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...

It is preposterous that arguably the biggest elections website in the world can create a misleading, multi-thousand word article on the Red Wave That Wasn't which simply says that the GOP ran decent candidates and was blindsided by Democratic money and mail-in ballot harvesting.

https://twitter.com/SeanTrende/status/1658858790228316166

I'm sorry, I really do hate to be critical of any forecaster or analyst, because I know how hard elections analysis is. But we also have a duty to stay factual and honest, and all this article does is skirt around and wrongly dismiss things that we have obvious data.

It’s flatly untrue that every indicator pointed to a big Republican wave. Democrats had overperformed in every single special election since the Dobbs decision was handed down, and we even noted this @SplitTicket_ when we told people to be aware of a possible Dem overperformance. @SplitTicket_ "There’s a case to be made that this Democratic overperformance might then actually be what ends up happening [...] when was the last time a party had robust primary turnout and overperformed in a ton of August specials, only to get blown out in November?" split-ticket.org/2022/11/08/a-f…

Looking at the consistent Democratic overperformances via persuasion with swing voters (even when base turnout lags) makes me think that if the general election were today, Andy Beshear would hang on in #KYGov. Underlying signals suggest a decently pro-Dem environment. We still have the race at a tossup over @SplitTicket_ — there's a lot of time for things to develop and change and it's a pretty red state, but it's hard to unseat a popular incumbent governor who's got great marks on his disaster response

*Sighs deeply* Every time we write a piece like this, so many people somehow think we're forecasting the end of the Republican Party, when we actually devote *multiple paragraphs* to how the party might rebound and adjust to solve the problem.

Diagnosis does not equal demise.

https://twitter.com/varadmehta/status/1655624532332359689

The one thing that has consistently rung true in American politics is that people (including analysts) conflate a diagnosis with a death sentence. We've seen from things like "The Emerging Democratic Majority" and the "Permanent Republican Majority" that this is always dumb.

How Democratic are young voters in swing states (at least by party registration)?

NC: D+11
PA, FL: D+17
AZ: D+22
NH: D+25
NV: D+28

For @SplitTicket_, our most detailed piece yet on a *potential* generational cliff.

split-ticket.org/2023/05/08/a-g… @SplitTicket_ There's only so many ways to tiptoe around the fact, but I'm finding very little to suggest that Republicans are going to be able to easily skirt around this huge and ahistoric generational chasm, because they've done nothing to try and address it up until this point.

Another way to look at this is that the Democrats got abysmal minority turnout and unfavorable economic conditions (like 8% inflation), and the national environment was still only R+1.5 despite all that.

Not sure that's something for the GOP to crow about.

https://twitter.com/PatrickRuffini/status/1653580843955134466

There are a lot of problems Democrats need to solve with Black turnout, but one contextualizing caveat is that this always plunges in midterms, and especially in midterms with a Dem in the White House, so the decline between 2018 and 2022 can be a bit overstated.