Tag Archives: House

Election Recap

By tmess2 | Published November 10, 2024

Needless to say, the election did not go the way that many had hoped.  But it’s important to take a clear look at the numbers.  It is always hard to tell for sure, and it varies from state-to-state, but it looks like in the swing states, the issue is more voters who were willing to vote for Joe Biden in 2020 were not willing to vote for Kamala Harris.  How much of that is based on inflation and myopic hindsight (thinking the Trump years were better than they actually were) and how much on other factors is unclear.

Looking at the individual states, in Georgia, there were 243,000 additional votes this year.  In Michigan, it looks like something on the order of 71,000 more votes were cast this year than in 2020.  In Nevada, there were about 28,000 more votes this year.  In North Carolina, there were about 177,000 more votes this year.  In Pennsylvania, there were about 5,000 additional votes.  In Wisconsin, there were about 86,000 additional votes.  While we do not have the final numbers from Arizona, the reports seem to suggest that the final count will end up with around the same number of votes.  Even if we end up with fewer votes, it looks like it will be within 100,000 of the 2020 totals.  In short, in the swing states, while almost certainly some people who voted in 2020 did not vote in 2024, they were more than replaced by additional voters.  Admittedly, within the states, we had some shortfall in the areas where we are strongest, the loss is not entirely due to Democrats not voting.

But people who are saying that the Democrats need major changes are missing the story of this election.  There is a lot of economic pain in the country even though, at the general level, the economy is in decent shape.  Since the Republicans do not have a sound economic plan, we are likely to see several elections in which the White House keeps flipping back and forth. Continue Reading...

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2022 Elections — A First Glance

By tmess2 | Published January 30, 2021

The 2020 elections left both the House and the Senate closely divided.  And two years is a long time in politics.  But experience has taught politicians two, somewhat contradictory, things that will impact what can get done during the next two years.

The first, especially for the House of Representatives, is that the President’s party typically loses seats.  But the reason for this normal rule is that a new President has typically helped members of his party to flip seats.  As such, this might be less true for 2022 than in the past.  In 2020, the Democrats only won three new seats, and two were the results of North Carolina having to fix its extreme gerrymander.  And only a handful of Democratic incumbents won close races.  And the rule is less consistent for the Senate, in large part because the Senators up for election are not the ones who ran with the President in the most recent election but the ones who ran with the prior president six years earlier.  In other words, the President’s party tends to be more vulnerable in the Senate in the midterms of the second term than in the midterms of the first term.  But the likelihood that the President’s party will lose seats is an incentive to do as much as possible during the first two years.

The second is that one cause of the swing may be overreach — that voters are trying to check a President who is going further than the voters actually wanted.  This theory assumes that there are enough swing voters who really want centrist policies and that they switch sides frequently to keep either party from passing more “extreme” policies.  Polls do not really support this theory and there is an argument that, at least part of the mid-term problem, could be the failure to follow through on all of the promises leading to less enthusiasm with the base.  But this theory is a reason for taking things slowly and focusing on immediate necessities first and putting the “wish list” on hold until after the mid-terms. Continue Reading...

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Fall Elections

By tmess2 | Published October 22, 2017

In most of the world, the practice is to limit the number of races being contested on any given election day.  Thus, regional elections are held on a separate day from national elections.  In the U.S., however, most states opt to hold state elections on the same day as national elections.  Thus, in most states, the election for governor either falls on the same day as the mid-term election or on the same day as the presidential election.  In a small number of states, however, the election for governor occurs in an odd-year.

Two states — Virginia and New Jersey — hold the election in the year after the presidential election.  (Three states — Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi — hold the elections in the year before the presidential election.)  Both New Jersey and Virginia have a tendency — not absolute, but a tendency — to elect a governor from the party not in the White House.  In New Jersey, the last time that the party in the White House won the governor’s race was 1985.  In Virginia, while the party in the White House won in 2013, the last previous time that the party in the White House won was 1973.  There are a lot of reasons for these results — including. similar to the problem that the party in the White House faces in mid-term elections, the simple fact that governing is much harder than running for office, so supporters of the party in power tend to be disappointed with the actual fruits of their victory while those out of power tend to be angry and motivated.

As things currently stand, things are looking very good for the Democratic candidates in New Jersey.  Aside from New Jersey’s normal Democratic lean and the tendency for the party not in the White House to win, the Republicans nominated the current Lieutenant Governor, making it hard to separate the current Republican ticket from the corruption of the current administration of term-limited governor Chris Christie.  The Democratic candidate, Ambassador Phil Murphy, leads by double digits in every poll this fall.  While some of the polls show enough undecided voters to leave a theoretical opening for the Republican candidate, the race in New Jersey is not particularly close. Continue Reading...

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