A bipartisan deal is President-elect Joe Biden’s only hope to get the kind of enormous Covid-19 relief bill and the dream of an “FDR-size presidency” that he wants. But bipartisanship doesn’t mean Democrats should return to the deficit-slashing, grand-bargaining approach that failed under President Barack Obama. There’s a better option.

The election results are on course to set up a divided government, with a Democratic president, a thin Democratic majority in the House, and a thin Republican majority in the Senate, or, best case for Democrats, a single-vote Senate majority.

Republicans would prefer a small relief bill if they provide any at all, with principled skepticism about government spending now aligning with a cynical lack of interest in seeing Biden preside over an economic boom.

And even if something gets done on relief, the bitter fiscal policy fights won’t end there. As one veteran of Obama-era battles tells me, it’ll be “trench warfare on appropriations and debt limit” starting with the expiration of government funding this December and continuing to August’s statutory debt ceiling.

Under the circumstances, Democrats could understandably be tempted to turn to the hoary Obama-era trope of deficit-reduction negotiating. After all, when Donald Trump became president, one of the Republican Party’s key policy objectives was to cut long-term Medicare spending. With Trump in office, that priority went away, but the desire didn’t.

Mitch McConnell simply pivoted to the theory that once Republicans were done cutting taxes, entitlement reform would have to be done on a bipartisan basis, seemingly concluding from the Trump experience that a one-party approach to these issues is less viable than he and Paul Ryan thought in the Obama era.

Biden, meanwhile, was a serious deficit hawk for most of his Senate career, and several of his current top advisers, including Bruce Reed and Jeff Zients, were deeply involved in Obama-era deficit reduction drives.

These could add up to a scenario where Republicans insist on spending cuts in government funding deals while Democrats argue that deficit reduction should feature tax increases too in order to be balanced and fair. This would exacerbate party tensions on the Democratic side, make it essentially impossible for a Biden administration to solve any big problems, and very likely founder on the basic reality that Republicans are fanatically opposed to taxing the rich.

There is an alternative to “eat your peas” politics — a push for a different kind of bipartisan deal in which, rather than giving up on progressive spending priorities, Biden tries to secure support for them by giving in to big, GOP-friendly tax cuts.

The Democratic economic policy wonks I’ve floated this by are skeptical, but mostly because they insist Republicans would never go for it. The Republicans are more optimistic — though they concede it’s dicey. Call it an ice cream party, the opposite of eating your peas. Certainly it might fail. But given the economic fundamentals, it’s worth a shot.

The country can afford ice cream for everyone

Democrats, with good reason, generally do not believe that large tax cuts for rich people are a good idea. They’ve also struggled for the past two decades to explain exactly why they’re a bad idea. But left-wing Democrats hate inequality while more moderate ones are suspicious of deficits.

Way back in a 2006 speech, for example, then-Sen. Barack Obama complained about George W. Bush’s policies that “over the past five years, our federal debt has increased by $3.5 trillion to $8.6 trillion. That is ‘trillion’ with a ‘T,’” he reminded us, saying “that is money that we have borrowed from the Social Security trust fund, borrowed from China and Japan, borrowed from American taxpayers.”

In retrospect, it’s truly remarkable how much money was spent during Bush’s first term with so little to show for it. Two rounds of tax cuts plus two wars — one with few successes and high human costs and the other a catastrophic failure — did not deliver much of a return on the $5 trillion invested.

But the deficits themselves were fine — finding people to lend the American government money was easy, and did not give China or Japan or anyone else power over us.

The interest rate investors charged on the federal debt was not especially high at the time Obama complained, and it’s only fallen since then across the financial crisis, stimulus, failed efforts at grant bargain, Trump tax cuts, pandemic, and more stimulus.

In particular, debt service payments as a share of GDP have plummeted since the 1980s and 1990s and are currently falling rather than rising.

The upshot is that the practical limit on the government’s ability to deliver fiscal stimulus is political, not economic. Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats initially proposed the $3.4 trillion HEROES Act, which was much more than Republicans were willing to spend (some Democratic economists also quietly tell me it was legitimately more than needed). They then lowered their bid to a $2.2 trillion package, while Mnuchin countered with a $1.8 trillion proposal. McConnell’s last offer was at $650 billion, and his position will probably become stingier given the election.

Realistically, even the smallest of these relief packages would help the country. And even the largest of them is affordable. But while Republicans obviously aren’t going to agree to a giant spending increase just to be nice, they might do it in exchange for a giant tax cut.

Republicans never finished their tax cut ice cream

Back in 2001 and 2003, George W. Bush wanted to enact tax cuts, and he wanted to do it using the budget reconciliation process to avoid a Democratic filibuster. But to qualify for reconciliation treatment, a law can’t raise the long-term budget deficit. So Republicans wrote a bill to cut taxes for nine years and then have them go back to Clinton-era levels in 2011.

Their thinking was that they could then campaign on extending the tax cuts later.

And so they did, but that didn’t stop Barack Obama from winning in 2008 and threatening to block their extension. Then in the lame-duck session after the 2010 midterms, Obama agreed to extend the tax cuts for two more years in exchange for Republicans doing a bit more fiscal stimulus. After Obama won again in 2012, there was another standoff, and another deal — extending most of the Bush tax cuts but raising taxes on families earning over $450,000 and again getting a bit more stimulus.

