Presidential and Senatorial Outcomes

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

 Drew DeSilver at Pew:

Now that Democrat Raphael Warnock of Georgia has won the final U.S. Senate race of this year’s midterm cycle, it’s clear that Senate elections continue to be very much in sync with states’ presidential votes.

Warnock’s victory means that only one of this year’s 35 Senate elections didn’t go the same way as the state’s 2020 presidential vote. The exception was Wisconsin, where Republican Sen. Ron Johnson won a third term this year by fewer than 27,000 votes – or 1% of the nearly 2.65 million votes cast – even though Democrat Joe Biden carried the state (by fewer than 21,000 votes) in 2020. Although Wisconsin’s Senate race was the lone exception this year, the midterms did reinforce the Badger State’s especially “swingy” reputation: Simultaneously with Johnson’s victory, Democratic Gov. Tony Evers won a second term by about 90,000 votes, or roughly 3.4 percentage points.

...

One consequence of the increasing alignment between states’ presidential and Senate voting patterns is a decrease in split Senate delegations. In the incoming 118th Congress, just five states will be represented by senators of different parties, the lowest number of split delegations in at least 55 years.

The trend also is similar to the decline of split-ticket voting in House races – that is, voting for a House Democrat and a GOP presidential candidate, or vice versa. That development has contributed to the scarcity of House seats “flipping” from one party to the other: Although redistricting this year makes head-to-head comparisons difficult, only about 16 House seats clearly flipped from one party to the other this year.

Both the decline in split Senate delegations and in split-ticket voting in House races have been driven by the deep antipathy between Democrats and Republicans, on personal characteristics as well as fundamental political values.

D Youth Vote Declines in 2022?

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

Will Weissert and Hannah Fingerhut at AP:

Voters under 30 went 53% for Democratic House candidates compared with only 41% for Republican candidates nationwide, according to AP VoteCast, a sweeping national survey of the electorate. But that level of support for Democrats was down compared with 2020, when such voters supported President Joe Biden over his predecessor, Donald Trump, 61% to 36%. And in 2018, when Democrats used a midterm surge to retake control of the House, voters 18 to 29 went 64% for the party compared with 34% for the GOP.

...

“There might have been retrenchment in youth voters,” said Michael McDonald, a political science professor at the University of Florida and an expert on voting and data.

McDonald cautioned against reading too much into what could be an anomaly. But he said the shift may have been fueled by issues like high inflation, which has hit young people especially hard since their wages are less likely to increase fast enough to keep pace with rising prices.

“Youngest people also have the weakest partisan attachments, so they can be more susceptible to partisan swings nationally,” McDonald said. “There’s no reason why Republicans can’t rebound among younger people.”

Not everybody agrees with the analysis:

 

Exit polls had young voters:
18-29 63-34 +29D
18-44 55-42 +13D

This data is in line with high quality pre-election polls.

The AP VoteCast data (+12D 18-29) is just way off, and should not be taken seriously. https://t.co/wAQMTwAZCF

— Simon Rosenberg (@SimonWDC) December 14, 2022

GOP Won the Aggregate Popular Vote for the House

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

Nate Cohn at NYT:

Here’s a figure about the 2022 midterm elections that might surprise you: Republicans won the national House popular vote by three percentage points — 51 percent to 48 percent. They still won by two points after adjusting for races in which only one major party was on the ballot.

Yes, that’s right: Republicans won the popular vote by a clear if modest margin, even as Democrats gained seats in the Senate and came within thousands of votes of holding the House.

If you’re looking to make sense of the 2022 election, the Republican lead in the national vote might just be the missing piece that helps fit a few odd puzzle pieces together.

The national polls, which showed growing Republican strength over the last month of the campaign, were dead-on. On paper, this ought to have meant a good — if not necessarily great — Republican election year.

...

How did the Democrats survive? Perhaps the simplest explanation: On average, they had better candidates thanks partly, but not completely, to weak Republican nominees.

The “MAGA” Republicans — as characterized by The Cook Political Report, based on their backing from Mr. Trump in the primaries — ran far behind the mainstream Republicans. This alone does a lot to explain the Republican showing in key Senate races in which Mr. Walker, Dr. Oz, J.D. Vance and Blake Masters underperformed or lost.

But as tempting as it might be to assume that “bad Republican” nominees are mainly to blame, strong Democratic candidates probably made a difference, too.

