Exit polls, as we wrote back in 2018, serve a couple of different purposes. While they’re not foolproof, in the days to come, they’ll help provide a sense of how and when voters made up their minds. 

Exit polls were not, however, designed to help give the American public a sneak peek of who’s likely to win, especially when people are still in the process of voting.

It’s just really hard to know in advance what the proportion of in-person Election Day voters and absentee voters will be in 2020,” they added. “This election night especially, it’s best just to wait for the final results — even if it takes a while.”

“The toughest nation to deal with are the Democrats in the USA,” Trump said at the time, overlooking the fact that “Democrats” are not a nation.

When asked in September if he would “commit to a peaceful transferal of power” if he loses, Trump again said: “Well, we’re gonna have to see what happens.”

In July, he also said, “I have to see” when asked whether he would accept the results of the general election.

Trump has attempted to try to prevent some mail-in ballots from being counted and has also ignited concerns about whether he would concede defeat if he loses.

Trump in August said that if he loses it would be because the election was rigged and stolen from him. He has specifically targeted mail-in ballots as a method of cheating, despite there being no evidence of widespread voter frau

The true number of infections is likely higher because many people haven’t been tested, and studies suggest people can be infected and not feel sick

Texas’ seven-day rolling average of the positivity rate has risen over the last two weeks from 7.12% to 10.72%. Nationwide, the positivity rate was 6.6%.

Texas health officials have reported more than 18,000 deaths so far from COVID-19.

Last Thursday, El Paso County officials ordered a two-week shutdown of nonessential activities after the area’s medical resources were overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases.

El Paso County Judge Ricardo Samaniego says they’re struggling to find space for the increasing number of people dying and are setting up a fourth mobile morgue unit at the medical examiner’s office.

She estimated that Trump needed to win 59% of the Election Day vote in Pennsylvania to pull off an upset victory there, well above what he won on Election Day in 2016.

he would need 61% of the vote in Wisconsin, compared to the 53% he won on Election Day four years ago.

In North Carolina, he would need to win 62% of the Election Day vote, well above the 56% he won four years earlier. In Arizona, the campaign said Biden had picked up 53% of the vote so far and predicted Trump would need to get 60% of Election Day voters to triumph there. 

The campaign was somewhat less optimistic about Florida and Texas. In Florida, the Biden campaign believes Trump would need to hit 56% of the Election Day vote ― almost exactly what he earned four years ago

In Texas, the campaign estimated only 49% of early voters backed Biden and noted that 53% of voters backed Trump on Election Day in 2016.

Republicans planned to vote in person because of Trump’s false attacks on the reliability of mail-in ballots.

Trump “demands loyalty as a means of maintaining control.”

“But the government should not help citizens to make them loyal; it should do help b/c it’s the right thing to do #VoteBidenHarrisToSaveAmerica,” Hijazi wrote.

Ahead of the election, the Trump administration redoubled efforts to locate Austin Tice, an American journalist who went missing in Syria, even sending the first high-ranking U.S. official to meet with the country’s internationally condemned regime in years as they sought a political win.

There’s nothing special or heroic about Trump performing duties for which he signed up.  

Four weeks after Hijazi came home, the families of other Americans jailed there said they had heard nothing from the White House about plans to help them.

Other Americans held by repressive governments have become less likely to be freed because of Trump’s policies.

By shattering Obama’s historic nuclear deal with Iran and subjecting the Islamic Republic to a “maximum pressure” campaign, Trump has made diplomacy with its leaders almost impossible.

In 2008, Barack Obama captured an electoral vote in Nebraska's second congressional district. In 2016, Donald Trump earned an electoral vote in Maine's second congressional district. This year, both of these congressional districts have received attention from the presidential campaigns.

All other states use the winner-take-all method, which awards all of a state's electoral votes to the ticket that earns a plurality of the vote in the state. This method can lead to some pretty disproportionate outcomes which most often work to amplify the difference between a candidate's popular vote total and electoral vote total.

