Tag: Midterms

Ed Morrissey calls them “worthless”:

Exit polling data gets collected all day long to find the eventual turnout model for elections, especially in demographics such as age, gender, ethnicity, affiliation, etc. That data only becomes valid when it is fully compiled. Partial data sets for exit polling do not provide predictive outcomes because the turnout models can change significantly during the day, perhaps especially because of early voting. That is exactly what happened in 2004, when media outlets used non-predictive data in predictive ways, and while the data sets were still being compiled.

That isn’t to say that completed exit polls are meaningless. The networks will use the data in part to plug into their election models in order to call races — but that takes place while the results of actual voting are being published, after the polls have closed.

Nate Cohn chips in his two cents on exit polls:

They’re not designed to measure the results perfectly or measure the composition of the electorate. I find myself surprised by how just how accurate the exit poll figures can be, despite the obvious issues with the raw responses and the inability to weight to population targets. Unfortunately, most analysts and reporters jump on the surprising, outlying, newsworthy findings. Often, those figures are the ones most likely to be wrong.

Dana Lind identifies another problem with exit polls, their “tendency to oversample a particular kind of voter of color — the kind who lives in majority-white areas”:

Even though the public doesn’t know exactly how the exit poll chooses where to go, it’s possible to make some educated guesses. The exit poll is trying to predict the margin of victory for one candidate over another across the state. So when it decides which polling places to put interviewers outside of, it’s reasonable to assume that it’s choosing lots of swing precincts — precincts that are harder to predict and likely to affect the outcome. Those are going to be largely white precincts. …

Here’s why this is a problem: the voters of color pollsters run into in majority-white precincts might not be representative of the voters of color across the state. In particular, according to Latino Decisions, voters of color living among whites are “more assimilated, better educated, higher income, and more conservative than other minority voters.”

Efforts to do so look likely to succeed:

Four states have minimum-wage increases on the ballot on Tuesday, an occasion that’s notable for two reasons. All four states — Alaska, Arkansas, Nebraska and South Dakota — lean conservative, meaning that the debate over low wages and income inequality has spread beyond reliably blue parts of the country. And should these four measures pass, as they’re all expected to, a majority of states in the U.S. will soon have higher wage floors than the federal minimum.

Danielle Kurtzleben puts these initiatives in context:

As the Wall Street Journal has noted, all 10 proposed minimum wage measures on state ballots since 2002 have passed. That’s remarkable because the minimum wage is a divisive partisan issue.

When the CBO in February released a report saying that a nationwide $10.10 minimum wage would lead to a decline of around 500,000 workers, conservatives pounced and liberals went on the defensive. But despite these apparent partisan divides in the US, Republican voters aren’t entirely against minimum wage hikes. While Democrats tend to broadly support a higher wage, Republicans don’t always disagree — indeed, they’re roughly evenly split.

Ben Casselman reviews the economic debate over the minimum wage:

Economists are divided over whether these efforts are a good idea. In aworking paper released Monday, David Neumark, J.M. Ian Salas and William Wascher fired the latest salvo in a long–running battle over the effects of raising the minimum wage. Neumark, his coathors and their allies argue raising the minimum wage leads to lost jobs; their opponents, including University of Massachusetts economist Arindrajit Dube, argue the impact on employment is minimal. A 2008 meta-study looked at 64 minimum-wage analyses and concluded that they generally found little to no impact on employment. A poll of leading economists last year found them nearly evenly divided on the question of whether a $9-an-hour minimum wage would “make it noticeably harder for low-skilled workers to find employment.”

Josh Barro compares the different measures:

The proposals differ in their particulars. Alaska would set its minimum wage the highest, with a gradual rise to $9.75 by 2016. Nebraska would go to $9 in 2016, South Dakota to $8.50 in 2015 and Arkansas to $8.50 by 2017. In Alaska and South Dakota, the minimum wage would continue to rise in line with price inflation in following years, which makes an enormous difference in the long term.

