In a troubling sign for Republicans less than two months before November’s elections, Democrats’ advantage on the question of which party Americans are more likely to vote for in November is ballooning, according to a new NPR/Marist poll. The gap has widened to 12 percentage points, up from 7 in […] Read more »
Trump’s Midwest is a gubernatorial battleground in 2018
President Trump’s Midwest is the key gubernatorial battleground in 2018. The swath of states that secured the president’s electoral college victory in 2016 is now home to a series of statehouse contests that could alter the balance of power in a region of the country long crucial to presidential elections. […] Read more »
The Upper Midwest swung to Trump in 2016. It may swing back to the Democrats in 2018
Donald Trump’s success in the Upper Midwest — particularly his victories in Michigan and Wisconsin — were pivotal to his success in the 2016 presidential election. His 1.5-point loss in Minnesota was the closest a Republican presidential nominee has come to winning the state since Ronald Reagan lost the state […] Read more »
What Ohio’s special election will tell us about November
The Ohio special election in the 12th Congressional District is coming down to the wire. In the last major tea leaves before the 2018 midterms, an average of recent polls puts Republican Troy Balderson just ahead of Democrat Danny O’Connor in their bid to succeed Republican Pat Tiberi. In a […] Read more »
Was the Midwestern ‘Red Shift’ More Pro-Trump or Anti-Hillary? The Answer Matters a Lot for 2018
… In general, one of the most challenging aspects of analyzing events in real time is distinguishing temporary blips from long-term trends. Popular pundits and other media figures often tend to overstate the degree to which immediate events portend long-term patterns; as I noted once in another context, “There’s a […] Read more »
Polls show a return of Democrats’ ‘Big Blue Wall’
When President Donald Trump captured the White House in 2016, he won with an electoral map that showed a shift in long-standing voting patterns, hammering away at the Democrats’ “Big Blue Wall” of states in the upper Midwest. New state polls from Marist this week, however, suggest those older patterns […] Read more »