The House in 2024

Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.

Laura J. Nelson at LAT:

In a major victory for Democrats, first-time candidate Derek Tran defeated Republican Rep. Michelle Steel in a hotly contested Orange County congressional race that became one of the most expensive in the country.

Tran will be the first Vietnamese American to represent a district that is home to Little Saigon and the largest population of people of Vietnamese descent outside of Vietnam.

The race was the third-to-last to be called in the country. As Orange County and Los Angeles County counted mail ballots, Steel’s margin of victory shrank to 58 votes before Tran took the lead 11 days after the election.

Tran was leading by 613 votes when Steel conceded Wednesday, and the Associated Press called the race for Tran not long after.

“Only in America can you go from refugees fleeing with nothing but the clothes on your back to becoming a member of Congress in just one generation,” Tran said in a post on X.

Tran was born in the U.S. to Vietnamese refugee parents. His father fled Vietnam after the fall of Saigon in 1975, but his boat capsized, killing his wife and children. Tran’s father returned to Vietnam, where he met and married Tran’s mother, and the couple later immigrated to the United States.

“This victory is a testament to the spirit and resilience of our community,” Tran said in a statement. “My parents came to this country to escape oppression and pursue the American Dream, and their story reflects the journey of so many here in Southern California.”

In a statement Wednesday, Steel thanked her volunteers, staff and family for their work on her campaign, saying: “Everything is God’s will and, like all journeys, this one is ending for a new one to begin.”

Steel filed paperwork Monday to seek reelection in 2026. Tran did the same Wednesday.

The 45th District was among the country’s most competitive races, critical to both parties as they battled to control the House of Representatives.

With Steel’s loss, Republicans will hold 220 seats in the House, barely above the 218-seat threshold needed to control the chamber.

Just one House seat has yet to be called: In California’s agricultural San Joaquin Valley, Democrat Adam Gray holds a slender lead over GOP Rep. John Duarte in the 13th Congressional District, but the race remains too close to call.

FWIW, current counts of House districts drawn by...

Republicans: 180
Bipartisan/ind. commissions: 116
Democrats: 75
Courts: 58
None (At Large states): 6

Bottom line: it's impressive Dems nearly flipped the House majority given 1) GOP redistricting advantage 2) Trump's win.

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 28, 2024

Harris: Woman, Asian, Black, Christian

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020. Our next book will discuss the extraordinary fight between an elderly white ex-president and a younger Black/Asian woman. 

Karthick Ramakrishnan and Sara Sadhwani

Recent data released by AAPI Data and Asian and Pacific Islander American Vote (APIAVote) indicate that gender representation plays a stronger role than racial representation in shaping voter support for her candidacy. The survey, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago in September asked respondents, “Thinking specifically about Kamala Harris, how important to you are the following aspects of her identity?” providing choices that included “her identity as an African American,” “her identity as an Asian Indian or South Asian,” “her identity as a woman,” and “her age.”

Given the amount of news coverage and social media engagement around Harris’s racial identity as both Indian and Black, Asian American voters would be expected to give the highest importance to her Indian and South Asian heritage and her African American identities, with gender and age identities far behind. The survey results showed the opposite (see figure below).

The figure above, from the 2024 AAPI Voter Survey, reveals a significant gender gap among AAPI voters in regard to the importance of Harris’ gender identity

Well over a third of Asian American voters (38%) say that Harris’ identity as a woman is “extremely important” or “very important” to them, with significantly smaller proportions indicating the same about her racial identities as Indian/South Asian (25%) and as an African American (24%) or about her age (25%). The findings were not statistically different among Indian American voters, who arguably share even closer ethnic affinity to Harris.

Notably, the “gender boost” in identity representation was driven entirely by the opinions of Asian American women. About a half (49%) of Asian American women said that Harris’s gender was important to them, nearly double the proportion among Asian American men (25%). This gender gap was also noticeable in questions about the importance of having more elected representatives who are women (56% of Asian American women said that this was extremely important or very important to them, when compared to 36% of Asian American men), and about their intention to vote for Harris (72% among Asian American women and 59% among Asian American men).

Kamala Harris: “I grew up in the Black church. I grew up attending 23rd Avenue Church of God in Oakland, California.”

Rev. Solomon Kinloch, Jr: “That’s church.”

Harris: “My pastor is Amos C. Brown of Third Baptist Church.”

Charlamagne: “God is good.”

Harris: “All the time.” pic.twitter.com/t1X71KId9f

— Keith Boykin (@keithboykin) October 15, 2024

Whether they're religious or not, I believe people want a leader who is driven by compassion not cruelty, one whose values are rooted in hope and not fear, whose moral convictions yield inclusion and not separation.https://t.co/sj872MkZKo pic.twitter.com/IixEWa3EDv

— John Pavlovitz (@johnpavlovitz) October 16, 2024

The Politics of Race

Our latest book is Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics. Our next book will look at the 2024 race.  Kamala Harris is a woman of mixed-race ancestry.  Trump has a history of exploiting racial division.

