FiveThirtyEight’s top politics stories this week

[FiveThirtyEight]( Popular in Politics Thursday, June, 06, 2024 [1. Democratic women are overperforming in 2024 primaries; Republicans lag behind]( [Democratic women are overperforming in 2024 primaries; Republicans lag behind]( Today, Democratic women make up 41 percent and Republican women make up just 15 percent of their respective parties' members of Congress. And of the 12 female governors currently serving, eight are Democrats. That discrepancy is due in part to what happens in the parties' respective primaries, where interest groups and candidates spar over the direction of their parties and just which candidates should represent them. While this year's primaries are far from over, we wanted to check in on how women have done in the first 17 states to hold primary elections for some mid-cycle clues as to whether Democratic and Republican women are maintaining the progress they've made in recent election years. [Read more]( [2. Trump’s conviction may be hurting him — but it’s early]( [Trump’s conviction may be hurting him — but it’s early]( There’s a [scene in the movie “Airplane!”]( where, having learned the breaking news of an impending airline disaster, a cadre of reporters run into a bank of phone booths so fast, it falls over. That’s what I imagine the nation’s pollsters looked like this weekend when they rushed to ask Americans how they were reacting to [former President Donald Trump’s conviction]( on 34 felony charges last week. [Read more]( [3. How Trump’s guilty verdict will impact the 2024 presidential election]( [How Trump’s guilty verdict will impact the 2024 presidential election]( [Scandals]( have [swirled]( around [former President Donald Trump]( since his [first presidential campaign]( in 2016. But as of Thursday — having been found guilty on all counts in his New York hush-money case — he is now officially a convicted felon. Could that fact cut through all the other headlines and be a game-changer for the 2024 election? [Read more]( [4. Polling isn't broken, but pollsters still face Trump-era challenges]( [Polling isn't broken, but pollsters still face Trump-era challenges]( Every election presents different challenges to pollsters. In the past few years, such obstacles have included declining response rates to [phone polling]( and among [some Republican]( or [conservative respondents]( — a sampling issue — and [trouble identifying the likely electorate]( in the face of high turnout — a weighting issue. These difficulties helped contribute to [larger-than-average polling errors]( in the 2020 presidential election, four years after pollsters also had [a worse-than-typical year]( in 2016 ([although for primarily different reasons](. Despite enjoying [notably more accurate results]( in the 2018 and 2022 midterms, pollsters this year are once again contending with a common denominator of the 2016 and 2020 cycles: now-former President Donald Trump, who is this year's presumptive GOP presidential nominee. [Read more]( [5. What if Biden or Trump suddenly leaves the 2024 race?]( [What if Biden or Trump suddenly leaves the 2024 race?]( What would happen if a major-party candidate died or abruptly dropped out of the presidential race before Election Day? [Read more]( [FiveThirtyEight] [View in browser]( [ABC News]( [Unsubscribe](