Viewing posts under:
Lakshya Jain
-
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,…
-
How Do Young Independents Vote?
In August of 2022, we published an analysis on the partisan affiliation of young voters. Our conclusion was that we were currently in the largest period of sustained age polarization in recent American political history, and that the extreme Democratic lean of young voters was a historical abnormality. But there’s something that we think is…
-
Can Southern Democrats Thread The Electoral Needle Again?
With the 2023 gubernatorial election cycle now kicking into full swing, Split Ticket is previewing and rating each election. We’ve already broken down the Kentucky gubernatorial race in a previous article, but today, we’ll be finishing off the set by discussing Mississippi and Louisiana. Mississippi If a poster child existed for “unpopular incumbent governor embroiled…
-
Primary Recap: Wisconsin
Primary Recap Wisconsin voters decided the first round of this year’s nonpartisan state Supreme Court election on Tuesday. Judges Janet Protasiewicz (a liberal) and Dan Kelly (a conservative) will advance to a hotly-contested April general election in one of the nation’s top swing states. Although Wisconsin Supreme Court candidates have no formal partisan affiliations, coalitions…
-
Another State Supreme Court Battle Brews In Wisconsin
Introduction Few states are as politically divided as Wisconsin, which voted for former President Trump in 2016 by a mere 23,000 votes, and for President Biden in 2020 by an even narrower 20-thousand vote margin. Federally, Wisconsin is one of just a handful of states that elected a bipartisan senate duo to Washington. In the…
-
How Has The US Senate Managed To Stay Competitive?
The 2024 Senate map is conventionally challenging for Democrats. Republicans need just two seats to flip the chamber, while Democrats must defend 23. Eight of the states that they are defending were more Republican than the nation in 2020 and three (Montana, West Virginia, and Ohio) backed President Trump twice while voting more than ten…
-
Did Refusing The COVID-19 Vaccine Cost The GOP Any Elections?
Vaccination has historically not been something that diverges along partisan lines in the United States. Until recently, both parties showed roughly equal rates of vaccine enthusiasm and skepticism alike, and Donald Trump’s administration was actually the one that launched Operation Warp Speed, which led to the rapid development of the extremely effective mRNA vaccines that…
-
Our 2022 Senate Wins Above Replacement Model
During the course of our 2022 postmortems, we at Split Ticket have already quantified the importance of candidate quality in the House of Representatives elections. Today, we extend our model to the 2022 US Senate elections, where the disparities in candidate strength were even more striking. The story of how the Democrats kept the Senate…
-
Electability, Ideology, and the 2022 Midterms
At Split Ticket, we have repeatedly proven that candidate-driven effects fundamentally impact election results, but we have not completely addressed a more controversial question: do ideologically-extreme candidates pay electoral penalties? Previous analysis on the correlation between moderation and overperformance suggests that they do. Today’s piece hints at a more profound claim: electability was a bigger…
-
Introducing Split Ticket’s Congressional Voting Index (CVI)
INTRODUCTION Split Ticket’s new Congressional Voting Index (CVI) gauges each House district’s partisan lean. In contrast to counterparts like Cook PVI, our CVI uses a unique methodology that makes it more representative of the current electoral climate. This tool will improve our 2024 House ratings by shedding light on how seats may be expected to…