NFL

How Massive The NFL Really Is, In 4 Charts

By Ryan Best

Feb. 6, 2023, at 6:00 AM

The NFL has had quite an eventful year. In fact, the 2022 season has been characterized by a series of controversies that, when taken together, seem like a microcosm of the criticisms and existential threats facing the league as a whole. In just the past year, there have been major stories centered around how the NFL handles (or downplays) sexual assault allegations against its star players, scary concussions, the physical brutality of the sport and the league’s racial regressiveness — especially in disadvantaging Black coaches in a predominantly Black league. 

But while it might be reasonable to expect the league to take a hit from this slew of negative attention, the NFL seems to have a Teflon-like ability to keep scandals from sticking. Fans are still watching games in droves despite all the controversies, even giving the league its highest-rated regular-season game on record this Thanksgiving. So, with the Super Bowl just around the corner, we wanted to take a few different looks at just how massive the NFL really is — and why rumors of its decline continue to be greatly exaggerated.

First, take the Big Game itself. This Sunday, tens of millions of Americans will tune in as the Kansas City Chiefs take on the Philadelphia Eagles in Super Bowl LVII. Every year, the Super Bowl is by far the biggest cultural event in America — or, maybe more accurately, it is the defining event for American culture. While similar events grapple with fractured media environments and the rise of streaming, millions more Americans still turn on their TVs and sit down on their couch with friends or seven-layer dip (or both) to watch the Super Bowl than any other major sports championship in the country.

But of course, football’s grip on American sports fandom expands well beyond just watching the Super Bowl. More generally, Gallup has been asking Americans about their favorite sport to watch since 1937¹ — and for the past half-century, American sports fans have come to a pretty clear consensus: Football is king. Football first claimed the top spot from baseball in 1972, and nothing has come close to it ever since. Meanwhile, baseball is on a precipitous decline — only 9 percent of all respondents said it was their favorite sport in 2017, the lowest total since Gallup first asked the question 80 years earlier.

We also can see football’s seemingly unimpeachable position as America’s favorite sport in how many fans it is able to draw to each game. Put simply, NFL games are massively bigger spectacles than contests in any other American sport, with thousands more people showing up to NFL stadiums during football season than we see at MLB, NBA or NHL games.

The Washington Commanders drew the smallest crowds in the NFL in 2022 — with just over 58,000 fans showing up to the average game at FedEx Field — while the Los Angeles Dodgers had the biggest games of any team outside the NFL in the same year. Their games averaged more than 10,000 fewer fans than the Commanders’. Yes, some of this is a function of venue capacity — no basketball or hockey arena can contain even 35 percent as many fans as the NFL’s smallest stadium (Soldier Field in Chicago) — as well as the NFL’s once-a-week business model, which stands in contrast with other leagues’ more daily scheduling rhythms. But even so, the NFL draws big enough crowds to justify massive stadiums and make its once-a-week model worth it. Simply put, the sheer drawing power of pro football is undeniable.

And these unencumbered decades of unwavering attention and butts-in-seats have helped NFL franchises themselves grow to enormous proportions, too. Of the 50 most valuable sports franchises in the world according to Forbes’ 2022 rankings, 30 are NFL teams.² The Dallas Cowboys top the list as the most valuable team in the world, with an estimated worth around $8 billion — $1.6 billion higher than the second-ranked New England Patriots. Combined, all the NFL teams on the list are worth a staggering $136.8 billion.

Any way you slice it, the NFL is simply America’s No. 1 obsession. And while it does face some real existential threats (including reports of declining popularity among the next generation of would-be fans), it’s still a behemoth that dominates America’s culture and economy. The NFL is so far out ahead of any other sport that a competitor usurping its title as America’s favorite league probably won’t happen for decades — if at all.

Check out our latest NFL predictions.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/chaotic-fictional-football-coach-fivethirtyeight-74531599

That — plus the fact that the majority of Americans dislike changing clocks to begin with — has led to efforts to eliminate standard time … and counterefforts to eliminate daylight saving time. Can either option squeeze more day out of the light we do have? Try your hand at optimizing daylight all year long:

Unfortunately, no solution will make every American happy. Even if you’ve found a combination that satisfies your personal preferences, you may have noticed that those preferences could negatively impact other parts of the country. And advocates for changing the system we currently have — whether pro-DST or anti — feel strongly that their personal preference is the best.

Those who want to permanently stay on standard time (the time we’re on from November to March) say it’s preferential to permanent daylight saving time because standard time more closely aligns the clocks with our natural circadian rhythm, which is dictated by light exposure. Such a change would be better for our health. For instance, daylight saving time has been associated with a host of negative health effects including worse sleep and cardiovascular disease, and permanent daylight saving time could lead to higher rates of depression — prompting groups like the American Academy of Sleep Medicine to endorse permanent standard time instead. “The problem is that we don’t adapt. Our bodies align to the sun,” said Dr. Karin Johnson, a sleep medicine specialist and a professor of neurology at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School.

Advocates for permanent daylight saving time, however, argue that Americans live by the clock, not the sun, and that brighter evenings fit with how we live in the real world. Perhaps that’s why in the past five years 19 states have passed a bill or resolution that would implement year-round daylight saving time. A bill that passed the Senate in March would also have made it permanent, but the measure has virtually no chance of being taken up by the House before the next Congress is seated.

There’s some evidence that people are more likely to shop or be active after work if it’s still light out. But the arguments aren’t just economic, said Steve Calandrillo, a professor at the University of Washington School of Law. With more people out and about in the evening hours, the chances for traffic accidents go up when the sun sets earlier. He pointed to a study from 2004, which found that switching to permanent daylight savings time could reduce pedestrian fatalities by 13 percent and motor-vehicle fatalities by 3 percent during morning and evening hours.³ Other studies suggest more evening daylight could help prevent street crime.

The problem is that both standard time and daylight saving time are fictions. Daylight saving time, which was introduced as a temporary measure for maximizing usable daylight during World War I, tends to get a bad rap for its artificiality, but standard time isn’t exactly natural either. According to Michael O’Malley, a professor of history at George Mason University and the author of “Keeping Watch: A History of American Time,” standard time was introduced in the late 19th century by railroad companies who wanted to standardize their timetables. Not everyone was happy about it. The city of Cincinnati, for example, initially continued to set its clocks to “Cincinnati time,” which was twenty-two minutes different from standard time. “Their argument was, ‘Noon is when the sun is overhead, not when the Pennsylvania Railroad says it’s noon,’” O’Malley said. Our current system of springing forward and falling back is a kludge designed to make everyone happy — which, of course, it fails at.

That’s the fundamental problem with trying to restructure time to fit our schedules. Whether it’s permanent standard time or daylight saving time, any attempt to standardize the clocks will be dislocating for someone. O’Malley’s dream is that the country could somehow return to solutions from before the 20th century, when local communities still responded to changes in daylight by shifting their own schedules to fit the season. That could mean schools might open or close earlier or later depending on when the sun rose and set in a specific place, he said. Adapting to seasonal darkness — and even finding joy in the coziness of the depths of winter — could mean living our lives differently depending on the local hours of light in the day. Slowing down, maximizing activity in sunlight hours and seeking warmth and comfort are ways that people have been coping with the long, dark, cold nights for centuries.

But the promise of daylight saving time — that we can somehow wring more productive hours of brightness out of the day — has always been a false one. No matter how we manipulate the clocks, this will always be a dark time of year. By trying to escape that reality, we may just end up making ourselves more unhappy.

2022 In Review

33 Cool Charts We Made In 2022

In 2022, FiveThirtyEight’s visual journalists covered the midterm elections, the end of Roe v. Wade and sports stories ranging from the World Cup to changes in Major League Baseball’s pitch timing rules. Here are some of the most interesting — and weird and colorful and complicated — charts we made in the last 12 months.

Charts are grouped by topic but are not in any particular order beyond that. Click any of them to read the story featuring that chart.

Politics

Sports

Science

A Red Wave In Florida.A Blue Riptide In Michigan.Where House candidates outperformed their district’s partisanship.

By Ryan Best , Humera Lodhi and Geoffrey Skelley

Republicans’ red wave was supposed to crash over the country in the midterm elections, sweeping them into office up and down the ballot. While the polls didn’t necessarily indicate Republicans would dominate the election, history and much of the preelection narrative suggested they would easily retake the House of Representatives as well as gain control of the Senate and pick up governorships and seats in state legislatures.

That didn’t pan out. But not because a red wave didn’t materialize at all — it just crashed into a series of regional blue riptides. These crosscurrents offset to some extent, leading to Republicans taking back the House by the narrowest of margins. At last count, the Republicans held 219 seats — just above the 218 necessary to claim a majority — while Democrats controlled 212, with four seats still in doubt as states continue tallying their votes.1

As the map below illustrates, Republicans notably outperformed the partisan baseline of seats, as measured by FiveThirtyEight’s partisan lean metric, in states like Florida and New York, while Democrats had stronger showings in Colorado and Michigan.2 This inconsistent over- and underperformance by each party proved pivotal for the 2022 outcome: It paved the way for a GOP majority while also helping Democrats avoid the sizable losses that often afflict the president’s party in midterm House elections.

Where did each party overperform?

The difference between each House district’s FiveThirtyEight partisan lean and the margin between Republican and Democratic candidates in the 2022 election. Hover over a district for more info

OVERPERFORMANCE≥D+20≥R+20WYWVWIWAVTVAUTTXTNSDSCRIPAOROKOHNYNVNMNJNHNENDNCMTMSMOMNMIMDMEMALAKYKSINILIDIAHIGAFLDECTCOCAAZARALAKWYWVWIWAVTVAUTTXTNSDSCRIPAOROKOHNYNVNMNJNHNENDNCMTMSMOMNMIMDMEMALAKYKSINILIDIAHIGAFLDECTCOCAAZARALAKMassachusetts 6th

<85% of expected votes reported

ELECTION MARGIN—−PARTISAN LEAND+26.0=OVERPERFORMANCE—

Election results as of Nov. 18 at 2:41 p.m. Eastern. Overperformance is calculated in districts where at least 85 percent of the expected vote is reported, where both major parties fielded a candidate and where no independent or third-party candidate finished first or second. Topline data is rounded. Margins compare the total votes cast for all candidates of each party and for the first round in districts with ranked-choice voting. Partisan lean is the average margin difference between how a district votes and how the country votes overall.

SOURCE: ABC NEWS

Arguably, no two states proved more important to the 2022 House results than Florida and New York. Republicans carried 31 of the 54 seats in these two states, a net gain of seven from where the parties stood entering the election.3 As Democrats’ overperformances in other states allowed them to hold onto many seats and pick up others, the GOP’s gains in these two states are arguably responsible for the party’s majority in the House.

Across both states, Republicans outperformed the partisan baseline in almost every district. Critically, this included 21 of the 22 seats that have a partisan lean somewhere between 15 percentage points more Democratic or Republican than the country as a whole — the seats where one party’s overperformance would be most likely to precipitate a shift in party control.

Where Republicans did well

The PARTISAN LEAN and VOTE MARGIN in the 2022 election for competitive districts (partisan lean between D+15 and R+15) in Florida and New York

D+10NONER+10R+20R+30R+40FL-26FL-28FL-21FL-16NY-11NY-2FL-15FL-7FL-27NY-1NY-3FL-13NY-4NY-19NY-22NY-17NY-18FL-23NY-25NY-20FL-22FL-14

Election results as of Nov. 18 at 2:41 p.m. Eastern.

SOURCE: ABC NEWS

These strong showings reflected the larger trends in both states. In Florida, Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis won reelection by 19 points, while GOP Sen. Marco Rubio won by 17 points. Their performance in South Florida may have also helped Republican Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart and Carlos Gimenez achieve the largest overperformances of any candidates in the House races we examined (although Diaz-Balart has long been a dynamo when it comes to easily winning elections). And in New York, a state with a partisan lean of D+20, Republican Rep. Lee Zeldin ran behind Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul by 6 points (although that’ll likely grow a bit more with many New York City ballots still being counted). These impressive Republican campaigns are attributable to multiple factors, such as DeSantis’s solid approval rating in Florida as well as frustration with crime rates among some New York voters, but the same trends trickled down to these House races, too.

Both states also had high-profile redistricting battles that, in the end, likely helped these Republican vote swings come close to maximizing GOP House gains in each state. DeSantis pressed for a map that was significantly biased toward the GOP, turning a number of purple seats into red ones and dismantling a seat that had previously elected a Black Democrat. In New York, Democrats drew and passed their own biased map, but the state’s high court overturned those lines and had a special master draw a new map that featured more highly competitive and GOP-leaning seats. Considering the tight margins in some districts, especially those north of New York City, the court-ordered map likely helped Republicans win as many as three more seats than they would have under the lines drawn by the Democratic state Legislature. That being said, the GOP’s strong performance on Long Island likely would have flipped two Democratic-held districts anyway.

