R House Victories and Ticket Splitting

 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 biggest upset of the election was the House GOP's seat gain in the face of expectations that it would lose seats.

Josh Kraushaar at National Journal:

There were three major groups of contests where ticket-splitting took place: 1) Races where the incumbent lawmaker had a well-defined record of bipartisanship; 2) races where the challenger was either ideologically extreme or ethically tainted; 3) races where the challenger’s political biography was unique enough to persuade a critical constituency to back them despite deepening partisanship.

Nebraska’s 2nd District race is a textbook example of a perfect political storm on all fronts. The Omaha-area district wasn’t just home to a competitive House race, but it also allocated a pivotal Electoral College vote to the presidential winner. Biden dominated in the district, winning by a seven-point margin in a district that Trump carried by two points in 2016. It featured the biggest pro-Biden swing of any targeted presidential state or district in the entire country.

But even as the district turned blue, Republican Rep. Don Bacon won re-election by a larger margin than in his last election. He even faced the same opponent, Democrat Kara Eastman, an outspoken progressive who received significant financial support from the national party in her comeback bid, but badly underachieved expectations. Republicans won over those Joe Biden supporters with an effective ad campaign that contrasted Biden’s more-moderate positions on issues like Medicare for All with Eastman’s progressive postures. One memorable ad from the National Republican Congressional Committee featured an Eastman lookalike sitting at her desk with Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez bobblehead dolls prominently featured.

But Bacon didn’t just benefit from Eastman’s left-wing record. He also positioned himself as a bipartisan problem solver, and won a critical endorsement from the district’s last Democratic congressman Brad Ashford (whom Bacon defeated in 2016). That double-whammy of an incumbent’s bipartisanship and an opponent’s ideological extremism was crystal clear from the election results.

Historical Context of the 2020 Election

In Defying the Odds, we discuss the 2016 campaign. Our next book (title TBA) discusses 2020.

Historical Context:

• Biden's raw popular vote total (78 million as of today) was the largest in history.
• Biden's popular-vote percentage (50.9 percent as of today) was the highest for a challenger since FDR in 1932.  
• Biden won a larger percentage than Trump in 2016, Bush in 2004 or 2000, Clinton in 1996 or 1992, Reagan in 1980, Carter in 1976, Nixon in 1968, Kennedy in 1960, or Truman in 1948.
• Biden was the first challenger to defeat an incumbent since Bill Clinton beat George H.W. Bush in 1992.
• Trump was the first president since Benjamin Harrison in 1892 to lose popular vote twice in successive election cycles.

 Louis Jacobson at PolitiFact:

If, as expected, Biden is certified the winner in Arizona and Georgia, and if President Donald Trump is certified the winner in North Carolina, then Biden’s Electoral College victory will be exactly the same as Trump’s in 2016: They both will have won states totaling 306 electoral votes.

Four years ago, Trump declared this number of electoral votes to be "a massive landslide." We rated that False, noting that 306 electoral votes ranks no better than the bottom quarter of Electoral College showings in American history, and no better than the bottom one-third of the showings since the end of World War II.

This means it would be equally inaccurate to claim that Biden’s win was a "massive landslide" in the electoral college.

However, the more restrained characterization by former President Barack Obama — that Biden’s victory was "decisive" — is well-supported.

Biden’s electoral vote total, like Trump’s, "was on the low side," said John J. Pitney Jr., a Claremont McKenna College political scientist. "The big difference, of course, is that Trump lost the popular vote. Biden is winning a majority of the popular vote, and by a healthy margin."

...

Biden’s achievement is especially notable since it occurred during a period known for high partisan polarization, experts say.

...

As of Nov. 13, Biden was leading in the popular vote tally by 5.37 million votes, according to the Cook Political Report's 2020 National Popular Vote Tracker. This number will probably expand, since late-counted votes in such solidly blue states as California and New York are expected to bolster Biden’s count more than Trump’s.

Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist, said Biden’s national popular vote edge could eventually reach 7 million votes.

Even before any of these late-counted votes are added to his tally, Biden has amassed a wider popular vote margin than any candidate since 1996 except for Obama in 2008, who won by more than 9.5 million votes. 

Legislatures

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.

