Lakshya Jain
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Redistricting and Partisan Balance: The New House Map Might Favor Democrats
For long-time watchers of cable news, it’s long been taken as a given that the House of Representatives has a semi-permanent Republican skew due to gerrymandering and geographical bias. Since the emergence of project REDMAP in 2010, in which Republicans crafted gerrymandered maps that drew several red-state Democrats out with surgical levels of precision, the […]
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Moderation and Electoral Overperformance
The oldest debate in electoral politics is between moderation and idealism. Some say that parties need to nominate ideologically-aligned candidates who can fire up the base; in theory, they claim, this would engage more low-propensity voters and drive up turnout, overwhelming the opposition through a surge of new voters. Others claim that the nominee must […]
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Ticket-Splitting Voters Are Disappearing — Which Makes Them Even More Valuable
The following article was written by Split Ticket Partners Lakshya Jain and Harrison Lavelle for The Bulwark on January 25 and is being reposted here with the permission of The Bulwark. On November 4, 2020, Rep. Collin Peterson—the maverick, conservative Democrat from western Minnesota—was nowhere to be found for a post-election interview. In and of […]
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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 […]
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2020 House Wins Above Replacement: Quantifying the Impacts of Incumbency and Spending
A while back, we debuted a Wins-Above-Replacement model for the US Senate that tried to assess candidate quality through answering the following question for each race: Assuming everything else (money, national environment, incumbency, etc) was held constant, what would the expected outcome be if the the matchup was a generic Republican vs a generic Democrat? […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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House Ratings Update: California
With California’s new maps recently being finalized by its redistricting commission, Split Ticket takes a look at the congressional districts that have been rated as competitive in 2022 by either us or the Cook Political Report. As a reminder, a “tossup” rating means a competitive race with no clear advantage to either side at the […]
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Op-Ed: Who Will Bell The Cat?
There once was a colony of mice that was being attacked by a marauding cat. As the cat began to eat more and more and the mice began shrinking in fear, the colony called an emergency meeting to address the situation. All the mice had some ideas on what to do, but nobody could settle […]