Then in 2017, Republicans pulled another version of the same move — pairing an unpopular permanent cut in corporate taxes with temporary cuts in individual income taxes, figuring they could run on extending them during the 2024 campaign.

But now Biden will be president, Democrats still control the House, incumbent presidents usually get reelected, and the odds of these cuts mostly being reversed (a few provisions, such as the increased generosity of the child tax credit, have bipartisan support) are decent. In an “ice cream for everyone” scenario, instead of offsetting his spending ideas by rolling back the Trump tax cuts, Biden could consider doing the opposite: swapping his spending ideas for the GOP’s tax ideas.

Now, make no mistake, permanently extending these tax cuts is an expensive proposition — costing over $1 trillion, according to the Tax Policy Center — and it’s very regressive, delivering much larger benefits to people in the top 20 percent of the income spectrum than to those in need.

But while this is not by any means a good idea, it’s also far from clear that it would be harmful. Current interest rates are very low, and they are likely to stay low for some time. The Federal Reserve recently adopted a new framework it calls Average Inflation Targeting (AIT), which critics, like David Reifschneider and David Wilcox of the Peterson Institute for International Finance, warned pre-Covid would be a “weak tool to deal with recession.”

Under the old framework, the Fed’s promise when inflation slipped below the 2 percent target rate was to restore it to 2 percent as quickly as possible. Under the new framework, the Fed promises to make up for past undershooting by allowing inflation to overshoot 2 percent before it raises rates. That’s a weak tool because it only very indirectly inspires anyone in the private sector to go spend more money. But what AIT does is hand a very powerful tool to Congress in the form of a guarantee that a strongly stimulated economy won’t be offset by immediate interest rate hikes.

An even more expensive idea, at least in the short term, would be permanent extension of a Tax Cuts and Jobs Act provision allowing businesses to immediately write off the full cost of their capital investments.

The short-term cost of this is very high because you’re losing a big chunk of corporate tax revenue. But the longer-term cost is considerably lower because, as Kyle Pomerleau and Scott Greenberg of the Tax Foundation point out, those investments do get written off over time under the current tax code anyway. Over an infinite time horizon, the revenue is essentially the same, though in any finite span of time you raise less with immediate expensing. The combination of high short-term costs and modest long-term ones could make something like this an ideal component of an ice cream party.

Can Democrats get over their love of targeting?

I floated the ice cream party concept past three Democratic economists who were involved in Obama-era budget negotiations on either the White House or congressional side, and they all said Republicans wouldn’t go for it (given the résumé-swapping going around the transition period, nobody wants to be quoted on the record about anything controversial).

These are not austerity fans or entitlement reform enthusiasts; they just think bargaining is much more likely to be small-ball stuff like the 2015 tax extender deal rather than a huge multitrillion-dollar package.

On the other hand, two Republicans involved in tax policy said they were intrigued personally, though they were also fairly skeptical of the politics.

One issue is simply that Democrats have traditionally been leery of this kind of thing. In 2008, Democratic experts adopted the slogan that fiscal stimulus should be “timely, targeted, and temporary” — i.e., focused on quick transfers of cash into the hands of the people most likely to spend it.

The 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was based on those principles, and the $600-a-week bonus unemployment insurance program in the CARES Act was perhaps their ultimate expression. The money started flowing fast (timely). It went to people who had urgent financial needs (targeted). And then it went away (temporary). Normally the Democratic wonks need to synthesize this view with Democratic Party elected officials’ desire to recreate their understanding of an FDR-style public works drive. But both the wonks and the hacks are united in their opposition to the conservative view that long-term investment tax cuts are a good idea.

As Samantha Jacoby and Kathleen Bryant wrote of full expensing proposals for the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities in June, “Those resources would be far better spent on more effective fiscal stimulus tools.” The implicit model is that there is some fixed sum of stimulus, and it’s important for the stimulus to be well targeted so you get the most bang for your buck.

The ice cream party way of thinking: The amount of stimulus available is limited by what congressional Republicans are willing to do, so it doesn’t matter if their ideas are bad — it only matters if they are willing to pair their ideas with your ideas.

But are they?

Can Congress do more than electioneering?

The fundamental issue is that electoral politics is zero-sum in a way that policymaking is not.

Currently, the United States is enjoying very low interest rates, which makes it extremely affordable to enact costly measures. Under the circumstances, the opportunity is clearly available for a win-win deal in which everyone gets to do something big that they are excited about. The parties don’t need to agree about what flavor of ice cream to eat; they just need to agree that everyone gets some ice cream. Reasonable people can disagree about which flavor would be helping the economy, but it’s pretty clear that one would in fact help the economy.

But that gets us to electoral politics, which is zero-sum. Only one person can win any given election. And it’s not obvious that Republicans would want to see a lot of successful policymaking happen in the Biden years.

Consider that early in Trump’s term, it was common for Democrats to worry that the White House might unveil a completely reasonable infrastructure proposal. If that happened, they’d have no choice but to agree and then Trump could become a popular and successful leader.

Instinctively, Democrats will completely reject any analogy between the threat of a popular and successful Trump (an authoritarian proto-fascist in their view) and a popular and successful Biden (a kindly old moderate in their view).

But Republicans may take a different view of things. This, however, is why putting permanent tax cuts on the table in a deal could be so potent. That would be a really big policy win for Republicans. Big enough that Democrats will find it genuinely painful, but by the same token big enough that Republicans could find it genuinely tempting.

