Should Americans trust polling data showing Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden leading President Donald Trump ahead of the November 3 election? VOA's Elizabeth Lee takes a look.

A U.S. map peppered with red and blue has become the unofficial logo of the presidential election in recent years. But it hasn’t always been that way, and, like much in politics, it’s a bit more complicated.

Hadeid Arreola sat at her family’s kitchen table during dinner about a month ago discussing the upcoming election with her parents and three sisters. Voting was important to her family, especially her parents, Mexican immigrants who became U.S. citizens about 25 years ago. They had always stressed its importance to their children.

For generations, redlining was used to designate neighborhoods—typically in urban areas with high concentrations of minority residents—as places banks should avoid offering home mortgages. The term originates from Federal Housing Administration maps developed in the 1930s where “red” labeled high-risk lending zones. To be “redlined” meant that households were structurally denied home loans and lost the opportunity to build wealth.

In this special edition of the podcast, Bill Finan—director of the Brookings Institution Press—talks with two of the authors of a new Brookings press book that explores America’s current political division from demographic and geographic perspectives. David Damore, Robert Lang, and Karen Danielsen, all professors at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, are co-authors of Blue Metros, Red States: The Shifting Urban-Rural Divide in America’s Swing States. Damore and Lang join Finan for this episode in which they address some of the factors that tend to make large metropolitan areas lean Democratic while existing in a sea of rural areas that are largely Republican. And, how do states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, and Texas—with both large urban areas and widespread rural areas—express this red-blue divide between rural and metropolitan areas? Listen also to find out which two counties in America could indicate which way the election is going on November 3.

Redlining was a government-sanctioned discriminatory policy that designated most urban minority-majority neighborhoods as places banks should not offer home mortgages. The term originates in color maps developed in the late 1930s by Homer Hoyt, an economist with the Federal Housing Administration, to direct mortgage loans made by the Home Owner’s Loan Corp. Redlining refers to the map’s color-coded neighborhood types: red zones indicated high-risk investments; yellow zones medium risk; and green zones low risk.

The recent special session pleased no one.

In a critical mark of the shifting political landscape, Democrats in November could secure a clean sweep of the Senate seats from the four key Southwestern states -- a milestone the party hasn't reached in nearly 80 years.