First, it is important to recognize that the Electoral College process leads candidates to ignore a majority of states across the country

Concerns over gerrymandering have persisted in American politics for two centuries. The term is attributed to Elbridge Gerry and it refers to the practice of drawing legislative districts to favor one political party over others.

A second potential problem could be found in the role of third-party spoilers. It is conceivable that third parties or independent candidates could have strong showings in a few highly conservative or liberal congressional districts and ultimately claim a few electoral votes.

A third concern is that moving to a district selection process could lead to even more misfire elections --elections where the winner of the national popular vote does not win in the Electoral College.

These outcomes underscore the role gerrymandering by state legislatures would have on the presidential selection process. It also suggests why Reince Priebus supported having some states adopt the district plan when he was the head of the Republican National Committee in 2013.

In 2016, its first time publicly releasing polls, Trafalgar was the firm whose state surveys most effectively presaged Mr. Trump’s upset win. A veteran Republican strategist, Mr. Cahaly even called the exact number of Electoral College votes that Mr. Trump and Hillary Clinton would receive — 306 to 227 — although his prediction of which states would get them there was just slightly off.

“social desirability bias”: the tendency for respondents to say what they think an interviewer wants to hear, not what they actually believe.

ut he’s not saying what they are. Mr. Cahaly releases almost no real explanation of his polling methodology; the methods page on Trafalgar’s website contains what reads like a vague advertisement of its services and explains that its polls actively confront social desirability bias, without giving specifics as to how. He says that he uses a mixture of text messages, emails and phone calls — some automated, and some by live callers — to reach an accurate representation of the electorate.

“People do not seem embarrassed to support Mr. Trump,” Mr. Cox said. In the past four years, studies seeking to quantify a so-called “shy Trump” effect in surveys have generally found little evidence to support it.

“It is wildly inappropriate not to tell me, not only what modes you use to draw your sample, but how specifically you did it,” he said. His general rule: “If somebody’s not transparent you can generally assume they’re crap.”

In 2010, Mr. Cahaly was arrested and taken to court for violating a law against using automatic calling machines — known as robocalling — to conduct polls. The charges against him were eventually dropped, and he later successfully sued a state law enforcement agency, causing South Carolina’s prohibition on robocalls to be declared unconstitutional.

Mr. Cahaly said he was doing legitimate polling, aimed at truly understanding voters’ opinions — and getting what he called “dead-on” results. During the 2016 Republican primaries, he was early to spot a surge of enthusiasm from many working-class voters who had long felt alienated from politics and helped power Mr. Trump’s ascent.

“I kept getting these stories about people who showed up to vote and didn’t know how to use the voting machines, they hadn’t voted in so long,” Mr. Cahaly said. So he began to look into who those people might be, and used data available online to create a list of roughly 50 lifestyle characteristics — including, for instance, whether they owned a fishing license — to identify the sorts of low-engagement voters who were turning out in droves. He used that data to make sure he was reaching the right kinds of respondents as he polled off the voter file in advance of the general election.

Mr. Cahaly feels no need to reveal his techniques, despite the near-universal doubt about his work from his peers. “I’ve given away enough; I’m not giving away any more,” he said, arguing that it had been a mistake to even tell the public about his “neighbor question,” which some other firms have since adopted in their own surveys.

The Postal Service has blamed the pandemic and labor shortages for some of the poor rates. As coronavirus cases surge across the country, the Detroit district reported just 78 percent of its employees were available to work, while Central Pennsylvania reported 84 percent, according to a court filing on Friday.

Backups in mail delivery were better than they once were, but customers were still experiencing delays, Mr. Combs said. The Postal Service has been careful to try to shield ballots from the slowdowns, but some might slip through the cracks, he added.

No, there aren’t any new online-voting options.Claim: People can vote by text message, by email or on a state-run website.Fact: Outside of a small amount of overseas absentee voters, no state allows Americans to vote by email, website or text message.Background: In 2016 and 2018, posts on Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites claimed that voters could cast their ballots through newly formed websites, or through text-messaging services.

