If the goal of the Democratic Party is to retain the majority in 2022, then funding or helping Lisa Murkowski makes absolutely no sense, because the value-over-replacement she provides to a Senate Democratic majority is minimal.
If Democrats think they've certainly lost the Senate in 2022, then helping to keep Murkowski might make a lot of sense.

If they think they've got a good chance to retain the Senate (as they do, given the map they're playing in), then keeping Murkowski provides no utility at all.
Any bill Murkowski goes for, all Democrats would have already supported, including Manchin. There is no use to a Democratic *majority* here, especially when you have a lane to elect Galvin, who'd be at the party median and cut the reliance on Manchin/Sinema by a fair bit.
(Shane does some *great* work and makes some amazing maps, and this is not at all a dunk on him -- go follow him! This is just me trying to clear up what I personally think can be a pretty common electoral misconception).

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More from @lxeagle17

23 Jun
THREAD: Simulating an RCV election in Alaska, we see that running a Democrat probably helps Kelly Tshibaka more than anything. But the value Lisa Murkowski provides to a Democratic majority is minimal, and the expected value of running a Democrat is still higher, IMO
Let’s construct a grossly simplified scenario where we have Tshibaka (R) at 40%, Galvin (D) at 30%, Murkowski (R) at 30%, and Murkowski loses the second spot by a hair to Alyse Galvin. Now you go to the H2H...
Does Galvin get 66% of Murkowski’s voters to back her as the second choice? Possible...but a tall order...so you’ve just given Tshibaka a huge boost here.

Conversely, would 66% of Galvin’s voters rank Murkowski as a second choice? That’s much easier to imagine.
Read 11 tweets
22 Jun
Murkowski's 2022 odds are honestly not nearly as high as everyone thinks they are and I think it's not unreasonable to say that come November, she may not be the favorite to make it out of the field.

You can call Alaska likely/safe R, but it's not likely/safe Murkowski.
.@EScrimshaw breaks it down here, but because of the way RCV works, Tshibaka poses a very, very serious threat, especially given the amount of campaigning Trump will do for her against Murkowski.
scrimshawunscripted.substack.com/p/2022-murkows…
That *does* open up an outside lane for a Democrat (I think @ElpisActual has discussed it as well) in which you could have Tshibaka (R) at 40%, Galvin (D) at 30%, Murkowski at 25%, and a random Independent at 5%.

And Galvin could edge out Tshibaka in a H2H there with RCV.
Read 4 tweets
19 Jun
The best way to illustrate how the 2020 electorate was way more R-favorable than any recent election, midterm or presidential, is this:

2020 was D+4.46. Applying 2020 latent demographic partisanship and turnout to...
2010: D+7.7
2012: D+5.5
2014: D+4.8
2016: D+5.4
2018: D+8.1
Also if you like things like this go follow @notkavi and our bot @bot_2024 — kavi does a lot of great modeling and work and programmed the bulk of that bot.
As I said in the replies to the original thread, I think the lack of demographics available to our bot (because of a lack of data) makes this estimation a bit susceptible to favoring Dems too much in some elections, but the overall picture is largely correct.
Read 4 tweets
18 Jun
Let's put this in simpler terms.

The two-way vote share, per Catalist, was ~R+12 with white voters in 2020. The white vote in a midterm would probably be ~R+10 or thereabouts, if we adjusted for voting propensity and assumed zero vote switching.
That *does* help Democrats a bit! But to take advantage of it, you need to make sure your base turns out, and this is still prone to the issue that white college voters who are Democratic may turn out at different rate from white college voters that are Republicans.
This is not meant to be a hard and fast quantification of everything. It's just meant to show that there is a real, somewhat quantifiable educational turnout edge based on recent history for Democrats, and that they could certainly use this to their benefit.
Read 4 tweets
18 Jun
A very rough estimate, but I'd say that Democrats probably have a ~1.5%-2% education turnout edge in the midterm electorate among *white voters*, using 2020 support numbers from Catalist and 2018/2016 turnout data (filtered for state house districts that are >75% white). Image
Important to note a few things here:

(1) there is a clear correlation between education and turnout, especially among white voters, and that was only magnified in 2020.
(2) This is a rough estimate because the granularity of data available here doesn't support anything more.
It's pretty critical to note that persuasion is far more important in influencing the electoral environment. That is to say that voters changing their mind is generally way more influential than a 1.5% turnout edge in *margin* (which is what this estimate is measuring in!)
Read 4 tweets
4 Jun
(1) People underestimate how much time most bills take to get anywhere. The GOP didn't get their healthcare vote until the last week of July.

(2) Biden's not going to abandon everything they wanted in the compromise bill when they've already hinted at reconciliation for the rest
I keep seeing the "Manchin and Sinema" argument, and my answer to this is that the opposition to a lot of things is almost never just Joe Manchin, as the Post said the other day. This caucus isn't as liberal on every issue as Twitter likes to think it is.
Suffice to say that when Manchin has already said that they should go to 4T for infrastructure previously, it's not like he's just abandoned the idea of $$ flooding into WV. And I would be very, very surprised if the Democrats didn't use reconciliation for the rest like they said
Read 5 tweets

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