He is playing a double game here.  On the one hand, he has questioned her Black identity, both in his remarks to the National Association of Black Journalists and in a social media post:

In polls earlier this year, Trump was overperforming among Black men.  It is likely that he was trying to hold onto his gains by convincing a segment of Black voters that Harris is inauthentic.  Like Barack Obama, she is Black but not descended from people held to slavery in the United States.

So far Harris is surging among Black survey respondents but Trump is still doing better than previous GOP candidates.  Some surveys suggest that young Black voters are more conservative than their elders.

The other side of the game is a naked appeal to old-fashioned white racism.  See below.  How can the campaign do both?  One word-siloing.  The decline of the MSM and the rise of hyperspecialized online media make it possible to get away with sending conflicting messages to different groups.

The Trump campaign went full racist. wow. pic.twitter.com/qJc9r4ITHf

— Alex Cole (@acnewsitics) August 13, 2024

Rightward Shift Among Chinese Americans in SF

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.  Our next book will carry the story through 2024.

 Jim Carlton  and Christine Mai-Duc at WSJ:

Long a reliable voting bloc for the left, Chinese-Americans have been important drivers of a recent backlash against progressive policies in San Francisco, which has grown in support and been backed by tech industry money.

Members of the Chinese community, who make up one-fifth of this city of 810,000 and a slightly smaller percentage of registered voters, say they have been particularly incensed by incidents of anti-Asian violence, school policies they believe have emphasized equity over merit, and street homelessness. Many are also upset that property crime has long been higher in San Francisco than most other major cities, though it has dropped this year.

Chinese-Americans were among the most emphatic backers of ballot measures passed last month mandating drug screening for public welfare recipients and expanding police powers, as well as the 2022 recall of the three school board members and the district attorney, Chesa Boudin. Their margin of support for those efforts was 10 to 30 percentage points higher than the overall San Francisco voting population, according to an analysis of publicly available data by research firm Data Second. The firm is run by the husband of Marjan Philhour, a candidate for San Francisco Board of Supervisors running on a moderate platform.

...

In the past, Chinese-Americans often voted for representatives from their own community, in which political activists had close ties to left-wing political movements. That was particularly true in Chinatown, the oldest enclave of Chinese immigrants in the U.S., dating to the 1850s.

As Chinese residents climbed the socioeconomic ladder, however, they increasingly moved to the city’s western, more suburban neighborhoods and began voting for reasons other than ethnic representation, political analysts and community leaders said.

Many Chinese-American voters grew angry at the political establishment during the pandemic, when prolonged school closures and a move away from merit-based admissions at one elite high school incensed families who put an emphasis on education.

Asian Americans to Democrats: "we want safe streets, good schools and less progressive ideology." That's the message and 2024 warning from San Francisco. Footnote about our unfortunate experience at the end. @OutFrontCNN story features @JoelEngardio. Producer: @jasonkCNN pic.twitter.com/6Up96sGD5H

— Kyung Lah (@KyungLahCNN) March 23, 2023

Poisoning the GOP

Our latest book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  The 2024 race has begun.

Trump: They’re poisoning the blood of country.. They poison mental institutions and prisons all over the world not just in South America… but all over the world they’re coming into our country from Africa, from Asia pic.twitter.com/fv38EABo1a

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 16, 2023

Sophia Cai at Axios:

It's not just Trump. Even as the GOP has recruited more minority prospects for public office — this year's initial field for the presidential race was historically diverse — more Republicans are latching onto Trump's racially divisive rhetoric.

• Vivek Ramaswamy, the son of Indian immigrants, has won fans among white nationalists for promoting the "Great Replacement Theory," a racist conspiracy theory that nonwhite people are being allowed into the U.S. and other Western countries to replace white voters.
• Ramaswamy, who among the GOP candidates has been particularly reluctant to criticize Trump, also has campaigned with former Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican who has said that U.S. culture can't be restored "with somebody else's babies" and called for an America "so homogeneous that we look a lot the same."
• Last summer, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis' team fired a speechwriter who created campaign material with neo-Nazi imagery, then shared it on a pro-DeSantis Twitter account.

More recently, some far-righters, conservative groups and others have begun calling former UN Ambassador Nikki Haley — whose parents were Indian immigrants — "Nimarata," her first name, rather than Nikki, the middle name she has gone by for most of her life.

• The emphasis on Haley's Indian heritage has escalated as she has risen in GOP polls and cast herself as a less chaotic, more sensitive conservative than Trump.
• Ramaswamy has called Haley "lying Nimarata Randhawa," referencing her family name before marriage.
• The Florida Standard — a now-defunct pro-DeSantis blog — has done so as well, as did a recent straw poll at a convention of the conservative advocacy group Turning Point USA.

Asians and Republicans

Our more recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses voter demographics .

