The first key to understanding Tuesday’s elections is recognizing that it was a midterm cycle. The party controlling the White House typically loses seats in midterms. In recent decades, those losses have averaged 30 seats in the House and four seats in the Senate. So far this cycle, Democrats have […] Read more »
Something Funny Happened In Iowa, And It May Hurt Democrats In 2016
Republican Sen.-elect Joni Ernst easily won her race in Iowa last Tuesday, beating Democrat Bruce Braley by 8.5 percentage points. Her victory wasn’t shocking, but its size was (to everyone except pollster Ann Selzer, that is). The final FiveThirtyEight projection had Ernst winning by just 1.5 percentage points. What the […] Read more »
Did Asian Americans switch parties overnight? No.
Buried in the blue and red bars of the exit poll results from Tuesday’s midterm elections is an astonishing figure. Asian Americans were nearly evenly split in their voting in congressional races: 50 percent to 49 percent, with a nod to Democrats by the faintest of recordable margins. … Is […] Read more »
Shellacking, the Sequel
… Tuesday’s resounding Republican sweep closely followed the script of the GOP’s landslide in 2010, and it exposed perhaps even more deeply the limits of the modern Democratic coalition—while underscoring the party’s persistent inability to convince enough whites that they will benefit from activist government. But just as President Obama […] Read more »
G.O.P. Is Making Progress Toward Presidency but Is Still Playing Catch-Up
After five of six presidential elections in which the Republicans have lost the popular vote, this year’s midterm elections point toward a plausible Republican path to winning the White House. .. But the Republican path is also narrow, one the Democrats could block if they reassemble their support among the […] Read more »
Meet the voters who feel the economy is rigged, believe in global warming — and voted Republican
… The exit polls show a midterm electorate that skews more conservative than the one that reelected Obama two years ago. But it still shows solid majorities among those voters for some traditionally liberal policy stances. Fifty-seven percent of voters said illegal immigrants working in the United States should be […] Read more »