Maybe they won’t go for it. But more likely, Democrats won’t even attempt to broach the subject — preferring to stick to targeted measures, settle for less if necessary, and potentially fall back to “eat your peas” efforts to reduce rather than increase the long-term deficit. But the best route to a successful Biden administration is the ice cream party, and if there’s one thing we know about Joe Biden, it’s that he likes ice cream.

Before the votes from the 2020 presidential election have been fully tabulated, pundits all across the land are venturing forth to offer analysis based on the demographic breakdowns provided in the exit polls.

If we’re looking to reiterate our own prior convictions, the data is serviceable. But if we want actual information about voting behavior, exit polls are not very useful — and the early exit polls that haven’t even been weighted to the final vote count are even worse.

To start with, as we all keep learning over and over again, it is difficult to conduct accurate surveys of voters’ opinion. Nothing about conducting an accurate exit poll is any easier than conducting an accurate pre-election poll. If anything, it’s harder. Some people vote on Election Day, and other people vote early through different means, so especially this year, with a huge shift in how people vote, the modern “exit” polls need to combine multiple waves of survey data.

Last but by no means least, one advantage exit pollsters have is that they know the final outcome of the election. So you never publish an exit poll saying Biden won the election by 8 points when he really won by 4. Instead, the exits are weighted to match the actual outcome.

But we don’t yet know what the actual outcome is, so the “results” of the exit polls keep changing as more votes are counted. CNN’s exit poll write-up has a disclaimer that reads “exit poll data for 2020 will continue to update and will automatically reflect in the charts below,” meaning that not only is the data you’re working with inaccurate, the very page you are citing will say something different in the future.

Unfortunately, facts derived from exit polls — like “53 percent of white women voted for Trump” — tend to become hardened conventional wisdom pretty quickly. More accurate information only becomes available later (a Pew analysis based on administrative data about who actually voted suggests the share was around 47 percent), at which point the truth comes out, but nobody cares anymore. It’s tempting to seize on this kind of information to illustrate broader points we want to make about social or cultural trends, but realistically it’s just not possible to answer certain questions with the level of precision implied by exit poll results.

Trump’s mysterious overperformance with white college graduates

Exit polls, public opinion surveys, and county-level demographic data all clearly show that Black and Hispanic voters overwhelmingly backed Biden (despite some Trump gains with these communities) while whites with no college degree love Trump and college-educated whites are more skeptical.

But according to the exit polls, Trump actually did much better with white college grads than pre-election polls suggested. That’s spurred some strong takes, including Andrew Sullivan’s suggestion that white college graduates lied to pollsters en masse and a data-rich article by political scientist Eric Kaufmann arguing that college-educated professionals became Shy Trumpers because of concerns about political correctness in the workplace.

It’s certainly possible that something like this is true. But the more boring (and also more likely) explanation is that the exit polls are overstating Trump’s support among white college graduates.

According to the exit polls, for example, non-college whites were 34 percent of the electorate in 2020. That’s exactly the same as the 34 percent share that exit pollsters found in 2016. But when Pew went back and examined the electorate based on validated voter data, they found that non-college whites were 44 percent of the 2016 electorate. Catalist, a Democratic data firm that works with voter file data, found that non-college whites were 48 percent of the 2016 electorate.

One possibility is that the non-college white share of the electorate plummeted for mysterious reasons. A second, more plausible theory is that the exit polls are undercounting non-college voters again. So what happens when you undercount non-college voters in a poll? In a conventional poll, you’ll just end up underestimating Trump’s support. But in an exit poll, you know how many votes Trump got. So with too few working-class whites in your sample and too many white professionals, to make the numbers add up you need to exaggerate Trump’s level of support with both subgroups.

In reality, Trump is less popular with working-class whites than the exit polls say and also less popular with white college graduates. It’s just that the white population is more working-class than the exit polls say.

The 53 percent myth

Back in 2016, the myth of majority support for Trump among white women was based on a similar error.

As Molly Ball wrote in a little-read 2018 debunking, Pew’s analysis suggests that the exit polls were simply undercounting the number of white voters. By doing that, the polls ended up exaggerating the share of the white vote that Trump won. In this particular case the difference between 53 percent and 47 percent is not large, but it happens to cross the psychologically significant 50 percent threshold. (Keep in mind that all polls are subject to error, and Pew’s methodology likely gets closer to the correct share but is also not exact.)

The truth took a long time to come out, however, because it simply takes a long time for comprehensive voter file or census data to be available.

If you want to be more reliable with your hot takes, look at maps and census information about county-level demographics. Trump, for example, did worse overall in 2020 but better in Miami and in the Rio Grande Valley in Texas and in the handful of Massachusetts towns with large Hispanic populations and in the precincts of Milwaukee with large Hispanic populations. It is theoretically possible that this is all some kind of weird coincidence, but it really looks like some broad gains for Trump with Hispanic voters. To know how broad exactly, we need to wait for full tallies from Arizona, Nevada, and the notoriously slow counters in California.

You can also just see with your eyes that Trump collapsed in the suburbs of Atlanta, in Fort Worth, and in many other jurisdictions that are full of economically comfortable college graduates. Catalist says it will have more information in a month or two and we can check back then.

It’s possible there was some kind of secret anti-anti-Trump backlash lurking somewhere out there among college grads, but it’s hard to see exactly where it would be.

