Here's where we stand in the House (11/10, 23:59 EST).

- Democrats at 213 seats with the latest #CA27 drop, but have lost #CO08. Rs at 217.
- Dems must sweep #CA13, #CA45, #AKAL, #AZ06, #CA41.
- #CA13 is tilt D. #CA45 a tossup/tilt R. #AKAL leans R. #AZ06, #CA41 very likely R. #CA13: the two counties that are the most complete already have Duarte underrunning his 2022 margins by ~2, when he won by only half a point.
- Merced (Gray's home county) has yet to report a ton of blue-leaning mail. Would narrowly rather be Gray, but it will be *very* close.

The Washington Primary has served as a historical canary in the coal mine. This year, it tells us that Democrats are in pretty good position to make gains in the House and have a modest popular vote victory.

From me and @maxtmcc, for the @WashingtonPost.

wapo.st/3Aw0wRg @maxtmcc @washingtonpost A lot of you had been asking us for *something* at least discussing the high-level takeaways of the Washington primary. The piece gives an easily-digestible overview of what it is, why it's important, and what it means.

In short: it's way better than what Dems feared a month ago

MONEYBALL (2024):

The pundits see Kamala Harris and they see a candidate with a -14 favorable rating, a horrible 2020 campaign, and similar odds against Donald Trump if she replaces Biden.

When I see Kamala Harris, I see...an imperfect understanding of what candidate quality is "She's got her issues. She tacked way to the left in the primary in 2020 and came out in favor of ridiculous things like banning fracking and signals to defund the police despite being a DA.

But is she 82 years old? No. No!"

It is worth pointing out that however this all plays out, Kamala Harris has played her role as Biden's VP to perfection at this point, and it is a *far* cry from the relative chaos that seemed to permeate her orbit and her office during the 2019-2021 period. Harris has managed to acknowledge Biden had some issues in the debate, played the role of loyal soldier since then, and has made several high-profile appearances to reinforce confidence in her without making a single move to undermine the President. It's not easy.

🚨 NEW POLL (@SplitTicket_ and @DataProgress) 🚨

Trump: 41%, Biden: 40%, RFK Jr: 10%

Generic Ballot: Democrat: 48%, Republican: 45%

split-ticket.org/2024/07/10/we-… @SplitTicket_ @DataProgress Two-way vote:

Biden 47/Trump 46
Harris 46/Trump 46

IMO a reason many Dems are upset is that it feels like Calvinball

Dems do well in specials? Doesn't matter.
Trump does poorly in primaries? Doesn't matter.
Biden does poorly in primaries? Sign of weakness on the left.
Biden polls badly? Awful. Polls already overshot him in 2020.

https://twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/1783188871292838161

I'm explaining. I'm not saying I agree with all of those arguments.

But it's clear to me that the reason this sentiment on Twitter exists is because there is a lot of talk focused around Biden's vulnerabilities in the data world, and not many about Trump's.

It's a fascinating chart.

Couple points: you won't find hard electoral data for a big racial realignment yet. I edited it to show what it's like without 2024 polling.

But there's some evidence to suggest depolarization is happening, if not realignment🧵

https://x.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1767198788689465639?s=20

There's a very clear dip in support between 2016 and 2020, but it's not obvious that it's part of a massive trend — that dip is comfortably in line with historical margins of variability. Much of the variability you see is in current polling.

https://x.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1767198792464433293?s=20

FWIW the "Uncommitted" campaign has to be very, very happy with tonight's results — the narrative in the media is already set.

They set a benchmark of 20K votes, and they cleared it easily. Virtually every politician and reporter is now saying it was a big success. The truth is that this wasn't a good benchmark, because turnout is massively up. Percentage-wise, this is underwhelming for them — they're on track for 12-13% of the vote, which isn't much more than the 11% that voted against Obama in 2012. But the narrative is what mattered.

So, one thing I have seen that seems obvious but is very much ignored in analysis is that in basically every election where it turns into "normal vs weird", the normal side massively overperforms. Which side is perceived as normal depends on the race, of course.

Let me explain.

Joe Kent vs MGP and Mark Kelly vs Blake Masters were both successfully framed as a weirdo with Nazi ties vs a pretty normal person.

Kathy Hochul vs Lee Zeldin and Tina Kotek vs Christine Drazan were both basically campaigns run by Republicans and independents who successfully took an issue the left is very weak on in the eyes of the electorate (crime).

Frisch vs Boebert, Ilhan Omar vs a random Republican, and Hobbs vs Lake are other good examples of candidates who are way too Out There being punished heavily by voters.

This isn't really about progressive vs moderate vs conservative. It's more about normal vs not-normal. Our @SplitTicket_ research found that within a certain ideological box, people all did pretty similarly. Freedom Caucus WAR (-0.8) was pretty similar to the Progressive Caucus (+0.2), which was similar to the New Democrats (-0.2).

But the Squad? 5.5 points below replacement. The "MAGA Squad" (Gaetz, MTG, etc)? 7 points underwater.

I think there's an increasing amount of evidence that a lot of this is just about being normal.

https://twitter.com/ChazNuttycombe/status/1731527409868939354

Now, to tie this back to the original post: Book bans themselves are just a symptom of why Democrats overperform in these races. When successfully weaponized, they repulse people by making the opposition look really extreme — usually because they have other crazy stances too.

