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4 Oct, 9 tweets, 3 min read
This article from 2019 seems relevant to some of the conversations in my Twitter feed this morning: swing voters aren't really disproportionately white working class anymore
I think a lot of the findings in this piece are reflected in the 2020 outcome nytimes.com/2019/11/05/ups…
And while this poll is two years old now, it is probably the last unbiased battleground polling we had of the 2020 cycle (at least v. the result). I think lots of the lessons from this series are still very worth keeping in mind
nytimes.com/2019/11/04/ups…
nytimes.com/2019/11/07/ups…
I bring all this back up because my 'interactions' seem frozen in 2014-2018 debates.
It was plausible to say Ds should focus on turnout after '14, or focus on reclaiming the Obama-Trump northern, white working class voter after '16
These cases have gotten a lot worse
By this 2019 polling, I think it's pretty clear that a lot of the foundations for either the WWC persuasion strategy and the progressive mobilization strategy had really eroded (I also thought that was true based on 18 results). I think that was pretty clear in 2020, too
By winning a group of disproportionately white, college educated, affluent, male voters who often cast ballots for GOP candidates downballot. It's not what any wing of the Democratic Party wanted
For some context on that, it is worth remembering that House Democratic popular vote tallies would have lost the Electoral College / Senate
As an aside, I do think that the approach in this article--several archetypal kinds of self-reported persuadable voters--is more useful than constructing a median voter out of majority/median demographic groups
yes--whites, women, voters over age 50, suburbanites, no college grads--are all 'majority' groups, if only narrowly. but that does not mean that white, no college women, over age 50 should dominate in political thinking or something

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More from @Nate_Cohn

Nate Cohn Profile picture
5 Oct
The certification step is where this sort of optimistic case on election subversion becomes too tenuous, as I think I've mentioned to @DouthatNYT before (can't find the thread)
nytimes.com/2021/10/05/opi… Image
The refusal to certify an election on a pretextual basis could change the game as we saw it in 20. It would around flip the politics of the fight, by denying the winning party the appearance of what was their most important advantage in '20: the reality of an uncontested election
Realistically, the courts would eventually intervene--but it's not quite enough to be sure. The state laws are often very vague, and often don't have clear evidentiary standards. Litigation could take longer than the safe-harbor deadline.
Read 7 tweets
Nate Cohn Profile picture
1 Oct
A few extra thoughts on this thread, mainly responding to various questions, criticisms, etc.
One overarching point, which I think is fairly obvious but worth stating: this is not a comprehensive account of everything that led to Trump. It's account of the effect of an inaccurate electoral narrative, which is hardly the only thing that helped Trump!
To take one obvious example: Clinton's unpopularity, emails, sexism, etc., does not get mentioned once. That is not because it's unimportant! It's because it's a different issue; it does not stem from bad exit polls or something.
Read 29 tweets
Nate Cohn Profile picture
1 Oct
Perhaps even more important is recalling the flawed assumptions, data and conventional wisdom that made this piece so important at the time, even as it seems fairly obvious in some ways today (at least to me)
After the 2012 election, the conventional wisdom held that Obama's victories reflected the power of a new coalition of the ascendent, or even an emerging democratic majority, powered by sweeping generational and demographic shifts
A lot of this flowed from the 2012 exit polls, which showed Obama winning just 39% of white voters--lower than any Democrat since Dukakis. But he nonetheless won easily, as Latinos surged to 10% of the electorate and whites fell to just 72%
Read 22 tweets
Nate Cohn Profile picture
28 Sep
I deleted a prior tweet about the Michigan congressional map, which implied the state doesn't have an explicit partisan fairness criteria for redistricting. It does, though without embracing a specific test
The map, to my mind, is almost exactly what you would expect if you ignored partisanship altogether. That's not the same as a gerrymander, of course. But it is definitely not an effort to achieve partisan fairness, even if that's very difficult to pull off in Michigan
This is a place, though, where the failure to define a serious partisan fairness test is going to get reformers into problems. It barely even matters what the test is, just that you choose it.
Read 4 tweets
Nate Cohn Profile picture
27 Sep
It's not yet really reflected in the congressional legislation, but election subversion has belatedly been getting serious attention in recent weeks.
When I wrote about subverison and the Georgia law in early April, the term hadn't really even been once over the preceding month. It was badly overshadowed by voter suppression. Now there are congressional hearings, conferences and real if early ideas for dealing with it
As the noise of new GOP voting laws has faded, it's become more obvious that subversion is the more serious risk to democracy. The persistence of the 'big lie,' Trump's grip on the GOP, the Eastman memo, and more, have helped keep the issue in the lime-light. It won't go away
Read 5 tweets
Nate Cohn Profile picture
23 Sep
I continue to find this map to be pretty strange, but one thing that I find less surprising is that there are lots of Democrats aren't thrilled by it
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
Read 6 tweets

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