At The Liberal Patriot, Seth Moskowitz analyzes a small but significant GOP shift among Asian Americans:

What makes the 2022 midterms so noteworthy, then, is that they represent a break from the decades-long trend toward Democrats. And when you drill down into the numbers, it becomes clear that two issues in particular are responsible for the Asian American backslide toward Republicans: public safety and education.

Let’s start with the former. As violent crime surged in cities throughout the country in 2020 and 2021, the Democrats in charge of many of those cities largely failed to respond with an effective message or policy agenda. Rather than prosecuting criminals and getting repeat offenders off of the streets, many Democrats took a “root causes” approach that came across as quixotic and ineffective. Moreover, following George Floyd’s murder and the subsequent Black Lives Matter protests, many people, fairly or not, began to see the Democratic Party as anti-police. For many Asian Americans who live in urban areas, the visible erosion of public safety was unacceptable—and they blamed Democrats for letting it happen.

The first sign that this could pose an electoral problem for Democrats came in early 2022 with the effort to recall San Francisco’s progressive District Attorney, Chesa Boudin. Simmering fury about Boudin’s handling of crime and his seemingly indifferent attitude towards the victims of crime, many of whom were Asian American, eventually boiled over into outrage. And while every major racial demographic favored recalling Boudin, Asian Americans were by far the most supportive, with around 67 percent supporting the recall and only 13 percent opposing.

Frustration about crime wasn’t isolated to San Francisco. Asked in a national poll ahead of the midterms how important crime was to determining their vote, 85 percent of Asian Americans said it was “extremely” or “very” important. And when asked which party handles crime better, Asian Americans broke about even between Democrats and Republicans. Compared to other issues like health care, immigration, and gun control, on which Asian Americans overwhelmingly prefer Democrats, crime is a striking outlier.

The other issue most responsible for Asian Americans’ rightward shift is education. For many Asian Americans, especially those who are immigrants or low-income, education represents the step ladder for reaching a better life for themselves or their children. In recent years, however, Democrats have begun to fold up that stepladder in the name of racial equity. Across the country—from San Francisco to Boston to New York City and beyond—public school systems have tried to restructure the admissions process for “gifted and talented” schools and programs. By replacing academic assessments with lottery systems or other subjective evaluations, these proposals would dramatically reduce the number of Asian American students admitted, sometimes by as much as 40 or 50 percent.

The response from Asian Americans? Anger, resentment, and an electoral backlash. In San Francisco, Asian Americans drove the recall of three school board members who had rammed through one such admissions change. In New York City, frustration with a new admissions process that replaced academic screenings with lottery systems for hundreds of selective public middle and high schools eventually drove Mayor Eric Adams to roll back the unpopular reform.

And while admissions changes like these are certainly animating for many Asian Americans, Democrats are pushing plenty of other education policies that are likely just as politically toxic. One example is California’s attempt to eliminate honors-level classes and prohibit schools from sorting students according to academic achievement. Another is the ongoing attempt to encourage colleges to consider race and ethnicity when deciding which students to admit, something that only 21 percent of Asian American adults support according to a recent Gallup poll. In short, Democratic attempts to meddle with education in the name of equity and social justice at the expense of equality and fairness are driving away Asian American voters.

Republicans and Asian Americans

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In Divided We Stand, we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.

 Ruy Teixeira at AEI:

Even in 2020, there were signs of defection in congressional races in California and in other local races. Like Hispanics, Asian voters were concerned about public safety and rejected demands to defund the police. Asian voters in California, New York and Virginia were also upset by the Democrats’ support for aggressive affirmative action policies that would be at their expense, since in gifted and talented high schools and in top-tier colleges, they were enrolled at percentages well above their percentage in the population and would be harmed by the imposition of the kind of quota systems Democrats were supporting. Partly in reaction to this, Asian neighborhoods in New York City swung by double digits toward Trump in 2020. In California, Asians, as well as Hispanics, played a large hand in the defeat of the affirmative action referendum, which lost by 57 to 43 percent.

In 2021 and 2022, Democrats also suffered from defections among Asian-American voters. In Virginia’s 2021 gubernatorial contest, victorious Republican candidate Glenn Youngkin got 44 percent of Asian votes. In that year’s New York mayoral contest, Republicans also improved over their 2017 performance by 14 points in heavily Asian precincts.

In 2022, Asian voter defection from the Democrats was more broad-based than in 2020. Nationwide the Democratic advantage among Asian voters declined 12 points relative to 2020. And there were abundant signs that Asian voters in many urban neighborhoods were slipping away from the Democrats. In New York City, the only precinct in Manhattan to vote for Republican gubernatorial candidate Lee Zeldin was in Chinatown. In Brooklyn and Queens, Zeldin outpaced Democrat Kathy Hochul in the heavily Chinese 47th and 49th Assembly Districts and 17th State Senate District in Brooklyn. Zeldin also won the 40th Assembly District based in Flushing, which is dominated by Chinese and Korean immigrants.

