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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 without meeting or exceeding expectations.… 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 affiliation is not tracked when… 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 his unlikely nomination, fundamentals across… Read more
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2020 House Wins Above Replacement: Quantifying the Impacts of Incumbency and Spending
Editor’s Note: In December 2024, the Split Ticket WAR model received a major methodological upgrade that resulted in WAR score changes. The findings remain directionally the same, but the updated WAR scores are found here. A while back, we debuted a Wins-Above-Replacement model for the US Senate that tried to assess candidate quality through answering the… 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 the then-de facto leader of… 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 outside of the Centennial state,… 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 results have become more indicative… Read more
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The White Vote and Educational Polarization
Over the last 30 years, the American electorate has undergone a major realignment, driven primarily by polarization along educational lines. Degree-holding suburban voters, previously a solidly Republican group, have drifted to the left and towards the Democratic party, while white non-college voters have responded in kind by shifting strongly to the right and swinging Republican… Read more
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Re-evaluating 2016 with our Senate WAR model
Among Democrats, arguably no cycle was greeted with as much hope for the Senate map as the one during the 2016 cycle. At the beginning of it all, strategists across the nation thought the majority was theirs for the taking, and Democrats were salivating at the prospects of unseating incumbent freshmen like Pat Toomey in… Read more
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