Elsewhere, some states saw their House districts swing to the left compared to their partisan baseline. Democrats didn’t have any states where they gained three or more seats, but their strong performances in Colorado, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Washington helped them hold on to many highly competitive districts while even picking up a couple of seats. Overall, there are 21 districts in those four states with a partisan lean between D+15 and R+15. Democrats outperformed in 18 of those seats and won 15 of them, compared with the six the GOP carried.

Where Democrats did well

The PARTISAN LEAN and VOTE MARGIN in the 2022 election for competitive districts (partisan lean between D+15 and R+15) in Colorado, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Washington

D+20D+10NONER+10MI-11PA-4WA-6PA-6CO-7WA-10MI-3MI-8WA-8PA-17MI-7PA-8PA-7WA-3CO-8CO-3MI-10PA-10PA-1MI-4WA-5

Election results as of Nov. 18 at 2:41 p.m. Eastern.

SOURCE: ABC NEWS

In other states, strong Democratic candidates at the top of the ticket (and/or ballot measures favorable to Democrats) helped form a blue seawall that limited Republican gains in toss-up races across the country. In Michigan, Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer won by a bit more than 10 points, and voters handily approved a constitutional amendment protecting abortion rights. Down ballot, this likely helped Democratic incumbents retain two purple seats — Michigan’s 7th and 8th districts — and flip the 3rd District. Similarly, in Pennsylvania, Democrats’ blowout win in the gubernatorial race and pivotal victory in an open-seat Senate contest surely lifted most Democratic boats in the House, helping the party retain control of the state’s highly competitive 7th, 8th and 17th districts. And other blue-leaning states saw mini-waves of their own. In Colorado, Democrats swept the statewide races, which no doubt helped Democrats pick up the newly created 8th District and come close to toppling Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert. And in Washington, Democrats easily held the Senate seat, retained the swingy 8th District and even picked up the R+9 3rd District, one of the biggest upsets of the cycle.

Democratic wins in Michigan’s 3rd District and Washington’s 3rd District also showcased how some GOP contenders endorsed by former President Donald Trump underperformed. In August primaries, the Republican candidates in both seats dispatched GOP incumbents who voted to impeach Trump after the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. But in the general election, the GOP insurgents proved unattractive to voters, as the Democratic candidates in each race outperformed the partisan baseline by a whopping 10 points or so.

These crosscurrents showed up within states, too, as some states saw inconsistent trends across districts. Take Ohio, where Democrats gained one seat but outperformed their baseline in only a little less than half of the races we looked at. The largest overperformance for Democrats in the whole country came in Ohio’s 9th District. Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur, the longest-serving woman in the history of the House, defeated Republican J.R. Majewski, who attended the Jan. 6 rally and reportedly misrepresented his military service record. Meanwhile, in Texas, each party outperformed the partisan lean in most districts they already controlled. But in South Texas, Republicans showed some continued progress after their 2020 improvement in that region, as their candidates outperformed the partisan lean baseline in the heavily Latino 15th and 34th districts — although they won only the former.

With contrasting red waves and blue riptides striking different parts of the country, the House results varied widely when compared to each district’s partisan baseline. Perhaps appropriately, then, these crosscurrents made 2022 the first midterm in 20 years that couldn’t be readily described as a “wave” election for the party that doesn’t control the White House.

Additional research by Holly Fuong. Story editing by Maya Sweedler. Copy editing by Andrew Mangan. Visual editing by Alex Newman. Art direction by Emily Scherer.

The Best NFL Receivers, According to ESPN AnalyticsThese ratings, updated weekly, use player-tracking data from NFL Next Gen Stats to evaluate every route a pass catcher runs and assess his performance in three phases

More NFL:How this worksOur 2022 NFL PredictionsCan you outsmart our forecasts?

Four takes on the top five receivers in the NFL this season

Overall

78867886BETTER BETTER BrownKelceHillDiggsLockettBrownKelceHillDiggsLockett

Getting open

83908390LockettJohnsonBrownHillOlaveLockettJohnsonBrownHillOlave

Making the catch

72827282Peoples-JonesLockettDiggsKelceCooperHollinsEvansBrownPeoples-JonesLockettDiggsKelceCooperHollinsEvansBrown

Yards after catch

72777277McLaurinSamuelMooreBrownSmith-SchusterMcLaurinSamuelMooreBrownSmith-Schuster

Wide receivers and tight ends with at least 24 targets in the 2022 season are eligible for leaderboards. Running backs are not eligible, as different weights are used to construct their composite scores than wide receiver and tight end composite scores.

Where every pass catcher in the NFL stands, according to ESPN Analytics

Open, catch, YAC and overall receiver ratings for NFL pass catchers. Filter or search to find players.

SORT CHART:

OPENCATCHYACOVERALL

99 RATING

75

50

25

Amon-Ra St. Brown

WR · LIONS · 2022

Eligible players are those that received at least 24 targets in the 2022 season. All receiving statistics for a given player are analyzed for each timeframe. The displayed team for each player is the one for which that player most recently played in that timeframe.

Read more about how ESPN Analytics’s receiver ratings work.

Design and development by Ryan Best. Statistical model by Brian Burke. Additional contributions by Jay Boice, Henry Gargiulo and Matt Morris. Editing by Maya Sweedler.

2022 Election

Voters Don't Think Either Party Deserves To Govern

In our final pre-election survey with Ipsos, we asked Americans how they feel about both parties.

By Geoffrey Skelley and Holly Fuong and Geoffrey Skelley and Holly Fuong

Graphics by Ryan Best and Humera Lodhi

Oct. 27, 2022, at 12:00 PM

This article is part of our America's Issues series.

Election Day is almost here, and millions around the country have already cast their vote. With this in mind, we wanted to use the last wave of our FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll before the midterm elections to dive deeper into which issues are driving Americans’ decision-making in the final weeks of the campaign. 

Using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, we’ve been asking the same 2,000 Americans about their biggest concerns and what they think about both major parties in the lead-up to the elections. This time around, we devoted much of our time analyzing the views of likely voters. We examined how different issues could affect their vote choices, their attitudes toward Democrats or Republicans and their perceptions of the parties’ values.

In each of our surveys this year, “inflation or increasing costs” has ranked as the most important concern for the country, and it was no different this time around, as 65 percent of Americans selected that issue.⁴ This marked a new high in any of our six waves of issue polling, an indication that concerns about inflation have risen ahead of the election — a potentially beneficial political development for Republicans, who as the out-party can capitalize on the public’s economic concerns. Rounding out the top three issues were “political extremism or polarization” (32 percent) and “crime or gun violence” (28 percent). Meanwhile, “immigration” and “climate change” ranked fourth and fifth at 21 percent and 16 percent.

But with the election right around the corner, we wanted to take a closer look at the views of likely voters.⁵ Overall, our poll found likely voters split evenly at 41 percent over whether they planned to vote for a Democrat or a Republican in the upcoming congressional election, about the same as in our September wave. But because most likely voters will vote Democratic or Republican, we asked the other respondents — those who were undecided, planned to vote for an independent or third-party candidate, would not vote or skipped the question — which major party they would support if they had to choose, as voters who lean toward one party tend to vote for that party. Even with those responses incorporated, however, likely voters remained almost evenly divided: Forty-nine percent said they would back a Democratic candidate, and 48 percent a Republican one. Nearly all self-identified Democrats and Republicans planned to vote for their respective parties, while independents preferred Democrats over Republicans, 49 percent to 42 percent.⁶

However, in a development that could redound to the GOP’s advantage, 63 percent of likely voters named inflation as a top concern for the country. Republican likely voters have consistently been more likely to name inflation as a leading issue, and 77 percent did so in the sixth wave. But 44 percent of Democrats and 65 percent of independents also indicated rising costs were a top issue, high-water marks for both groups across our polling. And the latter figure might be especially important because independents who named inflation as a top issue broke 54 percent to 36 percent for Republicans when we asked them to choose a party.

But while likely voters were split on which party they planned to vote for, they largely felt that neither party had earned the right to govern after November. Overall, 51 percent of likely voters said Democrats hadn’t earned another two years controlling the federal government, while 39 percent said they had.⁷ Among independents, 50 percent said Democrats didn’t deserve another two years and 34 percent said they did, while Democrats and Republicans mostly answered in accordance with their party. 

Yet things were no better for the GOP, as 55 percent of likely voters also said Republicans had not made a good case for why they should be given control of Congress for the next two years, compared with 35 percent who said they had. Notably, 61 percent of independents said the GOP had not, while just 27 percent said they had (once again, Democrats and Republicans largely answered in line with their partisan views).

We also asked respondents why they felt each party had or hadn’t earned the right to govern. Sixty-eight percent of likely voters who didn’t think the Democratic Party should have continued control said its policies and plans were moving the country in the wrong direction. A 41-year-old Republican multiracial woman from Oklahoma said that Democrats “create tension between groups who feel marginalized at the expense of the country to create an emotional frenzy that will drive people to the polls. I am a former Democrat and feel disgust at the lack of morals or ethics shown by the party.” Among those who thought Democrats should continue to govern, 44 percent cited their belief that Democrats were moving the country in the right direction, while 17 percent cited their work to pass major and important legislation. Another 19 percent also said Democrats should have control simply because they were “better than the Republicans.”

As for those who wanted Republicans to control Congress, 51 percent cited GOP policies and plans, while 28 percent answered because “Democrats are ruining the country.” Just 13 percent answered that they thought the GOP would do a better job dealing with the economy, although some voters thinking about inflation or rising costs may have indicated that they broadly preferred Republican policies. Meanwhile, there wasn’t one obvious reason why some likely voters felt the GOP shouldn’t have power: Thirty-six percent said GOP policies and plans would move the country in the wrong direction, 30 percent said Republicans had not presented a clear plan for what they would do in Congress, and 16 percent felt Republican “values and beliefs were bad or wrong.” When asked to describe the values and beliefs of the GOP, a 72-year-old woman from California who identified as a Democrat wrote, “The current group calling themselves the Republican Party are a corrupt group who are no longer disguising their true intentions, which are solely to create immense personal wealth and power for themselves.”

We also wanted to know what voters thought were the values and beliefs of the two major parties. Overall, almost 79 percent of likely voters said they understood the values and beliefs of each party “very” or “somewhat” well, but there were some notable, if unsurprising, differences.⁸ About 9 in 10 Democrats and Republicans said they knew their party, whereas around two-thirds said the same of the opposition. Meanwhile, about 80 percent of independents said they understood each party.

When asked to describe the values and beliefs of the opposing party, likely voters didn’t hold back. A 28-year-old man from California who identified as a person of color and a Democrat said the GOP aims to “protect the rich and corrupt, lie and gaslight to fool citizens, utilize religion and the media to control the narrative, and reinstate racism and division.” Meanwhile, a 37-year-old white woman from New Hampshire who identified as a Republican argued Democrats “want people dependent on the government” and “are in favor of murdering babies and keeping people poor.”

Of course, it’s not all negative attitudes toward the opposing party. Some Republicans have drawn a line against their own party on issues such as abortion: “The party has also lost itself in the abortion debate and does not seem to want to understand a balance between fetal rights and women’s reproductive rights and health,” said a 60-year-old white man from Georgia. On the other side of the aisle, a 38-year-old white man from Florida complained about his party, the Democrats, paying “lip service to progressivism while maintaining the status quo.”

In less than two weeks, how voters weigh the interplay of these issues, policy preferences and partisan loyalties will help determine the results of the 2022 midterm elections. Republicans have plenty of reasons to be optimistic about capturing the House, while control of the Senate looks very much up for grabs. After the election, we plan to examine what voters have to say about those results and what they think about our political system moving forward. But until then, we’ll have to wait and see how the midterms play out. 

Art direction by Dan Dao. Copy editing by Maya Sweedler. Story editing by Santul Nerkar.

More NBA:2020-21 NBA predictionsOur RAPTOR player ratings

By Ryan Best and Jay Boice

How would adding a superstar change your favorite team’s title chances? Could a specific role player be the missing piece for a certain squad? Use this team-building tool to tinker with a roster by “trading” and dropping players — with as many teams as you want, free of salary cap constraints — and watch teams move around in our RAPTOR-based playoff predictions.

