Three profoundly dangerous myths about the 2018 elections

In the days immediately after the 2018 elections the most widely circulated analysis held that along with high turnout among minority voters the significant Democratic gains in the House of Representatives and in a range of state level elections were the result of the significant defection from the GOP of […] Read more »

Republicans seek to expand Trump’s support for 2020, but will the president cooperate?

Republican allies of President Trump are researching new ways to position him in the run-up to the 2020 election, particularly among the college-educated suburbanites who voted for Democrats in November because of their disapproval of the president. One polling effort is intended to test messages and policy initiatives for the […] Read more »

All Is Not Lost for Republicans in the Suburbs

Will Ferrell once joked about his all-too-normal, stress-free upbringing: “Maybe that’s where comedy comes from, as some sort of reaction to the safe, boring suburbs.” Safe? Boring? Not any more, especially not for Republicans this year. It was suburban voters — women and men — who voted Republican in 2010, […] Read more »

The 200 Districts That Withstood The Blue Wave — And What They Have In Common

We’ve spilled plenty of digital ink on where Democrats made gains in the House, so now we are going to look more closely at the 200 seats the Republicans won. And we’ll use how a district voted for President Trump in 2016 in addition to a district’s population density as […] Read more »

Target 2020: the Independent Male Voter

Conventional wisdom holds that Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives because they got clobbered among college-educated women. They did take a beating in that demographic, but opposition from college-educated women doesn’t account for why the GOP lost. The real reason Republicans lost 40 House seats? They lost Independent […] Read more »