And Reihan wonders how the minimum wage hikes will play out in each state:

[W]hile the discussion of the minimum wage referendums have largely focused on what these states have in common — they’re relatively politically conservative — it hasn’t focused on the fact that among them, Arkansas is unusually poor and that its adult population has an unusually low average skill level. The consequences of a substantial increase in the local wage floor will likely have different consequences in Arkansas, in light of its history of deprivation and isolation, and where higher consumer prices associated with rising compensation costs will have more bite due to its low income levels, than in Alaska, which is considerably more affluent. And while both Nebraska and South Dakota had unemployment rates of 3.6 percent as of August, unemployment in both Alaska (6.8 percent) and Arkansas (6.3 percent) is fairly high. I can’t help but think that Arkansas is making a mistake. But better that Arkansas is making a state-level decision that, as inflation and productivity growth proceeds apace, will be less binding than new federal legislation, which will be less responsive to its particular conditions.

John Sides notes that the “president’s party tends to lose seats in midterm elections. Period.”

Part of the story is that the president isn’t on the ballot, and he often supplies coattails for congressional candidates to ride on.  Part of the story is that the electorate may react against the ideological direction of the president’s party–as it has since Obama took office–and seeks to elect candidates from the other party.  In any case, the “midterm penalty” is important.  In elections from 1980-2012, we estimate that this penalty is 3 points of vote share.

Derek Willis looks at possible outcomes:

For Democrats, who hold 199 seats, a good night would be not losing any seats at all. At best, they could gain perhaps two, but that seems a very long shot. If things go as expected for Democrats, they could wind up with their lowest total since 1949, when they had 188 seats. (They had 193 after the 2010 elections.)

Enten believes that the GOP’s unpopularity is holding it back:

A Republican gain of five to 12 seats is significantly less than one would expect using presidential approval ratings alone as a predictor. If voters cared only about Obama’s performance, we’d expect a much more lopsided result: A Democratic loss of about 25 seats. That seems unlikely. Part of the reason that gains will be kept down is that, at 12.4 percent, this is the lowest congressional approval rating going into a midterm election since the question was first asked in 1974.

Overall, the House is all but determined. It’s falling right along the lines that we thought it would given the factors that normally accurately forecast House elections. Republicans are set to gain because it’s a midterm year and the president is unpopular, but they probably aren’t picking up as much as ground as they would if Congress were more popular.

Regardless, Chait expects the Republican House to keep Washington gridlocked:

If the House could make a deal with Obama, the Senate would sign on to the deal if it were controlled by Republicans or if it were controlled by Democrats. Gridlock will continue through the next Congress regardless of the Senate race.

Indeed, gridlock will continue after 2016 as well, unless Republicans win the presidency (in which case the House will churn out Republican bills for signing, as it did under George W. Bush). To get a sense of just how grim the picture is for Democrats, Benjy Sarlin reported several months ago on a Democratic plan to try to win back the House in 2020. The year 2020 is not picked out of a hat. It coincides with the next Census, which will redraw the House map. Sarlin’s reporting makes it pretty clear the Democrats don’t have an especially good chance of winning back the House in 2020 — it’s simply the next time such a prospect becomes even faintly imaginable.

Tim Storey predicts more divided state governments:

U.S. states are at historic lows of divided government. Only three legislatures have chambers controlled by opposite parties (not factoring in the coalitions in New York and Washington). The last time that there were only three split legislatures was in 1944. When matched up with control of governors to determine full partisan control of state government, there are only 11 divided states headed into the election — the lowest number since 1952. With at least 11 close gubernatorial contests and about 10 legislative chambers that are truly toss-ups, it looks certain that at least some states will move from unified government to divided. That is almost guaranteed to happen in Pennsylvania, where incumbent Gov. Tom Corbett (R) trails badly in the polls. In several traditionally Democratic states like Massachusetts and Illinois, Republican gubernatorial candidates have a shot at winning, so those states could end up with divided governments as well.

Earlier Dish on the importance of state legislatures here.

