PBP: 2020 House and Senate Elections (Maybe even State level)

Gone but not forgotten.

 

The disappointment is forever.

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/white-house-forced-georgia-u-s-attorney-to-resign-11610225840

I know this is the 67th most-important story of the week, but no...really? The White House pressured the Georgia US attorney to resign to try and delay an investigation into more Trump crimes? WHO COULDA KNOWN

 

Breaking: The Georgia Secretary of State's Office has certified the results for the January 5, 2021 runoff.

U.S. Senate
Ossoff — 50.61% — 2,269,923 votes
Perdue — 49.39% — 2,214,979 votes

U.S. Senate Special
Warnock — 51.04% — 2,289,113 votes
Loeffler — 48.96% — 2,195,841 votes

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) January 19, 2021

Good. Outside the scope of a recount

 

I had expressed hope early on for 50k vote margins. There isn't a God. I thank Stacey and all the good people who got out the vote in Georgia, and mostly, the voters. Thank you. Thank you all so very much.

 

Jewish Space Lasers? Oh Georgia, don't you go changing.

 

Republicans in VA have moved towards using conventions to nominate their candidates for awhile now.

 

It’s so hard to draw a trend here because so much of a mayoral election is based upon local issues. Two of them that may resonate from the GOP candidate:

1) he’s an economic development attorney. In a blue collar, service-oriented economy in a low income metro, he’s playing the job attraction and re-open post Covid angle.
2) he did mention border security, but he did it in a fairly skilled way. Basically, when people come here, they’re economically desperate. No matter how good desperate people are, when they arrive you’re going to see an increase in property crimes, robberies, etc. Because good people are capable of bad things when they are desperate.

The other thing I’d point out is the Dem
candidate is a social worker and her husband is a professor with an Anglo surname. She is Latina, but that doesn’t help her. Social worker and professors both give off a bit of an ivory tower vibe.

 

In House District 5, Republican Bob Good defeated Republican incumbent Denver Riggleman in a convention, and Good won the general election. Riggleman criticized other Republicans on CNN. Good criticized Riggleman for presiding over the wedding of a gay staff member because Good is against gay marriage. Good believes that abortion should be illegal without exceptions. Riggleman believes that abortion should be illegal with exceptions. I hoped that Good was far enough right where he would lose moderates and lose the general election, but he won by 5.1, albeit his margin was worse than Riggleman's margin of 6.5 in 2018.

New Mexico held conventions instead of primaries for the District 1 special election to replace Deb Haaland, who resigned to be Secretary of the Interior. By having conventions, they were able to have the general election on June 1, as opposed to Ohio which will have two special elections on Election Day and Florida which will have primaries on Election Day for a special election in January. There is a federal law that elections must have ballots for overseas voters 45 days in advance, which becomes 90 days when it is done for a primary and a general election. Democrat Melanie Stansbury was the surprise convention winner and won the general election by 24.6, which was 50 percent larger than Haaland's win by 16.4.

https://centerforpolitics.org/cryst...mcauliffes-chance-to-buck-history-once-again/ has a table showing that in the last thirteen gubernatorial elections, the president's party has had an average margin of 16.0 worse than the president did the previous year. However, the last two margins were closer. In 2013, McAuliffe won by 2.5, which was 1.4 worse than Obama in 2012. In 2017, Northram won by 8.9, which was 3.6 better than Clinton in 2016, meaning the Republican did worse in 2017 than Trump in 2016.

 

Not at all likely in that district. The only potential threat to any Republican there is redistricting. It's a miracle that a Democrat has held that district as recently as 2008.

 

Old white dude is an extremely popular former governor who did a good job. Virginia does not allow governors to serve consecutive terms.

 

In Arizona, the Democrats won a 5-4 majority of House seats, while the Republicans won the statewide House vote. I looked at the percentages in each district, and I was surprised that those percentages could produce a statewide Republican majority. The reason is that the districts that elected Republicans averaged enough votes that 51.5 percent of votes in were in the four districts that elected Republicans, and 48.5 percent of votes were in five districts that eliminated Democrats. I'm not saying there was voter suppression, but if you're trying to guess about voter suppression, looking at states controlled by Republicans where Republican districts cast more votes is possible evidence. Even if the Republicans didn't expect to win any of the House seats held by Democrats, those voters mattered toward president, senator, and if any state or local elections were close.

I just compared the House elections in each state in 2020 and 1998. I looked at what percent of the House members in each state were from each party and what the statewide margin was. Some states had identical composition, but the margins changed so much that I did not consider them to be close to in 1998. For example, Idaho's margins of 39.2 and 32.4 in 2020 were much bigger than their margins of 10 and 7.8 in 1998. I acknowledge that somebody else who did this could occasionally disagree. There were 13 states that were close to how they voted in 1998, and they are Alaska, Florida, Hawaii, Kansas, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Montana, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Utah, Vermont, and Virginia. This only includes votes for the House.

I'm making a spreadsheet about something about the 2020 House elections, and I will post my results at some point.