Russell Berman at The Atlantic:

Jessica Post ... now runs the DLCC and helped the committee raise a record $50 million to spend on legislative races this year. But Election Night 2020 was another disappointment: Democrats whiffed in their bid to flip a single state legislative chamber and lost the majorities they gained in 2018 in New Hampshire. The biggest prize they lost was Texas, where the party needed nine seats to win the state House after making inroads two years ago; Democrats likely failed to gain a single seat.

“It turned out we hit a different electorate than everyone was expecting,” Post told me in an interview last week. Democratic strategists initially pointed to two main factors behind the losses: the surge of turnout among Trump’s base that public and private polling failed to capture, and the pandemic, which might have had a disproportionate impact on down-ballot Democratic campaigns.

Post said the DLCC saw evidence that the races were tightening in the final days and sent money to fortify incumbents in places such as Minnesota, where Democrats thought they had the best chance of flipping the state Senate and securing control of both the legislature and the governorship. But it was not until Post saw the long lines of Election Day voters in Republican areas that she realized the party’s assumptions about turnout were woefully off. “It’s not just Democrats who were turning out,” Post thought. The supersize showing by Trump’s base was particularly damaging in key state legislative races because the Democrats’ path to majorities ran through districts that Republicans had gerrymandered to their advantage.

... 

In no state was the outcome more disappointing for Democrats than Texas, which they had made a presidential battleground for the first time in decades only to see Biden lose by nearly six points. After picking up 12 seats in the state House in 2018, Democrats could not make a dent in the nine more they needed to capture the majority. “We’ll do some soul-searching,” a Texas Democratic strategist told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity to candidly assess the party’s performance. “Republicans were definitely better organized than they were in 2018.” The strategist said Democrats might have “overhyped” the party’s chances, but the promotion was necessary to draw donor money to such an expensive state. The strategist also said that Biden’s comments in the second presidential debate about transitioning “away from the oil industry” hurt Democrats in the Rio Grande Valley.

While the coronavirus pandemic did not stop voters from turning out in record numbers across the country, Democrats believe that it did hamper them in down-ballot races, where in-person campaigning is equally if not more important than TV ads. And just as at the presidential level, Democratic candidates were much more likely than Republicans to curtail their canvassing in the interest of public health and safety. “The candidate that knocks on more doors in a state legislative race is going to outperform the district,” says Daniel Squadron, a former Democratic state senator from New York who in 2018 founded the Future Now Fund to help the party flip legislative chambers across the country. “We’ve never before had a scenario where one party did it and the other party didn’t.”

 Lou Jacobson at US News:

So what happened? As the congressional results have shown, the GOP consistently managed to hold its own further down the ballot even as Biden ousted President Donald Trump. Put simply, it was a Biden victory without coattails.

In Pennsylvania, a state Biden is on his way to winning, the Democrat had advantages, but "there were simply no real signs that 2020 would be a wave election in the state," says Christopher Borick, a Muhlenberg College political scientist. "Ultimately, the Democrats made marginal, yet impactful, gains to flip the presidential race, while Republicans nudged a few seats their way."

Much the same occurred in Wisconsin, says University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Barry Burden.

"Biden won the state by a narrow margin and only shifted the vote about a point and a half from 2016," Burden says. "Such a small change did not produce significant shifts in the state legislature, where districts have been drawn to prevent it from responding to movement in the popular vote."

Wisconsin's district lines from 2010 aren't the only ones that have held up remarkably well for the GOP majorities that drew them.

Favorable district lines also helped Republicans keep their majorities in North Carolina, a state that Trump appears to be on his way to winning narrowly.

"Despite a court-ordered mid-decade redistricting, the new legislative districts were not particularly favorable to the Democrats," says Christopher A. Cooper, a political scientist at Western Carolina University. "Republicans won 51.6% of the vote in the House, but they will hold 56% of the seats."

Another challenge for Democrats: A growing urban-rural divide. In many key states, Democrats had to protect long-serving incumbents from rural districts. Yet Democrats had also made such significant gains in suburban districts in 2018 that they ended up harvesting much of the low-hanging fruit that year.