How could player moves reshuffle the NBA’s tiers?Projected records and playoff odds, based on RAPTOR player ratings and expected minutes, will update when a roster is adjusted.TRUSTING THE PROCESSPLAYOFF CONTENDERSTITLE CONTENDERSTRUSTING THE PROCESSPLAYOFF CONTENDERSTITLE CONTENDERS<40% to make playoffs≥40% to make playoffs≥10% to win finals<40% to make playoffs≥40% to make playoffs≥10% to win finalsBuild your team, using RAPTORTeam ratings are calculated based on individual RAPTOR plus-minus projections and expected minutes.SIMULATE FULL SEASON:Run our model from the start of the season without adjustments for injuriesADVANCED MODE:Reallocate a player’s minutes by changing his role on his teamINJURIES ():Icons indicate the approximate share of a player’s expected minutes he’ll miss↺ UNDOSTART OVERCHOOSE A TEAMUTAHJAZZ

CHOOSE A TRADING PARTNERLOS ANGELESCLIPPERS

How this works: When a trade is made, our model updates the rosters of the teams involved and reallocates the number of minutes each player is expected to play. We then run our full NBA forecast with the new lineups to produce updated win totals and playoff probabilities. Injury icons are an approximation of the share of minutes that a player will miss through the rest of the season because of injury or illness. A position is shown only when the player has been allocated minutes at that position in the team’s lineup. Read more about how our NBA model works »

STANDINGSGAMES

Forecast from TodayMORE NHL COVERAGEThe Colorado Avalanche Reached Hockey’s Summit — And Took Down A Dynasty In The ProcessBy Neil PaineThe Lightning Struck Back In The Stanley Cup Final — But The Avalanche Still Have The EdgeBy Neil PaineHOW THIS WORKS These forecasts are based on 50,000 simulations of the rest of the season. Elo ratings are a measure of team strength based on head-to-head results, margin of victory and quality of opponent. Read more »

Download this data

Design and development by Ryan Best and Elena Mejía. Edited by Maya Sweedler, Julia Wolfe and Sara Ziegler. Statistical model by Ryan Bestand Neil Paine. Additional contributions by Jay Boice.

By Geoffrey Skelley and Ryan Best

One of the “rules” of American politics is that the party that doesn’t control the White House will pick up seats in the U.S. House of Representatives during the midterm election. Considering that Democrats hold the White House and only a slim 222-to-213-seat edge in the House,1 Republicans appear to have a straightforward path to retaking Congress’s lower chamber. Indeed, FiveThirtyEight’s midterm forecast gives Republicans about a 7-in-10 shot of claiming a majority, as of Oct. 4, 2022, at 10:18 AM.

But knowing exactly which districts Republicans might swing is harder to say with certainty. The GOP’s path to a majority mostly runs through districts represented by Democrats but whose historic voting patterns suggest they are highly competitive or lean at least a bit to the right. Republicans also hope to pick up a handful of bluer seats, as the party not in the White House sometimes captures “reach” seats in midterms. But a 7-in-10 chance is nowhere near a guarantee for Republicans: Democrats’ hopes of retaining the House rest on swinging a handful of GOP-held seats and holding onto the same competitive seats the Republicans are targeting.

The map below shows the House seats that are most vulnerable to swinging from one party to the other based on our forecast.

Which districts could flip parties?

Each party’s chances to flip every House seat

ODDS OF DISTRICT FLIPPING…TO REPS:TO DEMS:10%20%30%40%50%60%70%80%90%>99%WYWVWIWAVTVAUTTXTNSDSCRIPAOROKOHNYNVNMNJNHNENDNCMTMSMOMNMIMDMEMALAKYKSINILIDIAHIGAFLDECTCOCAAZARALAKWYWVWIWAVTVAUTTXTNSDSCRIPAOROKOHNYNVNMNJNHNENDNCMTMSMOMNMIMDMEMALAKYKSINILIDIAHIGAFLDECTCOCAAZARALAKConnecticut 5th

DEMS CONTROL

PARTISAN LEAN:D+2.6

FORECASTED VOTE SHARE 53.2%53.2% 46.8%46.8%204060801000%FiveThirtyEight Deluxe forecast, Oct. 4, 2022, at 10:18 AM.

FiveThirtyEight Deluxe forecast, Oct. 4, 2022, at 10:18 AM.

With the help of data from midterm elections between 1998 and 2018, we’ve identified the types of districts that have historically swung between parties and grouped them into four clusters based on the incumbent party and the district’s partisan lean.2 Three groups consist of districts that Republicans could flip: conservative-leaning districts currently held by a Democrat, competitive “purply” districts currently held by a Democrat, and liberal-leaning districts held by a Democrat. The fourth and final group consists of all districts currently held by Republicans that Democrats could flip. Now, due to redistricting, there’s also an additional fifth group because 20 districts either don’t have an incumbent party or have two incumbents running. We don’t map out those seats, but we do briefly discuss them at the end.3 But as for the other 415 seats, we can examine how much they matter to each party’s majority-making hopes in the maps below.

First up, we have 11 seats that should offer the easiest pickup opportunities for the Republicans: districts currently represented by a Democrat but vote at least 5 points more Republican than the country as a whole, according to FiveThirtyEight’s partisan lean metric. In the six midterm elections held between 1998 to 2018, the party in the GOP’s position – that is, the party not in the White House – has managed to swing almost 3-in-5 seats that leaned toward it but were held by the president’s party. The most notable result was in 2010, when Republicans gained 63 seats overall, around two-thirds of which were red-leaning districts held by Democrats. The good news for Democrats in 2022 is that, compared with 2010, they don’t have nearly as much red turf to defend. But Republicans only need to flip five net seats to capture the House, and they could win at least that many from this category alone.

Which conservative districts could Republicans flip?

Republicans’ chances to flip House seats that have a more conservative partisan lean (≥R+5) and are currently held by a Democrat

ODDS OF DISTRICT FLIPPING TO REPUBLICANS:10%20%30%40%50%60%70%80%90%>99%WYWVWIWAVTVAUTTXTNSDSCRIPAOROKOHNYNVNMNJNHNENDNCMTMSMOMNMIMDMEMALAKYKSINILIDIAHIGAFLDECTCOCAAZARALAKWYWVWIWAVTVAUTTXTNSDSCRIPAOROKOHNYNVNMNJNHNENDNCMTMSMOMNMIMDMEMALAKYKSINILIDIAHIGAFLDECTCOCAAZARALAK

FiveThirtyEight Deluxe forecast, Oct. 4, 2022, at 10:18 AM. Districts filled with gray lines are those that have a partisan lean more liberal than R+5 or are not currently held by a Democrat.

The 11 conservative districts (≥R+5) with at least 10 in 100 odds to flip to Republicans:

Unlike 2010, this midterm will take place under new district lines, and many of the seats Republicans have the best chance of swinging have changed significantly due to redistricting. Florida’s GOP-drawn map transformed the 7th and 13th districts from highly competitive to clearly Republican-leaning, while Tennessee Republicans transformed the Nashville-based 5th District into a red bastion. These changes weren’t all due to partisan mapmaking, though. Arizona’s new map, drawn by the state’s independent redistricting commission, improved Republicans’ chances in both the 2nd and 6th districts, turning former swing seats into red-leaning districts. Democratic Rep. Tom O’Halleran is mounting a defense in Arizona’s 2nd, which has helped Democrats’ chances there as incumbents still get at least a small boost. No Democratic incumbents are defending the five most swingy seats, which only helps the GOP’s odds.

Some other red-leaning districts controlled by Democrats didn’t change much in redistricting, but they are also in the GOP’s sights as longer-term trends continue to reshape their political preferences. Wisconsin’s 3rd District has been drifting to the right in the past decade, and longtime Democratic Rep. Ron Kind retired, making it a prime Republican target. Democratic incumbents are seeking reelection in Maine’s 2nd District and Pennsylvania’s 8th District, but northern Maine and northeast Pennsylvania have swung right in the Trump era.

But no other seats look more like toss-ups than the 24 Democratic-held districts that have a partisan lean between D+5 and R+5. After all, during midterms from 1998 to 2018, the party in the GOP’s position flipped nearly one-third of seats like this held by the president’s party. Of these two dozen races, 13 involve Democrats defending seats they first won during the 2018 blue wave, but this year, Republicans may end some of their tenures in Congress.

Which purpley districts could Republicans flip?

Republicans’ chances to flip House seats that have a competitive partisan lean (D+5 to R+5) and are currently held by a Democrat

ODDS OF DISTRICT FLIPPING TO REPUBLICANS:10%20%30%40%50%60%70%80%90%>99%WYWVWIWAVTVAUTTXTNSDSCRIPAOROKOHNYNVNMNJNHNENDNCMTMSMOMNMIMDMEMALAKYKSINILIDIAHIGAFLDECTCOCAAZARALAKWYWVWIWAVTVAUTTXTNSDSCRIPAOROKOHNYNVNMNJNHNENDNCMTMSMOMNMIMDMEMALAKYKSINILIDIAHIGAFLDECTCOCAAZARALAK

FiveThirtyEight Deluxe forecast, Oct. 4, 2022, at 10:18 AM. Districts filled with gray lines are those that do not have a competitive partisan lean (≥D+5 or ≥R+5) or are not currently held by a Democrat.

The 20 purpley districts (D+5 to R+5) with at least 10 in 100 odds to flip to Republicans:

At the top of that endangered list is Rep. Tom Malinowski in New Jersey’s 7th District. In redistricting, New Jersey’s bipartisan commission picked the Democratic-drawn map, which worked to protect all potentially vulnerable Democrats save Malinowski, whose light blue seat became light red.4 In addition to Malinowski, three other Democrats first elected in 2018 are caught in toss-up races of their own for seats that now lean a hair to the right after redistricting: Democratic Reps. Cindy Axne of Iowa, Sharice Davids of Kansas and Susan Wild of Pennsylvania.

Republicans also have a chance of swinging some open seats in this cluster. Perhaps most notably, Oregon’s 5th District could prove to be a self-defeating moment for Democratic primary voters: They ousted longtime centrist Rep. Kurt Schrader and backed progressive Jamie McLeod-Skinner in this D+3 seat, which has potentially boosted the chances of Republican Lori Chavez-DeRemer. Over in Illinois, Democrats in the state legislature drew the state’s 17th District to be somewhat bluer in redistricting, but western Illinois has been trending to the right, and Republican Esther Joy King could find victory after narrowly losing in 2020 to now-retiring Democratic Rep. Cheri Bustos. Additionally, Democratic Reps. Conor Lamb and Tom Suozzi left behind Pennsylvania’s 17th District and New York’s 3rd District to pursue failed statewide bids, respectively, which will potentially aid Republicans’ chances of capturing those seats.

The remaining seats involve incumbents who are currently favored but far from shoo-ins, especially if the political environment becomes more favorable to Republicans in the final month of the campaign, which we may see some nascent signs of based on recent polling and economic news.

Next, we turn to the 178 seats Democrats are defending that vote at least 5 points more Democratic than the country as a whole. Most of these districts will not be in play in 2022, especially considering the president’s party won 96 percent of districts like this between 1998 and 2018. Still, a shift to the right in the political environment could open the door for the GOP in some of the blue-but-not-deep-blue seats in this category. For instance, in both 2006 and 2018, Democrats managed to flip 18 seats that were R+5 or redder while a Republican president was in office.

Which liberal districts could Republicans flip?

Republicans’ chances to flip House seats that have a more liberal partisan lean (≥D+5) and are currently held by a Democrat

ODDS OF DISTRICT FLIPPING TO REPUBLICANS:10%20%30%40%50%60%70%80%90%>99%WYWVWIWAVTVAUTTXTNSDSCRIPAOROKOHNYNVNMNJNHNENDNCMTMSMOMNMIMDMEMALAKYKSINILIDIAHIGAFLDECTCOCAAZARALAKWYWVWIWAVTVAUTTXTNSDSCRIPAOROKOHNYNVNMNJNHNENDNCMTMSMOMNMIMDMEMALAKYKSINILIDIAHIGAFLDECTCOCAAZARALAK

FiveThirtyEight Deluxe forecast, Oct. 4, 2022, at 10:18 AM. Districts filled with gray lines are those that have a partisan lean more conservative than D+5 or are not currently held by a Democrat.

The 11 liberal districts (≥D+5) with at least 10 in 100 odds to flip to Republicans:

Nonetheless, our forecast is currently bearish on the GOP’s odds of swinging some of these districts. If the GOP is going to capture some of these “reach” seats, their best shot may come in a seat like Nevada’s 4th District, a D+5 seat defended by Democratic Rep. Steven Horsford, whom Republican Sam Peters could best with an assist from the political environment and perhaps lingering negativity toward Horsford over revelations of a past extramarital affair that came to light in 2020. Republicans have also made a play for Rhode Island’s 2nd District a D+16 seat left open by retiring Democratic Rep. Jim Langevin. Republican Allan Fung is well-funded and nearly won the Ocean State’s governorship in 2014, but he faces an uphill battle against Democrat Seth Magaziner, the state’s General Treasurer.

The last cluster of districts are the 202 seats Republicans are defending, which history suggests won’t be easy for Democrats to swing in their direction: In the six midterms from 1998 to 2018, the White House party flipped just 2 percent of the districts defended by their opponent, regardless of their partisan lean. However, the political environment following the Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the constitutional right to abortion has proven to be less advantageous for the GOP than we might’ve otherwise expected, given historical midterm patters. This, in combination with redistricting and the candidates chosen by some Republican primary voters, has opened the door for Democrats to make a play for a handful of seats Republicans are defending this November.