Election night 2020 started with a bang: President Donald Trump and down-ballot Republicans blowing through poll-based projections of Florida. It ended with a whimper as America’s news devotees realized we were going to have to go to bed without clear information about the outcome.

But over the course of Wednesday, it became clear that despite the fireworks in quick-counting Florida, Trump was coming up short, including in Arizona, in the quirky Omaha-based House seat that has its own electoral vote — and, most of all, in the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that he flipped in 2016.

The real letdown for Democrats was not Biden, but down-ballot candidates. Many grassroots Democrats got fired up about Senate races that turned into blowouts, and what they’d hoped to be a night of securing five to 15 House seats turned out to be a night where a raft of Democratic incumbents faced defeat. Trump and Trumpism were rejected, but progressives don’t even really have the opportunity to argue about the scope of their mandate — the fact is they just aren’t going to have the seats to enact any of their boldest ideas.

But Trump, the figure who has dominated America’s political attention for the last four years, ever since he descended the escalator in Trump Tower to launch what was seen as a stunt campaign, is no longer in power.

Here’s who won and who lost.

Winner: Joe Biden

Fundamentally, when you win the presidential election, you are a winner. Historians will someday look back on the 2020 campaign and decide it was very boring — Biden led the polls virtually every day of the primary and literally every day of the general election, and then he won.

Those of us who lived through it know better. Biden’s candidacy experienced a near collapse in the early primaries, and then battled its way through a pandemic, mass protests, and many twists and turns related to the timing of the vote-counting process on the way to victory.

Biden won. And even though the outcomes down the ballot have disappointed progressives, it’s not entirely obvious that that disappointment disappoints Biden. His central promise was always to “restore the soul of America” and extirpate the stain of Trump. Throughout the campaign, he did end up outlining a fairly sweeping policy agenda, but he did not talk about it extensively, and the degree of his personal emotional investment in it is questionable. Attempting to navigate the congressional politics that await is going to be extraordinarily tricky. But being essentially forced to sit down and cut deals with Mitch McConnell rather than attempt to lead a highly partisan norm-busting wave of structural change seems to better suit his personal temperament.

Whether Biden’s actual presidency will be a success remains to be seen, but his candidacy absolutely was.

Loser: Democratic small donors

The 2020 campaign saw an unprecedented wave of small-donor money pouring into Democratic coffers, often through the ActBlue digital platform.

ActBlue is great as a product, so great Republicans have gotten kind of fixated on it as a boogeyman. But the real reason it drives so much money is that Democrats got hyper-engaged and were extremely eager to finance campaigns.

The problem was, it didn’t work. Democrats ended up spending tens of millions of dollars on Senate challengers who didn’t even come close to winning.

One of those challengers, Amy McGrath, was running a campaign that never made much sense. But others, at least at certain moments, appeared to have real shots at victory.

The waste of money is a shame on its own terms. But the interplay between viral internet fundraising and losing Senate campaigns also raises a broader question. Democrats’ big problem in the upper house of Congress is that the map is tilted severely against residents of big diverse metro areas. To win a majority, Democrats need candidates who can find ways to run and win in states that are much more conservative than the national median. But can candidates like that compete in the fundraising race with less promising candidates who adopt a more donor-friendly posture?

Winner: Congressional Republicans

Few House Republicans, essentially no Senate Republicans, and nobody in GOP congressional leadership actually wanted Donald Trump at the top of the ticket in 2016.

And the four and a half years since he won the nomination turned into an emotional and political roller coaster. At several moments, it looked as though Trump and his antics were going to sink the whole party. But the congressional GOP was almost uniformly unwilling to actually do anything about Trump, Trump’s outbursts, Trump’s corruption, and Trump’s abuses of power. Democrats hoped they would get their final comeuppance on Election Day and be taught a much-deserved lesson.

But it didn’t happen. Congressional Republicans escape from the Trump years with a tax cut, a stocked federal judiciary, an absolute stranglehold on the Supreme Court, and almost certainly a majority in the US Senate. They did lose the House in 2018 and didn’t win it back in 2020, but Democrats’ majority is now slim. And Republicans will dominate the redistricting process next year, setting themselves up nicely to make a big run at the majority in 2022.

Republicans who tell you they are secretly relieved that Trump lost are lying. The fact is, their strategy for navigating the Trump era worked out well for them, for all its shady tactics.

Winner: Poll workers

There were huge fears about the actual administration of the 2020 election, given the pandemic and communities’ normal reliance on older people to do much of this work.

But a big push to expand mail voting and early voting, the establishment of new polling places, and a drive to recruit new poll workers seems to have gone well. The election went off more or less without a hitch, even as turnout hit record highs. And since Republicans basically did fine with an expanded electorate, perhaps in the future they’ll be less concerned about the idea of trying to make it safe and convenient to vote and just see it as a nice service to offer citizens.

Loser: Blue Texas

For years, Democrats dreamed of turning Texas blue by mobilizing the notoriously low turnout population of the heavily Latino counties of the Rio Grande Valley. In recent years, the dream switched to one powered by growing Democratic clout in the booming suburbs of Dallas and Houston.

The goal wasn’t even necessarily for Biden to win the state (though they did want to win it) but to at least compete robustly enough to flip one or two or three House seats, and maybe take control of the state House of delegates and thus get a seat at the table in redistricting. None of it worked.