Sam Wang provides “final polling snapshots for gubernatorial races that are either close or likely to switch party control”:

Enten explains the lay of the land:

There are a lot of tight races. Five seats are forecasted to flip from Republican to Democratic or independent control: Alaska, Florida, Kansas, Maine and Pennsylvania. Two seats are projected to flip from Democratic to Republican control: Arkansas and Massachusetts. If all the FiveThirtyEight favorites win, Republicans will have 26 governorships in 2015, Democrats will have 23 and independents will have one.

Dickerson wonders about the lessons taken from the results:

Drawing a conclusion will be more complicated than simply waiting to see if Republican governors are re-elected.

If Gov. Scott Walker wins in Wisconsin and Gov. Sam Brownback holds on in Kansas, they will both be able to argue that they survived even after taking political risks to govern as proud conservatives. If, on the other hand Ohio Gov. John Kasich cruises to a big victory, that might show something different. Kasich, and Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan, opted to take the federal Medicaid money as a part of the Affordable Care Act. Doing so was once considered heresy in conservative ranks. But now people like Newt Gingrich point to Kasich as a model for expanding the Republican Party with black voters. In Gingrich’s election-eve predictions, he cites that Kasich won the endorsement of a black newspaper. The Ohio governor won that endorsement because he took the Medicaid money. Almost all of the vulnerable Republican governors this cycle did not. Will their victories or defeats render a verdict on that decision?

Larison cautions against over-hyping the Walker result:

If Walker does end up losing, as I am predicting he will, it shouldn’t come as a great shock, nor should it be treated as such a huge setback. Let’s remember that Walker was first elected in an unusually good year for Republicans in a state that had not made a recent habit of electing Republicans to statewide office. In that extraordinarily Republican year, Walker won with 52% of the vote. In a less lopsided election year, it’s possible that Walker might not have won the first time. Considering the controversy in his first term and the attempted recall, it wouldn’t be so strange if the electorate of a normally Democratic-leaning state grew tired of Walker and chose someone else to replace him. It does Republicans no favors to exaggerate the importance of any one governor’s race, and it would be a mistake for anyone to read too much into a Walker loss.

Sarah Binder isn’t so sure:

[E]ven in recent periods of divided control, the opposition party has been willing to confirm roughly half of a president’s appointees to the bench — not least because such nominees are often favored candidates of opposition party senators. (And as I noted here, even after Democrats banned judicial and executive filibusters, Republican senators voted to confirm most judges even after opposing them on cloture.) This fall, for example, Obama nominated a Utah judge to a federal district court bench with the glowing support of Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah. Perhaps a Republican Senate will leave advice and consent in tatters, seeing little gain to filling seats better left open for a Republican president.  Still, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Republicans leverage their majority power to continue to secure lifetime spots on the bench for judicial candidates well known back home.

Jeffrey Rosen imagines what would happen if a Supreme Court justice dies or retires. His “optimistic” scenario:

Democrats can point to bipartisan Supreme Court confirmations, like justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia, where they have voted for nominees with whom they disagree. And there is next to zero historical evidence of gridlock causing extended vacancies (although that could be plausibly chalked up to the fact that we didn’t experience divided government very often in the early years of the republic). Even Obama himself, in a recent interview with The New Yorker, suggested there would be pressure for Republicans to approve a nominee, saying that intense media coverage of SCOTUS nominations “means that some of the shenanigans that were taking place in terms of blocking appointments, stalling appointments [to the lower courts], I think are more difficult to pull off during a Supreme Court nomination process.”

On the other hand, there’s no particular grounds for optimism with a Democratic president and Republican Senate. With their vitriolic obstruction throughout the Obama presidency, including a fight over the debt ceiling and a government shutdown, some Senate Republicans have shown a willingness to paralyze the basic functions of government—and might be comfortable with an evenly divided Court of eight justices, which could mean repeated 4-4 deadlocks and opinions that lack precedential value.

Earlier Dish on the subject here.

