Lakshya Jain
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What’s Next: Split Ticket Partners With The Argument
If you happen to be following us on Twitter, you probably already know the big news: we’ve agreed on an exclusive partnership with The Argument. While Split Ticket and its website will still continue to exist as normal, we will be publishing the bulk of our analysis there for the… Read More
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Deconstructing WAR
For years, we’ve talked about candidate quality at Split Ticket, and about the inferences we draw from our modeling. Broadly, these are conclusions that are in step with what most political professionals and survey practitioners alike express: moderates generally tend to do better, and that gender and race don’t strongly… Read More
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The Real Reason Democrats Can’t Compete For 60 Senate Seats
It’s no secret that the Senate is an extraordinarily difficult and uphill challenge for Democrats — in order to win the chamber in 2026, the party will likely need to flip at least two of Texas, Ohio, Iowa and Florida. Meanwhile, their hopes of competing in 60 seats, like they… Read More
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How Democrats Won Wisconsin In 2025: Turnout.
If you looked at the landslide Democratic victory in the state Supreme Court election in Wisconsin, you might think that public opinion had swung sharply and massively against Donald Trump and the GOP, despite Elon Musk’s eight-figure investment in the state. But while persuasion certainly explains part of the victory,… Read More
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Wisconsin Republicans Have An Off-Year Turnout Problem
On Tuesday, Wisconsin voters will elect a Supreme Court justice in an election that could decide the ideological balance of the court until 2028. Although we will not be releasing a model for this race, the early vote data we have extensively analyzed and modeled suggests Democratic-aligned liberal judge Susan… Read More
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Are Moderates More Electable?
Recently, a study from Stanford’s Adam Bonica came out, suggesting that moderation generally has little to do with electability, and that parties should seek to appeal to their base voters first and foremost in order to win elections. I have a lot of respect for Adam, and I won’t cast… Read More
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Democrats May Risk Their Own Tea Party Moment
For keen political observers, the most surprising thing about Donald Trump’s second term probably isn’t the slew of executive orders, the abrupt foreign policy pivots, or even the integration of Elon Musk in government. Instead, to many, it’s how relatively quiet Democrats have been in organizing public opposition. There are… Read More
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An Update To Our Historical Wins-Above-Replacement (WAR) Models
Over the last several years, we’ve devoted hundreds (if not thousands) of hours to quantitatively modeling candidate quality and creating robust baselines to assess candidate performance via our Wins Above Replacement (WAR) models. This is because we want to have hard numbers underpinning our discussions, especially given that candidate quality… Read More
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Our 2024 Wins Above Replacement (WAR) Models
Today, we’re releasing our 2024 Wins Above Replacement (WAR) candidate quality models, for both the House and the Senate. For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, here’s a brief primer: our models assemble a “fundamentals”-based outcome estimate for a race by controlling for seat partisanship, incumbency, demographics, and money… Read More