Trump’s 6-point win in Texas was the smallest of any Republican in years, and as urban Texas keeps growing, Democrats will keep competing. But Democrats missed all their targets, which means Republicans will get to redraw the maps next year and make it even harder for Democrats to win. Perhaps most embarrassingly, Trump actually flipped a bunch of those heavily Hispanic counties while making what appeared to be significant inroads with Texas Latinos.

This phenomenon has been less discussed than Democrats’ weakness with Hispanic voters in Miami-Dade County in Florida, but is in some ways an even worse portent for the party because it can’t be linked to eccentric foreign policy views. The Texas opportunity remains tantalizingly close, and the state is simply so large that you have to figure Democrats will take more bites at the apple. But to do it, they need to find ways to make gains in both booming suburbs and low-income South Texas counties, and so far they’re finding that circle hard to square.

Loser: Martha McSally

Between 1988 and 2018, Democrats won zero Senate elections in Arizona.

Since then they’ve won two, and both times against Martha McSally. Having secured the nomination to try to succeed Jeff Flake two years ago and fallen short in the face of that year’s blue wave, Mitch McConnell then persuaded the state’s governor to appoint her to fill the vacancy opened up by John McCain’s death. Once in office, even though she’d just lost the election for this seat, she proceeded to do nothing to establish an image for independent thought or action.

The national political climate got a little better for Republicans in 2020 but not really a lot better. And up against a formidable contender in former astronaut Mark Kelly, she lost by a larger margin the second time.

Loser: The polls

Before Election Day, I looked long and hard at the polls and the models and came away with the happy news for Democrats that Biden would likely win the election even if there was a really big polling error. It’s hard to know exactly what went wrong with the polls until we count all the votes, but early election calls indicate something was awry.

National polling averages showed Biden up by 8 or more points. Ultimately, it looks like Biden will win nationally by about 4 or 5 points, but possibly as much as 6. This means those final national polls were off by a bit, which happens.

But the state polling in many critical races appears just really, really bad. In the FiveThirtyEight polling average:

• Biden was up by 8 in Wisconsin, where he in fact won in a squeaker.
• He led by 2.5 points in Florida, which he ended up losing by roughly as large a margin.
• Trump led in Iowa by just 1 point, but ended up winning by about 7 or 8 points.
• Ohio was considered a dead heat, but Trump ended up winning by 7 or 8 points there, too.

These polls were often bad in the exact same places where it had gone awry in 2016 and where errors were only partially corrected in 2018.

More than anything else, this created an emotionally deflating couple of days for Democrats, who, instead of being excited by Biden’s win, were disappointed that he didn’t win by as much as they’d been expecting.

Indeed, the Biden campaign spent the last couple of weeks of the campaign assuring voters that they did not have gigantic leads across the Upper Midwest. It would be comforting to think that meant they had super-accurate private polling. But even though my reporting indicates that Senate Democrats’ private polling was more accurate than the public polling, it still wasn’t very accurate. And by all accounts, both sides in the House races thought Democrats would be on offense rather than defense.

Declining response rates are making it very hard to do accurate polling, and the struggles are starting to be visible. The most accurate pollsters, like Iowa’s Ann Selzer, build their polls atop a great depth of local knowledge. But that only underscores how poorly the survey methodologies are working, since in principle the whole point of a statistical public opinion survey is to find out what people think without having any strong prior view of it.

In the wake of all this, it’s fashionable to say journalists should pay less attention to polls and complicated data analysis and just go talk to people. But without any reliable statistical information about broad trends, it’s hard to contextualize people’s stories or understand their significance. We are simply flying blind to a greater extent than is comfortable.

Election night started with a major underperformance for Democrats in Miami-Dade County that cost Rep. Donna Shalala her House seat and sank Joe Biden’s hope of an early win.

Miami has always been a bit of a city apart in terms of Latino politics in the United States, with a heavily Cuban American population that has a tradition of Republican voting and deep emotional and intellectual investments in the Latin American Cold War.

But while Cuba-specific issues are tactically central to electoral battles in Florida, the fact is that even before all the results are in, it’s clear Biden’s weakness with Latino voters was broader than that. In South Florida, Biden lost ground with a diverse Hispanic population that includes many families from Puerto Rico, Venezuela, or Colombia, as well as Cuba broadly.

More to the point, Democrats turned in extremely disappointing performances in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas, even in the context of a large overall improvement in the state. Trump actually won Zapata County, for example, a small border jurisdiction that’s 84 percent Hispanic and which Hillary Clinton won by 30 points in 2016.

The more urban (and, in the case of Las Vegas casino workers, unionized) Latino populations of Arizona and Nevada do seem to have delivered for Biden, so one should not overstate the scope of the trend any more than one understates it.

But there should be some broader rethinking prompted by the breadth of Trump’s improvements with segments of the Latino population that one might anticipate would be more open to a conservative message on either foreign policy or cultural issues.

It’s not just about electoral tactics or outreach: The professional class of progressives who often shape cultural narratives should consider the racial dynamics of the Trump years and their own approach to intersectional politics.

Biden’s weakness with Hispanics is bigger than Cubans

Since the issue arose first and most clearly in Miami, it’s understandable that a lot of intellectual reactions focused on specific issues related to the Cuban community.

Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times Magazine writer whose work on the 1619 Project has been very influential in progressive thinking about race, noted on Twitter that the “Latino” construct is a US invention, one that doesn’t reflect the actual racial dynamics in Latin America. Cuba, for example, is a multiracial nation with a history of slavery, racism, and colorism, much of which migrated to the US with the conservative-leaning bloc of Cubans who fled Fidel Castro’s revolution.