More detail on these defections has just been provided by a very detailed New York Times analysis of Asian voter shifts in the Zeldin-Hochul gubernatorial election

The Politics of Affirmative Action

 As we note in Divided We Stand, the defeat of California's Proposition 16 was the most underreported political story of 2020.

John Ellis at WSJ:

What nobody realized was that the entire country had become increasingly hostile to the use of race in such decisions. A 2022 Pew Research Center poll found that 74% of Americans oppose the use of race in college admissions. Even more surprising, 68% of Hispanics, 63% of Asians and 59% of blacks also opposed it. The same applied to both political parties, with 87% of Republicans and 62% of Democrats objecting.

But as the public attempted to slam the door shut on racial preferences, the universities were busy trying to open it wide. The stealthy end-runs around the law gave way to support for “equity”: the desire for racial proportionality in all things—never mind that the Supreme Court has held that quotas in college admissions are unlawful. Accordingly, many colleges have begun to abandon the use of test scores in applications.

In line with this hardening of campus attitudes, increasingly powerful diversity, equity and inclusion bureaucracies arose to achieve these aims. Consider The University of California, Berkeley, which now has a Division of Equity and Inclusion, a title that gives it a standing on campus equivalent to its Division of Mathematical and Physical Sciences. The university’s division has an array of highly paid managers. Eight have the title “director,” one of which is for “diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging,” and there are several assistant vice chancellors. Similar offices abound on campuses across the country, where they are major actors in promoting all manner of progressive causes, from social justice to critical race theory and anticapitalism.

Slugfest in Asian American District

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections. 

Seema Mehta and Anh Do at LAT:

A new Southern California congressional district was created expressly to empower Asian Americans — binding together residents of Vietnamese, Chinese, Korean and Indian descent to give those voters a stronger voice in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The race to represent the district, which includes portions of Los Angeles and Orange counties, has turned into a mud-slinging battle rife with accusations of racism, sexism and red-baiting between two Asian American candidates.

Incumbent Rep. Michelle Steel, a Korean American immigrant, has accused her Democratic rival, Jay Chen, of mocking her accent. Chen, the son of Taiwanese immigrants, responded with an op-ed titled “I didn’t mock Michelle Steel’s accent.” Steel has also tried to paint Chen, a Navy Reserve intelligence officer, as sympathetic to China’s authoritarian regime; Chen says she’s red-baiting.

“This district was drawn with the aspirational hope that it would uplift Asians,” said Democratic redistricting expert Paul Mitchell. “There’s nothing to suggest a district that’s heavily Asian like this could have the consequence of a slugfest or a mud fight between different Asian elected officials. That’s clearly unfortunate.”

The new 45th congressional district was created last year by an independent redistricting panel in the once-per-decade, post-census redrawing of political maps. It is more competitive than Steel’s current district and includes the Asian American hubs of Westminster, Cerritos and Artesia.

Odd Comments by Senate Candidates

 Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.   

Felicia Sonmez at WP:

Herschel Walker, the leading candidate for the Republican Senate nomination in Georgia, questioned evolution at an event over the weekend, asking why apes still exist if humans have evolved from them.

Walker made the remark Sunday during an appearance at Sugar Hill Church in Sugar Hill, Ga.

Polls show that Walker, who has been endorsed by former president Donald Trump, is the overwhelming favorite in the race for the GOP nomination to face freshman Sen. Raphael G. Warnock (D-Ga.) in the fall.

“At one time, science said man came from apes. Did it not?” Walker asked Chuck Allen, lead pastor of Sugar Hill Church, during Sunday’s event

 “Every time I read or hear that, I think to myself, ‘You just didn’t read the same Bible I did,' ” Allen replied.

Walker continued: “Well, this is what’s interesting, though. If that is true, why are there still apes? Think about it.”

Steve Ulrich at PoliticsPA: 

Republican U.S. Senate candidate Mehmet Oz said today that he would forego certain security clearances that are provided to all U.S. Senators to keep his dual citizenship with Turkey.

Oz was speaking to a group of reporters about the role David McCormick and his former hedge fund – Bridgewater Associates – played in the management of the Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System (PSERS).

When asked about his dual citizenship with the United States and Turkey, Oz explained that he keeps his Turkish citizenship to care for his mother, who suffers from Alzheimer’s Disease. When queried what he would do if this would disqualify him from security clearances, Oz agreed that he would forego them in this situation, noting “I can love my country and love my mom.”

 

Since this is now a thing: members of congress do NOT get security clearances; clearances are an Executive branch function and Members don't need it by virtue of their offices. Members do have to take an oath they won't disclose classified info, but that's a different matter. pic.twitter.com/jEgVXmR0Ac

— Daniel Schuman (@danielschuman) March 16, 2022

The New York Times dug up a 2013 podcast when Mike Gibbons offered some offensive stereotypes about Asian people.
Who knows how this will play in the #ohsen GOP primary, which is sort of a competition of outrageousness. https://t.co/6UvfAJWiqK

— Laura Hancock (@laurahancock) March 16, 2022

Asian American Population and Turnout

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the demographics of the 2020 election.

