Category: Modeling
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Do Special Elections Mean Anything?
One of the biggest open questions is why recent Democratic special election performances continue to paint a completely different electoral picture than what current polling suggests. Polls continue to show an effectively tied race between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and Biden’s approval remains stuck in the low 40s. On… Read More
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Presidential Elections And The Economy
Historically, voters have punished or rewarded presidents at the polls for their perceived handling of the nation’s economy — Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Ronald Reagan in 1984 are two excellent examples of this effect from both ends of the spectrum. While this sentiment has arguably been misplaced at times,… Read More
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The Electoral Impact of Election Denial
With few exceptions, majorities in both parties have historically accepted presidential election results. But that changed in the 2020 Presidential election cycle, when President Trump claimed the election would be stolen amid ballot counting delays. His conspiracy theories reduced Republican confidence in American elections to historic lows and led 147… Read More
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A Generational Cliff
Split Ticket has devoted significant coverage to the partisanship of young voters. Whether through analyzing individual-level data in voter files or by aggregating and examining exit poll estimates from the last four decades, the story we find remains consistent: young voters are extremely Democratic, and more importantly, ahistorically so. This… Read More
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The Libertarian Effect
Because American politics is dominated by a two-party system composed of Democrats and Republicans, it’s hardly a surprise that observers tend to neglect Libertarian candidates. After all, minor-party contenders usually raise little money and win very few votes, causing them to have insignificant impacts on general election outcomes. Sometimes, however,… Read More
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Modeling the Modern Era’s Congressional Environments
Last year, Split Ticket reviewed House-level election results for the 2020 and 2022 cycles and developed a metric to quantify what a “generic ballot” election result would have looked like. In such an election, every voter is presented with at least a Republican and a Democrat on the ballot at… Read More
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Our Wisconsin Supreme Court Election Preview
On Tuesday, voters will head to the polls in Wisconsin to choose a new state Supreme Court justice between the Republican-aligned former Supreme Court justice Dan Kelly and the Democratic-aligned judge Janet Protasiewicz for a seat on the state’s Supreme Court. With control of the court on the line and… Read More
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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… Read More
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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… Read More