Patrick J. Egan illustrates the advantage Republicans have in this year’s Senate races:

A good measure of the parties’ relative strength in the states holding Senate elections is the share of the state vote each earned in the most recent presidential election. The figure above plots (in blue) the Democratic share of the two-party presidential vote in the median state of those holding Senate elections from 1950 through 2014. For comparison, it also displays (in gray) the share of the national popular vote the Democrats received in the most recent presidential election. For most of the past six decades, these two trends tracked each other very closely: the parties’ relative strength in the set of Senate seats up for election was no different from their strength nationally. But that changed after the 2000 presidential election, in which the Republican Party’s dominance in the South emerged in full force.

His bottom line:

Simply put, this year’s Senate elections are unrepresentative of the nation to an extent that is unprecedented in elections held in the post-war era. So when we begin to sift through the results on Election Night, the number of Senate seats won and lost will tell us less than we might like about where the two parties stand in the minds of American voters.

Jonathan Cohn adds a qualifier:

Of course, it’s not simply geography that’s undermining Democratic strength this time around. If it were, Democrats wouldn’t be struggling to hold seats in places like Iowa, which Obama won. But the electorate for this Senate race is a lot more conservative than America as a whole. That has surely made a huge, and maybe decisive, difference.

Ben Highton highlighted the Republicans’ structural advantages back in February:

[T]he Senate treats states as equal – irrespective of population – and this gives the Republicans an advantage because on average, less populous states are more Republican than more populous ones.  What about the states that fall into each of the three Senate classes?  Compared to the national two-party presidential vote margin in 2012, class 2 states are 10 percentage points more Republican on average.  Of the three classes, this is the largest skew toward the Republicans.  The average margin in class 3 states is 6.1 points more Republican than the national presidential margin; and, the average margin in class 1 states is just 1.3 points more Republican.   Here’s a graph showing this:

A reader sums up a “bizarre race” in one district:

The race in Massachusetts’s 6th Congressional District is getting strange. The National Organization for Marriage, which opposes same-sex marriage, is urging supporters to vote for Democrat Seth Moulton rather than an openly gay Republican, Richard Tisei. Meanwhile, the Human Rights Campaign is staying out of the race completely, despite having previously endorsed in the district.

From one article cited by our reader:

Asked whether Moulton would welcome or reject votes cast in his favor by NOM supporters, a spokesperson for Moulton responded, “Reject.” “Seth Moulton fundamentally disagrees with everything NOM stands for and has long said that equality is the civil rights fight of our generation,” said Carrie Rankin, Moulton’s communications director. “Fighting against groups, like NOM, that deny equality as a basic human right will be a priority of Seth’s in Congress.” Rankin noted that Moulton has a gay brother and Moulton has said, “It’s fundamentally wrong that he and I don’t share the same rights just because of who he is.”

From another piece:

The nation’s largest LGBT-rights organization is not expected to get involved in the Massachusetts congressional race between openly gay Republican Richard Tisei and pro-LGBT Democrat Seth Moulton, Metro Weekly has learned. …

HRC, which has a policy of endorsing pro-LGBT incumbents, previously endorsed Rep. John Tierney (D) in Massachusetts’s 6th Congressional District. In September, Tierney suffered a surprising primary defeat to Moulton, a young Marine veteran vowing to keep the seat in Democratic control. Two years prior, Tisei lost narrowly to Tierney 47.1 percent to 48.3 percent. Many credited the win by a vulnerable Tierney, whose wife was mired in a federal tax scandal, to President Barack Obama and Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren being at the top of the 2012 ballot. In that race HRC also endorsed Tierney.

The Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, which seeks to increase LGBT representation, has endorsed Tisei the past two election cycles.

Tisei is one of two men seeking to become the first openly gay Republican elected to Congress. In California, Carl DeMaio is attempting to unseat Democratic Rep. Scott Peters for the state’s 52nd Congressional District. HRC has endorsed Peters in that race and representatives of the organization have been critical of DeMaio’s commitment to LGBT issues.

Previous reader dispatches from Texas here and South Dakota here.