Iowa Democrat Rita Hart decided this week to withdraw her challenge to her defeat in Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District last year. Her six-vote loss to Republican Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks capped off a successful year for Iowa Republicans who won the presidential race, Senate race and three of four House races […] Read more »
Demographics and Expectations: Analyzing Biden and Trump’s Performances
Key Points• The predictive power of demographics makes county margins strongly correlated and thus inferable from each other. Comparing the actual results to the expected results based on county demographics gives us a better idea of candidate performance.• In the 2020 presidential election, Democrats overperformed in states with high numbers […] Read more »
Do You Think You Can Tell How a Neighborhood Voted Just by Looking Around?
An interactive, street-level quiz on America’s full political landscape Most readers who have played so far are pretty good at this game, at least in certain kinds of places. The precincts that voted overwhelmingly for Donald J. Trump or just as heavily for Joe Biden were generally the easiest for […] Read more »
How Covid-19 and Deaths of Despair Combine to Affect Communities
The Covid-19 pandemic has torn through the United States in the last 12 months, leaving more than half a million dead and the nation’s economy in tatters, but the virus didn’t arrive on a blank slate. Long before Covid, the Deaths of Despair epidemic was already taking a massive toll […] Read more »
Why Republican voter restrictions are a race against time
With their drive to erect new obstacles to voting, particularly across the Sun Belt, Republicans are stacking sandbags against a rising tide of demographic change. In many of the states where Republicans are advancing the most severe restrictions — including Georgia, Arizona and Texas — shifts in the electorate’s composition […] Read more »
The Biden Agenda Doesn’t Run Through Washington
… Cities and their inner suburbs need an immediate lifeline from Washington to stabilize their finances after the devastation of the pandemic. But once those communities regain their balance, they could become crucial allies for Biden. By working with big metros, the president would be aligning federal policy with powerful […] Read more »