Measuring the strength and weakness of candidates is a time-honored tradition in political analysis. But too often it’s too subjective. An Inside Elections metric quantifies the electoral performance of candidates, making it easier to test conventional wisdom and prevailing political narratives. Did underwhelming nominees in key states torpedo GOP efforts […] Read more »
The ‘Red Wave’ Washout: How Skewed Polls Fed a False Election Narrative
… Traditional nonpartisan pollsters, after years of trial and error and tweaking of their methodologies, produced polls that largely reflected reality. But they also conducted fewer polls than in the past. That paucity allowed their accurate findings to be overwhelmed by an onrush of partisan polls in key states that […] Read more »
Black support for GOP ticked up in this year’s midterms
Black voters have been a steady foundation for Democratic candidates for decades, but that support appeared to show a few cracks in this year’s elections. Republican candidates were backed by 14% of Black voters, compared with 8% in the last midterm elections four years ago, according to AP VoteCast, an […] Read more »
2022’s Most Unexpected Winners and Losers
Generally, we don’t like to endorse zero-sum views of the world, but it was hard to miss the seesaw effect at play across the political landscape of 2022. So we offer for your amusement (or annoyance, depending on your political priors) 11 sets of paired winners and losers — the […] Read more »
The most underdiscussed fact of the 2022 election: how historically close it was
… It’s not unusual for any one of these (governorships, House seats or Senate seats) to be narrowly split. After all, we’ve just had two years in which each party has held 50 Senate seats. What is unusual is to have all three be so closely divided. By my count, […] Read more »
GOP stumbles with independents contributed to midterm woes
… Republican House candidates nationwide won the support of 38% of independent voters in last month’s midterm elections, VoteCast showed. That’s far short of the 51% that Democrats scored with the same group in 2018 when they swept into power by picking up 41 seats. The GOP’s lackluster showing among […] Read more »