Andrea Pino-Silva, a Cuban American left-wing activist, went further. She posited that by aligning with Trump, Cuban Americans are specifically reaching for a kind of aspirational white status. In this view, Cuban Americans don’t vote for Trump despite his racism. Rather, “Trump’s appeal is the appeal of white supremacy.”

There is truth in both of these points. Many Cuban Americans are fair-skinned, and there is a broader history of shared bonding over anti-Blackness as a vehicle whereby ethnic communities integrate into the implicitly white American mainstream.

But this is not the whole story. Democrats suffered huge collapses — on the order of 20 points — in multiple heavily Latino counties in the Rio Grande Valley. These are Mexican American voters who do not have a history of right-wing politics, and they broke hard against Democrats at the very time the party is having a breakout in the suburbs of Texas’s big cities.

Looking at Democrats’ problems with Cubans and South Americans in Florida in the context of their struggles with Mexican Americans in Texas suggests a different diagnosis. What if many US Hispanics simply don’t see the racial politics of the Trump era the way intellectuals — whose thinking and writing on structural racism and white supremacy have gained broad influence in recent years — think they should?

Trump, racism, and immigration

Over the past five years, many liberals have had occasion to refer to Trump’s rhetoric and approach to immigration policy as “racist.” I’ve done it myself.

Reasonable people can disagree about the details of immigration policy, but Trump’s demagoguery on the subject, to me, reeks of irrational hostility to people of Latin American ancestry. And his broader musings about “shithole countries,” frequent requests to get more immigrants from Norway, and demands that the congresswomen of color known as “the Squad” “go back where you came from” to me, again, reek of racism.

But at a certain point, one has to admit that not all the people this racial animus is directed at see it that way.

In the famous “autopsy report” prepared by the Republican National Committee after the 2012 election, the RNC concluded that “if Hispanic Americans perceive that a GOP nominee or candidate does not want them in the United States (i.e. self-deportation), they will not pay attention to our next sentence. It does not matter what we say about education, jobs or the economy; if Hispanics think we do not want them here, they will close their ears to our policies.”

At the time, that struck me as insightful and correct. It’s not that Hispanic voters are obsessed with immigration policy (polls normally show health care, education, and jobs as higher priorities), but Republican nominee Mitt Romney’s immigration rhetoric conveyed hostility to Hispanic Americans in a way that was just an insuperable obstacle. Trump, more than anything else, has proven that wrong. It simply is not heard that way by all Hispanics in the United States, and liberals need to take that into consideration. They also need to consider how their own rhetoric sounds.

The Latinx problem

For the past several years, the term “Latinx” has been gaining momentum in progressive circles, even though only 3 percent of US Hispanics actually use it themselves.

The word originates in academic and activist circles, having been coined in 2004 and only gaining popularity about 10 years later. The term is meant to solve two problems. One is that the Spanish language uses the masculine term “Latino” to refer not just to men but also to mixed-gender groups, implying a kind of problematic privileging of the male gender. The other is that the binary nature of grammatical gender — Latino men and Latina women — is a poor fit for the needs and lives of nonbinary and gender-nonconforming people. In academic and activist circles, “Latinx” suggests itself as an elegant gender-neutral solution.

The message of the term, however, is that the entire grammatical system of the Spanish language is problematic, which in any other context progressives would recognize as an alienating and insensitive message. As Terry Blas has written for Vox, in actual Latin American countries, the term “Latine” has gained some currency as a gender-neutral grammatical form. Using a word like that would mark you out as unusual in any Spanish-speaking community. But it’s a formulation that at least respects the basic way the Spanish language works, instead of trying to foist a series of unpronounceable words on it.

Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), who represents a heavily working-class, heavily Hispanic area in and around Phoenix, advises Democrats to “start by not using the term Latinx.”

It surely goes too far to suggest the use of this one word plays a large — or even a small — role in Democrats’ struggles with Hispanic voters. But it is, if nothing else, a symptom of the problem, which is a tendency to privilege academic concepts and linguistic innovations in addressing social justice concerns.

Among self-identified Democrats, for example, a Pew survey this summer showed that African Americans were slightly less likely than whites to favor cutting police spending, while Hispanics were much less likely. Statistically speaking, disagreements were associated with age, not ethnic identity.

Self-identified white liberals report warmer feelings about immigrants than do Hispanics. And on a question that serves as a component of the standard academic racial resentment battery — do you agree that “Irish, Italians, Jewish, and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up: blacks should do the same without special favors” — white liberals were more likely to disagree with it than Black people were.

Progressive intellectuals have tried for years to coach people to see racism as a disembodied property of inegalitarian systems rather than a question of individual prejudice or bad manners. That’s why the Border Patrol can be “racist” even if most of its officers are Hispanic, or why the presence of Black cops on a police force doesn’t debunk the charge that the criminal justice system is racist. This style of thinking has some real power. I have often used it to press people to understand the ways in which zoning regulations perpetuate segregation even in the absence of formal discrimination.

After non-college-educated white voters broke hard for Trump in 2016, Democrats spent a fair amount of time sweating how to win at least some of them back, while many in the media observed that they tend to score high on racial resentment indicators. But educational gaps exist within nonwhite communities as well, and in fact, college degrees are much scarcer among Black and Hispanic populations than among the white one.

