The 2018 cycle was a watershed year for Democratic women, who outperformed Democratic men in their primaries. And in November of that cycle, female candidates put a nail in the "women aren't electable" coffin when they were responsible for more than 60% of the congressional seats that flipped from red to blue.

In congressional races today, a number of Democratic women are challenging incumbent Republicans in seats our forecast rates as competitive, and Democrats are hoping for a similar outcome as 2018. This includes Sue Altman in New Jersey's 7th District, who is challenging Rep. Thomas Kean Jr., and Janelle Bynum in Oregon's 5th District, who is challenging Rep. Lori Chavez-DeRemer, one of just 34 Republican women currently in the House. (If Bynum wins, she will be the first Black person to represent Oregon in Congress.) In Arizona's 6th District, Kirsten Engel is challenging Rep. Juan Ciscomani.

GOP women also have a recent track record of flipping seats: In 2020, Republicans recruited women to run against vulnerable Democrats, in a strategy to flip highly competitive House districts, and many of them did defeat Democratic incumbents. There are a couple of Republican women challenging incumbents in races that our forecast suggests could be close, like Laurie Buckhout in North Carolina's 1st District, who is challenging Rep. Donald Davis, and Yvette Herrell in New Mexico's 2nd District, who is challenging Rep. Gabriel Vasquez. Buckhout and Herrell are both running in races our forecast rates "Likely Democrat," but they are still competitive.

If these Democratic and Republican women win, it could certainly add to the number of women in Congress. However, plenty of incumbent women who represent purple districts are facing challenges of their own, like Democratic Reps. Emilia Sykes in Ohio's 13th District, Marie Gluesenkamp-Perez in Washington's 3rd, Susan Wild in Pennsylvania's 7th, and Yadira Caraveo in Colorado's 8th. Republican women at risk of losing their seats include Michelle Steel in California's 45th and Chavez-DeRemer.

At stake is not just these seats, but gender diversity in Congress, which remains low. After the 2022 election, women made up just 29% of the House and 25% of the Senate. But the partisan gap is especially stark: Democratic women make up 41% and Republican women make up just 16% of their respective parties' members of Congress.

I'll be watching these races today, to get a sense of whether either party will add more women to their caucus, and if the progress women have made over the last several cycles (especially since 2018) will finally stall.

I wish I could tell you something more helpful than "it's close," folks, but according to 538's final presidential election polling averages, that really is the most responsible conclusion.

According to 538's average of national polls, Vice President Kamala Harris currently has a 1.2 percentage point lead over former President Donald Trump in the national popular vote. Harris, at 48.0% of the vote in our average, is polling about 0.6 percentage points below her peak on Oct. 1 this year. Trump, meanwhile, posted his highest vote share of the campaign today, at 46.8%. That is the same exact % of the vote he won in 2020, to the first decimal point.

The picture is not much different at the state level. According to our final polling averages, the margin between Trump and Harris is 2.1 percentage points or fewer in all seven swing states. Trump currently leads by 2.1 points in Arizona, 0.9 points in North Carolina, 0.8 points in Georgia and 0.3 points in Nevada. Harris is up by 1.0 point in Wisconsin and in Michigan. And in Pennsylvania (the state that's most likely to decide the outcome of the election), Harris has a tiny 0.2-point edge.

Of course, it is worth stressing that the polls will not be exactly correct. In fact, they very likely will not be. Polls overestimated Democrats by more than 2 points in both 2016 and 2020, for example, and underestimated Republicans by 2 points in a handful of key Senate races in 2022. Errors that large could cause the entire Electoral College picture to flip. And in fact, the bias in polls was nearly twice as high — 4 points — in the 2020 race. Our election model thinks the expected bias in polls this year is 3.8 percentage points on average, and could be more or less, favoring either party equally. When we did the math we found that polling error can be expected to be larger than 2 points toward either candidate about 60% of the time.

One of the trends we are going to be watching after Election Day is how educational polarization might have intensified among the American electorate. The Republican Party currently holds a six-point lead over the Democratic Party in voter preference among registered voters without a college degree, while the Democrats have a 13-point advantage among those with at least a bachelor's degree, according to Pew Research. This is a marked reversal from dominant voting patterns not even 20 years ago, when Republicans were predominantly viewed as the party of the wealthy and Democrats the party of the working class.

This divide has fundamentally reshaped our politics in recent years. Think of the Republican Party's embrace of anti-expert views on topics like vaccination or climate change or the wider conflict over teaching about race and gender in schools. These culture war issues — which also stem from a growing diploma divide, where higher educational attainment is increasingly aligned with liberal political values — have changed what issues our political parties prioritize, how they operate and which voters they try to win.

Recently, the 538 Politics podcast interviewed Matt Grossman and David Hopkins, political scientists and authors of "Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics." To hear their takes on this trend, check out the podcast here.

For decades, Wisconsin was a key brick in Democrats' "blue wall": It voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in every election from 1992 to 2012. But in 2016, that streak snapped: Trump won Wisconsin by 0.8 percentage points, helping propel him to the presidency.

Democrats flipped Wisconsin back in 2020, but Biden won it by only 0.6 points. And polls suggest 2024 could be the third consecutive presidential election in which Wisconsin is decided by less than 1 point. According to 538's final polling average of the state, Harris leads Trump by just 1.0 points.

If you dig into the crosstabs of those polls, it looks like Wisconsin is experiencing the same demographic trends as the rest of the country: White voters are getting more Democratic, while voters of color are getting more Republican. According to an average of crosstabs of Wisconsin polls conducted Sept. 18-Oct. 18, white Wisconsinites were supporting Trump by 1 point. But according to exit polls, they supported Trump in the 2020 election by 6 points. By contrast, according to crosstabs of Black and Hispanic Wisconsinites, those two groups had shifted toward Trump by more than 20 points each!

But there are two big caveats to this. The first is that Wisconsin's nonwhite population is pretty small. The state's citizen voting-age population is 86% white, 5% Black and 4% Hispanic. This makes it the whitest of the seven main swing states — meaning that any racial voting shifts in the 2024 election will have a muted impact here.

The second caveat is that, with such small Black and Hispanic populations, it's hard for pollsters to get a big enough sample of these voters in Wisconsin. That makes their Black and Hispanic crosstabs subject to a high amount of error.

More important in Wisconsin is the education gap. About one-third of Wisconsinites over age 25 have at least a bachelor's degree, while the remaining two-thirds do not. In 2020, Trump won non-college-educated voters in Wisconsin by 6 points, but Biden won college-educated Wisconsinites by 16 points.