Which districts could Democrats flip?

Democrats’ chances to flip every House seat currently held by a Republican

ODDS OF DISTRICT FLIPPING TO DEMOCRATS:10%20%30%40%50%60%70%80%90%>99%WYWVWIWAVTVAUTTXTNSDSCRIPAOROKOHNYNVNMNJNHNENDNCMTMSMOMNMIMDMEMALAKYKSINILIDIAHIGAFLDECTCOCAAZARALAKWYWVWIWAVTVAUTTXTNSDSCRIPAOROKOHNYNVNMNJNHNENDNCMTMSMOMNMIMDMEMALAKYKSINILIDIAHIGAFLDECTCOCAAZARALAK

FiveThirtyEight Deluxe forecast, Oct. 4, 2022, at 10:18 AM. Districts filled with gray lines are those that are not currently held by a Republican.

The 11 districts with at least 10 in 100 odds to flip to Democrats:

Most notably, Democrats have a decent chance of flipping Michigan’s 3rd District, where Democrat Hillary Scholten is slightly favored over Republican John Gibbs. Before August, Republican Rep. Peter Meijer was a good bet to hold onto the seat, which became slightly Democratic-leaning under the new lines drawn by Michigan’s independent redistricting commission. But Meijer lost to Gibbs in the Aug. 2 GOP primary, as Gibbs gained former President Donald Trump’s endorsement after Meijer voted to impeach him in 2021. Similarly, Democrats may be able to make a play for New York’s 22nd District. Moderate Republican Rep. John Katko retired after voting to impeach Trump, and Republican primary voters in the Syracuse-area seat opted for the Trumpier and less well-funded Brandon Williams instead of the national GOP’s preferred candidate in what our forecast views as a toss-up race.

Redistricting also played a role in the competitiveness of three Republican-held toss-up seats Democrats hope to flip. In California, the state’s independent redistricting commission placed Republican Reps. David Valadao and Mike Garcia in seats that were somewhat bluer than the ones they currently hold, while New Mexico Democrats drew GOP Rep. Yvette Herrell’s district to be highly competitive so that they might unseat her.

We’ve covered 415 of the House’s 435 seats here, but the remaining 20 districts don’t have an incumbent party, 18 because they are newly drawn or because an incumbent who might’ve run there decided to run in a nearby seat instead, and two others because they feature a general election showdown between a Democratic and Republican incumbent. Overall, 11 of these districts favor the GOP to some extent, seven favor Democrats and two are essentially toss-ups. So this, too, is a marginally beneficial category for Republicans, although it’s harder to say how these compare in a modern midterm context because the only other midterm since 1998 to come after decennial redistricting was in 2002, a sample size of one.

The four main categories of seats show where we might expect districts to swing this November. Republicans will be best positioned to challenge for the House majority thanks to the competitive seats and Republican-leaning seats held by Democrats. Democrats in turn will hope to flip a few GOP-controlled districts at the margins, prevent Republicans from grabbing hold of more Democratic-leaning seats and retain as many of those highly competitive districts as they can. History is on the GOP’s side, but the 2022 story still has to be written.

Editing by Alex Newman, Maya Sweedler and Curtis Yee. Illustration by Emily Scherer.

Explore The Ways Republicans Or Democrats Could Win The MidtermsPick the winner of each race to see how FiveThirtyEight’s forecast would change.

2022 election forecastHow our forecast works

By Ryan Best, Jay Boice, Aaron Bycoffe and Nate Silver

FiveThirtyEight’s Senate and House forecasts are based on myriad factors, with changes in one race often influencing odds in another. To see just how much individual races can change the forecast, first try picking different winners in key Senate races (or feel free to skip ahead to key races in the House!).1 But beware, the choices you make in the Senate affect the House, and vice versa.

iIncumbent candidate Scroll to see more racesDemocrats are slightly favored to win the Senate

Based on FiveThirtyEight’s current forecast

Republicans win33 in 100MAJORITY56REPSEATS5452525456DEMSEATSDemocrats win67 in 100Average: 50.656565454525250505050525254545656REPSEATSDEMSEATSMorelikelyMorelikelyRepublicans are favored to win the House

Based on FiveThirtyEight’s current forecast

Republicans win76 in 100MAJORITY270REPSEATS255240225225240255270DEMSEATSDemocrats win24 in 100Average: 228.7270270255255240240225225225225240240255255270270REPSEATSDEMSEATSMorelikelyMorelikelyWho will control Congress?

Based on FiveThirtyEight’s current forecast

Republicans win both chambers33 in 100Republicans win the Senate
Democrats win the House<1 in 100Democrats win the Senate
Republicans win the House43 in 100Democrats win both chambers23 in 100Odds displayed in the graphics may not match numeric odds due to rounding.

How this works: We start with the 40,000 simulations that our election forecast runs every time it updates. When you choose the winner of a race, we throw out any simulations where the outcome you picked didn’t happen and recalculate each party’s chances of winning each chamber using just the remaining simulations. If you choose enough unlikely outcomes, we’ll eventually wind up with so few simulations that we can’t produce accurate results. When that happens, we go back to our full set of simulations and run a series of regressions to see how your scenario might look if it turned up more often.

In simplified terms, the regressions start off by looking at the vote share for each candidate in every simulation and seeing how the rest of the map changed in response to big or small wins. Let’s say you picked Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock to win Georgia. In some of our simulations, Warnock may have won Georgia very narrowly, and in others, he may have lost it very narrowly. But in simulations where he won Georgia by a big margin, Democrats may have also won big in toss-up races and pulled some Democratic-leaning races into their column, while the reverse may be true in simulations where Warnock lost Georgia by a wide margin. We figure out how every other race tended to look in that full range of scenarios, tracking not just whether other Democratic candidates usually won other races but also how much they generally won or lost each one by.

After all of that, we take some representative examples of scenarios that include the picks you made and use what we learned from our regression analysis to adjust all 40,000 simulations, and then recalculate win probabilities for each race and chamber of Congress. Finally, we blend those adjusted simulations with any of the original simulations that still apply and produce a final forecast.

What If Democrats — Or Republicans — Had Won Every Redistricting Battle?

By Ryan Best and Nathaniel Rakich

Get the data on GitHub

With control of Congress at stake for potentially 10 years, the 2021-22 redistricting process was a pitched battle between the two parties. Both sides fought hard to install maps favorable to them, but in the end, their efforts largely came out in the wash. The new national congressional map that emerged largely preserved the (Republican-leaning) balance of power that existed at the end of last decade.

But what if it had turned out differently? What if Democrats or Republicans — or even nonpartisan reformers — had won every redistricting battle this cycle? How different would the national congressional map look?

We don’t have to imagine. Thanks to the FiveThirtyEight redistricting tracker, we have a record of 365 potential congressional maps that were officially proposed this past year. And we can use the best Democratic, best Republican and most competitive proposal from every state to picture what each side’s best-case scenario was this redistricting cycle.

To be clear, this isn’t what the national map for the House of Representatives would look like if one party had had free rein to gerrymander in every state. (We already did that project.) Instead, these are the best maps for each side that theoretically could have resulted from the redistricting process as it actually played out.1 Curious what these alternative political universes would look like? Use the interactive below to toggle between them:

CHOOSE MAPS THAT WERE:

ApprovedMost competitiveBest for DemocratsBest for RepublicansPARTISAN LEAN OF DISTRICTS:

Solid D≥D+15

Highly Competitive

Solid R≥R+15

Competitive D≥D+5

Competitive R≥R+5

MAJORITYThere are 208 Republican-leaning seats, 187 Democratic-leaning seats and 40 highly competitive seats in the approved maps.

It goes without saying that a Democratic proposal would never realistically pass a Republican-controlled legislature, or vice versa. But looking at actual maps that were proposed does reveal some fundamental truths about redistricting and each side’s constraints this cycle. For example, on Earth 2, where Democrats got everything they wanted, the party was still held back by the fact that they didn’t control the redistricting process in enough states. Meanwhile, on Earth 3, Republicans drew themselves some cutthroat gerrymanders — but bizarrely, it wound up resulting in more safely Democratic districts too. Let’s take a trip into the multiverse, shall we?

WHAT IF DEMOCRATS HAD PASSED THEIR BEST MAPS?MAJORITYThere are 185 Republican-leaning seats, 215 Democratic-leaning seats and 35 highly competitive seats in the most favorable maps for Democrats.

A blue seat for Salt Lake City and the Milwaukee suburbs? No Republican-leaning seats in Maryland? A second majority-Black seat in both Alabama and Louisiana? Swing seats in Arkansas and Montana? The preservation of their aggressive gerrymander in New York? Welcome to Democrats’ dream scenario for 2021-22 redistricting.

If the best proposal for Democrats had been enacted in every state, the country would have wound up with 28 more Democratic-leaning seats and 23 fewer Republican-leaning seats than the current, real map.2

Still, even in this best-case scenario for Democrats, that wouldn’t have been an overwhelming number of Democratic-leaning seats. The country’s median congressional seat still would have been highly competitive, with a partisan lean of D+4. By contrast, consider that the median congressional seat here in the real world (North Carolina’s 13th District) has a partisan lean of R+3. In other words, even in their best-case scenario, Democrats could have put themselves in an only slightly better position than Republicans find themselves in right now.

This reflects just how behind the eightball Democrats were in the redistricting process from the very start. For example, Democrats were totally shut out of the redistricting process in Texas, so the map most “favorable” to them was drawn by Republicans and is heavily biased toward the GOP. Redistricting commissions, meanwhile, helped several states draw more democratic maps this cycle, but prevented many of those same states from drawing more Democratic maps. And because these commissions disproportionately exist in states where Democrats enjoyed full control of state government, Democrats were limited from drawing maximalist gerrymanders in states like California, Colorado, Virginia and Washington. Instead, these maps were all relatively fair maps drawn by commissions.

WHAT IF REPUBLICANS HAD PASSED THEIR BEST MAPS?MAJORITYThere are 227 Republican-leaning seats, 174 Democratic-leaning seats and 34 highly competitive seats in the most favorable maps for Republicans.

On the other hand, imagine a world where the state supreme courts of North Carolina and Ohio had let Republicans enact their most egregious gerrymanders, or where the redistricting commissions in Michigan and New York had passed some of their early, Republican-favorable drafts. In this best-case scenario for the GOP, we’d be looking at 227 red seats nationwide and only 174 blue seats.

This is so much better for Republicans than the Democrats’ dream scenario is for Democrats (a map with 215 blue seats and 185 red seats). What’s more, the median congressional seat on the GOP map would have a partisan lean of R+7 — enough to put control of the House mostly out of reach for Democrats. Again, this asymmetry reflects that, between political geography and having control of more map-drawing entities, conditions were simply better for Republicans this redistricting cycle.

But paradoxically, there’s one way in which the Republican dream map is good for Democrats: It creates two more solidly blue seats3 than the Democratic dream map does (149 versus 147). That may seem counterintuitive, but it illustrates the tried-and-true gerrymandering technique of “packing” — i.e., packing as many of your opponent’s voters as possible into the smallest number of districts. For example, the most pro-Republican map of Pennsylvania created five solidly Democratic districts in order to make the other 12 winnable for Republicans.

The other striking thing about the Republican best-case-scenario map is how it’s only a few good Republican maps away from the national map we actually got. It has only 19 more Republican-leaning seats and 13 fewer Democratic-leaning seats than the real map, reflecting how a lot of things went right for Republicans in redistricting this year (even if it could have gone even better). For instance, the party’s best maps in Texas and Florida (two of the three states with the most congressional districts) were very close to the ones that eventually passed.

WHAT IF THE MOST COMPETITIVE MAPS HAD PASSED?MAJORITYThere are 186 Republican-leaning seats, 181 Democratic-leaning seats and 68 highly competitive seats in the most competitive maps.

Both the Democratic and Republican dream maps — and, for that matter, the maps that actually were enacted — sacrifice the number of highly competitive seats. But on Earth 4, those of us who enjoy competitive elections can truly be happy. Not only does this map boost the number of competitive seats by 28, but it also creates an almost perfectly balanced national House map — one where Republicans have a negligible five-seat advantage.

In contrast to the real world, where the lack of competitive districts means we should expect only narrow House majorities for the foreseeable future, this super-competitive map could produce some drastic swings in the party composition of Congress. If Democrats won every highly competitive district in this map, they’d emerge with a 249-186 House majority; if Republicans did, they’d sit at 254-181. That’s a bigger majority than either party has held in the House since the huge Democratic majority that followed the 2008 election.

But those 68 highly competitive seats still wouldn’t be nearly as many as the House had as recently as the 2000 election, when there were 102 such districts. Again, that reflects cold, hard political reality: Competitive districts are on the decline in this country — and not just because of gerrymandering.

