On the eve of #CARecall, we can probably say that this race is safe D, because there is genuinely a < 5% chance Newsom loses tomorrow. It would take a polling error of a magnitude large enough to end the industry in California altogether.
My prediction is Remain +21 (with a rather high error range — nothing from Remain +15 to Remain +23 would surprise me), but we probably won’t know the full results for a while. But the race should probably be called tomorrow night. I’d be surprised if it isn’t.
(someone better catch the Brexit meme here)
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If I had to take a guess at the #CARecall margin, I’d probably say No wins by 17, based on the available evidence. There’s been some very serious late movement towards Newsom and it’ll take a Herculean lift and a massive polling error for Yes to have a whiff of a chance here.
And once again, it was exceptionally smart of Newsom’s camp to not field a replacement candidate. That’s the only way you keep the Democrats all in line, and if you do that, recall gets squashed.
Anyways, if that does happen, Newsom would emerge stronger than ever before, because the press insistence on making it a horse race would backfire badly and cost the CA GOP their best 2022 candidate in Faulconer, and Newsom would have overperformed public expectations by a lot.
No such question has been settled, considering that non-college rural whites have one of the lowest voting observable propensity rates, and if you think people will let a vaccine mandate from 2021 influence their 2022 voting likelihood, you might be overreacting again.
I feel like the last five years should have taught people not to overreact to a single news cycle and yet here we are every time something happens that conservatives or liberals think will be the death knell for the other party.
FWIW, racial minorities, who still break heavily Dem, have fairly low voting propensity rates too, so the "will the 2022 electorate be more or less Biden-supporting (in terms of presidential vote cast) than 2020?" question probably hinges to some degree on their turnout also.
50% of the model is based on polls, weighted for sample size and recency. 25% uses a 2013/2017 composite educational turnout screen and applies polling margins by education. 25% uses 2020 margins, split by education, for voters and applies it to the poll electorates.
For the county forecast, we calculate the expected lean of each county by taking a composite average of county PVI relative to statewide average for 2020, 2017, and 2013, and we apply our model's overall forecast to the county leans.
In CA, 68% of November 2020 ballots were cast by mail. AP estimates that Biden won them 72-26. The Dem/Ind/GOP split was 50/25/25 in share of returned ballots. Currently, it’s 56/22/22 in the first batch of data (5% returned; November saw 61% returned).
Yesterday, the report we got indicated 3% of ballot returns. From there, Democratic share has dipped a percent or two, which makes sense considering how few ballots have been returned and how Democrats tend to return their ballots earlier.
The biggest argument I see against Conor Lamb's candidate quality is how he "underperformed Biden".
This is not nearly as clear cut as everyone seems to think. Lamb's vote share was 51.1%. Biden's was 50.7%. The thing is, Lamb's opponent got 48.8%, and Trump got 48%.
In 2020, closer districts (particularly suburban ones that are ancestrally Republican) tended to see Biden overperform the House candidate by a fair amount. Lamb underperformed Biden by only 0.4 points in margin, which is about a point or two *better* than we may have expected
Add in 2018, where @EScrimshaw notes how Conor Lamb blew through expectations and thrashed his opponent with a 12.6 point victory despite having $8M in outside spending thrown at him, and I think it's clear -- Conor Lamb is a very, very good candidate. scrimshawunscripted.substack.com/p/pennsylvania…
It's well known that SurveyUSA can't poll California -- they've had several ridiculous polls over the last several years that border on polling malpractice.
But this result is fairly shocking. Let's dive in further to see what's going on. 🧵
To begin with, their sample of *registered voters* is kind of off in partisanship and race.
The D/R/Ind. splits in February 2021, per the CA SOS: 46/24/24
The SurveyUSA poll: 46/29/22
The racial splits are kind of strange too. We know, from AP voter analysis, that the CA electorate was ~54% White, 7% Black, 24% Latino, 15% Asian/other.
SurveyUSA has the *registered voter* sample at 61% White, 4% Black, and 15% Latino. That's quite off.