A Return to Normalcy? The 2020 Election That (Almost) Broke America — the University of Virginia Center for Politics’ new look at the 2020 presidential election and its consequences — is now available through UVA Bookstores, Indiebound, and other online booksellers.

Edited by Crystal Ball editors Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik, and J. Miles Coleman, A Return to Normalcy? brings together what Booklist calls a “stellar coterie of reporters, pundits, and scholars” to “parse the 2020 election via a data-driven set of analytics displayed in useful charts and graphs, drawing conclusions that will satisfy hard-core political junkies and provide a solid foundation for everyone looking ahead to 2022 and 2024.”

Tonight (Thursday, April 8) at 6:30 p.m. eastern, four of the book contributors will participate in a free virtual forum: “Taking Stock: The Societal Impact of the 2020 Election.” Business Insider‘s Grace Panetta will moderate. She wrote a chapter on the massive expansion of early and mail-in voting necessitated by the pandemic. In it, she notes how President Trump’s criticism of mail-in voting “represented a stark reversal for the GOP because it upended decades of Republican get-out-the-vote strategy — in the process baffling and upsetting numerous Republican candidates and operatives. In states including Arizona, Georgia, Florida, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, laws establishing no-excuse mail voting had in fact been enacted by Republican-controlled state legislatures—and in some cases signed into law by Republican governors.”

Crystal Ball Senior Columnist Alan I. Abramowitz, the Washington Post‘s David Byler, and National Journal‘s Madelaine Pisani will participate as panelists.

Abramowitz’s wrote on the polarized state of the nation — “The Politics of Good versus Evil.” This polarization manifested in views of former President Trump: “In its final poll prior to the 2020 election, Gallup found that 94 percent of Republicans approved of the president’s performance compared with only 4 percent of Democrats—a remarkable 90-point difference. This was the largest difference in approval between Democrats and Republicans in the long history of the Gallup poll.”

Byler assessed Joe Biden’s path to the Democratic presidential nomination and pondered whether his nomination was inevitable or accidental. He recounts the momentous series of events in which Biden went from primary favorite to seemingly dead in the water to effectively the presumptive nominee, all in the course of several weeks in early 2020. Byler argues that a few tweaks to how the primary season unfolded “would have made this race much closer, and a few more might have changed the outcome entirely.”

And Pisani analyzed the battle for the Senate, which the twin runoffs in Georgia altered from bitter disappointment to stunning triumph for Democrats. As Pisani writes, Democrats took a path to a Senate majority that few anticipated at the start of the cycle as Republicans successfully defended many of their most vulnerable seats but were undone by the Georgia runoffs. The end result was a Senate in which a historically small number of states had bipartisan Senate delegations: “After 2018, only 10 states had split Senate delegations, which was down from 14 split delegations in the previous cycle. With Democratic losses in Alabama and Republican losses in Arizona and Colorado, that number dropped to seven split delegations after 2020 — the fifth election cycle in a row during which the number of split delegations has declined. It’s also the lowest number of split party delegations in the history of direct Senate elections.”

This virtual event will begin at 6:30 p.m. eastern. Registration is free and can be found at this link, or just tune in at this direct link. If you can’t watch live, we’ll post the video at our YouTube channel, UVACFP, following the event.

This is the second of three forums we are hosting around the release of A Return to Normalcy? The first, featuring Crystal Ball Managing Editor Kyle Kondik; the Brennan Center for Justice’s Theodore Johnson; Georgetown University’s Diana Owen; and RealClearPolitics’ Sean Trende, is available here.

The third forum — “The Changing Face of America: Voters of Color in the 2020 Election” — will be next Thursday, April 15, at 6:30 p.m. The Brennan Center’s Johnson will moderate, and panelists are Andra Gillespie, Associate Professor of Political Science and Director of the James Weldon Johnson Institute at Emory University; Mark Hugo Lopez, Director of global migration and demography research at the Pew Research Center; and Natalie Masuoka, Associate Professor of Political Science and Asian American Studies at UCLA. That virtual event is also free; you can sign up here.

