Thread by @RachelBitecofer

Nothing against the rest of this article but this claim

"White, suburban women with college degrees fled the party in droves."

This, we have not been able to quantify.

1. We know that white, college educated millennial white women are not becoming Rs like their moms & thus

https://twitter.com/NickBaumann/status/1169947177214521344

the suburbs of America, especially in the South, are becoming more D friendly.

2. We know that in 2018 these voters greatly improved their turnout over the 2014 midterms & 2016 & swung suburb and House seats to the Ds (BTW: I'll soon be adding FL, GA, TX, and AZ to my analysis).

3. We know that some of these non-Republican, white college education women are Democrats, BUT some of them are Indies and some of these Indies voted for the GOP in 2016 but voted for the D House candidates in 2018 (this is @yghitza's "Catalist" study. Keep in mind, this study

also shows strong turnout effects!)

BUT we do not have, as of yet, quantifiable evidence that white, college educated women who were R identifiers have quit the Republican Party "in droves" especially not in the context this author asserts, which is that they are voting for Ds.

We do see some erosion of party identification for Rs during the Trump Era, with corresponding growth in Independents, which tends to happen when a party's brand becomes unpopular. BUT most defectors "lean" towards their former party & behave as "soft" partisans

In 2018, the modal "crossover" vote (Rs voting for the D, Ds voting for the Rs) was NO DIFFERENT than in '16, '14, '12, '10....) You get the point. If there was an R exodus, we would see it clearly in polling data bc in the few places crossover above the normal 10% DOES occur

(WVA, MA, MD) it is obvious in ALL the polling data. Indeed, even a small deviation stands out. One such deviation in '18 is the AZ senate race. It happens more often in state office races (which is why Bevin has better offs of losing in KY than McConnell).

I have been through all the publicly available data for House races in 2018 and I was lucky to be a pollster here in VA where two of the most likely House races to produce significant crossover voting occurred: VA 7 and VA 2. Both candidates ran "Blue Dog" campaigns under the

the belief they would need to attract R voters to win. I was lucky enough to poll each race once, with robust N. And the 7th district poll was spot on. The 2nd district poll has earned the distinction of being the only horse race poll my colleague & I have ever ran that failed to

predict the outcome (it failed badly, as did most polls run there, but at least ours was run in early Oct, so theoretically, the race "changed" after we polled it). In ours, in the NYT-Sienna polls, there is simply no evidence of surplus R crossover in these districts, & the

voter file analysis I'll be releasing confirms that both candidates carried their districts due to turnout surges among Dem voters and Indies, the majority of whose votes they carried.

Of course, we all know Rs who have defected the party over Trump. They exist. But there is no

mass exodus. The other "inconvenient truth" my voter file analysis will demonstrate is that in 2018, R voter turnout was very, very strong. I have recently found out that in FL, R turnout in 2018 was above 80%. That does not sound like an unhappy party w mass exodus in progress.