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arminthomas
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Boston: Melting Pot or Powder Keg?
The political dynamics in the city of Boston have always been highly dependent on ethnocultural coalitions; Irish vs. English, Catholics vs. Protestants, White vs. Nonwhite. The Hub has been home to countless waves of peoples who were making their first stop in America. But often, increased diversity disrupts a delicate balance struck between Boston’s feuding…
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Media Markets and Gerrymandering
Gerrymandering is one of the most thrown-around words in political discourse. It is applied to every possible concept, regardless of its actual relevance to the topic at hand. Very broadly though, all concepts of the term involve the notion that the playing field is tilted to entrench an advantage for one side, most often with…
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Henry Cuellar: The Last Politiquero
Introduction South Texas’s sharp shift in 2020 to the Republican Party surprised many. This region is dominated by working-class Latinos, many of whom are Catholic, forming an overlap of the Texas Democratic Party’s historically strongest demographics. Even in Republican landslides such as Senator John Cornyn’s 2014 rout of David Alameel, South Texas stuck with the…
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Revisiting Q Scores
A while back, Split Ticket introduced a new metric to quantify the relative conservatism of a political region, as defined by educational, racial, and political statistics. This was dubbed the Q-score, and it had the highest magnitude among populist white working-class areas that used to be swingy or Democratic, such as southern Ohio, eastern Kentucky,…
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Gubernatorial Ratings Update: 6/1
Michigan In a stunning turn of events, the top three candidates for the GOP gubernatorial nomination were kicked off the ballot for signature fraud, leaving Republicans with a splintered field of underwhelming nominees and an upset primary electorate. The chaos surrounding the fracas has deeply angered many Michigan Republicans, and as a result, not one…
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Temperature Check: Colorado
The Colorado Democratic and Republican Parties have now concluded the majority of their pre-primary activities, including county and district caucuses and assemblies. Democrats are looking to extend their dominance in the formerly purple Centennial State, while Republicans are trying to win back some ground. Split Ticket examines the races and makes some early predictions below.…
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Quantifying Conservatism
When Brian Kemp launched his 2018 campaign for governor, his first ad caught everyone’s eye. With promises to “blow up” government spending, a massive truck that he claimed would be used to “round up criminal illegals and take ’em home”, and a gun pointed at his daughter’s boyfriend that “no one [was] taking away”, Kemp’s…
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A New Way to Quantify Political Geography
In redistricting, partisan balance is a central component of debates around the fairness of a map. Those arguing that a map is an unconstitutional gerrymander often point to the partisan balance of the map not matching the state’s, while those defending it often say that the state’s geography is simply not friendly to the opposite…