Category: Modeling
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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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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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Just how intertwined are Presidential and Senate results?
Introduction As any election observer will know, ‘split ticket’ voting is becoming an increasingly rare phenomenon in Presidential years. Fewer and fewer states opt to back different parties for President and Senate with each passing cycle, increasing cohesion between federal races. (Gubernatorial contests have more variance owing to their non-federalized nature, but are few and […]