To say that working-class nonwhites don’t care about racial justice would be absurd. But many of them may not accept the academic constructs of what these things mean. At the same time, as Biden fell short in Florida, a minimum-wage ballot initiative won with over 60 percent of the vote. A higher minimum wage is, among other things, a powerful tool for closing the racial gap in income, seemingly one that’s more broadly popular than the overall Democratic Party gestalt.

The votes are not fully in. It will be weeks or months before we have all the data to hash out. But given the prominence of “Trump as white supremacist” narratives over the past several years, one question Democrats will need to answer is why some Latinos strayed from the party in 2020. They should be open to answers that go beyond tactics and outreach strategy and ask real questions about concepts and fundamentals.

This weekend saw the release of a final batch of high-quality polling that generally confirms what polling has said all along: Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden is in the lead.

Evidence for that proposition comes from a tetralogy of New York Times polls conducted in conjunction with Siena College, which were released Sunday morning. They show Biden ahead in Arizona, Pennsylvania, Florida, and Wisconsin — easily enough states to give him the win. But even a Des Moines Register poll conducted by the legendary Ann Selzer that was released on Saturday evening, which showed Trump with a 7 percentage point lead in Iowa, is actually not very good news for President Donald Trump.

The only genuinely solid result for Trump was an ABC News/Washington Post poll showing him up 2 points in Florida. But the same pollsters simultaneously found him down by 7 points in Pennsylvania.

Overall, the message of the polls is crystal clear — Trump is losing the election, including in the key swing states, and the margin is not small. That doesn’t mean he won’t win, as large polling errors do sometimes occur, but you’d be well-advised to bet fairly heavily against it.

Trump is losing in the latest polls

To sum it all up, here are the latest poll results:

• Arizona: Biden 49, Trump 43 (NYT/Siena)
• Florida: Biden 47, Trump 44 (NYT/Siena)
• Pennsylvania: Biden 49, Trump 43 (NYT/Siena)
• Wisconsin: Biden 52, Trump 41 (NYT/Siena)
• Iowa: Biden 41, Trump 48 (DMR/Selzer)
• Pennsylvania: Biden 51, Trump 44 (Washington Post/ABC)
• Florida: Biden 48, Trump 50 (Washington Post/ABC)

Given that there is essentially no time left in the election, these polls are very bad news for Donald Trump. He has been lagging badly in national head-to-head polling the whole race, but the contest for Pennsylvania has generally been closer — FiveThirtyEight’s average of recent polls in Pennsylvania has Biden ahead by 5 points — and there are good odds that Pennsylvania will be the decisive state in the Electoral College.

These two Pennsylvania polls do show the state slightly closer than national polling averages, which Biden leads by more than 8 points, but it’s still just not that close. Polling errors of 6 to 7 percentage points in magnitude do happen, but it would be unusual. Or to put it another way, even if the polls in Pennsylvania are off this year as much as they were in 2016, then Trump would still lose.

A 6 percentage point lead in Arizona, according to the Times/Siena poll, gives Biden a backup path to victory if he does somehow fall short in Pennsylvania. An average of recent polls in Arizona shows Biden with a smaller, 3-point lead there.

And while the Biden campaign would be disappointed to lose Iowa by 7 percentage points after having looked close there in many other polls, this result is simply not as good as it superficially seems for Trump. He won the state by 9 percentage points two years ago, and if he loses 2 percentage points of support across the Northern battlegrounds he will lose the election. Iowa, with its six Electoral College votes, isn’t a big prize for either candidate. But where the Iowa poll does matter is in the race for the Senate, where Theresa Greenfield’s efforts to unseat Joni Ernst are looking worse than they did a month ago in a race that could potentially decide whether Democrats or Republicans control the chamber.

Finally there is the ABC/Post Florida poll, which has genuinely good news for Trump. By their numbers, he is not only winning the state, he’s winning it by a slightly larger margin than he did in 2016. That’s the kind of result Trump needs to win the election nationally, but of course, that poll also has him losing Pennsylvania rather badly — in which case Florida alone won’t get it done for Trump. And Florida polling averages from FiveThirtyEight show Biden with a narrow 2-point lead.

Only a historic error will deliver Trump the win

Hillary Clinton was leading in the polls in 2016 and then lost the election, dealing a blow to the public’s confidence in pollsters and forecasting.

But much of the flawed overconfidence in Clinton coming from sites projecting her odds of winning as 90 percent or more was based on bad modeling, not on bad polling. She led in all the swing states, but led by small margins. Small polling errors happen all the time (indeed, they happened in 2012; it’s just that nobody remembers that Obama won by a bit more than expected), and it’s only moderately unlikely that a candidate down by 2 or 3 percentage points will lose.

Trump, however, is down by 6 or 7 percentage points in Pennsylvania, and separately is down by smaller amounts in North Carolina and Arizona — which have distinct regional and demographic mixes meaning that poll errors in those states would be only partially correlated with ones in Pennsylvania. None of this is to say that he can’t win the election, but if he does it will involve a much larger polling error than we saw last time around, and raise some fundamental questions about whether the major public pollsters can do reliable surveys at all.

Going into the final weekend of the presidential campaign, a trove of new national polling shows Democratic nominee Joe Biden with a comfortable lead.

