Month: January 2022
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Ticket-Splitting Voters Are Disappearing — Which Makes Them Even More Valuable
The following article was written by Split Ticket Partners Lakshya Jain and Harrison Lavelle for The Bulwark on January 25 and is being reposted here with the permission of The Bulwark. On November 4, 2020, Rep. Collin Peterson—the maverick, conservative Democrat from western Minnesota—was nowhere to be found for a… Read More
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Biggest House Underperformances of 2020
Introduction When pundits look back on past House cycles, they often pass ex post facto judgement on campaign outcomes and candidate quality. Overperforming incumbents and successful challengers, especially those scoring unexpected victories, are lauded and heralded as models for electoral success. But what about the underperformers? The hopefuls that win… Read More
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Vaccines and Partisanship
Much has been written about vaccine polarization in the United States and how Republicans, in particular, are driving vaccine hesitancy. This is a tricky concept to measure — we do not have joint data on vaccine uptake and voting (i.e., the number of vaccinated Democrats and vaccinated Republicans), as party… Read More
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The Trump Endorsement: An Analysis
Introduction Over the course of the 2016 primary season, businessman and reality TV star Donald J. Trump took the GOP by storm. His enigmatic rise allowed him to triumph over more than a dozen experienced elected office holders and party luminaries that most pundits considered significantly stronger than him. After… Read More
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2020 House Wins Above Replacement: Quantifying the Impacts of Incumbency and Spending
A while back, we debuted a Wins-Above-Replacement model for the US Senate that tried to assess candidate quality through answering the following question for each race: Assuming everything else (money, national environment, incumbency, etc) was held constant, what would the expected outcome be if the the matchup was a generic… Read More
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Impeachment Republicans: Where are they now?
Intro Recently, one of our readers suggested that we revisit the ten House Republicans who broke with their party to vote in favor of President Donald Trump’s second impeachment in 2021. Despite the possibility of electoral retribution, all of these members decided to place convictions above ambition by voting against… Read More
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The GOP Civil War Comes to Colorado
On January 5, Colorado State Sen. Don Coram (R-Montrose) announced he would mount a primary challenge to incumbent U.S. Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Silt). A deal-making Republican with a bipartisan temperament, he has garnered respect from numerous Democrats, Republicans, and independents clued into Colorado politics. Considering Boebert’s polarizing status inside and… Read More
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House Crossover Voting: 2020
Intro When we last looked at different partisan outcomes resulting from split-ticket voting, the Senate was our focus. To yield a worthwhile R2 value we compared Republican vote share between Presidential and Senate candidates. (Analyzing margin alone can be deceiving) The mathematical conclusion derived from our findings was clear: top-line… Read More