True, in states like Georgia and Texas, the politicians who drew every proposed map this cycle had no incentive to encourage competitive seats — but even in states where nonpartisan entities like commissions and courts drew some proposals, the most pro-competition map still has a surprisingly small number of highly competitive seats. Minnesota’s most competitive map had only one, for instance. Virginia’s had only two. California’s had six, but that’s only 12 percent of the state’s 52 districts.

Simply put, political polarization has made it harder to draw competitive seats. There are fewer swing voters than there used to be, and the political realignment along urban-rural lines means most parts of the country are either solidly red or solidly blue. And there is no alternative universe where that isn’t true.

UPDATED 34 MINUTES AGO

U.S. SENATE
It’s a toss-up for the Senate
The Deluxe version of our model simulates the election 40,000 times to see who wins most often. This sample of 100 outcomes gives you an idea of the range of scenarios the model considers possible.

MAJORITY
57
REP
SEATS
56
55
54
53
52
51
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
DEM
SEATS
52 in 100
52 in 100
Republicans win
Republicans win
48 in 100
48 in 100
Democrats win
Democrats win
Republicans winDemocrats win
SEE THE SENATE FORECAST
U.S. HOUSE
Republicans are favored to win the House
The Deluxe version of our model simulates the election 40,000 times to see who wins most often. This sample of 100 outcomes gives you an idea of the range of scenarios the model considers possible.

MAJORITY
270
REP
SEATS
255
240
225
225
240
255
270
DEM
SEATS
87 in 100
87 in 100
Republicans win
Republicans win
13 in 100
13 in 100
Democrats win
Democrats win
Republicans winDemocrats win
SEE THE HOUSE FORECAST
THE LATEST
LAST UPDATED JUNE 30, 2022
Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s 2022 midterm forecast! We’ve got a bit of a split diagnosis in this election: Republicans are favored to win the House, while the Senate is a toss-up. How can this be? Well, as editor-in-chief Nate Silver writes in his overview of the forecast, the national environment doesn’t look good for Democrats, which is why we expect Republicans to make gains in the House — even though those gains might not be historic. But in the Senate, candidate quality matters a lot more, and this could prove to be a silver lining for Democrats. It’s a similar story in the 36 races for governor.
Remember, though, we’re still a little more than four months away from Election Day, so there’s still plenty of time for things to change. To read more about how our forecasts work, please check out our methodology.
Remember me? I’m Fivey Fox! Welcome to our 2020 forecast. Oh, @#$%&!, it’s the midterms already?
U.S. GOVERNORS
Forecasting each governorship
Each party’s chances of winning the 36 governorships up for election

Icon Legend
Solid R
≥95% R
Likely R
≥75%
Lean R
≥60%
Toss-up
<60% both Lean D ≥60% Likely D ≥75% Solid D ≥95% D AL AK AZ AR CA CO CT DE FL GA HI ID IL IN IA KS KY LA ME MD MA MI MN MS MO MT NE NV NH NJ NM NY NC ND OH OK OR PA RI SC SD TN TX UT VT VA WA WV WI WY SEE THE GOVERNORS FORECAST We’re forecasting the race to control the Senate and House, as well as each party’s chance of winning the 36 governors seats up for election. 2022 ELECTION COVERAGE Where The Midterms Could Most Affect Abortion Access By Nathaniel Rakich, Geoffrey Skelley and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux What Went Down During The June 28 Primary Elections By FiveThirtyEight The Election Deniers Dominating The Primaries In Colorado By Kaleigh Rogers 21 Republican Primaries And A Special Election To Watch On June 28 By Geoffrey Skelley and Nathaniel Rakich 9 Democratic Primaries To Watch In Illinois And New York By Nathaniel Rakich We made this FORECAST MODEL Nate Silver PROJECT MANAGEMENT Christopher Groskopf CONTENT EDITING Sarah Frostenson Meena Ganesan Christopher Groskopf Nate Silver COPY EDITING Jennifer Mason DESIGN Ryan Best Elena Mejía DEVELOPMENT Ryan Best Jay Boice Aaron Bycoffe Christopher Groskopf Elena Mejía ART DIRECTION Emily Scherer ILLUSTRATION Fabio Buonocore Joey Ellis DATA & RESEARCH Cooper Burton Aaron Bycoffe Mary Radcliffe PAST CONTRIBUTORS Colleen Barry Micah Cohen Dhrumil Mehta Jasmine Mithani Derek Shan Anna Wiederkehr Julia Wolfe Yutong Yuan Download the data:PollsModel outputs Notice a ?Send us an email. *It's 2022! Read our methodology before you @ us. Lite What Election Day looks like based on polls alone Classic What Election Day looks like based on polls, fundraising, past voting patterns and more Deluxe What Election Day looks like when we add experts’ ratings to the Classic forecast + COMMENTS Get more FiveThirtyEight Store Newsletter Twitter Facebook Data RSS About Us Jobs Masthead Pitch FiveThirtyEight Advertise With Us About Nielsen Measurement Terms of Use Privacy Policy Do Not Sell My Personal Information Your California Privacy Rights Children's Online Privacy Policy Interest-Based Ads © 2022 ABC News Internet Ventures. All rights reserved.

2022 Election

3 In 10 Americans Named Political Polarization As A Top Issue Facing The Country

By Geoffrey Skelley and Holly Fuong and Geoffrey Skelley and Holly Fuong

Jun. 14, 2022, at 12:09 PM

This article is part of our America's Issues series.

Political division has been on the rise for years in the U.S. The gap between the two parties has only grown more sharply in Congress, while the share of Americans who interact with people from the other party has plummeted. Furthermore, many Americans only read news or get information from sources that align with their political beliefs, which exacerbates fundamental disagreements about the basic facts of many political problems.

In other words, hatred — specifically, hatred of the other party — increasingly defines our politics.

It’s hard to overstate how dire the situation is because it’s been this way for a while. It’s something, too, that everyday Americans are feeling — and are worried about. “American citizens are growing more extreme and isolated in their political views,” said a white woman in her mid-30s from Wisconsin who identified as a Democrat. “No one can respect each other’s opinions and try to work together in a peaceful way,” said a Republican Hispanic man from California in his mid-20s. “Individuals and the media hard-sell their own views with no understanding or attempted understanding of other viewpoints,” said an independent Black woman from Texas in her mid-60s.

Polarization and extremism ranked third across a list of 20 issues that we asked about in the latest FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll, which was conducted from May 26 to June 6. Using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, we interviewed the same 2,000 or so Americans from our previous survey, and of the 1,691 adults who responded, 28 percent named “political extremism or polarization” as one of the most important issues facing the country,⁹ trailing only “inflation or increasing costs” and “crime or gun violence,” the latter of which surged in the aftermath of mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas.

Americans typically have not ranked polarization or extremism as a top concern. Historically, concerns around the economy or fear of military conflict have loomed the largest in American minds. But over the past decade, Gallup has seen a larger share of people cite dissatisfaction with the government or poor leadership as the nation’s top issue, reaching record highs in recent years. This is similar to what we found in our survey, too. Almost 3 in 10 Americans said they were worried about extremism and polarization, which is essentially unchanged from our poll last month.

Democrats were the most likely to name polarization or extremism as a top worry, at 33 percent, but independents and Republicans weren’t too far behind at 28 percent and 23 percent, respectively. This does seem, though, to be an issue that Americans who are more politically engaged care about. For instance, 38 percent of likely voters named it as a top concern, compared with 28 percent overall, which marked the largest gap between likely voters and Americans as a whole on any issue we measured.

How Americans define “polarization” varies. Some spoke of the inability of the two major parties to compromise, while others blamed political leaders or the other party. But overall, regardless of how they identified politically, most Americans blamed elites for America’s divides. Sixty-four percent said they felt political polarization is mostly driven by political and social elites, compared with only 11 percent who thought it had more to do with how ordinary Americans think and behave.¹⁰ “Both political parties have moved way to the outside, and there's no center pole for people to meet at,” said Sandra O’Kay, an elderly woman from Virginia who identified as an independent. “Congress is not making the rules. They're just fighting one another.”

And when we asked about what specific groups or ideas might be driving polarization, there was also a fair amount of consensus on the four leading contributors: politicians, wealthy donors, social media companies and mainstream media outlets. After that, though, agreement broke down, and there were some stark differences across party lines. 

The biggest splits by party came over the role of conservative media outlets, religion and religious leaders. Nearly two-thirds of Americans thought conservative media had a “major” or “significant” impact on political division. However, as you can see in the chart above, this was strongly split along party lines. Eighty-one percent of Democrats said this, compared with only 48 percent of Republicans, while independents echoed where Americans fell overall. Democrats were also more likely to say that religion or religious leaders were major drivers of polarization, which probably reflects the fact that Democrats are much more likely to be religiously unaffiliated than Republicans.

There were also smaller but still noticeable splits over the role racism, capitalism and wealth inequality play in stoking division. For instance, solid majorities of both Democrats and Republicans said that they felt that racism had had a major or significant impact on polarization, with 82 percent of Democrats and 62 percent of Republicans answering that way. However, given that Republicans and Democrats view discrimination very differently, they likely answered this way for very different reasons. Meanwhile, Democrats were likelier to blame wealth inequality and capitalism than were Republicans.

Some of this disagreement on what’s driving polarization likely reflects just how far apart the two parties are on a variety of issues; however, even where there are stark disagreements, those differences are often still overstated. We asked respondents in our survey whether they agreed with five statements that we thought were polarizing, and to guess how members of the other party would respond. 

On the topic of whether abortion should be legal in cases of rape, incest or to save the life of the mother, a majority of Democrats and Republicans were on the same side — about 89 percent of Democrats and 64 percent of Republicans agreed with this statement. However, their perceptions of each other were starkly different: Democrats thought that a minority (only 30 percent) of Republicans agreed, whereas Republicans correctly thought that a solid majority (68 percent, which is still an underestimate) of Democrats agreed with the statement.

That said, there were other instances where Democrats and Republicans knew just how divided they were on an issue. For instance, on the topic of what should be taught in middle and high schools, 64 percent of Democrats and 16 percent of Republicans said that schools should teach about sexual orientation and gender identity. And respondents from both parties guessed within 2 percentage points of the actual share of the other party that agreed with the statement. We saw a somewhat similar picture regarding whether middle and high schools should teach race and racism in the U.S. Eighty-three percent of Democrats said they should, while Republicans perceived Democratic support at 65 percent; meanwhile, just 29 percent of Republicans agreed, while Democrats thought 19 percent of Republicans were in support.

The disconnect between Democrats and Republicans over race and racism is further exemplified by their vastly different responses to Republican South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott’s statement, “America is not a racist country. It's wrong to try to use our painful past to dishonestly shut down debates in the present.” In our survey, we asked respondents to score eight public statements on whether they represented an extreme or non-extreme viewpoint,¹¹ and when they were asked to rate Scott’s anonymized quote as “extreme” or “not extreme,” almost three in four Democrats said that it was extreme, as opposed to just 34 percent of Republicans. 

These partisan differences are in part related to the ethnic diversity of Democrats, as Black and Hispanic Americans account for a larger portion of the Democratic Party than the Republican Party. Tellingly, respondents’ answers also varied by race or ethnicity, with nearly three-quarters of Black Americans and 57 percent of Hispanic Americans finding the statement extreme, compared to 48 percent of white Americans. 

Suffice it to say, there are real differences between the two parties, but most Americans (62 percent) still want the U.S. to actively reduce political polarization. Only 9 percent think that the U.S. should let things be.¹² But as our poll shows time and time again, many Americans don’t think political leaders and elites represent their interests. “I feel like I have to just kind of read up on what people are saying and what people are doing and try to figure out who's the least extreme, who I side with. [To make the U.S. less polarized,] I think [we need] cooperation and collaboration between everybody, politicians and people in general,” said Sara from Alabama. 

It’s evident, too, that polarization is weighing heavily on many Americans, as it’s hard to see a way out of our current partisan gridlock. “I think things have to hit such a dark, grizzly, rock-bottom state,” said Randal Strauss, a 55-year old independent man from Nebraska. “Where people think, hey, something's got to change.”

Additional reporting by Maya Sweedler and Santul Nerkar. Art direction by Emily Scherer. Copy editing by Santul Nerkar. Graphics by Ryan Best. Story editing by Sarah Frostenson.

2022 Primaries

The 6 Political Neighborhoods Of Los Angeles

By Maya Sweedler and Nathaniel Rakich and Maya Sweedler and Nathaniel Rakich

Graphics by Ryan Best

Jun. 7, 2022, at 10:00 AM

Politics in Los Angeles are as complicated and knotty as its highway system. L.A. has so much inequality over so much space that its residents often want wildly different things from their politicians — even if nearly all of those politicians are Democrats. 

The city’s open-seat mayoral election — whose first round¹³ takes place on Tuesday — reflects that paradox, with a pileup of Democrats pitching solutions to a city of 3.9 million residents. 

