Tag Archives: Ohio

The Midterms — Preview (Part 1)

By tmess2 | Published October 29, 2022

We are into the home stretch of the campaign.  This election comes down to those who want to protect women’s rights, LGBQT rights, our democracy, the middle class, and the safety of our streets on one side against those who want to undermine the concept of free and fair elections and impose an authoritarian theocracy on the other side.  The midterm elections are more like parliamentary elections in other countries.  There is no national race and winning is about the results of multiple state and local races.

As in 2020, there is expected to be a large number of votes by mail.  Some states have changed their laws to allow counting of mail-in ballots to start earlier, but some still require the process of verifying and counting mail-in ballots to begin on election day.  So there will be some states in which the Republican candidate will take an early lead based on the in-person votes, but the Democrat candidate will close that gap (and potentially take the lead) as the mail-in votes are counted.  On the other hand, in states that announce mail-in and early voting results first, the opposite will occur.

These previews will go in the order of poll closing times.  In states that are in two time zones, some states will release results as polls close.  Others will hold off on releasing results until all polls close.  If I know that a state holds off until all polls close, I will put the state in the time when the last polls close.  Otherwise, I will put the state in when the majority of the polls close.  I will list the time by Central Standard Time as that is my time zone.  For ease of conversion, CST is UTC +8 (i.e. it is 8 p.m. UTC when it is noon CST), Atlantic ST +2 (2 p.m AtST for noon CST), Eastern ST +1 (1 p.m. EST for noon CST),  Mountain ST -1 (MST 11:00 a.m. for noon CST), Pacific ST -2 (PST 10 a.m. for noon CST), Alaska ST -3 (9 a.m. AkSt for noon CST) and Hawaiian ST -4 (8:00 a.m. HST for noon CST). Continue Reading...

Posted in Elections | Also tagged , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Midterms — Preview (Part 1)

The Fall Campaign

By tmess2 | Published September 4, 2022

Traditionally, Labor Day Weekend was seen as the start of the Fall campaign (at least by the media).  If that was ever true, it no longer is.  With cable and websites like Facebook and Youtube, there are a lot of relatively inexpensive way to get advertisements out during July and August.  If a campaign waits unti September to begin its ad campaign, the other side has already defined the race.

But, by this point in the cycle, we are down to the last handful of primaries, and the national committees and big PACS are already looking to decide where they are going to be spending the big bucks in late September and early October.  (As the change in the mechanism for advertising has obliterated Labor Day as the start of the fall campaign, the change in voting habits (with a significant percentage casting early votes or mail-in ballots) has also altered when the big final push begins.  While, in a close race, last minute news and ads can make a difference, it is just as important to get as many votes locked in as early as possible so that the last-minute spending can be focused on a tiny number of votes.

But that is the inside baseball stuff of campaigns.  The purpose of this post is to set the stage for the next eight weeks.  For the past two years, Democrats have had the frustration of a very narrow margin in the House of Representatives and a dead-even Senate.  Because Nancy Pelosi may be one of the all-time great Speakers, Democrats have been mostly able to pass things in the House.  The Senate, however, has been very, very difficult.  The filibuster rules has limited the Democrats to passing anything significant via the reconciliation process.  Even the reconciliation process requires keeping the entire Democratic caucus together which has proven difficult as a single member can insist on changes to any proposal.  And the  lack of a majority has also prevented any changes to the filibuster rule (again due to the ability a single Democrat to veto any proposed change). Continue Reading...

Posted in Elections, General Election Forecast | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on The Fall Campaign

The 2022 Elections: Revenge of the Trumpists

By tmess2 | Published May 1, 2022

We are on the eve of the start of the first big segment of the primary season for the 2022 election.  Texas had its primary back in March, but primary season really starts this Tuesday with primaries in Ohio and and Indiana.

Including the Texas run-off, there are primaries or run=offs set for every week between now and June 28 other than the week of Memorial Day.  During that period, a grand total of thirty states will have primaries or run-offs (with some having both).  There is normally a longer breaker between the Spring primaries and the late Summer/early fall round of primaries.  But due to postponed election dates, Maryland will have its primary in mid-July and North Carolina will have its run-off on July 5 or July 26, depending on the offices which require a run-off.  Phase two of the primary season begins on August 2 and runs through September 13.

Mid-term elections are tough for the party in power.   The public always want the big problems solved instantly.  And big problems are typically years in the making and will require years to solve.  Making things worse, the party that wins an election always tries to pass what their primary voters want (which is not the same as what general election voters want) but ends up with in-fighting between the various factions of the party.  It has been a long time since any party has won by a big enough margin to be able to pass legislation despite those differences. Continue Reading...

Posted in Elections, General Election Forecast, House of Representatives, Senate | Also tagged , , Comments Off on The 2022 Elections: Revenge of the Trumpists

Redistricting 2022

By tmess2 | Published January 29, 2022

The legislative part of redistricting is almost complete.  Only nine states are still in the process of drafting the “first” set of maps.  (Tw of those nine states are my home state of Missouri and the neighboring state of Kansas.  In both states, the maps are through one house of the legislature and are under consideration in the second house.)  In three states (Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), the first set of maps defaulted to the courts when the legislatures and the governors were unable to agree on the new maps.