"Democrats were counting on the blue wave of 2018 that swept them into control of the Minnesota House of Representatives to do the same with the Minnesota Senate in 2020," says David Schultz, a professor of politics and law at Hamline University. "However, there really were no more than eight or nine potentially competitive seats in the Senate out of 67. The Democrats already controlled most of the ones they could pick up."

House GOP's Pretty Good Election

 

 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.

From NRCC: 

Republicans won 28 of the 29 most competitive House races as projected by Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight.

From Day One of this cycle, Chairman Emmer made it a priority to recruit the most diverse slateof candidates ever, and now, Republicans are welcoming a record-breaking new member class.Every House Republican candidate who flipped a Democrat-held seat is a woman, a minority,and/or a veteran.Thus far, 13 new Republican women are joining the House Republican Conference next year –breaking the record of nine new women set in 2010. Moreover, six new minorities and 11 newveterans will join House Republicans.Chairman Emmer also established from the outset of this cycle that this election would be achoice between Republicans’ message of freedom versus Democrats’ radical socialist agenda.The results speak for themselves as Democrats failed to have an answer for their socialist agenda. Soon-to-be former Congresswomen Donna Shalala and Debbie Mucarsel-Powellspecifically cited the NRCC’s message tying them to socialism as the reason they lost.

Ally Mutnick at Politico:

But the most shocking results available thus far make it clear that Trump did far better than polling indicated he would in many suburban battlegrounds, and in others Republican congressional candidates may have benefited from ticket-splitters. Overall, it looks like 2018 was a high-water mark for Democrats — a wave that crested and fell.

Democrats' unexpected losses ranged from districts in Florida and Texas where sliding Latino support proved costly, blue-trending suburbs where affluent voters split their tickets and rural seats in which Trump's GOP roared back last week. In the end, Democrats could end up losing around 10 seats, depending on the final counts in the more than a dozen races yet to be resolved.

 

Fraud?

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's dishonesty and his record of disregarding the rule of law.  His legal challenges to the election of Joseph Biden have toggled between appalling and farcical.

Nick Corasaniti, Reid J. Epstein and Jim Rutenberg at NYT:

 Election officials in dozens of states representing both political parties said that there was no evidence that fraud or other irregularities played a role in the outcome of the presidential race, amounting to a forceful rebuke of President Trump’s portrait of a fraudulent election.

Over the last several days, the president, members of his administration, congressional Republicans and right wing allies have put forth the false claim that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump and have refused to accept results that showed Joseph R. Biden Jr. as the winner.

But top election officials across the country said in interviews and statements that the process had been a remarkable success despite record turnout and the complications of a dangerous pandemic.

“There’s a great human capacity for inventing things that aren’t true about elections,” said Frank LaRose, a Republican who serves as Ohio’s secretary of state. “The conspiracy theories and rumors and all those things run rampant. For some reason, elections breed that type of mythology.” 

Shawn Boburg and  Jacob Bogage at WP:

A Pennsylvania postal worker whose claims have been cited by top Republicans as potential evidence of widespread voting irregularities admitted to U.S. Postal Service investigators that he fabricated the allegations, according to three officials briefed on the investigation and a statement from a House congressional committee.

Richard Hopkins’s claim that a postmaster in Erie, Pa., instructed postal workers to backdate ballots mailed after Election Day was cited by Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) in a letter to the Justice Department calling for a federal investigation. Attorney General William P. Barr subsequently authorized federal prosecutors to open probes into credible allegations of voting irregularities and fraud before results are certified, a reversal of long-standing Justice Department policy.

But on Monday, Hopkins, 32, told investigators from the U.S. Postal Service’s Office of Inspector General that the allegations were not true, and he signed an affidavit recanting his claims, according to officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe an ongoing investigation. Democrats on the House Oversight Committee tweeted late Tuesday that the “whistleblower completely RECANTED.” 

A Pennsylvania judge asked a Republican lawyer whether he was alleging any fraud.

His answer, in direct contradiction of @realDonaldTrump: “at present, no.” pic.twitter.com/nUxMt6W0bB

— Jessica Silver-Greenberg 🕵🏻‍♀️ (@jbsgreenberg) November 11, 2020

 

 Rich Galen at Mullings:

If any of them have evidence of a crime, then let them state that evidence in front of a Federal Officer.

