The negative partisanship model proved its worth again last night in KY & VA where massive turnout surges powered GOP suburban collapses, leading to an upset of a red state gov & the final transition of the former capital of the Confederacy into a Blue state.
The model has also shown itself adept at identifying high competition contests (PVI wise)where lower college edu rates require Dem campaigns to more heavily juice turnout: and this is exactly why Ds came up short in 3 winnable races in VA senate districts: 7, 8, and 12 
Regular followers will know that I argue the way to "juice turnout" is to adapt GOP campaign tactics of nationalizing the race (make voters w low interest care about the race by getting them to think about it in national (Trump/Pelosi terms) & by structuring your messaging around
making the "stakes" of the election clear. This deals w a sad, but unavoidable fact about the American public: they barely care about national politics so they really, really, really don't care about state & local politics. That's why everytime some pundit trumpets the old
"All Politics is Local" line (which is admitting catchy) I want to punch them in the face (yes, that's negative partisanship). There may have been a time when all politics is local - but it ain't now. Local politics didn't make the off, off year turnout spike 10-15 pts just like
Healthcare didn't make the Midterm turnout do the same last year. Negative partisanship, threat response, & increasingly nationalized elections did. The correlation these days between the potus and congressional vote is like.9. It's actually the opposite: All Politcs Is National
We saw a mixture of strategy in the 7,8, and 12th. In the 12th Rodman closed out by nationalizing the race. The Trump hat mailer pictured above is from the 12th & she ran at least 1 TV ad on a anti Trump theme. In the 7th and 8th I never saw any nationalized or stakes framing.
None of these candidates made gun control a major theme of their campaigns despite high rates of AA populations and massive public support for the issue that is at 80%. Instead, they ran on healthcare- an issue that was salient BEFORE the GOP caved on Medicaid expansion.
Reminder: for communities of color, THE core constituency of the modern Dem coalition - and after young people and Latinos, the group most sensitive to surge and decline in non-presidential elections, tightening VA's wild west gun laws is literally a matter of life & death &
bc of institutionalized racism & byproducts of segregation, their exp w guns is an everyday nightmare, 1 that has been ignored for decades while they attend funeral after funeral. White liberals, esp white liberals running for office in diverse districts would do well to rem that
The combined power of party ID (including for Independent leaners) & knowledge of the voting habits of demographic groups (including those in the process of realignment: working class whites are moving right, college edu whites are moving left) make it possible for me to ID the
2020 "true hot spots and anticipate how they are likely to break based on hypothetical turnout scenarios. The scenario my model assumes is a high turnout scenario. It assumed it while in the womb in '17 in VA & it manifested. I built my 1st model w it as an assumption in '18 & it
Manifested. And it assumed high turnout in VA in '19- only to see my top goal post of 40% probably be proven too modest. You can see what the model has to say about 2020 here. cnu.edu/wasoncenter/
In a few weeks I'll be making some updates to the forecast, including adding some statistical bells & whistles from feedback I got at APSA and launching it off a new website-which will house all my future work in 1 place. I also have a few new pieces coming now that the election
Is out of the way. If you've read this thread all the way through (and you're not Elliott;) it probably means you're a fan of my work - please help spread the word! My followers are like family to me & w/o y'all I'd still be yelling into the vortex- ❤️❤️❤️❤️