Ronald Brownstein at The Atlantic:

Asian Americans still represent a small sliver of the population in all but a few states. But census figures show that from 2010 to 2019, the group grew rapidly, increasing its population nationwide by nearly 30 percent, or just over 5 million people. In percentage terms, that was by far the biggest increase over the past decade for any major racial group. Among adult citizens eligible to vote, Asian Americans have doubled their share, from 2.5 percent in 2000 to 5 percent in 2020, according to calculations by William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution’s Metropolitan Policy Program.
...

The Asian American population isn’t nearly large enough to decide those states on its own. Although Asian Americans represent almost 9 percent of eligible voters in Nevada, they represent only about 3 percent in Georgia, Arizona, and North Carolina, Frey shared with me. Yet the rise in voter participation has proved crucial for Democrats in several closely balanced states. A growing number of Asian American voters—mostly in the Washington, D.C., suburbs—were central to tilting Virginia blue over roughly the past 15 years. They played a comparable tipping-point role in Democrats’ victories in Georgia last year, at both the presidential and senatorial level. TargetSmart, a Democratic voter-targeting firm, calculates that some 60,000 more Asian Americans voted in the state in November than had in 2016—an increase that far exceeded Joe Biden’s narrow margin of victory there. “In Georgia, they delivered this election for Joe Biden,” [AAPI Victory Alliance Executive Director Varun] Nikore said. “And then they delivered Joe Biden the Senate.”

Nationwide, Asian Americans increased their turnout at an astounding pace last year—soaring from about 49 percent in 2016 to just over 59 percent, the census found. Although turnout rose substantially for every major racial and educational group in 2020, the increase among Asian Americans was significantly larger than the growth among college-educated white voters (just over three percentage points), Latinos (just over six points), and even Trump’s core supporters, white voters without a college degree (also a little more than six percentage points)....

Higher turnout from an expanding pool of eligible voters combined to produce a dramatic rise in votes from the Asian American community. In its recently released analysis of voter files nationwide, Catalist calculated that the total number of votes cast by Asian Americans grew from 2016 to 2020 by almost 40 percent, reaching about 7 million. TargetSmart, in its analysis, put the increase even higher, at about 47 percent.

...

The biggest problem for the GOP may be that Trump’s words stamped his party precisely at a moment when the clay was soft—in other words, when 2020 produced a huge influx of young and first-time Asian American voters without long attachments to either party, according to research from both[political scientist Karthick] Ramakrishnan and Catalist.

How Trump Fanned Anti-Asian Prejudice

 

Our new book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses Trump's rhetoric about COVID.

Laura Kurtzman at UCSF:

In the week after former President Donald J. Trump tweeted about “the Chinese virus,” the number of coronavirus-related tweets with anti-Asian hashtags rose precipitously, a new study from UC San Francisco has found.

The study examined nearly 700,000 tweets containing nearly 1.3 million hashtags, the week before and after the president’s tweet on March 16, 2020, to see whether his use of the term “Chinese virus” – an expression that public health experts warned against using – may have led others to use anti-Asian language on Twitter.

They found that users who adopted the hashtag #chinesevirus were far more likely to pair it with overtly racist hashtags.

By contrast, those who adopted #covid19, the WHO’s official name for the disease and the term recommended by public health experts, were far less likely to include racist hashtags in their tweets.

The study, published March 18, 2021, in the American Journal of Public Health, comes as the country has experienced a rash of violent attacks on people of Asian descent and lends support to warnings by public health experts that naming a disease after a place or a group of people is stigmatizing.

“These results may be a proxy of growth in anti-Asian sentiment that was not as prevalent as before,” said Yulin Hswen, ScD, MPH, an assistant professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at UCSF and a member of the Bakar Computational Health Sciences Institute. “Using racial terms associated with a disease can result in the perpetuation of further stigmatization of racial groups.”

Researchers chose to analyze hashtags, rather than the content of the tweets themselves, because hashtags have been shown to act as a predictor of the formation of hate groups and the occurrence of hate crimes.

The researchers manually coded each of the hashtags, labeling a hashtag anti-Asian if it expressed hostility towards the region, people or culture of Asia; demonstrated fear, mistrust and hatred of Asians; supported restrictions on Asian immigration; or used derogatory language or condoned punishment of Asian countries and people.

The results showed a large difference in anti-Asian sentiment between the kind of hashtags that appeared in tweets with #covid19 and those that appeared in tweets with #chinesevirus. About 20 percent of the nearly 500,000 hashtags with #covid19 showed anti-Asian sentiment, but anti-Asian bias was apparent in half of the more than 775,000 hashtags with #chinesevirus.

