I am running a live election-night model for the governor’s race (similar to the NYT “needle”) and will be posting updates in this thread as results pour in. The model turns on once ~20 precincts report e-day votes & ~5 counties report absentees.
The state elections website (which is publishing statewide returns publicly) is really taking its sweet time. Lagging the networks by quite an amount. But with 3 absentee dumps and results from 107 precincts, reporting jurisdictions show a small shift toward Dems v 2020.
I imagine the model will switch itself on any moment now and then I can send you a screenshot
Our polling model for VA-Gov is up. It controls for house effects and (attempts to) adjust for partisan nonresponse ("attempts to" bc we detect only modest patterns in the VA polling right now).
One big thing: Polls show ~7% of voters are undecided right now. That really explodes the CI. Luckily, there has been very little correlation so far between the number of undecideds & the gap between McAuliffe and Youngkin. (Versus in CA when we saw undecideds breaking 4 Newsom.)
One thing to keep your eye on, in terms of trying to spot potential polling error, is that multiple polls have come in with Youngkin's vote % with voters of color wayyy higher than Trump's, including among Black respondents. Like ~10pts. Nonresponse or real? We'll know Tuesday...
My piece on the state of the Democrats: Their problems stem from long-term increases in ideological sorting, factionalized identities, nationalization, & educational polarization—each of which contribute to their problems in the Senate + Electoral College. economist.com/united-states/…
The piece doesn’t get into institutional reforms that might help them, in part because none are likely to pass and in part bc that’s not the point of the article. For the record, though, they should pursue everything that might make our federal institutions more proportional.
In the end, I think these structural patterns and long-term trends in the electorate, especially an increase in our collective “social distance” (identity-based polarization) & ideological sorting, are likely to overwhelm the impacts of message-based strategies, eg “popularism.”
I… don’t know. This objection rings hollow to me. In part because educational polarization is a long term trend (we have 70 years of it at this point) with stable growth — but really because our conversations on this are usually conditioned on patterns staying roughly the same.
You can make the argument that, well, correlates of voting will change over the next decade, so the rural white non-college bias of the Senate will get “solved” somehow — but it’s still a huge problem today, and it should be the mean expectation for the future too.
So yeah. I don’t think predictions for 5-10 years from now have too high uncertainty to not be useful. But smart people are conditioning on these things in convos, & I think they’re right. After all I think it’s *un*reasonable to think edu polarization will substantially reverse!
This Pew poll seems to indicate support for Trump among Republicans is a lot lower than either the 2024 trial-heat polling or my general read of the media conventional wisdom suggests. Only 44% say he should run for president again. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021…
Not really sure how to reconcile this all, to be honest. My hard prior is that, if the GOP had a primary today, Trump would win a resounding victory. But maybe that prior is wrong. When we find conflicting evidence the answer is usually somewhere in between!
Let’s do an exercise:
Poll 1: If the 2024 GOP primary was held today, with all the rules from 2016, and it was Trump v all the top GOP leaders who _might_ end up running, would he win?