But in the remaining states, the maps have been adopted.  And that means that the battle over the maps has moved to the courts.  At this point, I am aware of three states in which we have rulings about the new maps.  Two of them are no surprise, or, at least, not much of a surprise.  In Ohio, the Ohio Supreme Court found that the map passed by the Ohio legislature violated the Ohio Constitutions rules on redistricting which bars drawing a map which unduly favors one political party or unduly splits political subdivisions.  In North Carolina, the North Carolina Supreme Court has under review an initial decision upholding the maps drawn by the North Carolina legislature.  The North Carolina Supreme Court will hear arguments on February 2.  Right now, it looks more likely than not that the North Carolina Supreme Court will strike down the map in that state.

The surprise on the list might be Alabama.  Alabama was not on the list of states that we looked at last year.  The failure to do so caused us to miss a change in demography within the state.  For the last several cycles, there has been one minority-majority district in western Alabama (the Seventh District).  In previous decades, the consensus was that — even though approximately one-quarter of the state is African-American — the minority population was too dispersed to creeate a second district that would either be a minority-majority district or close enough to qualify as an influence district.   (Part of the theory of the case is that the new districts dilute the influence of African-Americans in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act or is a racial gerrymander in violation of the Equal Protection Clasue.)  After the last census, however, it appears that by placing Birmingham in one district (the Seventh District) and Montgomery in a separate district in the southern part of the state, you could get two minority-majority districts (or at least two districts that would qualify as influence districts).  For now, the panel of judges hearing the Voting Rights Act case has ordered that Alabama will not be allowed to use the new maps pending a final decision (and has given Alabama thirty days to submit replacement maps or the court will draw maps for this election cycle).  Alabama has asked the Supreme Court to put this ruling on hold, and the Supreme Court has asked the plaintiffs for a response by February 2. Continue Reading...

Posted in Elections, House of Representatives | Also tagged , , , , , , Comments Off on Redistricting 2022

Redistricting — Ohio

By tmess2 | Published July 18, 2021

Like Pennsylvania, Ohio is  a midwestern state that has lost a seat in the House and has an open Senate seat.  There are two key differences.  First, in Ohio, the governor is also a Republican.  Ohio voters have adopted some checks on the majority party ability to redistrict at will, but the majority can force through a map that will last for two cycles without any minority support.  Second, Democratic Representative Tim Ryan has already announced that he will be running for Senate.  While that allows the legislature to keep the remaining incumbents in separate districts, it does not mean that changing the maps in a way that keeps incumbents separate will be easy as incumbents do not always live in the center of their district.

Already, Ohio is a very gerrymandered state with some very weird map shapes.  As with the other states that lost a seat, most of the existing districts are short on voters with two exceptions — the Third District (Columbus) and the Twelfth District (the area to the north and east of Columbus in central Ohio).  Other than the Fifteenth District (the area to the south of Columbus) which is only 15,000 people short, the remaining thirteen districts are between 30,000 and 90,000 people short.  In particular, the five districts that adjoin the current Thirteenth District are a combined 330,000 short.  But as the current Thirteenth has just approximately 707,000 people, that will be around 370,000 people that those districts will have to kick to the rest of the state.  More significantly,  as in the rest of the state, the lines were carefully drawn to pack as many Democrats into the Democratic districts as possible.  The Eleventh District which stretches from Cleveland to Akron is carefully drawn so that the Democrat expected votes are around 80%.  While it borders the Thirteenth District, it can’t move too far east into the current Thirteenth without needing to shed Democratic voters into the Republican districts to the west.  And the Fourteenth District (northeastern Ohio) is a lean Republican district that really can’t afford to give Republicans to the Eleventh District or take in the Democrats around Akron, Ravenna, or Youngstown.  In short, once again, the Republicans are going to be very carefully looking precinct by precinct as they carve up the Thirteenth District and make the necessary shifts of the districts toward the eastern part of the state.

Trying to draw a more favorable map for Democrats, I began by doing two things:  First, there are three counties that are large enough to fully contain a district — Cuyahoga County (Cleveland), Hamilton County (Cincinnati), and Franklin County (Columbus).  In the current map, only Franklin contain fully contains a district (Third District).  So I kept Cincinnati intact (which would force the two Republican representatives from the First and Second District into a primary) and drew a map that had eastern and central Hamilton County around Cincinnati in the First District and kept the Eleventh District in Cuyahoga County.  That flipped the First District from a toss-up favoring the Republicans to a lean Democratic District.  It did lower the African-American population in the Eleventh District  Overall, African-Americans are still the largest population group but they are only a plurality and among the voting age population, there are slightly more whites than African-Americans.  African-Americans should still have the majority of votes in the Democratic primary, and the district is solidly Democratic; so African-Americans should be able to elect their preferred candidate.  These shifts force the Second District eastward and northward (taking some area from the Fifteenth District). Continue Reading...