 

Wikipedia gives the tipping point margin (TPM) for president and Senate. I calculated the TPM for a House majority in each state. I ranked all the margins in each state and gave the margin each district would have to shift for the minority party to get half and to get a majority. "Odd" means that the state has an odd amount of seats, so it is impossible to get exactly half. I did not do Louisiana because their combination of jungle primaries and runoffs made it ambiguous how to rank the districts. Iowa had a Republican win a House seat by 6 votes, so the TPM for the Democrats to get half rounds to 0.00%. Rhode Island had one district have one Democrat and two Independents, so the best the Republicans could have done was half. South Dakota only had a Republican and a Libertarian, so a Democrat could not have won the sheet. The column of D or R states which party has the House majority in that state, and the percentages are for the necessary swing for the other party to get the majority. 20 states have a Democratic majority, 3 states (Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania) have half of each, and 27 states have a Republican majority.

 

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/06/30/behind-bidens-2020-victory/ is about presidential elections in 2016 and 2020 and House election in 2018, but the presidential election topic is locked, so I'm posting here. From 2016 to 2020, the gender gap decreased (women were more Democratic than men by a smaller margin in 2020 than in 2016), the education gap increased (people with college degrees were were Democratic than people without college degrees by a larger margin in 2020 than in 2016), and the generation gap decreased (all four generations were more even in 2020 than in 2016, Biden won Generation Z by 20 percent but those people couldn't vote in 2016 so they can't be compared to Generation Z in 2016). 58 percent of Trump voters in 2020 were Whites without four-year degrees, and that group was 27 percent of Biden voters. The geography gap had Biden improving over Clinton in suburbs and Trump improving in urban and rural areas. What doesn't make sense is the differentials in 2016 add to Democratic by 19, and the three differentials in 2020 add to Democratic by 12. I don't have exact information, but I've read that urban, suburban, and rural have about equal amounts of people, so the sum of the differentials should be more Democratic in 2020, but it wasn't. Trump improved slightly among Protestants, and Biden improved over Clinton among Catholics, Unaffiliated, and Other religions. 58 percent of Trump voters and 35 percent of Biden voters were Protestant. Trump did much worse among White Catholics, and his margin got 2 points worse among voters who attend religious services at least monthly. Citizens who did not vote were also analyzed, and they supported Biden over Trump by 15, which supports the belief that Democrats need to get out the vote (whenever I see the acronym GOTV it looks like a TV channel, so maybe a political channel should use that name). In 2020, college graduates were 39 percent of voters and 17 percent of nonvoters. Specifying that the nonvoters analyzed were citizens is useful, but it did not mention the fact that there are citizens who were ineligible because of crimes. Married men had a big change from 32 percent for Clinton to 44 percent for Biden.

 

Hope the good people of OH11 send Nina Turner packing. Such a toxic piece of work.

Just in in #OH11: Shontel Brown (D) leading Nina Turner (D) 56%-36% w/ early votes from Cuyahoga & Summit counties reporting...

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) August 3, 2021

 

Slate seems to disagree...

Shontel Brown defeats Nina Turner, much to Hillary Clinton and Jim Clyburn’s delight. (slate.com)

Shontel Brown won the Democratic primary for Ohio’s 11th District special election Tuesday night, according to the Associated Press, defeating her chief rival, Nina Turner. The race was a bitterly fought proxy war between the Democratic establishment and the left, between senior members of the Congressional Black Caucus and members of the Squad, and, most of all, between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders in what is now the sixth year of the 2016 Democratic presidential primary. Brown will almost certainly win the November special election in the safely Democratic district.
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Unsurprisingly, so does Turner.

“I am going to work hard to ensure that something like this doesn’t happen to another progressive candidate again,” Turner said in her concession speech. “We didn’t lose this race. Evil money manipulated and maligned this election.”
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I wonder if she realizes that this sounds borderline Trumpy to people not already convinced by her ideas. In any case I think she has a lot to learn about how to win elections:

Turner, perhaps even more than Sanders himself, became a vessel for the left’s rage over Sanders’ fate. She was one of the most assertive surrogates on Sanders’ behalf in both presidential races, pushing him to continue late into the 2016 nomination contest and protesting Clinton at the messy 2016 Democratic National Convention. In 2020, after Sanders had bowed out, {Turner} described choosing between Biden and Trump as “like saying to somebody, ‘You have a bowl of shit in front of you, and all you’ve got to do is eat half of it instead of the whole thing.’ It’s still shit.” She would eat those words—the whole bowl of them—repeatedly during her primary campaign.​

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I'll admit, there's a time when that kind of speech is warranted, but Congresswoman Nina Turner doesn't seem to have good political sense nor awareness.

 

And therein is the problem with the American far left… they have zero political sense and awareness. Seriously… How do you bungle advocating for police reform when there are rows of police turning cities into warzones because they don’t like being called a bastard..

 

Nina's message last night was exactly why she is considered so toxic. It was totally ungraceful, unwarranted not to mentioned with anti semitic undertones.
She is a whack job!