Let's see if their phony charges trip off the tongue as easily when they're staring down the barrel of a potential crime known in these parts as a "1001 violation."

Section 1001 of the U.S. Code states in part:
"Whoever, in any matter within the jurisdiction of the executive, legislative, or judicial branch of the Government of the United States, knowingly and willfully-
falsifies, conceals, or covers up by any trick, scheme, or device a material fact; [or] makes any materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent statement or representation …shall be fined under this title, imprisoned not more than 5 years…"

Five years, Mrs. Bueller.

Pending that, let every reporter covering those clowns ask, "Would you be willing to state your claim before an FBI Special Agent?" and watch them scuttle for cover like the anti-democratic roaches they are. 

The Georgia GOP congressional delegation misspelled “Georgia” in their letter alleging massive vote fraud in the election in Georgia. pic.twitter.com/4PT5kYsFzD

— Matthew Yglesias 🍦 (@mattyglesias) November 10, 2020

 

The Georgia GOP congressional delegation misspelled “Georgia” in their letter alleging massive vote fraud in the election in Georgia. pic.twitter.com/4PT5kYsFzD

— Matthew Yglesias 🍦 (@mattyglesias) November 10, 2020

Trump Legal

In Defying the Odds, we discuss Trump's dishonesty and his record of disregarding the rule of law.  His legal challenges to the election of Joseph Biden have toggled between appalling and farcical.

Trump's campaign has spent much of the past week in court with little success, and without presenting anything close to evidence that points to a fraudulent result.

Here's a breakdown of the litigation the campaign has filed:https://t.co/WwIpypEBIB

— NPR (@NPR) November 10, 2020

Jeremy Roebuck, Maddie Hanna and Oona Goodin-Smith at The Philadelphia Inquirer:

What began five years ago with the made-for-TV announcement of Donald Trump’s presidential ambitions from the escalator of his ritzy Manhattan high-rise ended Saturday with his aging lawyer shouting conspiracy theories and vowing lawsuits in a Northeast Philadelphia parking lot, near a sex shop and a crematorium.

In hindsight, the hastily arranged news conference featuring Rudy Giuliani, the president’s personal lawyer, just minutes after Joe Biden had been declared the victor of the 2020 race, delivered a fitting end to a campaign that had been at times characterized by its slapdash techniques.

But the question of how a landscaping company in Holmesburg became the backdrop for what could have been one of the Trump team’s last public gasps in its bid to reverse the results quickly captured the public’s imagination.

It started Saturday morning, with a presidential tweet that, as has often happened during the last four years, Trump’s advisers quickly scrambled to correct.

Trump announced: “Lawyers News Conference Four Seasons, Philadelphia, 11 a.m.,” only to delete his post minutes later and replace it with one changing the venue from the upscale Center City hotel to a similarly named business: Four Seasons Total Landscaping on industrial State Road, next to Fantasy Island Adult Books and Novelties and across the street from the Delaware Valley Cremation Center.

Matt Friedman at Politico:

The first person Rudy Giuliani, the attorney for President Donald Trump, called up as a witness to baseless allegations of vote counting shenanigans in Philadelphia during a press conference last week is a sex offender who for years has been a perennial candidate in New Jersey.

Adam Klasfeld at Law and Crime:

Over the weekend, the Trump campaign promised major revelations in their legal efforts to change the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, but their lawyers stumbled out of the gate on Monday morning.

The Trump lawyers submitted a “defective” appeal of a Michigan judge’s ruling that dismissed their lawsuit. The judge found last week that the lawsuit contained “inadmissible hearsay within hearsay.”

“I regret to inform you that your submission is defective,” the Trump campaign was informed in a one-page letter, alerting them that their lawyers forgot to attach a copy of the judgment and the underlying evidence.

Jennifer Rodgers, a former federal prosecutor and CNN analyst, called the mix-up an “embarrassing error but pretty minor.”

“Lawyers have paralegals and junior lawyers make filings all the time so these things happen,” Rodgers told Law&Crime in a text message. “But of course the broader point is this is not a sophisticated legal team the way you would expect from a presidential campaign. Long ago Trump ran through the top notch lawyers willing to work for him, so he’s working with lower-tier representation for sure.”