Nationwide, Democratic incumbents enjoyed a modest incumbency advantage of a few percentage points — enough to stay standing in a red tide, even if they might have been submerged in a red wave. Almost by definition, incumbents are relatively good candidates (the bad candidates are less likely to become incumbents, after all), and they often enjoy additional advantages in fund-raising and name recognition.

Similarly, there were not many races where Democrats nominated progressives who might have alienated swing voters. Overall, progressive candidates — as defined again by The Cook Political Report’s primary score card — fared about a point worse than more typical Democrats. But there are few races where moderate Democrats can really argue that progressive nominees cost them victory.

"Marshall Law"

 Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good.  Some Republican leaders -- and a measurable number of rank-and-file voters -- are open to violent rebellion, coups, and secession.

Hunter Walker at TPM:

White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows exchanged text messages with at least 34 Republican members of Congress as they plotted to overturn President Trump’s loss in the 2020 election.

Those messages are being fully, publicly documented here for the first time.

The texts are part of a trove Meadows turned over to the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack that was obtained by TPM. For more information about the story behind the text log and our procedures for publishing the messages, read the introduction to this series. Meadows’ exchanges shed new light on the extent of congressional involvement in Trump’s efforts to spread baseless conspiracy theories about his defeat and his attempts to reverse it. The messages document the role members played in the campaign to subvert the election as it was conceived, built, and reached its violent climax on Jan. 6, 2021. The texts are rife with links to far-right websites, questionable legal theories, violent rhetoric, and advocacy for authoritarian power grabs.

One message identified as coming from Rep. Ralph Norman (R-SC) to Meadows on January 17, 2021, three days before Joe Biden was set to take office, is a raw distillation of the various themes in the congressional correspondence. In the text, despite a typo, Norman seemed to be proposing a dramatic last ditch plan: having Trump impose martial law during his final hours in office.

Mark, in seeing what’s happening so quickly, and reading about the Dominion law suits attempting to stop any meaningful investigation we are at a point of � no return � in saving our Republic !! Our LAST HOPE is invoking Marshall Law!! PLEASE URGE TO PRESIDENT TO DO SO!!

 In April, Jamie Gangel, Jeremy Herb and Elizabeth Stuart reported at CNN:

By January 17, [Marjorie Taylor] Greene was suggesting ways to keep Trump in office, telling Meadows there were several Republicans in Congress who still wanted the then-President to declare martial law, which had been raised in a heated Oval Office meeting a month earlier.

Greene texted: “In our private chat with only Members, several are saying the only way to save our Republic is for Trump to call for Marshall (sic) law. I don’t know on those things. I just wanted you to tell him. They stole this election. We all know. They will destroy our country next. Please tell him to declassify as much as possible so we can go after Biden and anyone else!”

Again, Meadows does not appear to respond.

Freedom Caucus Terms

Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. 

Charlie Mahtesian at Politico:

The letter from HFC Chair SCOTT PERRY (R-Pa.), Republican Reps. CHIP ROY (Texas), DAN BISHOP (N.C.), ANDREW CLYDE (Ga.), PAUL GOSAR (Ariz.) and Reps.-Elect ELI CRANE (Ariz.) and ANDY OGLES (Tenn.) makes several demands of any would-be Republican speaker, including that they:

• Reinstate the “motion to vacate” — basically, allowing any member of the House to force a vote to oust the sitting speaker. The letter notes that the rule was “in place for a reason from 1801 to 2018”;
• Provide the House with 72 hours of notice on every bill and grant members the ability to amend legislative text;
• Promise that Republican leadership and associated outside entities (like the McCarthy-aligned Congressional Leader Fund) will not wade into primaries;
• Give conservatives more representation on so-called “A” committees, including the House Rules panel;
• Use must-pass bills to try to secure a number of policy wins, including: (1) leveraging the annual defense authorization to reinstate service members who were dismissed due to their refusal to get the Covid vaccine, (2) forcing any debt ceiling increase to be accompanied by spending cuts, and (3) requiring the farm bill to include cuts to food stamps.

A reminder:  The seven members on the letter are completely separate from the five other conservatives who have voiced their intention to vote against McCarthy regardless of what assurances he makes. Read the full letter here

The Walker Campaign Autopsies

 Our most recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses state and congressional elections.  In a normal year, Republicans would have regained a majority in the Senate.  But in some places, they threw away seats by running bad candidates. The worst was Herschel Walker in Georgia.  He ended up with 48.6 percent of the vote.  If the Republicans had run a normal candidate (e.g., Doug Collins) or even if Walker had run a normal campaign, the GOP would have taken the seat.

