Every election comes with its own ‘branded’ swing voter. In the 1990s and early 2000s, we had soccer moms and NASCAR dads, as well as security moms and office-park dads. Over the last four years, the typical swing voter was either defined as an upscale suburban resident (Peloton moms) or […] Read more »
Introducing the 2021 Cook Political Report Partisan Voter Index
The Cook Political Report is pleased to introduce the post-2020 edition of the Partisan Voter Index (PVI) for all 50 states and 435 congressional districts. Although these district boundaries won’t be in place for 2022’s midterm elections due to upcoming redistricting, this dataset will serve as a useful baseline to […] Read more »
McConnell blasts big business stands
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s (R-Ky.) diatribe against big business could spawn volumes of analysis. The text tells many tales: the frayed coalition between the board room and the pick-up truck, hypocrisy, and more. What struck me most was the fundamental inaccuracy of nearly every assertion and premise on which […] Read more »
Trump didn’t bring White working-class voters to the Republican Party. The data suggest he kept them away.
Republican leaders have been hailing a class realignment of the parties. “We are a working class party now. That’s the future,” tweeted Sen. Josh Hawley on election night 2020. In February, Sen. Rick Scott told audiences at CPAC, “We will not win the future by trying to go back to […] Read more »
Presidential ‘fast starts’ come with electoral risk
“President Donald Trump is off to a fast start,” I wrote in a Jan. 30, 2017, column for Inside Elections with Nathan L. Gonzales, before warning that the same “aggressiveness could produce the same sort of reaction that Barack Obama’s fast start did in 2009: It could lead to a […] Read more »
Polling data reveal a real opportunity for Democrats
… From our vantage point, the data plot line that is the most meaningful for Democrats, as we look ahead to big races in 2021 and the 2022 midterms, is the 6-point increase in independent affiliation from just a few months ago at the end of 2020. Today, 44 percent […] Read more »