… We’re now firmly in the analysis phase of the 2018 midterm elections, an election cycle in which Democrats slightly overperformed expectations in the House while seeing a net loss in the Senate, winning two-thirds of the contested Senate seats. One of the central questions for the party centers on […] Read more »
Was it a wave election? Depends on your data set
As the final 2018 election results trickle in, analysts and social media commentators have turned their attention to assessing the damage. Namely, was 2018 a “wave” election or not. Both sides of the “wave or no wave” debate have dug into their positions and both have some data to use […] Read more »
Republicans Must Do Some Soul-Searching
Over the next few months, as election results are finalized, exit polling massaged, and post-election polling conducted and examined, we will be spending a lot of time slicing and dicing the data. But in the meantime, Republicans need to be doing some soul-searching about their party and its future. Of […] Read more »
The Extraordinary 2018 Election in Colorado
This post-election survey of unaffiliated voters, along with observations of voter turnout in Colorado, can only be described as extraordinary. It was extraordinary because in the past 20 years never has one political party been so overwhelmingly rejected at every level of representative government by the electorate. It was extraordinary […] Read more »
Weak Spots in Democrats’ Strong Midterm Results Point to Challenges in 2020
Democrats had a great showing in the 2018 midterm elections. But even in such a strong year, they sometimes struggled to match their traditional support in electorally significant areas — with serious implications for 2020. Their triumph was a somewhat narrow one, concentrated in well-educated, affluent communities. Over all, the […] Read more »
2018 rewrote the main rule of US politics
So much for the old rule that all politics is local. … In virtually every state, Democrats last Tuesday displayed a clear advantage in densely populated, culturally and racially diverse white-collar metropolitan areas, while Republicans relied on elevated margins in the preponderantly white, religiously traditional, smaller places beyond them. In […] Read more »