Two of the 12 candidates on the ballot are clear front-runners: Rep. Karen Bass and billionaire real estate developer Rick Caruso have made public safety and cost of living central issues in their campaigns, but they have dramatically different visions of what a safer, more affordable L.A. should look like. Bass, who led the state Assembly before serving a decade in the U.S. House of Representatives, is the more progressive of the two. The former chair of the Black Congressional Caucus has leaned into her background as a community organizer in the city, highlighting her “crisis-tested” skill set that would help her address homelessness as a pressing economic and public health crisis. Caruso, meanwhile, is a former Republican who has blanketed the airwaves with dire depictions of the city’s uptick in crime, promising to “clean up” the streets and hire 1,500 more police officers. His big spending has helped him clear the field; in recent weeks, other candidates who sought to position themselves in the moderate lane have dropped out and endorsed him. L.A. Councilman Kevin de León — the only major Latino candidate in a city that is almost half Latino — is also running but has lagged behind Bass and Caruso in polls.

This election poses a problem for us incorrigible election-watchers: The major candidates are all Democrats, and Los Angeles is an almost uniformly Democratic city. So, to make sense of the city’s political fissures (and there certainly are plenty), we needed something more sophisticated. When we ran into the same problem sizing up the mayoral election in deep-blue New York City last year, we tried to show that its politics were far more complex than just “solidly Democratic” by dividing the city into five “political boroughs” based on the results of recent Democratic primaries. It’s only fair, then, that we give L.A. the same treatment on the occasion of its own big municipal election. (Let no one accuse FiveThirtyEight of East Coast bias!)

We’ve carved up Los Angeles into six political regions based on the results¹⁴ of seven elections on the November 2020 ballot: the presidential race, the district attorney’s race and five high-profile local ballot measures.

Together, these elections encapsulate several modern political cleavages: 

• The contest between then-President Donald Trump and now-President Joe Biden gets at the traditional red-blue divide.
• The district attorney’s race shows support for a centrist Democrat (incumbent Jackie Lacey) versus a progressive criminal-justice reformer (George Gascón). 
• Proposition 22, which sought to guarantee modest benefits to gig workers (e.g., Uber and Lyft drivers) in exchange for classifying them as independent contractors (and thus ineligible for fuller benefits), reveals Angelenos’ feelings on business and labor. 
• Measure J, which sought to invest more money in communities of color to discourage incarceration, and Proposition 15, which would have effectively raised taxes on many commercial properties by taxing them at market value instead of purchase price, gauge how much residents want to redistribute wealth in their city. 
• Measure J and Proposition 16, which aimed to overturn the state’s ban on affirmative action, get at attitudes on racial justice.
• Proposition 21, which tried to expand rent control, helps us see where city residents stand on the hot-button issue of housing.

With the mayoral race playing out along many of these same lines, we hope our six “political neighborhoods” will be useful for interpreting the results as they come in on Tuesday night (and, because California votes by mail, in the days after). But even if you don’t care about who leads Los Angeles, these regions also highlight broader truths common to many American cities: People of color are strong Democrats but aren’t necessarily strong liberals; trendy white neighborhoods have some of the most progressive politics in the city; Latinos can’t be pegged to a single political identity; and even in dark-blue cities, you can still find support for conservative candidates and causes.

South Central

Our tour of L.A.’s political geography begins with the political neighborhood of South Central,¹⁵ which almost entirely overlaps with the real-life neighborhood of the same name situated between Downtown L.A. and the 105. This is the most deeply Democratic region of a deeply Democratic city: Biden carried South Central with 87 percent of the vote. And it is also very liberal on racial-justice issues. For instance, Measure J passed here with a well-above-average 71 percent of the vote, while affirmative action was very popular here as well.

None of these results is surprising when you consider that South Central residents are almost all people of color: 68 percent of the voting-age population here is Hispanic, while 22 percent are Black; by contrast, only 5 percent of the voting-age population in this political neighborhood is white.¹⁶ 

Although Black residents are not the majority in this region, predominantly Black areas do set the tone for some of its politics: Biden’s, Measure J’s and Proposition 16’s best showings in South Central came in majority-Black ballot groups like those in Hyde Park. Yet the neighborhood’s strong support for Proposition 15 was driven mostly by heavily Hispanic areas. While support for raising taxes on commercial properties reached as high as 70 percent in Hispanic ballot groups, it was closer to 60 percent in Black ones.

South Central may be strongly Democratic and liberal on certain issues, but it’s not necessarily a progressive stronghold. With high crime rates being a perennial problem in this neighborhood, a significant number of voters here supported Lacey and her more punitive approach to preventing crime. (She also grew up in the neighborhood.) South Central supported Gascón for district attorney with only 57 percent of the vote, below his citywide haul of 59 percent. And despite Proposition 22’s cap on gig workers’ benefits, residents of this working-class neighborhood may have been convinced by Uber and Lyft’s argument that jobs would be cut if the measure failed. Proposition 22 passed here 55 percent to 45 percent, making South Central its second-best neighborhood.

It will be interesting to see who wins out here in the mayor’s race. As a Black Democrat who represents part of the neighborhood in Congress, Bass seems a good fit on paper. But Caruso’s more populist tendencies — such as talking tough on crime — could appeal to South Central too.

True-Blue Progressives

Los Angeles’s True-Blue Progressives¹⁷ — our second political neighborhood — can be found mostly (but not exclusively) north of Downtown. That’s where you’ll find the hip neighborhoods of Silver Lake, Echo Park and Los Feliz, as well as Northeast Los Angeles, a predominantly Hispanic neighborhood with a suburban feel. But the True-Blue Progressives neighborhood also encompasses the chic corridors of Hollywood and Wilshire Boulevards and, several miles to the southwest, the traditional hippie haunt of Venice.

This is indisputably L.A.’s most progressive region. It was the strongest of our six neighborhoods for Gascón as well as for all the further-left positions on the local ballot measures. Most notably, it was the only neighborhood to break strongly with Big Tech on Proposition 22, voting against it 59 percent to 41 percent.

Taken as a whole, the True-Blue Progressives neighborhood is racially and ethnically mixed; Latinos are the biggest demographic group, but they make up only 38 percent of the area’s voting-age population. However, the white voting-age population is larger than the citywide average. Interestingly, there aren’t significant differences in how the plurality-Hispanic and plurality-white parts of this neighborhood vote; both are dyed-in-the-wool progressive.

In the mayoral race, it would be a big surprise if Bass didn’t crush Caruso here. But de León could post good numbers here too, considering that he represents parts of Northeast L.A. on the city council. He hasn’t fully embraced progressivism in his mayoral campaign, but he did run for U.S. Senate in 2018 as a more liberal alternative to Sen. Dianne Feinstein. Finally, if Gina Viola — the race’s only full-bore progressive candidate — were going to make a splash anywhere, it should be here. Unfortunately for her, though, she is polling at around 2 percent citywide.

Fair-Weather Progressives

The Fair-Weather Progressives neighborhood¹⁸ follows the path of the 10 across central Los Angeles, from predominantly white Culver City through heavily Black Crenshaw, significantly Asian American Koreatown, diverse Downtown and heavily Hispanic Eastside L.A.

With a demographic composition that’s similar to the city’s as a whole, the population of this area is diverse, and most of its voting population is liberal. It was Biden’s, Gascón’s, Measure J’s, Proposition 15’s and Proposition 21’s second-best political neighborhood. But where it differs from the True-Blue Progressives is its vote on Proposition 22: Fair-Weather Progressives voted to give gig workers the benefits of full employment by a tighter margin of 52 percent to 48 percent. On the spectrum of progressivism, then, this neighborhood falls somewhere between True-Blue Progressives and South Central.

Predominantly white ballot groups like those covering Sawtelle and ballot groups with significant Asian American populations like those in Koreatown were less supportive of Biden than the neighborhood’s Hispanic sectors. Those white ballot groups were also more skeptical of affirmative action and expanded rent control.

Expect the Fair-Weather Progressives to support Bass for mayor; her orientation as more-progressive-than-Caruso-but-not-capital-P-progressive seems to be a perfect fit for voters here. But de León will be counting on a strong showing here too, especially in Downtown and Eastside L.A., which are also largely in his city council district.

Tinseltown

When you think of the glitz and glamour of Los Angeles, you’re probably thinking about the next political neighborhood: Tinseltown.¹⁹ This neighborhood includes ballot groups in Hollywood Hills, Studio City and Beverly Crest as well as West Los Angeles and Century City. While two Angelenos will probably give you three different definitions of this area, it includes a solid piece of Hollywood. Tinseltown is largely white, trends wealthier than neighborhoods to its east and south and votes fairly liberal.

This neighborhood neither swung as hard for Biden as the more left-leaning neighborhoods nor swung as hard for Lacey as the more conservative neighborhoods. Gascón overperformed his citywide averages in Tinseltown by 3 percentage points, while Biden ran about average. And when it comes to the propositions, Tinseltown was fairly middle-of-the-pack. While Proposition 16 passed here with a slightly smaller margin compared with the citywide average, Propositions 15 and 21 basically matched the L.A. averages. The most significant differentiator was Proposition 22, which failed by the narrowest of margins (fewer than 5,000 votes out of almost 131,000 cast).

Though its 2020 voting pattern is pretty similar to the city’s overall, Tinseltown doesn’t particularly resemble L.A as a whole. Among all the political neighborhoods, this one has by far the largest share of the white voting-age population, at 63 percent, and it’s the only political neighborhood where every ballot group is at least a plurality white. It also has the smallest share of the Hispanic voting-age population, at just 13 percent. Six of the seven ballot groups where Proposition 16 garnered less support than the city average had a higher share of voting-age white residents than the neighborhood and the city overall. 

Hollywood stars and industry leaders have split on Caruso and Bass, with each candidate collecting endorsements from a number of big names, and given the liberal but not too liberal voters of Tinseltown, it seems as though this neighborhood could go either way.   

Inner Suburbs

The Inner Suburbs is a transitional neighborhood that covers much of the San Fernando Valley and some of the westernmost neighborhoods of L.A., which include Pacific Palisades and Brentwood.²⁰

This fairly expansive political neighborhood lies closer to the city’s denser urban center compared with the Outer Suburbs (our final political neighborhood, and the most conservative). Propositions 15, 16 and 21 all passed here, unlike in the Outer Suburbs, but by the smallest margins among the city’s political neighborhoods. With the Asian and Black voting-age populations together totaling less than 15 percent, it’s predominantly white and Hispanic. Five ballot groups are majority Hispanic, five are majority white and the remaining five are more diverse.

The Inner Suburbs’ support for more local rent control was driven primarily by five majority-Hispanic ballot groups. The five majority-white ballot groups, meanwhile, brought down the region’s support for raising nonresidential property taxes, voting 52 percent in favor versus the rest of the neighborhood’s 56 percent.

Caruso owns a home in this neighborhood, as do a handful of his celebrity endorsers, such as record executive and Taylor Swift archrival Scooter Braun. Still, the liberal-leaning tendencies of this group, particularly on issues related to housing and funding, indicate that Bass could find a foothold. 

Outer Suburbs

We’ll end on the closest thing Los Angeles has to a conservative political neighborhood,²¹ which comprises two distinct areas: a northern region that covers the western and eastern edges of the San Fernando Valley, plus the southern neighborhoods of San Pedro, Wilmington and Harbor City near the Port of Los Angeles. Biden garnered 64 percent of the vote here, by far his worst showing, while Lacey got 51 percent — the only political neighborhood in which she beat Gascón. This neighborhood was also the only one where Propositions 15, 16 and 21 all failed, as none surpassed 47 percent of the vote.

That this neighborhood is the most hesitant to commit to wealth redistribution and racial equity isn’t surprising when you consider its proximity to two of the historically conservative regions in the state: Orange County and northern L.A. County. The Outer Suburbs supported the reclassification of gig workers as contractors with a city-high 59 percent of the vote. Increasing funding for anti-incarceration programs squeaked by on the narrowest of margins, attracting 51 percent of the vote — 14 points lower than the city average.

The averages disguise some geographic divides. The San Fernando Valley itself is politically and demographically diverse, but as it nears the San Joaquin Valley to the north, wealthier communities like Woodland Hills and Chatsworth begin to tack right. And down south, the historically industrial Harbor communities and the “Shoestring Strip” are a little less conservative than their northern counterparts: Three of the four ballot groups voted in support of Measure J, compared with just four of the 12 comprising the political neighborhood’s northern reaches, and two voted in favor of Proposition 15.

While Bass has made efforts to reach out to this political neighborhood, it’s reasonable to think that, given its support for Lacey two years ago, Caruso’s tough-on-crime messaging will resonate here.

The partisan affiliation of the next mayor of L.A. seems clear, but the nature of his or her coalition is not. Los Angeles faces the same internal tensions as many other American cities: longstanding racial inequities, a population sensitive to rising crime and a housing crisis crushing residents, particularly those with lower incomes. Resolving those tensions will be more difficult than the city’s deep-blue hue might indicate. With relatively little agreement on what L.A. ought to do about these challenges, the next mayor will have to convince skeptical neighborhoods that his or her vision is the right one.

