Heading inland, Las Vegas is also choosing a new mayor this year. Like San Francisco, the Las Vegas mayoral election is happening at the same time as a presidential race for the first time, following 2019 legislation that moved the elections from odd- to even-numbered years. Whoever wins, it will be the first time in 25 years that the office hasn't been held by a member of the Goodman family. Oscar and Carolyn Goodman, a husband-and-wife pair of Democrats-turned-independents, have traded the mayor's office since 1999.

The race is officially nonpartisan, though the candidates have opposing partisan backgrounds: Victoria Seaman, a city councilmember, previously served as a Republican in the state House, while former Democratic U.S. Rep. Shelley Berkley, is betting on the city's heavily-Democratic voters to carry her to victory. Berkley won more votes in the June primary, in which a third major candidate drew nearly 20% of the votes, but we haven't seen any public polling of the race since then. Berkley has positioned herself as a continuation of the Goodman regime, while Seaman has been more critical: Her campaign website cites a need to move on from the "failed policies of the past" without mentioning the Goodmans by name.

One of the biggest issues in the race has been how to deal with a lawsuit involving a defunct golf course in one of the city's wealthiest neighborhoods. A developer bought the golf course in 2015 intending to turn it into a housing development, but was blocked from doing so by the city. The developer sued, and the case has since been embroiled in a years-long legal battle that could end up costing city taxpayers over half a billion dollars. Both candidates say they want to settle the lawsuit, but disagree on how to do so.

As I wrote last week, voters in 10 states will decide on abortion-related measures, the biggest push for restoring reproductive rights at the ballot box since Roe v. Wade was overturned in the summer of 2022. Abortion has been a winning issue for Democrats in the past two years, and there's some evidence that many voters, especially women and Democrats, are even more motivated to show support for Harris because of the issue than they were for Biden.

Most of the state initiatives on the ballot today would restore the protections for abortion access that were in place under Roe, but some abortion-rights advocates think that they should go further. (Nebraska has two measures on the ballot, one of which would ban abortions after the first trimester.) Before it was overturned, Roe protected the right to abortion until the point of fetal viability, but many women still struggled to access abortion care under its constitutional protections, especially for later pregnancies. And while Americans have traditionally been in favor of some restrictions on abortion later in a pregnancy, there's some evidence in recent polling that Americans are increasingly suspicious of government involvement in abortion at any stage of pregnancy. For example, a June 2023 survey from the nonpartisan research firm PerryUndem found that registered voters may even be more likely to support a ballot initiative without viability limits than the same measure with viability limits, due to stronger support among those in favor of protecting abortion rights.

Another survey from September by PerryUndem and the National Institute of Reproductive Health — a group advocating for legal protections for abortion, including those beyond the Roe framework — found that 66% of Americans thought the decision of whether or not someone can have an abortion in the last three months of pregnancy should be "left to the person and their doctor," compared to 75% who answered the same way when asked the same question without a specific timeline. That means that support for abortion rights later in pregnancy might not be radically different from support for it earlier in pregnancy — perhaps in part because Americans have seen the consequences of state-level bans.

Whatever happens to these state initiatives, abortion rights advocates are likely to keep pushing forward with more expansive protections. Meanwhile, even though the issue contributed to a worse-than-expected midterm election for Republicans two years ago, the party continues to nominate anti-abortion candidates, especially in very red districts and states. If voters pass ballot initiatives protecting the right to abortion in their states while also electing candidates who would support passing a federal abortion ban, the battle over abortion rights could stretch into elections to come.

— Monica Potts

Republicans see immigration as a winning issue, and Trump has regularly attacked Biden and Harris for their immigration policies. Trump has promised to deport millions of undocumented immigrants, a proposal that 54% of Americans support according to an Ipsos/Scripps News poll from September. On the other hand, Americans question Trump's mental fitness for office, with 46% of registered voters saying he is mentally sharp enough to be president according to a September survey by Iposos/Reuters. Take our quiz to see what else Americans think of Trump and his platform.

We’ve talked a lot about how polling error is a fact of life in elections, but polling bias also tends to happen. Now, when we say bias, we don’t mean intentional efforts to put out polls that favor the preferred party of the pollster and/or sponsoring organization. Instead, polling bias indicates to what extent pollsters as a whole over- or under-estimated one party’s actual performance in the election.

For instance, we know that pollsters underestimated Trump’s position in the 2020 presidential election, to the tune of an average bias of about 4 points more Democratic than the real result. In 2016, the bias was similarly around D+3. So we’ve had two straight presidential cycles in which the polls have exaggerated the Democrats’ standing in the polls, which naturally makes people suspicious that we could once again see pollsters undershoot Trump’s actual vote share in 2024.

However, one only has to look a little farther back to see that polling bias does not consistently favor one party or the other. In 2012, pollsters undershot Barack Obama’s result in the presidential race by an average of about 2.5 points. And all told, the average bias in presidential elections dating back to 2000 is about a point more Democratic than the actual outcome. The broader point is, it’s nigh impossible to predict which direction polling bias will go ahead of the election. Pollsters are constantly working to try to overcome the challenges facing their industry, so expecting the past to be prologue when it comes to error and/or bias is a fool’s game.