When they looked to see whether the timing of the president’s tweet had any effect, they saw that the number of anti-Asian hashtags associated with #chinesevirus grew much faster after his March 16 tweet, which said, “The United States will be powerfully, supporting those industries, like Airlines and others, that are particularly affected by the Chinese Virus. We will be stronger than ever before!”

Hswen said the results of the study demonstrate how important it is to use neutral language when naming diseases and other threats to public health. And she expressed alarm that as recently as March of 2021, former president Trump referred to the Covid-19 vaccine as the “China Virus Vaccine.”

“Chinese virus, China virus, Wuhan virus, or any derivative of these terms is not something we should be using,” she said. “We should not be attaching location or ethnicity to diseases.”

Authors: Joining Hswen in the study were Xiang Xu, MS, Jared B. Hawkins, PhD, and John S. Brownstein, PhD, all of Boston Children’s Hospital; Anna Hing, MPH, of the University of California Los Angeles; and Gilbert C. Gee, PhD, of Harvard Medical School.

Georgia Electorate

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race.   Our next book, title TBA, discusses the 2020 results.

The Georgia Senate races will determine control of the Senate.

Jeff Amy at AP:

One thing helping line voters up is the decision of the candidates in both races to run as tickets, with joint appearances and advertisements. J. Miles Coleman of the University of Virginia Center for Politics said the joint effort has helped Warnock wrap up Democratic voters.

“He and Ossoff have done a better job of running as a ticket,” Coleman said. “I think overall that’s going to benefit Warnock and help him consolidate some of his support.”

With the candidates running as tickets, it’s unlikely the parties will split the seats. 

Abby Budiman  and Luis Noe-Bustamante at Pew:

The number of Black registered voters in Georgia increased by about 130,000 between Oct. 11, 2016, and Oct. 5, 2020, the largest increase among all major racial and ethnic groups, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Georgia Secretary of State’s Office data. Meanwhile, early reports suggest that turnout in November 2020 among Black registered voters increased compared with 2016, but not as much as other groups.

The increase of 520,000 in new registered voters in Georgia since 2016 came from a variety of sources, as no single racial or ethnic group accounted for more than 25% of the newly registered. Even so, some groups of registered voters saw larger increases than others, shifting the overall racial and ethnic composition of registered voters.

Emily Badger at NYT:

The suburbs of Cobb County, Ga., boomed during white flight on the promise of isolation from Atlanta. Residents there dating to the 1960s did not want Atlanta problems, or Atlanta transit, or Atlanta people. As a local commissioner once infamously put it, he would stock piranha in the Chattahoochee River that separates Cobb from Atlanta if it were necessary to keep the city out.

The county became a model of the conservative, suburban South, opposed to the kind of federal meddling that integrates schools, or the kind of taxes that fund big infrastructure. And then, this year, after timidly embracing Hillary Clinton in 2016 (she won the area by just two points), Cobb County voted for Joe Biden by 14 percentage points. And Democrats swept the major countywide races.

“It’s been this evolution of Cobb from a white-flight suburb to, now, I went to a Ramadan meal in a gated community in Cobb County that was multiracial,” said Andrea Young, the executive director of the Georgia A.C.L.U., and the daughter of the former Atlanta mayor Andrew Young. “This is the story,” she said, “of Atlanta spilling out into the metro area.”

Around the region, suburban communities that once defined themselves in opposition to Atlanta have increasingly come to resemble it: in demographics, in urban conveniences and challenges, and, finally, in politics. Rather than symbolizing a bulwark against Black political power, these places have become part of a coalition led by Black voters that is large enough to tip statewide races — and that could hand control of the Senate to Democrats next month.\

David Lauter and Jenny Jarvie at LAT:

But while the change in the state’s politics bloomed faster than many expected, its roots are deep, growing out of a generation-long trend of migration back to the South — and to the Atlanta metropolitan region in particular — by hundreds of thousands of Black families.

That reflects a crucial pattern in American politics, said Keneshia Grant, a political scientist at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

“Migration has been especially important to the story of Black participation in American politics,” said Grant, author of a book, “The Great Migration and the Democratic Party,” that traces the significant expansion of Black political influence that came about as a result of the move to Northern cities from the end of World War I through the 1960s.

As that pattern of northward migration began to reverse, Atlanta emerged in the 1990s as the largest destination for Black migration in the country, a trend that accelerated through the early 2000s.

“In the same way that the Great Migration is a long story, this return migration is also a long story,” Grant said. “When you want to understand what’s happening in Georgia in 2020, you have to look at it as the result of something much longer.”

Many factors have gone into the shift of Georgia’s politics, including the intensive voter registration and mobilization campaigns led by Stacey Abrams, the party’s 2018 candidate for governor who is widely expected to run again in 2022. Those campaigns, however, could succeed only because of the underlying changes in the state’s population.

House Elections

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race.   Our next book, title TBA, discusses the 2020 results.

