2020 Post-Election Thread

In that own article says they counted safe rated ones as swing districts. That’s bullshit.

Fact is we lost all the tossups except maybe NY-22.

Based off their one polling company. Aggregated polling showed they were swing districts and I trust them more.

Cook is an election analysis and forecasting site, not a pollster, although they do use polls in their analysis. Dave Wasserman, the “I’ve seen enough” guy, works for them. Idk much about them, but they seem okay. Nate Silver factors their assessments into his House forecast model.

To evaluate the implicit claim that M4A Dems outperformed, we need the Presidential election broken down by House district to see how Congressional Dems did relative to Biden. If progressives are winning - but underperforming Biden in their districts - then that’s not good evidence that M4A is netting them votes.

The district breakdown is mostly not available yet (see below). Probably won’t be until the states certify.

So we’ll see. The one bit of evidence that I know about is NE-02 (because Nebraska splits its electoral votes by district), and it cuts against the thesis that M4A was a winner. Biden won the district by 6.6 points. M4A Dem Kara Eastman lost by 4.6 points, so -11.2 swing from Biden. Worth noting in this case that Eastman had establishment support (Biden endorsement, DCCC money).

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I mean honestly who cares what these meaningless factoids turn out to be. Not doing M4A partywide is unforgivable.

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Errr if M4A results in a net negative -11 is it really unforgiveable? Seems like these ‘factoids’ are kind of important.

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After an election, pundits and politicians all have their takes on why things happened the way they did. Invariably, their take aligns exactly with what they already believed. To actually do this kind of analysis is really hard and takes more than a few days and someone more qualified than your typical politician or pundit.

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Yes because single payer isn’t really underwater 11 points to the standard bearer. That’s a Third Way talking points memo done in satire. Remember Claire “Midwesterners don’t like free stuff” McCaskill who lost to Josh Hawley (lol) in Missouri? Yeah they took the free stuff this year. They love it. The problem isn’t actually free stuff; the problem is party elites are still trying to run as Republicans in swing states/districts and failing miserably.

Fox Newsketeers say, “If we go to medical socialism then I’m moving to Canada!” which is the emptiest threat of all threats, and then Dems say, “I’m a fighter pilot that believes sick people should die in the streets” and they lose by a 2:1 margin anyway. Or lose to a guy that nearly OD’d on Just For Men gel that might be soliciting child prostitutes. Can’t split party messaging like that, have to pick one thing and be all-in party-wide because getting to 50+1 votes is hard and you get Liebermanned if everyone ain’t on the same page.

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Well, I don’t know if what you’re saying is true. I do know that assuming it’s true and ignoring any piece of possibly contradictory evidence isn’t a strategy

This prose is just so good always.

Like the post before mine implied, this won’t be sussed out to any degree of certainty doing crosstabs. It requires big time econometrics to isolate the effects. The degree of difficulty on that dive is approaching 5.0 and there probably isn’t enough data to get any kind of separation in the parameter estimates anyway. It’s the kind of paper that would come out years from now. So what I’m saying is, actually yeah, there really isn’t much evidence here.

But let’s assume there’s good evidence that single payer is actually that far underwater in some swing districts. What does that say about strategy, exactly–that we need to run more fighter pilots against single payer? Because I’d say that sounds like a seat-maximizing strategy, not a policy-maximizing one.

Not sure if ponied, but this seems like an important datapoint for something:

https://twitter.com/Redistrict/status/1331483636613459969

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I don’t suppose you guys believe that people can be more anti-Trump than pro-Biden or party loyalist.

No, I think that is probably true. It looks to me though that in places like that Biden did actually peel off some republicans as an anti-trump vote? That would appear to be what you are saying, correct?

Edit: I guess I’d need to see what percentage Omar got in '18 for comparison purposes although not having another presidential year where she’s running to compare it to limits its usefulness.

Meh, in 2018 Omar got 78/22. So she pretty significantly underperformed that in 20 on much higher turnout. So Biden turned out low-propensity republicans?

I don’t think you can draw any conclusions like that from one race. I would guess Anti-Trump drew out many non-partisans who more evenly split their votes in other races.

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Her opponent in 2018 spent like $25k against Omar. This year her opponent spent $10 million (will be one of the most expensive congressional races of all time) with a shitload of outside dark money coming in to spread racist smears against her. Guessing that probably had an effect and surprisingly some of the racists who didn’t vote for Omar weren’t turned off by Biden

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Trumpers seem to be celebrating bigly over this. I’m assuming it doesn’t mean shit but interested what others think

https://twitter.com/TracyOliver617/status/1332537709395578880

It wasn’t a ruling.

Ianal. But i assume “likely to succeed” and “having a likelihood of success” are two very different things, right?

You’re gonna hate this article. Sorry that it’s true.