But, of course, the vote for president is not a national election. It’s a series of state-by-state elections that determine the winner of the Electoral College. Here, Biden’s edge is more muted, but still substantial. And whether looked at nationally or statewide, there’s simply no sign of a late change in either direction. Trump is not suffering from the new spike in Covid-19 cases, nor is he gaining ground based on the final debate or his last-ditch efforts to attack Hunter Biden.

That stability is good news for Biden. He had a solid lead in the polls four months ago, but there was still much uncertainty as to the ultimate outcome. That the many subsequent events — conventions, protest and unrest, multiple debates, the president’s Covid-19 illness and recovery — left the race largely steady means that Biden’s odds of victory have grown substantially, even if his polling lead has not. Trump has a clear path to win, but it’s not especially probable.

On the other hand, the Economist’s super-bullish odds for Biden say that the likelihood of Trump winning is 4 percent, or about as likely as Steph Curry missing a free throw — a rare occurrence, but certainly something that happens. FiveThirtyEight gives Biden about an 11 percent chance; if someone told you a given restaurant gave food poisoning to 11 percent of its clients, you probably would not eat there. In non-election scenarios, the kind of odds Trump is facing would be understood as involving a fair amount of risk.

The national polls show a strong Biden lead

More than a dozen national surveys were released Thursday, all showing Biden in the lead and averaging to something in the high single digits.

His best result came from the USC Dornsife tracking poll (which has a somewhat unorthodox methodology) and registered a gigantic 12-point lead. Trump’s best poll came from Rasmussen, which invariably delivers Republican-leaning results and still showed Biden up 1 point.

All in all, the RealClearPolitics unweighted national average shows Biden up 7.8 points. Crucially, in that average, Biden is over 50 percent — so even if every single undecided voter and third-party supporter decided to flock to Trump in a desperate pro-malarkey surge, Biden would still have the lead.

Remarkably, throughout the entire campaign there’s been essentially no shot of Trump actually winning more votes than his opponent, and that continues to be true on the eve of the election. But it’s the states that matter, and in the states, the race is closer.

Biden has a healthy lead in Pennsylvania

The most likely “tipping point” state — the one that could be decisive if the election is close — is Pennsylvania. And the polling averages there are closer.

RealClearPolitics says Biden is up by 4.3 points, which is a healthy lead, but polling errors of that scale happen. The final RCP average for Pennsylvania in 2016, however, had Clinton up by 1.9 points. Trump won by 0.7 points, for a total polling error of 2.6 points. (FiveThirtyEight’s weighted polling average currently puts Biden up by 5.2 points.)

In other words, if you think that pollsters have done nothing at all to fix the methodological problems that plagued swing state polling four years ago and that an error of the same magnitude will recur, then Biden would still win Pennsylvania and thus almost certainly win the election.

And the two most recent polls for Biden — +7 from Quinnipiac University and +5 from a firm called Citizen Data that’s not well-known — were actually better for him.

Then there are a bunch of other states where Biden has a lead, but generally a smaller one.

Biden has smaller leads in the other battlegrounds

By the numbers, Biden unquestionably does not “need” to win Pennsylvania.

Polling averages show him with modest leads in North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Arizona, and even Iowa, so taking even an important state like Pennsylvania off the board isn’t the end of the story. But his leads in all these states are smaller — 1.4 in Florida, for example, and just 0.7 in North Carolina.

If it turns out the polls are badly off in Pennsylvania, one likely scenario is that they were off everywhere, and Trump wins after all. That’s because while polling errors are random, large polling errors can be correlated from place to place. If you undersample white voters with no college degree, as many pollsters did in the 2016 cycle, you end up undersampling them everywhere, so every state where those voters are a large share of the population tips the same way.

But it’s also not out of the question that polling error could go one way in Pennsylvania and another way in a demographically dissimilar state like Arizona or North Carolina.

And in North Carolina, Biden did get late-breaking good news from the very well-regarded New York Times poll, which put him up 3 points, while Citizen Data had him up 7. In Arizona, by contrast, the most recent survey was a Rasmussen poll that had Trump up 4, though on Wednesday, a well-regarded Latino Decisions poll had Biden up 5.

The basic picture, which is really what we’ve seen all year, is that you’d definitely prefer to be in Biden’s shoes. But the odds of a Trump win, though not large, are also not large enough to dismiss out of hand. On the other hand, liberal anxiety and conservative chest-thumping can obscure the fact that mistakes may happen in either direction.

Biden could win in a landslide

Biden definitely doesn’t need to win Texas to win the election, which is good news for him because the latest polls all have him losing the state — whether by 4 points or by just 1. There was a Data for Progress poll on October 26 showing him up 1 point, but the same day the New York Times had him down 4.

The larger significance of all this is that Trump’s polling lead in Texas is actually smaller than Biden’s lead in Pennsylvania.

In other words, while it’s definitely possible that Trump will defy the odds and win, it’s more possible that Biden will win a landslide victory that features a shocking blue Texas scenario. This would almost certainly involve sweeping Florida, Georgia, and North Carolina, too, and likely involve Iowa and Ohio as well. Indeed, FiveThirtyEight thinks it’s slightly more likely that Biden will win Alaska than that Trump will win the election.

That doesn’t mean either outcome is likely (though the combined probabilities of one or the other happening are over 25 percent), but it’s a reminder that uncertainty exists in all directions. For now, though, the last week’s flurry of polling mostly confirms what’s been true of this race all along — Biden is up, and the Electoral College helps Trump, but not enough to save him unless the polls are wrong.