Additional research by Aaron Bycoffe. Copy editing by Andrew Mangan. Story editing by Chadwick Matlin.

CORRECTION (June 7, 2022, 2:57 p.m.): A previous version of this article suggested that the Outer Suburbs political neighborhood borders Orange County. In fact, part of Los Angeles County separates the Outer Suburbs from Orange County, so the Outer Suburbs are just close to Orange County.

Just How Far Apart Are The Two Parties On Gun Control?

By Ryan Best, Mary Radcliffe and Kaleigh Rogers

After what feels like a relentless sequence of high-profile mass shootings, Americans are once again debating whether the country needs stronger regulations on guns. Many lawmakers and activists contend that, even in a country as bitterly polarized as the United States, some gun-control measures actually attract wide support — whether Americans actually vote for the measures they say they support is another matter. However, when you compare specific questions by party response, there’s a gap.

Consider background checks. Morning Consult and Politico asked about this gun-control measure in March 2021. How do you think Republicans and Democrats responded?

What percentage of Republican and Democratic respondents do you think said they “strongly” or “somewhat” support requiring background checks for all gun purchasers?0%255075100

Source: Morning Consult/Politico, March 6-8, 2021, among 1,990 registered voters

Guess

That’s pretty close to consensus, but already we can see that even broadly popular measures like background checks aren’t as appealing to some Republican voters as they are to Democratic voters. Let’s take a look at some other measures. In April 2021, the Pew Research Center asked about barring people with mental-health issues from buying guns. How do you think Republicans and Democrats responded?

What percentage of Republican and Democratic respondents do you think said they “strongly” or “somewhat” favor preventing people with mental illnesses from purchasing guns?0%255075100

Source: Pew Research Center, April 5-11, 2021, among 5,109 adults

Guess

Again, we see a lot of agreement from both sides of the political spectrum. But this question was a little vague — what does it mean to prevent people from buying guns? And which mental illnesses should be included? An APM Research Lab survey on Extreme Risk Protection Orders tried to go deeper by asking about these so-called “red flag” laws. These laws would allow family members, the police or certain other officials to seek an ERPO, a court order to temporarily take guns away from someone who may harm themselves or others. When asked whether they supported family-initiated ERPOs, how do you think Republicans and Democrats responded?

What percentage of Republican and Democratic respondents do you think said they “strongly” or “somewhat” support allowing a family member to seek a court order to temporarily take away guns if they feel a gun owner may harm themselves or others?0%255075100

Source: APM Research Lab, July 16-21, 2019, among 1,009 U.S. adult residents

Guess

Once again, a majority of both Democrats and Republicans support this kind of measure, though the gap is wider. When asked whether they would support the police initiating such an action, support dropped among both groups, to 78 percent among Democrats and 66 percent among Republicans.

How about a law banning assault weapons, something that Congress passed in 1994 (but let expire 10 years later) and an option that President Biden recently promoted?

What percentage of Republican and Democratic respondents do you think said they “strongly” or “somewhat” favor banning assault-style weapons?0%255075100

Source: Pew Research Center, April 5-11, 2021, among 5,109 adults

Guess

While Democratic support remains high, Republican support drops dramatically, even though the previous ban enjoyed some bipartisan support when it passed.

Another proposal that has been floated by politicians is allowing teachers to carry weapons in school. How far apart do you think Republicans and Democrats are in supporting this measure?

What percentage of Republican and Democratic respondents do you think said they “strongly” or “somewhat” favor allowing teachers and school officials to carry guns in K-12 schools?0%255075100

Source: Pew Research Center, April 5-11, 2021, among 5,109 adults

Guess

While a majority of Republicans support this idea, it’s not nearly as popular with them as some other measures — and it’s clearly unpopular with Democrats.

But getting gun-control laws passed is not just about whether voters support certain measures but also about how passionate voters are that those measures will work. If a voter generally supports a new law but doesn’t think it will actually change much, they may not be as active in supporting it. A 2019 poll by ABC News/The Washington Post asked about this:

What percentage of Republican and Democratic respondents do you think said they were “very” or “somewhat” confident that passing stricter gun-control laws would reduce mass shootings in this country?0%255075100

Source: ABC News/The Washington Post, Sept. 2-5, 2019, among 1,003 adults

Guess

However, when asked about improving mental-health monitoring and treatment, Republicans were much more confident that this would reduce mass shootings, even slightly more so than Democrats: 78 percent of Republicans said they were “very” or “somewhat” confident that this would work, and 75 percent of Democrats agreed.

Some differences in thinking about gun control may have to do with whether people own guns themselves.

What percentage of Republican and Democratic respondents do you think said they, or anyone in their household, own a gun of any kind?0%255075100

Source: Morning Consult, Feb. 12-13, 2022, among 2,210 adults

Guess

Although most Americans don’t own a gun, a small share own a lot of them, which is why the U.S. has more guns than people.

While both Democrats and Republicans support some gun-control measures, broad support for extensive gun control is its own constitutional knot thanks to the Second Amendment. In April, YouGov/The Economist asked Americans which was more important: the right of people to own guns or protecting people from gun violence. (Respondents could also say if they thought both were equally important.)

What percentage of Republican and Democratic respondents do you think said they believe the right of people to own guns is more important than protecting people from gun violence?0%255075100

Source: YouGov/The Economist, April 16-19, 2022, 1,500 U.S. adult citizens

Guess

While a plurality of Republicans (49 percent) said both are equally important and a majority of Democrats (57 percent) said protecting people from violence is more important, the difference is striking. As the country debates how to end mass shootings like the ones that happen in the U.S. every day, this gap may be the most meaningful of all.

Edited by Chadwick Matlin and Jennifer Mason. Art direction by Emily Scherer.

2022 Election

We Asked 2,000 Americans About Their Biggest Concern

By Geoffrey Skelley and Holly Fuong and Geoffrey Skelley and Holly Fuong

May 17, 2022, at 6:00 AM

This article is part of our America's Issues series.

In 1935, Gallup first asked Americans what they thought was the most important problem facing the United States. In the midst of the Great Depression, about 3 in 5 Americans mentioned concerns related to the economy.

Fast forward nearly 90 years, and countless pollsters regularly ask Americans what’s top of mind for them. But on their own, answers to this question don’t really tell us that much. Issues like “the economy” or “political polarization” are often too broad to define. Moreover, two voters might both say something like “crime” is important to them, but for very different reasons. It’s why understanding how these issues factor into how Americans vote is so challenging.

But understanding how the most important issues facing the country factor into voters’ lives — including what they really know about the issues — is exactly what FiveThirtyEight aims to do. In partnership with Ipsos, FiveThirtyEight will conduct six polls between now and Election Day, interviewing the same group of around 2,000 Americans about the biggest issues facing the country. By interviewing the same people each month, using Ipsos’s KnowledgePanel, we’ll get a better sense of whether Americans’ concerns are changing and the extent to which those worries will influence the country’s political environment as we move closer to the 2022 midterm elections. We’ll do deep dives into what Americans name as their most pressing concerns and also conduct one FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll after the election to see where things stand after the country has voted.

At this point, the answer to what Americans are most worried about is pretty straightforward: inflation. In the first FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll,²² 52 percent of Americans said the most important issue facing the country was inflation. We asked Americans this question in a variety of ways,²³ but regardless of how we asked it, the top answer was always the same: inflation.

It’s true that a larger percentage of Republicans than Democrats or independents in our poll said they were concerned about inflation. But inflation still led the way regardless of party identification: About two-thirds of Republicans selected it as a top issue, as did about half of all independents and slightly more than 40 percent of Democrats. Inflation was the top issue for respondents of all age groups and for both men and women, too. Now, some Americans did find other issues more important, though. For instance, 43 percent of Black Americans listed “race and racism” as a top concern, while 37 percent named inflation.

But inflation in particular is casting a pall over the lives of Americans of all stripes. “At the end of the month, it’s harder to buy food and pay bills and keep the kids with clothes and sneakers on them,” a Hispanic 48-year old Democratic woman from New York told us. “No matter how much they raise wages, costs exceed them,” said a white 60-year old Republican woman from Pennsylvania. And as a 36-year old man of color from Arizona who identified as independent put it: “It is impacting my spending power and the future wealth of myself and generations that come after me, including my own children.” Moreover, with prices continuing to rise — inflation was 8.3 percent in April — these concerns aren’t likely to go away anytime soon.

And most Americans don’t feel like things have improved for them financially, either. Overall, 32 percent said their personal financial circumstances had worsened over the past year, 52 percent said things were about the same, and just 12 percent said they were doing better. Tellingly, 41 percent said they had made a major change to how they live, including a majority (56 percent) of households making less than $50,000 per year. 

Many in our survey said they were driving less, taking fewer vacations or just being more cost-conscious at the grocery store. Put more simply, many Americans are watching what they spend. “I just noticed that I'm really checking my bill a lot more. I actually maintain a spreadsheet just to track how my costs have gone up,” said James Bassett, a 48-year old white man from South Carolina. “It's definitely made me a lot more mindful and taken a little bit more time to process what I need and what I don't need.”

For the most part, though, Americans have a decent understanding of what inflation and the broader economic situation looks like in the U.S. For instance, a plurality of Americans knew that unemployment is currently at its lowest level since the start of the pandemic. Similarly, slightly more Americans knew that wages were increasing faster over the last year than they had at any point over the previous two decades — even though a plurality said they didn’t know. That said, there were a couple points where a majority of Americans were wrong. Most notably, 51 percent said that inflation was higher now than at any time since World War II, even though inflation was actually higher at some points in the 1970s and early 1980s.

Both younger and older Americans, including those who lived through the high inflation periods of the 1970s and ’80s, were likely to say that inflation was higher now. Some recency bias is probably at play here, but older Americans may also feel a greater pinch from inflation today than they did in earlier decades because they are more likely now to live on a fixed income from a pension or social security. “Once you fall behind, there's no catching up until they give you an increase the following year,” said Jarvis White, a 65-year old Black man from Florida. In his view, the situation in the 1970s and ’80s, even during the 1970s oil embargo, “pales in comparison” to today’s circumstances.

Similarly, a plurality of respondents said U.S. gas prices rank among the highest in the world — they don’t. But it’s easy to understand why many Americans think they do. For starters, compared to food, clothing or electricity, gas prices have seen the largest percentage increase over the past year, which a majority of respondents answered correctly in a separate question in our poll. Moreover, a lot of Americans drive and have to visit the pump often, especially compared to other countries, so it’s no wonder many thought gas prices were relatively high by global standards. “I work in sales, so I drive a lot. Gas is killing me right now,” said Jeni Johnson, a 53-year old white woman from Michigan.

There were some differences in how Americans answered these questions based on party. For instance, a much smaller share of Democrats than Republicans (48 percent vs. 86 percent) correctly said inflation wasn’t higher when Donald Trump was president, and a smaller share of Republicans than Democrats (40 percent vs. 57 percent) correctly said that unemployment is at its lowest point since the start of the pandemic, which reflects how partisanship can color economic views. But broadly speaking, Americans were on the same page, including in some cases for what they thought was responsible for driving inflation. A sizable majority of Democrats, Republicans and independents said that supply chain breakdowns, the COVID-19 pandemic and foreign conflicts had all had a “major” or “significant” impact. From there, though, there was much less agreement, as the chart below shows.

Most divides fell along somewhat predictable political lines. For instance, Democrats were more likely to blame businesses, with 70 percent saying that businesses trying to make more profits had made a major or significant impact on price increases and 60 percent saying the same of a lack of competition among businesses, compared with only 45 percent and 39 percent of Republicans, respectively. Conversely, Republicans were more likely to blame government COVID-19 spending programs, with two-thirds saying that it was a major or significant reason for inflation, while only 37 percent of Democrats said the same. Of course, neither side is fully correct in its assessment of what’s causing inflation, but it does underscore once again how partisanship can influence how Americans interpret economic conditions.

Regardless of partisan differences, though, half of the respondents in the FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll named inflation as a top concern — both for them personally and for the country. And there’s good reason to think that this issue could be a major boon to Republicans’ hopes of taking control of the House and Senate. That’s because independents, about half of whom named inflation as a major worry, aren’t happy with the status quo — only 30 percent had a favorable view of Biden in the poll, compared with 55 percent who had an unfavorable opinion of the president. Independents are less likely to vote than Republicans or Democrats, and our survey suggests that about half of all likely voters who are independent haven’t yet decided which major party they’ll support or have decided they will not support either in November. Yet given Biden’s poor numbers among independents and that inflation looks like a long-term problem, Republicans appear to have an easy way to appeal to dissatisfied, less partisan voters who will be more open to a message of change come November.

In other words, inflation could very well be the issue that tips the scales this year sharply to the Republicans’ advantage.