No, voting machines aren’t doing strange things.Claim: Voting machines are malfunctioning and causing votes to be improperly recorded.Fact: A handful of voting-machine malfunctions are reported every election cycle in most states. The errors are most often due to mistakes by users.Background: Frequently circulated videos purport to show machines malfunctioning or refusing to let people cast their vote for a particular candidate. A 2016 video shot by a woman in Pennsylvania and posted to Twitter claimed that a voting machine was not allowing her to vote for Mr. Trump. The video, which is likely to resurface this year, was provided as evidence that machines were rigged. But as ProPublica reported, the problem with the machine was user error.

No, ICE isn’t monitoring polling locations.Claim: U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents will be at polling stations.Fact: ICE will not be at polling stations.Background: This rumor has made the rounds for a decade. During the 2018 election, claims that ICE would be at polling stations proliferated on Twitter, making misinformation aimed at suppressing the vote one of the most prevalent forms of misinformation on the platform, according to Twitter.

2. False claims of mail-in ballots being dumped or shreddedMail-in ballots and related materials being tossed was another popular falsehood that election officials said they were hearing.

There were 3,959 public Facebook posts sharing this rumor, according to our analysis. Those posts generated 953,032 likes, comments and shares. Among those who shared the lie were two pro-Trump Facebook groups targeting Minnesota residents, as well as President Trump himself. At least 26,300 tweets also discussed the falsehood.

3. False claims of planned violence at polling sites by Antifa and Black Lives Matter protesters

Election officials also said people were confronting them with false assertions that antifa, the loose collection of left-wing activists, and Black Lives Matter protesters were coordinating riots at polling places across the country.Image

He said in an email that his post was not a call for violence and that The New York Times should focus on “the key planners and financiers of all the rioting, arson, looting and murder” instead.

We have seen this already. In September, the Russian media outlet Kommersant reported that Russian hackers had stolen voter roll data from Michigan — but in fact, that data was already publicly available. A few weeks ago, Iranians sent threatening and intimidating emails to voters, masquerading as a white supremacist group.

3. Expect messiness.

4. Check before you share information

5. If you see something, say something.

6. Be patient.

7. Vote.

These are public Trump fans who, in private, acknowledge that his tweets are humiliating, his crowing about his victories is tasteless, his policy flip-flops are dispiriting and some of his statements are hurtful and damaging. They won’t say they’re tired of him to a pollster. It can be as embarrassing to admit you liked Mr. Trump and now fear him as it was to admit you were attracted to him in the first place. Mr. Trump’s critics portray his supporters as fools, and to say you only now realized he has problems seems to concede the point.

Other Trump-supporting friends used this phrasing, too, and I began to wonder if it was a sublimated yearning. It would accomplish two things: first, make Mr. Trump a martyr to leftist intolerance, and second, get him out of office.

My relative was more upset. She called me near tears. “What’s going to happen to your health care?” she asked. (I rely on the Affordable Care Act.) She never thought Mr. Trump would occupy the White House. Her vote was a form of trolling.

President Bill Clinton was a prime example of this double standard; he represented a party that insisted it — and only it — supported women’s empowerment while he preyed on a female intern.

They expressed strangely little anxiety that Mr. Trump would get very sick or die. Compassion for his suffering, yes. Anger at Democrats’ schadenfreude, yes. But no fear he would be swept off the political stage.

Mr. Trump’s shtick became less satisfying when he was president. My relative found his demonizing of Baltimore appalling and confessed she’d had to stop looking at his tweets. “Reagan was very genteel,” another pro-Trump friend complained to me — very much unlike Mr. Trump.

“How could so many of my countrymen love this man so much?” The answer may be simpler than we expect: a lot of them don’t.

Perhaps it is actually disturbing to consider that Trump fans’ intense public enthusiasm may be a front, because that would mean a proportion of them had a wish to throw the country into chaos. They don’t think America looks good right now, either. They think it looks bad, and they possessed — and probably still possess — such anger and cynicism about American politics that they risked a conflagration.