Marc Caputo at NBC reports that Walker's son told the campaign about his unacknowledged children.

By that point, because of the family information provided by the candidate’s son in January, the staff was prepared for questions about Walker’s other children after it had conducted opposition research into him to anticipate future surprises. The “oppo” book, however, didn’t have information about the abortion story, which rocked Walker’s campaign.

The oppo book was also the second dossier made about Walker.

Before Walker announced his candidacy Aug. 25, 2021, he engaged three top political consultants with Georgia roots — Austin Chambers, Paul Bennecke and Nick Ayers, who had served as former Vice President Mike Pence's chief of staff. They promptly hired a law firm to conduct opposition research on Walker. It’s a standard practice on campaigns to do self-research, in order to know everything that could come out about a candidate.

In just two weeks, the firm assembled a 500-page dossier filled with possible business scandals, controversial quotes from Walker and allegations of domestic violence and bizarre behavior, according to four sources who had seen the oppo book.

“We found 500 pages in two weeks on you and God only knows what else is out there,” Chambers told Walker, according to one of the sources who overheard him discuss the book with Walker in a July meeting in the dining room of a Republican donor who lived in Atlanta’s Buckhead district.

Insiders diverge on why the three consultants did not end up working for Walker, but knowledgeable sources say they parted ways.

Natalie Allison at Politico:

Interviews with a dozen campaign staff members and Republican operatives working with the Walker campaign suggest that it wasn’t just the candidate who had flaws — the campaign itself was hampered by poor decision-making.

Some said that Walker and his wife, Julie Blanchard Walker, never fully empowered his team to make decisions, frequently questioning suggestions and plans by veteran campaign operatives. The pair insisted on spending what aides described as an “excessive” amount of time poring over proposals for every campaign stop, bottlenecking planning. That included wanting to spend significant time in heavily Democratic areas to woo Black voters, a problem that worsened in the runoff when staff wanted Walker to focus exclusively on mobilizing Republicans who had just voted for him in the general election.

Staffers said Blanchard Walker even suggested her husband should be winning as much as 50 percent of the Black vote in Georgia, regularly commenting that the campaign needed “to be getting him in front of his people, in front of his community,” as one person working on the campaign recalled.

Roger Sollenberger at The Daily Beast:

Walker wasn’t surprised he had won Johnson County. He won it, in fact, with slightly under 74 percent of the electorate. Walker was instead surprised—“absolutely shocked,” according to a former staffer—that he didn’t win 100 percent of the county. Not only did Walker fall well short of those absurd expectations, Gov. Brian Kemp outperformed him in Johnson County, another fact that infuriated him, three staffers said.

“I’m gonna call the sheriff and have him find out who didn’t vote for me,” Walker said, according to one aide.

 

Consultants and the GOP

 Our recent book is titled Divided We Stand: The 2020 Elections and American Politics.  Among other things, it discusses the state of the parties. The state of the GOP is not good. 

Erick Erickson:

A number of years ago, I noted a connection between various Republican consultants and the incestuous ties within political campaigns. The GOP has a problem with a lot of consultants. They get paid commissions whether a candidate wins or loses. They get commissions from most parts of a campaign business and, interestingly, do not invest in parts that do not pay commissions. It is time for action.

On the consultant front, here in Georgia, it is not just that Raphael Warnock outspent Herschel Walker. It is how Warnock outspent Walker. In 2021, Warnock had over seventy varieties of streaming ads for digital services. The Republicans had two. This time, again, Warnock more precisely targeted various voters online than the GOP did. One will not be surprised to discover how little consultants make off digital advertising.

In 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama brought his consulting team in house, paid them salaries, and gave them benefits. The GOP continued to rely on outside consultants who drew commissions and often worked multiple candidates. Obama hired some of the best and had them totally committed to him. The GOP hired the freelancers who freelanced and made commissions. Obama got better deals because his consultants were in house, not marking up their work for commissions.

There really are no commissions for early voting ground games. The GOP consultants have focused on media ad buys, mail pieces, and not critical operations for vote mobilization. That must change for the GOP to win. Either the consultants need to rethink or the GOP needs better consultants.