I'm reminded of an influential book from 1970, "The Real Majority," which was very influential in the Nixon White House, centered around the idea that the median voter was an 'unpoor, unblack and unyoung' middle-aged, middle-class, midwestern white (wife in Dayton, specifically)
This, of course, is not nearly as true as it was in 1970. To some extent, the sense that 'popularism' is revisionist--despite being the conventional wisdom--reflects an Obama-era overreaction, when many seemed to conclude that demographic changes had been greater than they were
And within large metro America, a tipping point has been reached: that 1970-era story doesn't really hold anymore. And since so many journalists, activists, etc., are in large metro America they do occasionally seem to need to be reminded about the rest of the country
The Real Majority, oddly, opens with a 'riddle': who will win a big city mayoral race: a black tough-on-crime cop or a white liberal lawyer. The answer, ofc, is the black cop; the point is crime > race. But there are a lot of places where that answer has probably changed
(i pulled this back up a few months ago, since it's kind of uncannily similar to the NYC mayoral primary)
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
I think it's strange in a few ways. One is that it goes through a lot of twists and turns to achieve relatively little? Taking all of their general goals/choices for granted, IDK what they've gained over this simple one--which has the added edge of the 35% Latino VAP CD as D+20
Another strange thing is that the maps gradually became somewhat less fair and more GOP leaning, by partisan fairness metrics, and I'm not really sure why. Even the preliminary plan--which seems more reasonable to me on other respects--was met with some push back from Democrats
Washington Post poll in Virginia is a bit of an odd one, and a departure from their state polling in prior cycles
Most obviously, they've gone from pure RDD in 2020 to an RDD+RBS sample, presumably to gain some of the benefits of the voter file while preserving full coverage.
Whatever the merits of that choice (most state telephone pollsters just go with RBS only), they try to blend the two samples in an odd way: they de-dupe the RDD frame, weight each to the full population, toss together (as oppose to voters with or without RBS coverage + p sltn)
A little early to tell, but if you squint at the numbers there's a case that Biden's numbers are inching back up a bit as Afghanistan fades from the news.
Here, Monmouth with Biden at 46/46 monmouth.edu/polling-instit…
Sure, there's probably some nonresponse bias. There always is!
But the amount of focus on partisan nonresponse bias has gotten way, way out of hand on this website as of late
Way back in the day, you needed a little bit of evidence to claim non-response bias was at play. Stability in the YouGov poll, or another party weighted poll, would offer some evidence--even if not conclusive evidence, given other methodological differences
With Election Day vote largely counted, "no" still has a considerable 64%, down from 67 at race call.
That may come down a bit--Biden fell about 1.5 pts between now and the outcome. OTOH, mail ballots over the last few days didn't seem as disproportionately GOP as 2020.
We'll see what it looks like in the end, of course, but at the moment I don't really see any signs that Newsom fared particularly poorly among Latino voters, as the exit poll suggested.
The results in relatively Latino counties appear about the same as 2018
And in the end, it may be that the polls underestimated 'no' by a fairly modest margin. Just typing that out, it's hard not to wonder whether acquiesce bias--the tendency for people to say 'yes' to be agreeable--might play a role. But there are many other plausible explanations
The polls have closed in California's gubernatorial recall election.
NYT results here >>> nytimes.com/interactive/20…
Expect Newsom to take an early lead, as the disproportionately Democratic early mail votes will be the first counted.
If the 2020 election is any indication, the 'no' vote could start out 5 pts higher than the ultimate result.
The exits show "no" up by around 18 points or so.
If so, those early Newsom votes may be enough to yield an early call cnn.com/election/2021/…
A flash-back to around 1AM ET on 11/4, with some modest implications for following the vote tonight
The early dump of advance votes was overwhelmingly for Biden.
In the end, Biden won California by a more modest margin--a mere 29 points--as the Election Day and late mail votes ate away at his lead, as it did in Arizona.
When you piece it all together, the Election Day vote was basically 50/50 and the late mail votes were more like 60/40. The early mail dumps were 70/30.