Viewing posts under:
Lakshya Jain
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Is Electability Real?
One of the biggest flashpoints in the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries was the notion of electability. Candidate after candidate was assessed by primary voters on the basis of who would be most likely to win the general election against Donald Trump, and entire campaigns floundered or surged around their answers to the question. Critics of…
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Our 2018 House Wins-Above-Replacement Model, and the 2022 Implications
In today’s era of hyperpolarization, the single most accurate predictor of a district’s congressional vote is the presidential lean of the seat. As we previously analyzed here at Split Ticket, 97% of a district’s 2020 congressional vote could be explained simply by its presidential lean that year. With this in mind, it is likely that…
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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…
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2022 Governor Rating Updates: Texas
When we debuted our governor ratings for Split Ticket, we had initially earmarked the Texas gubernatorial race, rapidly shaping up as a showdown between incumbent Republican Greg Abbott and former Congressman Beto O’Rourke, as one to watch. Early on, there were key points of concern for Republicans, ranging from a plausible primary challenge from Abbott’s…
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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?…