David Wasserman at Cook Political Report:

In 2018, Democrats ran up the score by recruiting political outsiders, especially women with national security backgrounds, to challenge GOP "insiders." And, they won. Meanwhile, of the 29 House Republican freshmen from 2018, only one wasn't a man and only one wasn't white. But Republicans turned the tables in 2020, and it worked.

Of the 13 Republicans who flipped Democratic-held seats in 2020, all were women and/or minorities. Three are of Cuban ancestry, two were born in South Korea and one was born in Ukraine — allowing them to personalize an anti-socialism message. It helped that these candidates didn't look like Trump or GOP leaders, and many (though not all) sounded quite different from Trump too.

All cycle, the NRCC, Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and Rep. Elise Stefanik (NY-21) worked local trenches to clear fields for these recruits and, if necessary, help them get through tough primaries. In the end, women and minorities helped Republicans win six districts Trump failed to carry. 

Wasserman at Cook:

26. Democrats would likely have lost their House majority in 2020 had it not been for lawsuits that overturned GOP-drawn congressional maps prior to 2016 (Florida and Virginia), 2018 (Pennsylvania) and 2020 (North Carolina). The new, court-ordered maps gave Democrats approximately ten more seats than they would have won under the old lines — roughly double Democrats' new House edge.

27. According to FiveThirtyEight's Nathaniel Rakich, there have only been three federal elections in the last century decided by less than 20 votes. This year alone, there may be two such races: Republican Mariannette Miller-Meeks was certified as the winner in Iowa's 2nd CD by six votes, and Republican Claudia Tenney currently holds a lead of 11 votes in New York's 22nd CD.

28. There will be at most 17 congressional districts that split their tickets between the presidential and congressional ballots, the fewest in the past century (there were 35 such districts in 2016 and 83 in 2008).

29. The biggest overperformance of the top of the ticket by a House Democrat was by Rep. Collin Peterson (MN-07), who lost by only 13.6 points despite Biden losing his district by 29.4 points. The biggest overperformance of the top of the ticket by a House Republican was by Rep. John Curtis (UT-03), who won by 41.9 points while Trump won his district by just 25.1 points.

30. The biggest underperformance of the top of the ticket by a House Democrat was by Rep. Ilhan Omar (MN-05), who won by 38.5 points as Biden won the district by 55 points. The biggest underperformance of the top of the ticket by a House Republican was by Rep. Jim Hagedorn (MN-01), who won by 3.1 points as Trump carried the district by 10.1 points.

Greg Giroux at Bloomberg Government:

Kim and Steel will be the only Republican women in the California delegation and are two of the first three Korean-American women ever elected to Congress. They targeted their districts’ large Asian-American constituencies — mostly Chinese, Korean, and Filipino in the 39th, and largely Vietnamese in the 48th.

“Even in a polarized political climate, good candidates with a strong message can win anywhere,” said Sam Oh, vice president of the Republican digital firm Targeted Victory, who was general consultant to the Steel and Kim campaigns. “Michelle Steel and Young Kim are dynamic candidates with deep roots in their communities and with proven records of getting things done and being bipartisan.”

House GOP pickups:#CA21 David Valadao#CA39 Young Kim#CA48 Michelle Park Steel#FL26 Carlos Gimenez#FL27 Maria Elvira Salazar#IA01 Ashley Hinson#MN07 Michelle Fischbach#NM02 Yvette Herrell#NY11 Nicole Malliotakis#OK05 Stephanie Bice#SC01 Nancy Mace#UT04 Burgess Owens

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 21, 2020

This is the closest House election since #IN08's four vote Dem win in 1984. It's also Republicans' 13th pickup of a Dem seat so far (all pickups by GOP women/minorities), and Dems are slated to drop from three seats to just one in Iowa.

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) December 2, 2020

Brindisi takes the unofficial lead w/ more Oneida Co. ballots reviewed, but still a long way to go in #NY22. https://t.co/QrZkpJUVbW

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) December 23, 2020

California House Seats

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race.   Our next book, title TBA, discusses the 2020 results.

Michael Blood at AP:

Biden, despite his dominating win in the state, did not have coattails in key House races.

In the 25th District north of Los Angeles, Republican Rep. Mike Garcia held on for a 333-vote win over Democrat Christy Smith while running as a Trump apostle in a district with a 7.5-point Democratic registration edge. The son of a Mexican immigrant father, the former Navy combat pilot won the seat in a May special election after the resignation of former Democratic Rep. Katie Hill.

In the Central Valley’s heavily Democratic 21st District, Republican David Valadao, a dairy farmer and son of Portuguese immigrants, reclaimed the seat he lost in 2018 to Democratic Rep. TJ Cox. Valadao had endorsed Trump but also emphasized he has broken with the White House, including criticizing the administration for family separations at the border.

Young Kim defeated Democratic Rep. Gil Cisneros in a rematch in the Democratic-leaning 39th District, anchored in Orange County. A former state lawmaker, she was born in South Korea and grew up in Guam.

