FiveThirtyEight’s top stories this week

A [FiveThirtyEight]( email [Popular This Week] Sunday, October 30, 2022 [1. Overturning Roe Has Meant At Least 10,000 Fewer Legal Abortions]( [Volunteer clinic escorts shield a patient from anti-abortion activists outside the Hope Clinic For Women in Granite City, Illinois]( The same day the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in June, Alabama’s law banning abortion took effect. The next morning, phones began ringing in Georgia. [Read more]( [2. The Dallas Mavericks Are Different From Last Year. That Doesn’t Mean Worse.]( [Grizzlies Mavericks Basketball]( “I don’t know if you saw me or not, but I was having fun out there.” [Read more]( [3. Where Our Model Thinks The Polls Might Be Biased]( [2022-ELECTIONUPDATE-1028-4×3]( With less than two weeks until Election Day, Republicans now have a 48 percent chance of taking the Senate, according to FiveThirtyEight’s Deluxe forecast, their highest figure since late July and putting the battle for Senate control officially in toss-up territory. But whether that shift will continue or has peaked is in the eye of the beholder. [Read more]( [4. The Supreme Court Could Overturn Another Major Precedent. This Time, Americans Might Agree.]( [POLLA_1028-4×3]( The Supreme Court is poised to upend decades of precedent on affirmative action. This Monday, the justices will hear two cases challenging race-conscious admissions policies at Harvard University and the University of North Carolina. The universities use race as one of many factors when deciding which applicants to accept — a practice that has been affirmed multiple times by the Supreme Court, including in a 2003 case where the justices ruled that ensuring racial diversity in higher education is important enough to justify the limited use of race in college admissions. [Read more]( [5. How LIV Golf Is Tearing The Sport Apart, In 3 Charts]( [Phil Mickelson]( It seems you can’t go a week without players from the PGA Tour and LIV Golf sniping at each other in the press. The most recent edition featured maybe the two biggest principals in golf’s civil war — Phil Mickelson and Rory McIlroy — going at it over which tour represents the future of the game. And that very argument has been at the heart of the battle tearing professional golf apart ever since the Saudi-backed LIV Golf circuit hit the scene earlier this year. [Read more]( [6. The Astros Are Chasing History. But The Phillies Know How To Pull A Historic Upset.]( [WS-2022-PREVIEW-4×3]( On paper, this year’s World Series between the Houston Astros and Philadelphia Phillies looks like a gigantic mismatch. The Astros won 106 games during the regular season, with a plus-219 run differential, 57.7 wins above replacement and a 1589 Elo rating; the Phillies won 87 with a plus-62 differential, 42.0 WAR and a 1547 Elo. Based on a composite of the differences in those four categories, this is the seventh-most lopsided World Series matchup (on paper) since 1903: [Read more]( [7. The Niners’ Offense Is Cruising — Until Kyle Shanahan Runs Out Of Scripted Plays]( [San Francisco 49ers v Chicago Bears]( Kyle Shanahan is in his feelings. The head coach of the San Francisco 49ers misses his former offensive coordinator (and current Miami Dolphins head coach) Mike McDaniel, and the Niners offense is suffering mightily in McDaniel’s absence. [Read more]( [8. Voters Don’t Think Either Party Deserves To Govern]( [IPSOSPOLL_1027-4×3]( Election Day is almost here, and millions around the country have already cast their vote. With this in mind, we wanted to use the last wave of our FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll before the midterm elections to dive deeper into which issues are driving Americans’ decision-making in the final weeks of the campaign. [Read more]( [9. How Much Power Do Christians Really Have?]( [INVISIBLE-DIVIDES-1027-4×3]( Welcome to Invisible Divides, a series exploring the profound differences in worldview between Democrats and Republicans. These beliefs about education, religion, gender, race, and political extremism align with partisanship — but run much deeper. Differences like these don’t just influence the ways Democrats and Republicans vote, but also how they think about their place in America. And they help explain why opposing views on important issues today seem increasingly irreconcilable. [Read more]( [10. The Astros Are Baseball’s Most Business-like Buzzsaw]( [Houston Astros players Alex Bregman and Yuli Gurriel celebrate a victory against the New York Yankees.]( Nobody has won a World Series without losing a postseason game since 1976. Of course, Major League Baseball’s playoffs were smaller back then: The ’76 Cincinnati Reds beat the Philadelphia Phillies in a three-game National League Championship Series, then swept the New York Yankees in a four-game World Series. The playoffs were an even more exclusive affair before that, as the World Series was the only playoff series until MLB added its two championship series in 1969. Twelve teams pulled off World Series sweeps between 1907 and 1966, vanquishing the other playoff team from the opposite league. [Read more]( --------------------------------------------------------------- Weekly Listen [Play]( [Politics Podcast: Live From D.C. … This Is Model Talk]( [FiveThirtyEight] [View in browser]( [ABC News]( [Unsubscribe]( Our mailing address: FiveThirtyEight, 47 West 66th Street, New York, NY 10023.