Additional reporting by Santul Nerkar and Jean Yi. Art direction by Emily Scherer. Copy editing by Santul Nerkar. Graphics by Ryan Best. Story editing by Sarah Frostenson.

Critical Race Theory

How Anti-Critical Race Theory Bills Are Taking Aim At Teachers

By Theodore R. Johnson, Emelia Gold and Ashley Zhao, Theodore R. Johnson, Emelia Gold and Ashley Zhao and Theodore R. Johnson, Emelia Gold and Ashley Zhao

Graphics by Ryan Best

May 9, 2022, at 6:00 AM

This spring, a high school English teacher in Missouri lost her job following parents’ complaints that one of her assignments taught critical race theory.

The teacher had assigned a worksheet titled “How Racially Privileged Are You?” as prep material for reading the school-approved book “Dear Martin,” a novel about a Black high school student who is physically assaulted by a white police officer. But despite the teacher’s insistence that she wasn’t teaching her students critical race theory, an academic legal framework that asserts that racism is systemic and embedded in many American institutions, the local school board disagreed and determined that the material was objectionable.

The Missouri incident wasn’t an anomaly. In Tennessee, a teacher was reprimanded — and later fired — after telling his class that white privilege is a “fact” and assigning a Ta-Nehisi Coates essay that argued that white racial resentment was responsible for the rise of former President Donald Trump. Meanwhile in Texas, a principal was suspended after parents accused him of promoting critical race theory based on a letter he had written more than a year earlier, calling for the community to come together and defeat systemic racism in the days following the murder of George Floyd. His contract was subsequently not renewed.

In none of these schools was critical race theory actually being taught, but that is largely beside the point. Rather, these fights make up the latest chapter in the GOP-initiated culture war and are more broadly about how teachers should — and shouldn’t — talk about race and racism in America.

Since January 2021, Republican state legislators have introduced nearly 200 anti-critical race theory bills in 40 states, according to data compiled by the nonprofit organization PEN America.²⁴ According to our analysis of the 11 states that have already signed bills targeting K-12 schools into law,²⁵ and the 84 such bills that are still pending in state legislatures, few of these bills actually target the teaching of critical race theory. Instead, these bills are largely messaging bills that draw on talking points from the Trump administration. That said, many still seek to impose severe penalties for those found to be in violation. Even if the primary purpose of these laws seems to be to inflame the Republican base and win elections, these bills have created a chilling atmosphere for teachers who may decide to avoid discussing race, identity and contemporary issues in the classroom altogether, rather than risk their jobs.

First, despite governors and legislators often describing these measures as bans of critical race theory in schools, just 17 of the 84 pending bills and two of the 11 state laws (Idaho and North Dakota) make any explicit mention of “critical race theory.” Mississippi’s law mentions critical race theory in its title but nowhere in the text. 

Moreover, in the pieces of legislation that do mention critical race theory, few specify what is meant by it and the ones that do are often inaccurate. A pending New Jersey bill states that critical race theory includes ideas like one race is “inherently superior” to another and that the United States is “irredeemably racist” — neither of which are actually tenets of critical race theory. A bill introduced in South Carolina says that critical race theory includes the belief that the advent of slavery “constituted the true founding of the United States,” which is not a precept of critical race theory but rather a swipe at The New York Times’s 1619 Project. Incidentally, 12 of the 84 pending bills, plus Texas’s law, specifically forbid teaching or using the 1619 Project in a course.

In fact, in examining the language of these pieces of legislation, we found that more than two-thirds of the pending bills and every single one of the state laws (except for North Dakota’s) contained text essentially identical to an executive order Trump issued in September 2020, entitled “Combating Race and Sex Stereotyping.” That executive order didn’t actually mention critical race theory by name, but it has still served as a blueprint for Republican lawmakers trying to ban critical race theory in schools. Indeed, there has been a concerted effort to get Republican legislatures across the country to adopt language from Trump’s executive order in the bills they put forward, as evinced in circulated documents like “Model School Board Language to Prohibit Critical Race Theory,” which was produced by a conservative advocacy group founded by Trump’s former director of the Office of Management and Budget.

In other words, these bills aren’t concerned with critical race theory as much as they are focused on enshrining Trump’s agenda in law. They’re what political scientists call message bills, or “hopeless legislation constructed not to change public policy but instead to signal desirable attributes of incumbents to constituents.” But as the teacher and principal firings cited earlier suggest, these bills can still result in real harm to teachers and students alike.

Of the 84 proposed bills we looked at, we found that 47 outlined punishments for those found to be in violation of the legislation. The most common punishment, found in 27 of the pending bills as well as two of the state laws, is financial — often involving fines or funding cuts for the school or district, generally imposed by a school board or governing state agency. Two other common punishments, include legal action brought by parents, students or the state’s attorney general against a teacher or school district found to be in violation (11 bills) and the termination of a teacher accused of promoting critical race theory (12 bills).

An additional 15 bills imposed other forms of disciplinary action, such as verbal or written reprimands, revocation of certifications and school accreditations, suspension without pay or corrective action plans for school curricula.

We found that it’s often school principals and local superintendents who must enforce these laws. That means these administrators must determine whether a teacher’s history lesson was sufficiently objective or whether the teacher was responsible when a student reports feeling guilt or discomfort. Some of the punishments are very severe, too. A pending Virginia state law, for instance, states that anyone determined to have violated its anti-critical race theory law is guilty of a misdemeanor crime and faces termination or revocation of their teaching license. Meanwhile in Kentucky, one introduced bill would’ve allowed any person aggrieved by the violation of the law to seek damages of up to $100,000.

Some bills also impose a penalty if teachers don’t teach something. For example, a pending Illinois bill mandates that students be taught that socialism and similar political systems would lead to the overthrow of the United States, and it would punish any school board found to be in violation with fines of up to $5,000 per student. In Missouri, meanwhile, one proposal mandates that teachers explore the “contending perspectives” of contemporary controversial issues, meaning both sides of the racist replacement theory currently being pushed by some far-right commentators must be presented while the 1619 Project would be effectively banned from the classroom by other bills currently pending in the state legislature.

These bills often don’t give accused teachers an opportunity to defend themselves against the charges, either. For instance, the Missouri teacher who was fired for assigning the racial privilege worksheet was let go by the school board in a closed-door session that she was not permitted to attend. Upon being notified of the board’s decision, she said, “If this is how they terminate teachers — without asking questions, without speaking to the teacher — then no one is secure.”

Though only 11 of the nearly 200 anti-critical race theory bills introduced in the last year and a half have been signed into law, the very presence of these bills, including their often ambiguous language, have created a chilling atmosphere for teachers who may decide to avoid discussing race, identity and contemporary issues in the classroom altogether, rather than risk losing their jobs.

Take Jen Given, a 10th grade history teacher in New Hampshire. She used to teach her students about racial economic disparities via lessons on Jim Crow laws, redlining and other topics. However, following the passage of a bill that included anti-critical race theory provisions in June of last year, she stopped including those subjects in her curriculum. “The law is really, really vague,” she told The Washington Post this year, continuing, “We asked for clarification from the state, from the union, from school lawyers. The universal response is no one’s really sure.”

The ultimate effect of these laws appears to create uncertainty for teachers and administrators, while deputizing parents and students to shape school curricula and influence how — or in some cases, if — teachers discuss difficult aspects of our history and contemporary society.

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Design and development by Ryan Best, Jay Boice and Jasmine Mithani. Edited by Christopher Groskopf, Jennifer Mason and Sara Ziegler. Statistical model by Ryan Best and Jay Boice. Illustration by Elias Stein.

Abortion

States Aren’t Waiting For The Supreme Court To Rule On Abortion

By Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux

Graphics by Ryan Best

May 3, 2022, at 12:46 PM

On Monday night, Politico published a draft opinion from the Supreme Court that indicates a five-justice conservative majority plans to strike down Roe v. Wade and eliminate the constitutional right to abortion. It is not a final ruling, and it can change, but if it does not, the ruling would dramatically restrict abortion access across the country.

But even before the leaked draft, state legislators weren’t waiting for the justices’ final word. For several months, lawmakers from each party have been acting as though the constitutional right to abortion is already gone. 

According to the Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit research group that supports abortion rights, 536 abortion restrictions were introduced in 42 states between Jan. 1 and April 14 this year. Most haven’t become law, but some did make it through the legislative gauntlet: Nine states have enacted nearly three-dozen abortion restrictions, including a near-total ban on abortion in Oklahoma, a ban on abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy in Idaho (Oklahoma passed one of those too) and bans on abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy in Arizona, Kentucky, and Florida.²⁶

Blue states haven’t been idle, either. According to Guttmacher, seven states have enacted about a dozen abortion protections so far this year, with the goal of ensuring that abortions will remain accessible there, even if this summer the Supreme Court allows states to ban abortion.

But a map alone can’t show the reach of some of these laws. States are racing to preempt and undermine each other’s legislation, resulting in a cascade of unorthodox proposals. Increasingly, in recent times, abortion laws in various states actively conflict with each other, foreshadowing the giant legal mess that will ensue if Roe is overturned. All of this means that if the Supreme Court’s conservative justices are hoping to wash their hands of abortion decisions by overruling Roe, they’re in for disappointment. Overturning Roe will unleash a new set of complicated legal battles that will bring the issue of abortion straight back to the high court.

Anti-abortion advocates are now grappling with the reality that outlawing abortion won’t entirely end abortion. Faced with the growing popularity of abortion pills, lawmakers in red states have passed a wave of new restrictions on sending medication abortion through the mail as well as some outright bans on abortion pills. “I see these restrictions as trying to intimidate people away from using the internet for access to abortion care,” said Elizabeth Nash, the interim associate director of state issues at Guttmacher.

Abortions performed in clinics remain a battleground, too. After Texas implemented a ban on abortion after about six weeks of pregnancy last September, an analysis found that the total number of abortions among Texas residents declined by only about 10 percent, because so many people were leaving the state to get an abortion or ordering abortion pills online to use on their own. Some blue states are trying to keep things that way. This year, California and several other states are considering using state funds to subsidize abortion costs for low-income people, including even those who live in other states. Other states, including Maryland, are taking steps to make it possible for a wider range of health care providers to perform abortions, which will make it easier and cheaper to offer. The Oregon legislature approved $15 million in funding to help abortion providers scale up their facilities. 

All of this has turned into a complicated dance in which legislators on both sides of the aisle aren’t just trying to make it easier or harder to get an abortion in their state — they’re also trying to insulate their residents from what other states are doing. In Missouri, where anti-abortion legislators have already made it very difficult to get an abortion, many pregnant people are already leaving the state to get abortions — a journey that was made much easier when Planned Parenthood opened a massive clinic just across the state line, in Illinois. So Missouri state Rep. Mary Elizabeth Coleman, a prominent anti-abortion legislator, proposed a law that would allow private citizens to sue out-of-state abortion providers who perform the procedure on Missouri residents, as well as anyone who aids a Missouri resident in getting an abortion. Another law introduced in Missouri applies the state’s abortion laws to abortions performed on Missouri residents in different states.

Neither of these Missouri laws has moved much in the legislature. But if Roe is overturned, other anti-abortion legislators in other states will likely consider similar measures. “You can imagine doctors or administrators or other health care providers thinking, ‘Can I care for this patient from Missouri, or am I at risk of being sued in a Missouri court?’” said David S. Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University. “That would have a chilling effect.”

But in blue states, abortion-rights supporters are already thinking about their next move. The Connecticut legislature recently passed a law that would shield abortion providers who perform abortions on people who live in other states from being sued or prosecuted in states where abortion is illegal, and the governor has promised to sign it. California is considering a similar measure, and New York legislators also introduced several bills to protect abortion providers from extradition.

These laws could take the fight over abortion into head-spinningly complicated new territory. Since abortion was declared a constitutional right in 1973, the legal sparring over the procedure has never been simple — pretty much every aspect of the procedure has been litigated. But because it’s a federal constitutional right, there’s never been a question of whether a California abortion provider could be hauled into a Texas court to answer for a procedure they performed in California. In a post-Roe world, providers and people who help women get abortions will face a whole new set of risks. States like California could theoretically protect their providers from lawsuits and prosecution by instructing its own state courts to ignore a summons from a state like Texas. But unless other states were to do something similar, a state-versus-state situation like this would mean the provider couldn’t easily leave California — and they certainly couldn’t travel to the state where they were being sued.

This flurry of legislation is a tiny glimpse into the Pandora’s box that the Supreme Court will open if the justices do overturn Roe. It’s already clear that individual states will not be content to simply create their own abortion laws and apply them within their borders, and state laws that enable citizens to sue residents in other states over the procedure would create new and complicated legal battles that the Supreme Court will likely have to resolve. Anti-abortion advocates want to end the procedure across the country, and abortion-rights advocates want to stop them — which means that things could soon get even more chaotic.