The technical error by the campaign’s attorney Thor Hearne marked an anti-climactic opening shot of a quixotic effort to prevent Joe Biden from assuming the office of the presidency on Inauguration Day.

It also represented a strained effort to a revive a legal action based on testimony by what poll watcher Jessica Connarn claims to have heard from an unidentified person who repeated a rumor and passed her a note.

“‘I heard someone else say something,’” Michigan Judge Cynthia Stephens said on Thursday, summing up Connarn’s affidavit. “Tell me how that is not hearsay. Come on now!”

Dartunorro Clark and Ken Dilanian at NBC:

The head of the branch of the Justice Department that prosecutes election crimes resigned Monday hours after Attorney General William Barr issued a memo to federal prosecutors authorizing them to investigate “specific allegations” of voter fraud before the results of the presidential race are certified.

Richard Pilger, who was director of the Election Crimes Branch of the DOJ, sent a memo to colleagues that suggested his resignation was linked to Barr’s memo, which was issued as the president’s legal team mount baseless legal challenges to the election results, alleging widespread voter fraud cost him the race.

“Having familiarized myself with the new policy and its ramifications, and in accord with the best tradition of the John C. Keeney Award for Exceptional Integrity and Professionalism (my most cherished Departmental recognition), I must regretfully resign from my role as Director of the Election Crimes Branch,” Pilger’s letter said, according to a copy obtained by NBC News.

“I have enjoyed very much working with you for over a decade to aggressively and diligently enforce federal criminal election law, policy, and practice without partisan fear or favor. I thank you for your support in that effort.”

Jessica Silver-Greenberg, Rachel Abrams and David Enrich at NYT:

Some senior lawyers at Jones Day, one of the country’s largest law firms, are worried that it is advancing arguments that lack evidence and may be helping Mr. Trump and his allies undermine the integrity of American elections, according to interviews with nine partners and associates, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect their jobs.

At another large firm, Porter Wright Morris & Arthur, based in Columbus, Ohio, lawyers have held internal meetings to voice similar concerns about their firm’s election-related work for Mr. Trump and the Republican Party, according to people at the firm. At least one lawyer quit in protest.

Hispanic Support for Trump in Texas

In Defying the Odds, we talk about the social and economic divides that enabled Trump to enter the White House. In our next book (title TBA), we discuss how these divides played out in 2020.

Elizabeth Pindell at WSJ:

President Trump drew more votes in majority-Latino counties on the Texas-Mexico border than four years ago.

Though Mr. Biden prevailed, the falloff of support in a historically loyal but socially conservative region signals trouble for a Democratic Party seeking to hold together a broad voter constituency. Many counties in this stretch of South Texas are more than 90% Hispanic and traditionally the state’s bluest—unlike Florida, where there are many more Republican-leaning Latinos. It is a place that Democrats counted on, and, according to residents here, didn’t understand enough to see what was coming.

Gilberto Hinojosa, chairman of the Texas Democratic Party and resident of the Rio Grande Valley, said the group was trying to figure out exactly what happened. What seems likely, he said, was that Democrats didn’t counter Republican messaging on three issues important to Latino voters: pandemic shutdowns, oil jobs and abortion.

Aside from Mexican heritage and Spanish surnames, much of the Rio Grande Valley has more demographic similarities with some Trump strongholds in white rural communities than the nation’s urban areas. Many South Texans live in communities with lower-income and lower-education rates. In Starr County, just over half of its 65,600 residents graduated high school, and the unemployment rate of 18.5% is the highest in Texas. The region is ethnically homogenous, rural in parts, deeply religious, intensely patriotic, socially conservative and hurting economically.

“There’s a lot of parallels between a community that’s 96% Hispanic and a community that’s 96% white,” said Freddy Guerra, a former mayor of nearby Roma. “Racism is not something that people deal with in Starr County because everybody’s brown. Climate change isn’t something they feel. They prefer bread on the table.”

...

The president’s border wall expansion is deeply unpopular in the region, but some local Trump supporters said it didn’t matter as much as other issues because he had only small success adding sections in South Texas. Mrs. Lazo shrugged off Mr. Trump’s often-derogatory comments about Mexicans and his hard-line border policies. “I’m Hispanic,” she said, “but I’m American.”