FiveThirtyEight’s top politics stories this week

A [FiveThirtyEight]( email [Popular In Politics] Thursday, December 17, 2020 [1. Raphael Warnock’s Dog Ads Cut Against White Voters’ Stereotypes Of Black People]( [WARNOCK-DOG-4×3]( If he wins next month, Raphael Warnock may have his pet beagle to thank. [Read more]( [2. Warnock And Ossoff Are Testing A New Strategy For Democrats In The South]( [Democratic Senate Candidate Raphael Warnock Holds Press Conference]( For most of the past four years, the Midwest occupied the leading spot on the marquee of U.S. electoral politics. Voters there helped tip the Electoral College toward Donald Trump in 2016, as he eked out victories in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. And rebuilding the so-called blue wall was in part why Democrats chose an older, white, relatively moderate man as their presidential nominee in 2020. That strategy worked. Joe Biden narrowly carried all three states, providing him the Electoral College margins to win the presidency. [Read more]( [3. Why The Suburbs Have Shifted Blue]( [SUBURBS2020-4×3]( President Trump spent the last few months of the presidential campaign appealing to — and sometimes even pleading with — suburban voters. At a rally in Pennsylvania in October, Trump called out suburban women specifically, saying that “they should like me more than anybody here tonight because I ended the regulation that destroyed your neighborhood,” referring to his administration’s move to end a government program aimed at reducing segregation in suburban areas. “I ended the regulation that brought crime to the suburbs,” said Trump. “[A]nd you’re going to live the American dream.” [Read more]( [4. A Record-Breaking Number Of Women Could Be In Biden’s Cabinet]( [Cabinet-Women_Update-4×3]( UPDATE (Dec. 17, 2020, 3:30 p.m.): On Thursday, President-elect Joe Biden tapped Deb Haaland to be the first Native American secretary of the interior. As we wrote earlier this week, Biden is on track to name a historic number of women and people of color to his Cabinet. [Read more]( [5. Split-Ticket Voters Are A Small Group, But They Could Decide The Georgia Runoffs]( [US-VOTE-GEORGIA]( Contrary to popular belief, there just weren’t that many people who voted for different parties in the presidential and Senate races this year. And where split-ticket voting did occur, it appeared to have more to do with the candidates on the ballot than the voters themselves. For example, Republican Sen. Susan Collins ran far ahead of President Trump in every corner of Maine, and Republican Sen. Steve Daines ran a bit behind him in almost every county in Montana. In other words, ticket-splitting didn’t vary that much within each state and was, in most cases, pretty minimal. [Read more]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Forecasts How popular is Donald Trump? [How popular is Donald Trump?]( [See all polls]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Weekly Listen [Play]( [Politics Podcast: What Do 1,200 Books About Trump Really Tell Us?]( [FiveThirtyEight] [View in browser]( [ABC News]( [Unsubscribe]( Our mailing address: FiveThirtyEight, 47 West 66th Street, New York, NY 10023.