One of the strangest parts about the Texas suit is that it originates in Texas. If there's any state GOP that ought to intuit that the election result is entirely sound, it's probably the Texas GOP
The state of Texas has strict voter ID laws and didn't expand absentee voting. As far as I know, Texas checked just about every box of the GOP voting rules wish list.
And yet Trump only won Texas by 5.3 points--a result that's pretty facially consistent with GOP defeat
Biden improved by 3.4 points over Clinton's performance in the state--a larger improvement than his gains in any of PA/MI/WI.
He did so despite suffering big losses among the state's Latino voters--a group that represents a sliver of the vote in PA/MI/WI
Anyway, it's hard to imagine being a Texas Republican--and seeing the way your state has swung left under tough voting rules--and being aghast that Biden managed to squeak out wins in traditionally bluer states
More generally, one of the incredible things about the election is that Biden generally *underperformed* in the decisive battleground states.
Biden gained less in PA/MI/WI than elsewhere in the nation, causing Trump's E.C. edge to expand to nearly 4 points
If there's any irregularity, maybe that's it? It is a little hard to explain why Biden did quite so poorly in the Midwestern battleground states
If you go through the states that trended GOP with respect to the country, you can group them into four main groups:
Diverse, urban: CA/NV/FL/NY/NJ/IL/HI
Above avg Black population: NC/AL/MS/AR/LA
McMullen/LDS: ID/UT
Key northern battleground states: WI/IA/OH/PA
And that's it.
Here's that in map form, thanks to @uselectionatlas
Anyway this was a stable election, outside of Latino areas and traditionally GOP well-educated suburbs, so a lot of the differences here are small. But it is not at all obvious that Trump should have done as well as he did in the key battlegrounds, given what happened elsewhere

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More from @Nate_Cohn

14 Dec
Good morning everyone, happy start of in-person early voting for Georgia Senate runoffs day
We already have a lot of data in GA: more than 1.2 million absentee ballot requests, including 260k votes.
It's hard to read too much into the data, but on balance it's hard to say that it augurs for a vastly different electorate than the general (in terms of partisanship)
It's hard to read too much into the data because voters didn't exactly have an equal opportunity to request absentee ballots for the runoff and the general election. The general election was coming all year; the runoff and its significance only became evident a month ago
Read 10 tweets
12 Dec
Indeed, and so it's worth circling back on an element of the post-election discussion about Latino voters: the refrain that it's a heterogeneous group (which is undoubtedly true)
Every major demographic group is heterogeneous. Many frequently analyzed demographic groups, like women or young voters include people of every educational, racial or regional strata
Even racially/educationally homogenous groups (say, white working class voters) include huge variation: white no college voters in Mississippi and Vermont have... very little in common
Read 9 tweets
10 Dec
One simple way of thinking about the Biden coalition--and maybe not a very good one--is to note that it's the Kerry '04 states, plus NM/NV/CO/AZ in the southwest and GA/VA in the southeast.
If you look at long term change this way--in terms of state flips--it highlights the growing diversity of the electorate, which nudged (as many predicted at the time!) these states toward Dems. OTOH, it obscures wild swings among white voters by education and region
And in a certain sense, it is pretty remarkable that Trump wasn't able to flip any Kerry states, despite making such huge gains among whites without a degree--including states where >50% of votes fall into the category
Read 6 tweets
7 Dec
I think there's really one case in which we'd learn something from the polls in Georgia: if they showed the GOP clearly ahead, indicating a shift in the national political environment to something like a Biden midterm
The polls don't really seem to show this so far, and therefore we're probably in the range where the polls won't help us much over the hard results from November. The changes in attitudes are too small to be precisely measured, and polls aren't good at measuring changing turnout
We could get some decent signal on changes in turnout with advance voting data, though tbh the absentee voting surge for the general will make it more difficult to parse this than you might think
Read 6 tweets
3 Dec
One measure of how absentee ballots became partisan over time in Georgia: the partisanship of absentee ballot requests by date
In April, the early absentee ballot requests were overwhelmingly GOP after the primary was delayed and the SOS mailed out absentee requests.
Over time, Trump polarized the issue and Democrats became far likelier to apply. wrdw.com/content/news/G…
The y-axis is the share of applicants (with a record of partisan voting) who are recent Democratic primary voters. GA doesn't have party registration, so it's the best we've got
Read 4 tweets
2 Dec
To the extent there's a disagreement (and I wouldn't even call it that), it's about a very valid question about when (and potentially how) to allocate voters of 'unknown' race in GA. Whether you do so doesn't affect the conclusion, but it's being used to imply that it does
As long as I've been at the Times, none of my GA analyses have allocated 'unknown' voters. That's in part because you wade into the debate about how to do it, which seems unnecessary if it doesn't materially affect your findings--as in this case
Read 10 tweets

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