I'm a little late to the Catalist report on the demographic makeup of the electorate from earlier this week, but I wanted to note a few quick things
catalist.us/wh-national/
One observation: in the fight between AP/Votecast and the exit poll, the Catalist estimates are a fairly clear vote in favor of Votecast.
And when you put all the various sources together (adding CCES, CPS, live phone), the exit polls are an outlier on several indicators
I'm not going to be comprehensive, but the exit polls continue to show--as they have for more than a decade--an erroneously diverse and well educated electorate, with countervailing (and erroneous) Dem weakness among white voters (esp with a degree)
The Votecast figures aren't exactly like Catalist/CCES/CPS/my own estimates, but they're a lot closer and they come out on Election Day
Second observation: the Catalist figures show, by far, the most Democratic gains among white voters and largest Trump gains among Latinos of all of the various sources.
And I'm inclined to believe, based on the other available evidence, that they're right about it
The Catalist figures show Trump making nearly 3x as many gains among Latino voters as either the CCES or exit polls showed, with Trump gaining *8* points of major party vote share.
That comes close to what you'd guess based on the precinct results, live phone data.
Similarly, the Catalist figures show Biden making more gains among white voters than the CCES/exits. Here again, the magnitude of the swing is fairly similar to what the precinct results / live polls implied
Third, there are some pretty big differences--across all the estimates--on the attitudes of white voters by education and Latinos.
Honestly, I think a lot of this is in part because the polls were bad this cycle, and the varying techniques that get used to make up for it
Variance in the composition of the electorate is another factor: if you have more Dem-friendly groups (like more well-educated white or nonwhite voters) then estimates for each group will need to be more Republican in order for everything to add up to the result
Anyway this brings closer to getting to whatever our 'best' answer about 2020 might be in the end. There are still some important things to nail down--magnitude of white educational polarization and shifts in turnout, in particular. More later

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More from @Nate_Cohn

4 May
Why rising diversity isn't quite helping Democrats as much as progressives hope or conservatives fear nytimes.com/2021/05/04/us/…
--Most growth is among non-Black groups of nonwhite voters, who back Ds more modestly
--Rs do fairly well among those groups in the red states that Ds need to flip
--Ds made big, overlooked gains among white voters in many states where diversity might have otherwise been key
That second point--the R strength among nonwhite voters in red states like TX/FL--has a blue state corollary: D strength among nonwhite voters in blue states, which adds to the Dem E.C. challenge by padding Dem margins in IL/CA/NY/CT/NJ etc. without adding electoral votes
Read 11 tweets
29 Apr
New census data on 2020 turnout is out:
White, non-Hispanic share of the electorate drops to 71 percent from 73.3 in 2016
Black share of the electorate drops slightly, from 12.4 to 12.3 percent
Hispanic share increases to 10.6 from 9.2 percent
Demographic change was the main driver of the shift.
The turnout rate among non-Hispanic white voters increased by 5.6 points, slightly above the 5.4 point national average
Black turnout rate increased by just 3.2 points
Hispanic turnout rate increased by 6.1 points
Here's the change in the white share of the electorate, by state.
State data is pretty noisy, don't interpret the details!
One preemptive example: it's likely the white share of the electorate declined slightly in both PA/MI, rather than big drop in one and increase in the other
Read 7 tweets
29 Apr
A nice FiveThirtyEight summary of some of the various GOP electoral biases, which were quite extreme in 2020 and could conceivably get worse
(by their definition, the GOP E.C. edge grew from 3.5 to 3.9 points with the new population figures on Monday)
fivethirtyeight.com/features/advan…
One minor thing: just because something is biased doesn't mean it's counter-majoritarian. The House is conceived to reflect majority will. The Electoral College is complicated, but it's not really counter-majoritarian and to the extent it is, that's not why it's biased
The Senate, on the other hand, really is designed to check the majority (the extent that's good or bad is another question, ofc).
What's fascinating is that the Senate, EC and House are all similarly biased against Dems, despite being intended to be biased in very different ways
Read 6 tweets
28 Apr
It's 2028. Kamala Harris loses the election by the margin of... 89 census takers in New York and Minnesota
It's a tough map to pull off, but there are a few other ways to get there (if Dems get 269 and MN is red, then Democrats lost by the margin of MN getting the final vote over NY)
Read 5 tweets
23 Apr
Important @rickhasen piece on the growing danger of election subversion, which has been painfully overlooked in recent months
He offers a few possible actions Congress might consider:
--ensure paper balloting
--fix the electoral count act
--impose basic safeguards on vote counting
--support local election administration
My sense is that this is probably only the start of the conversation on how to address these kind of issues.
Progressives have spent years thinking about expanding voter access. Few people have spent time any time thinking about election subversion
Read 5 tweets
19 Apr
The rise of political sectarianism is a growing threat to American democracy
nytimes.com/2021/04/19/us/…
I'm a little surprised this concept hasn't already taken off! There was a paper in Science by a lot of prominent political scientists last fall. It deserves a book--it's a clarifying lens for thinking about America today--so I'm giving it an article
pcl.stanford.edu/research/2020/…
In recent news, I think sectarianism helps make sense of the declining role of policy debate in sustaining partisan conflict. It's hard to make sense of, say, Dr. Seuss or Rubio on Amazon unionization unless you put intergroup hostility at the center of politics
Read 9 tweets

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