FiveThirtyEight’s top stories this week

A [FiveThirtyEight]( email [Popular This Week] Sunday, December 20, 2020 [1. 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]( [2. 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]( [3. Once You Get The COVID-19 Vaccine, Can You Still Infect Others?]( [Northwell Health Workers Receive First Doses Of Pfizer Covid-19 Vaccine]( Now that the world has successfully completed history’s fastest development of a new vaccine, you might be wondering why we don’t always just make one this fast. If the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines are safe and effective and the process to produce them didn’t cut any corners … well, why does it normally take around a decade to do something we just did in less than a year? [Read more]( [4. Does It Matter Which COVID-19 Vaccine You Get?]( [VACCINES-BRANDS-4×3]( By the end of this week, the United States could have not one, but two COVID-19 vaccines authorized for emergency use. After nine months of isolation and lockdowns and more than 300,000 deaths, it is difficult to find superlatives to fit this moment. Any I come up with feel like they still understate how fantastic the news truly is. What’s more, there are even more vaccines waiting in the wings. Within a few months, we will likely have access to vaccines by Pfizer and Moderna … and Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax, and AstraZeneca. We’re going to go from desperately wishing for a vaccine, any vaccine, to having a cornucopia of choices. [Read more]( [5. 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]( [6. What The Polls Say About Georgia’s Senate Runoffs]( [GA-SEN-4×3]( Headed into the 2020 election, we knew that Election Day might turn into Election Week or even Election Month because of the huge increase in mail voting due to the coronavirus pandemic. While it thankfully didn’t take a month to find out who won the presidency or which party will control the House, we are still in the dark about who will control the U.S. Senate. [Read more]( [7. Americans Overwhelmingly Want Congress To Approve Another Coronavirus Stimulus Package]( [0327_POLLA-4×3]( Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup. [Read more]( [8. 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]( [9. Updated: 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]( [10. Biden Is Projected To Be The President-Elect. Here’s How It All Went Down.]( [2020-Election-Night-4×3-NoLive-BidenWin]( [Read more]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Weekly Listen [Play]( [The Secret To Winning Is Not To Play]( [FiveThirtyEight] [View in browser]( [ABC News]( [Unsubscribe]( Our mailing address: FiveThirtyEight, 47 West 66th Street, New York, NY 10023.