Viewing posts under:
Armin Thomas
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Our Initial 2024 Senate Ratings
The upcoming Senate map has been on “borrowed time” for Democrats for almost two decades, but a mix of exceptional candidate quality and excellent environments have kept them afloat for quite some time. In 2006, Democrats defeated six of the so-called “Class I” Republicans, flipping the Senate in a wave fueled by the unpopularity of…
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A Generational Cliff
Split Ticket has devoted significant coverage to the partisanship of young voters. Whether through analyzing individual-level data in voter files or by aggregating and examining exit poll estimates from the last four decades, the story we find remains consistent: young voters are extremely Democratic, and more importantly, ahistorically so. This analysis can be extended to…
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How Successful are House Challengers in Competitive Rematches?
Candidates who lose close House races are often motivated to run again. When they do, their high name recognition, strong fundraising connections, and tested campaign infrastructures tend to give them an advantage over primary opponents. Support from national party committees like the NRCC and DCCC can also be decisive in consolidating would-be crowded primary fields,…
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Analyzing Republican Overperformance in Elections for State Treasurer and Controller
National polling generally suggests that voters trust Republicans more than Democrats when it comes to handling fiscal policy. In the lead-up to the 2022 midterms, pre-election polling from ABC News showed the GOP enjoying a 12-point advantage on the economy, compared to a 12-point deficit on the issue of abortion. More recently, CNN released a…
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Modeling the Modern Era’s Congressional Environments
Last year, Split Ticket reviewed House-level election results for the 2020 and 2022 cycles and developed a metric to quantify what a “generic ballot” election result would have looked like. In such an election, every voter is presented with at least a Republican and a Democrat on the ballot at the House level. While it…
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Our Wisconsin Supreme Court Election Preview
On Tuesday, voters will head to the polls in Wisconsin to choose a new state Supreme Court justice between the Republican-aligned former Supreme Court justice Dan Kelly and the Democratic-aligned judge Janet Protasiewicz for a seat on the state’s Supreme Court. With control of the court on the line and issues such as redistricting, abortion…
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Examining Ross Perot’s Impact on the 1992 Presidential Election Results
Many political scientists now recognize that Ross Perot’s independent candidacy did not spoil the 1992 presidential election for Republican President George H.W. Bush, yet few comprehensive quantitative analyses exist to prove such conventional wisdom correct. While exit polls are by no means perfect measures of electoral preferences, they are often the best resources available for…
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Where Do Democrats Win White Voters?
For decades, column after column has been written on how diverse America has become. From John Judis and Ruy Teixeira’s 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority, to the 2020 election postmortems, analysts have devoted hundreds of thousands of words to the diversification of the American electorate. These statements are not without merit. America is diversifying,…
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Examining California’s “Blueshift”
Many observers falsely assume that California’s electorate gets uniformly bluer between primary and general elections, giving Democratic candidates an edge in competitive races at the congressional and legislative levels. Reality is more complicated than any statewide average admits. Shifts don’t just vary based on political environments; they’re also affected by different demographic and geographic characteristics…
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Montana’s Reservations Lean Blue. They Could Get Bluer.
Introduction Control of the United States Senate may hinge on Montana, where Democratic Senator Jon Tester is set to face what could be his toughest re-election bid. National Republican Senatorial Committee Chairman Steve Daines, a fellow Montanan, is taking the effort to unseat Tester seriously. As Montana voted for Trump by over 15 points in…