In the coastal, Republican-leaning 48th District, it appears Board of Supervisors Chairwoman Michelle Steel benefited from unrest over the state’s coronavirus restrictions, an issue she highlighted in her campaign against Democratic Rep. Harley Rouda. Huntington Beach, in the heart of the district, has been a hotbed of opposition to the rules.

Steel and Kim join Washington state’s Marilyn Strickland as the first Korean American women elected to Congress.

Democrats sought to nationalize the races and hitch the GOP House candidates to Trump, while Republicans stressed “issues that people cared about the most, that impacted their daily lives,” said Sam Oh, who helmed winning campaigns for Steel and Kim.

Rose Kapolczynski, a longtime consultant to former Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer, credited Republicans with recruiting able contenders. In Orange County “voters saw a different face to the Republican Party in Steel and Kim,” she said. And it was a different year from 2018, when Trump wasn’t on the ballot and many voters sent a message with their House votes, contributing to the Democratic rout.

NRCC Recruitment: The Iron Law of Emulation

In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race.   Our next book, title TBA, discusses the 2020 results.

House Republicans did a strong job of recruitment.

Li Zhou at Vox:

There’s also a historic number of women of color who’ve been elected to Congress: According to CAWP, newly elected Black women, Latina women, and Asian American and Pacific Islander women all broke records in the House. Some outlets have also noted that Rep. Yvette Herrell — a member of the Cherokee Nation — adds to the number of Native American women in Congress as well, though Herrell has told CAWP that she identifies as white

...

Republican wins this year stood out, especially after the number of GOP women in the House dipped dramatically in 2018. That year, the ranks of Republican women in the lower chamber went from 23 to 13, while Democrats’ grew from 64 to 89. (Republicans will have at least 27 in the new term.)

At the time, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) said that Republicans had reached a “crisis level” of women in the House.

That “crisis” has since spurred more GOP groups — including Stefanik’s Elevate PAC — to boost women candidates, particularly at the primary level where there hasn’t historically been as much support. On the Democratic side, Emily’s List has been integral to backing candidates at the primary stage of the race, and Republican organizations are increasingly working to replicate that model.

This year, that effort ramped up, according to Kodiak Hill-Davis, a founder and political director of Republican Women for Progress, a group dedicated to providing training for GOP candidates. “Without getting these women through the primaries, you can’t get them through the general election,” she told Vox.

A growing number of organizations — including Winning for Women, VIEW Pac, and E-PAC — are among those dedicated to this effort, which includes financial investment and endorsements that highlight women candidates. “In addition to any funding they’ve been able to provide, they also send a signal,” [Rutgers politicsl scientist Kelly] Dittmar said.

In 2019, Bridget Bowman reported at Roll Call:

Indiana Rep. Susan W. Brooks made a point of telling her Republican colleagues this week about several new candidates who are women and people of color.

“It’s important that we, as a conference, do a better job of looking like America, and better representing the very diverse country that we have,” Brooks, the National Republican Congressional Committee’s recruitment chair, told Roll Call after Tuesday’s meeting of the GOP conference.

Brooks said she told lawmakers it was important to recruit a diverse group of challengers for the 2020 election following devastating losses in 2018. She said she is well aware that just 13 of the 197 House Republicans are women and just nine are not white.

In February of this year, Brooks wrote:

That plan started with changing the way our Party recruited candidates.  With help from my fellow Members of Congress serving as Recruitment Captains, we went out looking for candidates who uniquely fit their district, reflect the diversity of America, and can win competitive races.  We didn’t stop because one person announced they were running.  We kept looking for the best candidates in these districts to win in November.  Our Recruitment Captains prioritized creating a Republican conference that better reflects our diverse national Republican Party.

...

With support from Chairman Tom Emmer and others like Congresswoman Elise Stefanik, whose leadership PAC, Elevate-PAC, is designed to help elect Republican women, we are putting ourselves in a position to elect more Republican women to the House of Representatives.  A record 200 women have filed to run for the House this cycle which demolishes the previous record.

Danielle Kurtzleben at NPR:

Stefanik has become the face of efforts to boost Republican women in Congress. She was in charge of recruitment for House Republicans in 2018, an abysmal year for GOP women. Among the 13 women elected to the House from the Republican Party in the midterms, there was just one nonincumbent candidate.

After that, Stefanik clashed with National Republican Congressional Committee chair Tom Emmer over whether the party should do more to boost women in primaries. Emmer told a reporter that would be a "mistake." Stefanik, for her part, focused her energy on building up her leadership PAC, E-PAC.

Her committee promoted more than two dozen candidates and gave $415,000 to Republican women, including Fischbach.

Stefanik credits the candidates with their wins, but she also feels that she played a key role.

"What I believe is different this cycle is I publicly made this a priority for the Republicans I served with in Congress," Stefanik said. "I very publicly said at the end of the midterms in 2018 that we needed to do better."