Not sure this is true. Evers won by 3.5% as an incumbent governor in a heavily pro-choice state. Barnes lost by 1% against an incumbent GOP Senator who outspent him. That 4.5% delta is pretty normal, and our @SplitTicket_ metric has Barnes as a better candidate than Johnson.

https://twitter.com/brent_peabody/status/1716843809307263260

@SplitTicket_ You can say that Barnes *still* underperformed because Ron Johnson was a bad incumbent (I have seen this argument from a couple data people I do respect) but I am personally not sure that I'd chalk this loss down to Dems picking a poor candidate, given the spending data here.

She's absolutely correct, but people like Kara Swisher (and a large chunk of the Silicon Valley tech journalists) helped build up the myth of Elon Musk in the first place and I think this is a great example of these things eventually coming full circle.

https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1693814364220895333

There was this recognition in SV (at least, among those I know) that Elon was both brilliant in some technical aspects and *also* very socially inept with a reputation that was somewhat overinflated from the PayPal exit. Somewhere along the line, people forgot about the last part

Currently, I think it's fair to say that while Joe Biden was the best nominee for Dems in 2020, he is *not* the strongest nominee for them in 2024, even accounting for an incumbency advantage.

Doesn't matter. Won't change the matchup. But that's what the data says. If voter sentiment on the economy improves a lot, this may no longer hold — if voters begin associating Biden with stability and a great economy (possible, the election is a year out and economic indicators look good), then this might flip!

But that's not the current reality.

I've done a *lot* of analysis on the tendency for special elections in very white districts to have a Democratic edge because of education-driven turnout differentials. But using that to routinely explain away 16 point underperformances is lazy.

https://t.co/bN1eLRVJuScenterforpolitics.org/crystalball/ar…

https://twitter.com/jrrosswrites/status/1681483344289099778

Yes, it's a low turnout election and swings are magnified there. But what would be good to remember is...

(1) Democrats win white college+ voters by like 10, not 50
(2) in *this* part of Wisconsin, they very likely lose them. It's very ancestrally Republican.

The sentiment on certain wings of Twitter is increasingly turning into a variety of "very few people know this but everything is extremely bad and will stay forever bad as nothing good will ever happen again."

I don't know how people live like that. It's exhausting to even read. There's people saying that by 2025, the US will lose every one of its democratic traditions because Biden is "completely cooked". Or that it will become a theocracy that again opposes gay marriage (despite 70% of the population now supporting it). Why? Online Vibes, I guess?

What Doug Burgum reminds me of is the type of candidate that media folks believe would be a strong contender. In many ways, he's a mix of Steve Bullock, Michael Bloomberg, and Tom Steyer in the 2020 primaries.

In theory, these guys play well. In practice, that's not so true. 🧵 Burgum runs into two big problems: nobody knows who he is, and nobody currently cares. The aspirational, "we can do better" stuff he's running on is not something that appeals to enough of the Republican base to win, especially when the ex-president is polling at over 50%.

Here we go. Introducing @SplitTicket_'s 2024 Presidential ratings.

split-ticket.org/2023/06/02/our… @SplitTicket_ Went back and forth a lot on these ratings, but I think it makes no sense to assume we know what the 2024 environment will be, in which a Trump-Biden rematch is likely to happen but polling and signals are all over the place. So the current baseline is a 2020 redux.

The interesting thing about Steve Garvey entering #CASen and running a well-funded campaign is that this changes the calculus for the Democrats running.

Garvey likely advances to the general, so the round-1 leader between Schiff/Porter/Lee would be the de-facto next Senator.

https://twitter.com/baseballot/status/1664341294439604225

*However*, if Garvey didn't get in, you could see a scenario in which a Dem-on-Dem second round would result in all kinds of coalitions being formed between the voters of the eliminated candidates.

Like, if it's Schiff vs Porter, who would Barbara Lee's supporters break for?

A couple points to note on the excellent @Nate_Cohn's piece today on millennials.

(1) the generational lean of millennials/gen Z is ahistorically Dem in absolute terms

(2) the typical aging shift right doesn't erase the sheer size of the partisan gap

nytimes.com/2023/06/01/ups… @Nate_Cohn In our first @SplitTicket_ piece on young voters and their Democratic leans, we noted the same thing in exit polling. But the fact remains that millennials are ahistorically Dem, and even the largest swing right observed does not erase this gap.

split-ticket.org/2022/08/01/is-…

The universe would be a much better place if we all took ourselves a little less seriously with a little less self-importance

https://twitter.com/hollystallcup/status/1661524572494020612

“it is important to me to take my public leadership seriously” sorry but literally who are you

Under every data lens taken on this topic, the story is clear: election denial is really unpopular, and quantifiably so. At @SplitTicket_, we find the performance difference between election acceptors and deniers to be ~4 points in margin in battlegrounds

split-ticket.org/2023/05/24/the… @SplitTicket_ That's true whether you look at stuff done by us, the @UpshotNYT, @gelliottmorris, or @Catalist_US. This is a fantastic way for a party to keep losing winnable races and it's likely part of what cost the GOP the senate in 2022.

Twenty years ago, both parties came up with conflicting theories on how they were entering a new age of dominance.

Neither of them panned out, so now everyone is determined to ignore *any* signs of danger for either party because things always work themselves out automatically.

https://twitter.com/gelliottmorris/status/1659248960555319314

I have written many times about how I think the fact that there are only two parties means that neither the GOP nor the Dems are likely to ever really be locked out of power for too long — the vacuum created by dissatisfied voters is usually filled by someone eventually. But...