Congratulations to DC journalists, Twitter, and the three ambitious Democrats on getting so bored that they successfully wasted everyone’s time and created a competitive 2024 #VASen race for twelve hours.
We were privately told yesterday night that Kaine was hosting a fundraiser right after his announcement, which made us think he was running, but none of us were really clued in on his thought process. Generally you can get any variant of a rumor in DC confirmed by *someone*.
People like to pretend they know a lot more than they really do and in general unless these things break from news organizations or someone directly clued in to the source, my default reaction now is to take it with a slight bit of caution (having been burned before!).
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I confess this is likely the first election I've seen where a party was so explicitly and asymmetrically punished for extremism. Especially when that party began as locked out of power in a favorable midterm.
@SplitTicket_@HWLavelleMaps The Democratic members of the Problem Solvers Caucus had a Wins-Above-Replacement score of +0.1. The Congressional Progressive Caucus had a WAR of -0.2. These are functionally identical. The New Democrats actually did the worst of the major Dem factions (-0.6).
@SplitTicket_@HWLavelleMaps The main Dem outliers were the Blue Dogs (+1.2) and the Squad (-6.3). Voters did reward or punish Dems for ideological moderation/extremism...but at the very edges. But now take a look at the GOP — the Freedom Caucus had a WAR of -1.2, while the GOP Problem Solvers were +2.4.
Mark Robinson is just the North Carolina version of Doug Mastriano with a bit more $$. It’s absolutely defensible to start 2024 #NCGov as Lean D, especially given that Dems will run a popular statewide official like Josh Stein while Robinson is currently the clear GOP favorite.
Robinson’s win as LG in 2020 really wasn’t as impressive as people think. That office is extremely anonymous and it’s very hard to get anyone to know or care about it, especially a presidential year. Different story when you’re running for governor.
How exactly do people think stuff this is going to play out in a statewide race in a state with a very partisan GOP legislature, especially with abortion no longer constitutionally protected? wral.com/nc-s-lieutenan…
Both Katie Porter and I have something in common (in that neither of us will ever be a US Senator).
OK a more detailed read on #CASen that isn't just a flippant comment:
Porter's odds, I'd say, are really around 10%. Schiff is going to be *the* SoCal candidate, beats Porter with every one of her strong demographics, and has *way* more money than anyone realizes.
Lee and Khanna will run from NorCal. I do not think Breed runs, but if she does then she becomes the favorite (or co-favorite, with Schiff). Ultimately, I think that Porter would have a way better shot if Adam Schiff wasn't running, but he is, and that's a problem for her.
FWIW basically any objective measure has John Fetterman as a significantly above replacement candidate and Dr. Oz as a horrible, *horrible* one — Fetterman would have won even if the gubernatorial matchup was Shapiro vs a generic R (if that could ever emerge from a PA GOP field).
I generally don't do class-based analysis because I'm not that great at punditry but I do think there's this thing where a lot of the college-educated folks are extremely annoyed that someone who refuses to dress or talk like them despite actually being One Of Them managed to win
yeah Fetterman had a stroke that somewhat limited him physically, but it's been well-documented that this doesn't have any lasting *cognitive* issues and I think voters recognized this sort of thing better than many consultants do (plus, it likely helped people relate to him).
Probably makes it clearer now that we have the margin included with the WAR, but these are all the districts that would have flipped if the matchups were "generic R vs generic D", as per our @SplitTicket_ model.
@SplitTicket_ So, I want to talk a bit about what that actually means.
You can't really measure how good one candidate is without examining how good or how weak their opponent was. From his previous elections, we know Rudy Salas was an excellent candidate. The problem is that Valadao is too.
@SplitTicket_ So, what you really do is to measure the candidate quality differential of a matchup and compare it to the modeled generic matchup, as this is the only baseline you can have. So, Valadao performed 5 points better against Salas than a generic R would have vs a generic D.
PRESENTING: The @SplitTicket_ 2022 House Wins Above Replacement model — our attempt at boiling candidate strength with one number. If you've ever wondered how candidate quality impacted a race, check out what our metric suggests!
@SplitTicket_ There are three main themes we touch on.
(1) Democrats ran stronger candidates where it mattered, in general. 45 battlegrounds saw Dem overperformances, while 37 battlegrounds saw GOP overperformances. This fits with what we've seen in other elections.
@SplitTicket_ (2) Democrats probably won more seats than they should have, even considering the overall environment. We think they ended up winning 9 seats that would have gone the other way with a generic nominee, compared to the GOP's 6.