Ipsos, the global research firm, in conjunction with the University of Virginia Center for Politics, has unveiled its Political Atlas for the 2020 presidential election. With just weeks to go until Election Day, this tool will offer countless journalists, commentators, political operatives, fundraisers, and others invaluable insights into the state of the American electorate.

“It’s more important than ever to provide as much context as possible to political polling numbers,” said Clifford Young, President of U.S. Public Affairs at Ipsos. “On-the-ground analysis of what issues are being discussed on the internet and in the media, what people are seeing on their social media feeds, how many new cases of COVID-19 there are in a given state, how bad unemployment has gotten—these factors all matter a great deal, and we ensured they were a major feature in our platform.”

The Ipsos/UVA Center for Politics Political Atlas compiles valuable information on how former Vice President Joe Biden and President Donald Trump are performing on a state-by-state, and even county-by-county, level, combining up-to-date polling with analysis from UVA Center for Politics Director Larry J. Sabato’s industry-leading Crystal Ball tool. From there, it goes deeper, allowing users to see fundraising totals, voting methods and Facebook ad spends, social media sentiment, and even the frequency of discussions on key, top-of-mind issues, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, racial justice, and public trust in government.

“Election polling coverage can be misleading—it makes for a great headline to say Biden is up by ten points nationally, but over the last few years most elections have come down to a few key states,” said Larry Sabato, director of the University of Virginia Center for Politics. “Understanding those states—what issues matter to them, what’s being discussed in their local papers and nightly news, and how much the candidates are spending there—could not be more important for this election.”

The 2020 Political Atlas can be accessed for free at political-atlas.com.

Join Larry J. Sabato and the Crystal Ball team tomorrow (Thursday, Sept. 3) at 2 p.m. eastern for the next installment of our new Sabato’s Crystal Ball: America Votes webinar series.

We will be discussing the fallout from the two party conventions, the race for the House, and the state of the polls with a special guest: Ariel Edwards-Levy, senior reporter and polling editor for the Huffington Post. If you have questions you would like us to answer on air about these or other topics, just send us an email at goodpolitics@virginia.edu. We’ll try to get to as many reader questions as possible — and if your question doesn’t get answered this week, we may answer it in a future episode.

You can watch via YouTube; while you’re there, subscribe to our University of Virginia Center for Politics YouTube channel (the name of the channel is UVACFP). The program will also be available at our YouTube channel (and at the original link) if you can’t tune in live. An audio-only version will also be posted at our podcast page. The podcast is also available on SoundCloud, and it will be on other podcast platforms soon.

If you missed it, you can also find last week’s episode at our YouTube channel or directly at this link. We tackled the Republican National Convention, the Senate, the swing state of North Carolina, and more.

If you would like to sign up for Thursday’s webinar and get e-mail alerts about future episodes, sign up at our Eventbrite page and select the “season pass” option.

To support this series and the Center for Politics, text USAVOTES to 41444.

The University of Virginia Center for Politics in partnership with UVA’s Miller Center, Weldon Cooper Center/Sorensen Institute, and Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy have selected 56 students for the newly-created 22nd Century Scholars scholarship program set to launch next week. The Center for Politics has also announced plans for a $3 million endowment, with lead gifts from Eaddo and Peter Kiernan and Teresa Bryce Bazemore and Lenny Bazemore, to create a continuing endowment for this and other internship programs and to serve as a funding source to assist additional students in the future.

The talented UVA undergraduate students (rising second, third, and fourth-years) were selected from a pool of 300 student applicants (most from UVA but some from as far as Harvard University) who lost related summer jobs and internships as a result of the pandemic across a wide spectrum of the public sector including: Capitol Hill (with both Democratic and Republican members); within the Executive Branch (the Department of State, Department of Justice, and USAID); the National Institutes of Health; statehouses; local government; as well as domestic and international non-profits and NGOs.

The first 56 UVA students to pioneer the 22nd Century Scholars program are:

“The public sector badly needs the energy, talent, and fresh perspective of young people. But because of the pandemic, tomorrow’s leaders have lost some of the opportunities they otherwise would have had to make a difference now. Our new 22nd Century Scholars program is a way for us to help these students learn about and remain engaged in the important work of public life,” said Larry J. Sabato, director of the UVA Center for Politics.

