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Posted on 11/10/2022 9:20:21 PM PST by SeekAndFind
I’ve written before about data analyst David Shor. He’s a progressive who found himself canceled back in 2020 after he tweeted some data suggesting that riots made for bad politics. That didn’t go over well in the BLM summer and he got fired. But he’s become a leading figure on the left both for analyzing election data but also for warning Democrats about repeating deeply unpopular phrases like “defund the police” or terms like “Latinx.” He wants Dems to win and he can see certain woke terms are just off-putting to voters.
Today New York Magazine published an interview with Shor in which he offered his early assessment of the midterms. He started out by noting that Democrats really didn’t have great turnout overall this year but did better in the races where it mattered.
The party’s overall share of the national vote is actually going to look fairly bad. It looks like we got roughly 48 percent of the vote. But that’s because Democratic incumbents in safe seats did much worse than those in close races.
In districts that the Cook Political Report rated as “likely” or “solid” or “safe” for the Democratic incumbent, Democrats’ share of the vote declined by 2.5 percent relative to 2020. In districts that were rated as “toss ups” or “lean Democratic,” however, our party’s vote share went down by only 0.4 percent compared to 2020.
As for what helped keep Democrats motivated in those close races, Shor agrees the Dobbs decision probably had a lot to do with it but his explanation was interesting.
We track party ownership of 33 different issues. And in 2020, abortion was middle of the pack. It wasn’t an issue that Democrats dominated. But the Dobbs decision changed that. Abortion suddenly became our second-best issue basically overnight…
I think it’s important to emphasize that what happened with abortion is extremely rare. It’s very rare for party ownership of an issue to shift this rapidly. And I think it really boils down to this concept of “thermostatic” public opinion...
The reason why the party that controls the presidency does poorly in midterms is that voters are trying to balance out policy change by creating divided government. And I think what’s really unique about this midterm cycle is that Republicans created a radical policy change — and one that was quite unpopular — without controlling the presidency or the legislature. And that allowed Democrats to plausibly run as the party that was going to make less change than the opposition, which is a super-unusual situation.
So midterms are usually bad for the party in power not because there’s some rule saying it must be so but because the party in power is usually the party judged to be going too far by voters. You can easily think back to Democrats passing Obamacare and then getting wiped out and losing 63 seats in the 2010 midterms. But this year, the big social change wasn’t anything done by Joe Biden or the Democrats it was Dobbs. So despite high inflation and an unpopular president there was a countervailing pressure created by people unhappy with the big change and the result is a midterm election where there’s actually less change than you would normally expect.
Shor was also asked about the change in Latino voting. Did it continue to shift right this year? Did it revert back?
…with the exception of Beto regaining ground in the Rio Grande Valley, I think there’s a pretty clear story nationwide. We’re still looking at precinct-level data. But if you look at county-level regressions, it really does seem like support continued to fall in relative terms in Hispanic areas. Certainly support was down relative to 2016. But it’s possible that it was down relative to 2020…But if you look at the results in Virginia last year, and in special elections earlier this year, I think it’s all consistent with the idea that a significant percentage of Latino voters durably realigned in 2020.
Looking forward, Shor has been one of the analysts warning that the 2024 Senate map is going to be bad news for the party. He thinks this election changes that but only very slightly.
That's why it was leaked early this year.
Sounds suspiciously like 2020, where the dems magically did much better in precisely the crucial swing states they needed, and only in those places. That just can’t happen by accident; it has to be engineered.
Abortion moved the races to within the chest range so they were stolen. Linda floating the national abortion ban a few weeks ago showed up in ads all over the country. A willful act of sabotage.
Remember - when the DNC had to buy presidential ticket "votes" - there were no coattails, because the coffers were dry for the downticket races.
Lookit the big ol' coattails on the JoeTatoe in 2022, when the DNC can splash the gelt around to US House and US Senate "races".
People don't seem to get that these "votes" cost money, just like everything else.
Look at your own state Repukelickings.
They could have moved to defuse the issue at the state with compromise legislation - but just as with the Weed proposition in 2018, they let it get on the ballot.
Again - a willful act of sabotage.
If Dobbs abortion hurt the GOP in congressional races, I put a fair amount of blame for that on Linda Graham. We on the pro-life/GOP side have been saying for decades that we wanted to return the issue to the states where it properly belongs. And we could have stuck to that line and mostly defused the issue, but Linda went out there and started drafting a bill for a national 15-week ban— an utterly quixotic idea that had ZERO POSSIBILITY of passing in the Pelosi/Schumer congress. And then the Dems and the media responded, not entirely unreasonably, “What do you mean return it to the states? How can say that when your own Lindsey Graham is at this very momeent trying to regulate abortion nationally?
“They could have moved to defuse the issue at the state with compromise legislation“
Yes you would think that but you can bet Whitmer would have found an excuse to veto it so the rats could get it on the ballot. The rats have perfected getting high Dem turnout ballot initiatives on November ballots.
It was the ill-timed Roe decision. 80%. The remaining 20% was the (unlawful and cynical) promise from Biden to forgive student loans. Trump had nothing to do with it.
Dobbs and Bidens student loan scam it’s all women under 30 care about the end.
“We need to emulate Tammany Hall!” - Howard Dean unveiling his 50 State Initiative.
Just think about what he’s saying with that.
RED WAVE IN NEW YORK DEMOCRAT STRONGHOLD
<><>AOC-endorsed candidate got beat two to one
<><>Republicans won six additional seats, perhaps more
<><>several Democrat =races still in jeopardy
<><>Dem Congressional Campaign Committee and party Finance Chair, Sean Maloney, lost
<><>Maloney spoke harshly re AOC’s apparent lack of election participation
<><>AOC played no part as the Democrat majority got decimated by Repubs.
Fraud and their indwelling demons
Simple as that.
That narrative was helped along by fey Lindsey Graham spouting off at the mouth about a Federal law banning abortion. What side are you on Linda? No need to answer. We known.
Graham and Hannity should get married. They were meant for each other.
What "SAVED" the democrats was RIGGED ELECTION FRAUD.
You just can’t be within 1% or they can cheat and the biggest Dem block vote outside of blacks is single women-who hat Trump’s name calling
The ANSWER is right in front of EVERYONE. They wouldn't
The CORE ANSWER lies in understanding.. "WHY did FLORIDA turn out so well?"
That is quite SIMPLE.
Ron DeSantis displayed gutsy leadership in confronting COVID, enduring taunts as "DeathSantis" and far worse as he refused to cower before the might of Dr. Fauci, the medical establishment, Big Pharma, the media, and Democrat politicians. As a result, Florida prospered as other states closed down their businesses and schools. (The other governor who resisted the panic, South Dakota's Kristi Noem, won with an even bigger margin: 26.8 points with 97% of the vote counted.)
Voting integrity systems were put in place in Florida after the state became a national laughingstock in the wake of the 2000 presidential election, and "hanging chad" became a symbol of questionable vote totals. Florida permits any registered voter to request an absentee ballot, but the request has to be received by the office of the local supervisor of elections by the close of business ten days before the election. Only the voter or an immediate family member can make the request. There are NO mass mailings of vote-by-mail ballots.
FIX the many BROKEN VOTING SYSTEMS or SUFFER the CONSEQUENCES.
I think David Shor is a smart guy and if he got rid of the influence of his bad friends then in 10 years he’d probably be a Republican.
bttt
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