2020 Election

Guide to this page

I'm putting most of the election articles on a Facebook page: Polit Soc. This will be easier for me than editing the html on this page, and it will let you click through to links that may otherwise be restricted. You can subscribe to it, "like" it, or "friend" it, and then you'll see new stories on your own Facebook newsfeed. (And if you know how to run Facebook pages, I'm always happy for advice on how to do it better!)

The present page is a very pared down version of the 2016 page. I think most students by now have better skills for searching the web than I do, so I'll just give a few suggestions here. You might also be able to find some ideas on the 2016 page.

Students in my "Political Sociology" class: As you read this material, watch for 4 important factors:

1. Which candidate do the different social groups support (age, gender, religion, race, region, party loyalists, etc., etc.)? Plus how big is each group?
2. What percentage of each group actually votes: what's their turnout? How good is each campaign's "ground game" of getting out the vote?
3. How do the different issues play? Which issue helps which candidate, which social groups respond to which issues, and how do the campaigns maneuver to bring "their" issues to the forefront?
4. Are the polls giving us accurate readings of voter preferences and turnout? There are various factors that may distort their accuracy.

Final 2020 Exit Polls and Election Maps

Coming.

 

General Sources of Polling & Analysis

• RealClearPolitics - Links to current political news and analyses, plus polling horse race, nationally and in battleground states.
  

• RCP's Polls
• RCP's Elections
• RCP's Presidential Electoral Map
• RCP's Senate Electoral Map
• RCP's House Electoral Map
  
  
• Politico.com - Politics, Political News, Campaign 2012.
  
  
• The Gallup Poll
  • Election page
    
    
• FiveThirtyEight - Nate Silver started his meta-analysis site in 2008. He moved it to the New York Times; and it's now independent.
  • Forecasting
  
  
• Pew Research Center - Some of the best in-depth polling & analysis available

• Politics & Policy
  
  
• Polling Report - a collection of recent surveys from all sources; updated daily
  
  
• Cook Political Report 2020 Demographic Swingometer
  

Basic Press Sites (Not updated from 2016)

• The New York Times
  • Politics, main page
  • Polls: Articles, Analyses
  • Upshot (data geek heaven)
    
    
• The Washington Post
  • Politics section
  • Polls section
  • Wonkblog - social, economic, political, urban analyses
  • Monkey Cage - Commentary on political science and political issues
  • EJ Dionne (my college roommate)
    
    
• CNN
  • Election
  • Polling
  • Electoral Map
    
    
• USA Today
  • Elections
  • Politics
  • Polls
    

Other Sites that Synthesize available polling (Not updated from 2016)
... and some of them try to predict the Electoral College Vote outcome

• Princeton Election Consortium - Prof. Sam Wang's Meta-analysis of polls

• Electoral-vote.com - President, Senate, House Updated Daily
• PredictWise - aggregates, analyzes, and creates predictions, by David M. Rothschild of Microsoft and Andrew S. Leonard.

• Scott Elliott's Daily Election Projections - summarizes electoral and popular vote trends
• Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia's Center for Politics - insightful data-based analyses.
• American Research Group - includes state-by-state polls
• Politics by the Numbers