Beginning next week and running through the end of July, the students will participate in a first-ever joint public sector summer internship program to be administered by the UVA Center for Politics and its partner organizations in this effort: the Miller Center, the Weldon Cooper Center/Sorensen Institute, and the Frank Batten School of Leadership and Public Policy. Other cooperating units include the UVA Democracy Initiative’s Deliberative Media Lab.

“When Larry Sabato was my undergraduate advisor, his recommendation helped me secure an internship on Capitol Hill. That experience changed my life, and convinced me that public service was worth pursuing. For students who won’t have that experience this summer, I’m honored that the Miller Center gets to work with our colleagues at UVA to provide those experiences during this disruptive time,” said Bill Antholis, director of the Miller Center.

The 22nd Century Scholars scholarship program is made possible through emergency funding provided by the Larry J. Sabato Foundation and the Peter and Eaddo Kiernan Foundation with additional support from Sonja Hoel Perkins, McGuireWoods Consulting, Michael Greenwald, Larry Schack and Katie Shaw, Erik Hirsch, and many other generous donors. Scholars will receive a $2,000 stipend as part of the program. This program will provide students with the ability to work individually and collectively on some of the biggest problems facing the country and the world today in the wake of the global pandemic.

Through this innovative program, students will gain hands-on experience working with the Center for Politics and their partner organizations focused on public service at the University of Virginia. They also will have access to additional resources, such as webinars with policymakers, non-profit leaders, and other guests. Additionally, dozens of University alumni will be donating time to serve as career mentors for the students.

“We call these awardees 22nd Century Scholars because starting this summer and for many years to come, they will be leaders who position our nation and the world for the next century. To make sure we do this right, every one of these 22nd Century Scholars now and in the future will have a UVA Alum designated as their mentor for life,” said Peter Kiernan, chairman of the Center for Politics’ board. “What is most heartening is how many alums have already stepped forward to volunteer to guide these talented young people. We are seeing the UVA family at its very best.”

Those who are excited to support the 22nd Century Scholars program can earmark donations through the Center for Politics’ donor page.

The Crystal Ball and Decision Desk HQ have been calculating and tracking the Democratic pledged delegate allocations during the presidential primary season. Georgia’s presidential primary was originally scheduled for Tuesday but has been moved to May 19. That means there will be no new delegates up for grabs until Hawaii’s party-run primary on Saturday, April 4.

With a break in the schedule, we thought we’d update readers on the state of the race, where Joe Biden has captured an imposing delegate lead.

The Democrats Abroad announced their election results on Monday, with Bernie Sanders capturing 57.9% of the vote to Joe Biden’s 22.7%. That translates into nine delegates for Sanders and four for Biden. Still, Biden’s overall lead is close to 300 delegates.

As states continue to process votes and confirm their results, we continue to update our delegate counts from contests held in March. A summary of states with delegates remaining to be allocated is presented in Table 1 (as of Wednesday afternoon).

Table 1: Remaining delegates to be awarded from states that have already voted

With some delegates still pending allocation, Joe Biden holds a 284-delegate lead. At this point, in order to win the nomination outright, Bernie Sanders would need to win 62% of the remaining delegates. Meanwhile, Biden only needs to win about 46% of the remaining delegates to hit the magic number of 1,991 pledged delegates.

Table 2: Current Democratic pledged delegate tallies

Due to the coronavirus outbreak, several states have postponed upcoming elections. The original schedule, alongside postponement dates, is listed below. We will have delegate counts for these elections available shortly after results are final and will continue to update remaining March delegates as results are finalized. The elections are primaries, unless otherwise noted below.

Sunday, March 29: Puerto Rico (Postponed until April 26)

Saturday, April 4: Alaska (Postponed until April 10), Hawaii, Louisiana (Postponed until June 20), Wyoming (Postponed until April 17)

Tuesday, April 7: Wisconsin