that are much worse than 50 years ago."

Why 50-year cycles? Turchin explained that a surge of violence begins in the same way as a forest fire: explosively. After a period of escalation followed by sustained violence, citizens begin to "yearn for the return of stability and an end to fighting," he wrote in his paper. The prevailing social mood swings toward stifling the violence at all costs, and those who directly experienced the civil violence maintain the peace for about a human generation — 20 or 30 years. But the stability doesn't last.

Eventually, "the conflict-scarred generation dies off or retires, and a new cohort arises, people who did not experience the horrors of civil war and are not immunized against it. If the long-term social forces that brought about the first outbreak of internal hostilities are still operating, then the society will slide into the second civil war," he wrote. "As a result, periods of intense conflict tend to recur with a period of roughly two generations (40–60 years)."

The polls, which were taken in the six battleground states where Trump won most narrowly in 2016 tested the president’s head-to-head performance against his top polling Democratic rivals—Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders

The results were revealing and should jar any liberals under the impression that Trump has been fatally hobbled by scandal from their comfortable epistemic bubble.

Biden was the only candidate of the three to beat Trump in the hypothetical match-ups, and he did so by narrowly edging the president in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Florida, and Arizona while trailing in North Carolina. It was Trump who came out on top narrowly in the other-matchups, sweeping all six states against Warren and losing only Michigan to Sanders.