Posted in Cleveland, Elections, House of Representatives | Also tagged , , Comments Off on Redistricting — Ohio

Redistricting 2021 — The Numbers

By tmess2 | Published May 1, 2021

On Monday, four days ahead of its latest target date and almost four months behind the statutory date, the Census Bureau released the national and state-level results from the Census including the apportionment numbers that determine how many representatives each get.  As can be expected, there are multiple different tables summarizing the data in different ways for us number geeks.

The bottom line table shows the apportionment population (both those living in the state and those residing overseas — like military personnel — who call that state home), the number of representatives that each state is getting, and the change in representation.   We will get back to the change in a minute, but the big level number is that the apportionment population is slightly over 331 million.  As such, the average size (mean) of each congressional district is just under 761 thousand.  Alaska, Vermont, and Wyoming have fewer people than the average congressional district.  While the apportionment formula does not work for calculating the population needed for the first representative, even Wyoming has enough population to be entitled to three-quarters of a representative.

If, D.C. and Puerto Rico were states, Puerto Rico would be just ahead of Utah (which has four representatives) and just behind Connecticut (which has five representatives) and D.C. would be between Vermont and Alaska.  Given that Puerto Rico is only slightly larger than Utah (which was not close to getting a fifth representative and far enough behind Connecticut, Puerto Rico would be due for four representatives.  If  both were states, the five states that would lose a representative would have been Oregon, Colorado, and Montana (all of which gained a seat), California (which lost a seat), and Minnesota (which barely avoided losing a seat).  The chart of priority values that allows us to consider the impact of adding Puerto Rico and D.C. also shows that Minnesota barely held onto its last seat and New York barely lost its seat.  Apparently, given the formula, Minnesota would have lost that seat if it had 24 fewer people, and New York would have kept its seat if it had 89 more people.  (The disparity in numbers is caused by the fact that the two states have different number of seats. Continue Reading...

Posted in House of Representatives | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on Redistricting 2021 — The Numbers

Why Congress has authority over Federal Elections

By tmess2 | Published March 20, 2021

As Republicans in swing states seem to be dedicated to winning elections by keeping Democrats from voting rather than persuading people to vote Republicans, Democrats in Congress are pushing the “For the People Act.”  Some of the provisions in this Act will prevent states from suppressing the vote in federal elections.  The House version has already passed and it seems that Senate version may be the bill that forces a showdown over the future of the filibuster.

One of the critiques that the conservative media establishment has made of this bill is that it involves a takeover of elections by Congress.  This critique, however, ignores the plain language of the Constitution.  Congress has full authority over elections to Congress.  Specifically, Article I, Section 4 permits the states to make laws about congressional elections but it expressly grants authority to Congress to “at any time by law make or alter such regulations” as the states have enacted.  However, Congress has, for the most part, opted against fully using its authority because it hasn’t felt the need to do so.

In explaining the need for this power, the authors of The Federalist Papers noted that, without this Congressional power, state governments would be able to frustrate the federal government by simply failing to hold elections.  And we are currently seeing, in real time, an example of what state control over elections can mean for Congress. Continue Reading...

Posted in Elections, House of Representatives | Also tagged , , , , Comments Off on Why Congress has authority over Federal Elections

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...

Posted in Elections, House of Representatives, Senate | Also tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , Comments Off on 2022 Elections — A First Glance

Election Night Preview — Part 1 (6 PM to 8 PM EST)

By tmess2 | Published October 27, 2020

Election Night in the U.S. is always different from how things play out in most other countries.  The U.S. is one of a handful of countries that have more than two time zones.  And, in most of those other countries, all areas within the same time zone close at the same time.  Voting hours in these countries are set by federal law.  In the U.S., however, voting hours are set by state law.   And that creates a weird sequence of poll closing times.

In addition, poll closing times are, in some sense, tentative.  While you need to be in line to vote by the time that polls close, anybody in line to vote gets to vote.  For states that close in the early evening, long lines at closing time are nor unusual as there is not much of a window to vote after getting home from work resulting in many people attempting to vote after work still being in line when the polls cloase.  And there is always the possibility of an emergency order permitting certain precincts to stay open late to compensate for problems earlier in the day.  Even after polls close, many jurisdictions use a centralized counting location.   That means that there is a lag time between the polls closing and the ballots getting to the counting location.  In my county, the closest precincts are still only getting to the county seat about thirty minutes after polls close and the far edges of the county are getting there around an hour after the polls close.  As a result, it typically takes ninety minutes for my small (eighteen precinct) county to report all of the results.  Large urban counties can take three to four hours to report all of their election night results.  This delay in reporting (which is pretty much the same in most states) is one thing that traditionally makes it difficult to project result.  If the three largest counties in a state have only reported 10% of the vote while the rest of the state is 80% in, there is still a large number of votes that can change who wins a close race.

The other issue that will impact this election is the number of mail-in votes.  As we have previously discussed, every state has different rules for counting mail-in votes.  In most states, early in-person votes will be released around the same time (if not before) the election day votes, but mail-in votes will be reportedly differently in different states.  As such, with each state, the big questions will be:  1) is the reported vote just the early vote or also the election day vote; 2) if we have full early vote and partial election day vote, how much does the election day vote differ from the early vote; and 3) how much of the mail-in vote has been counted and how much may remain to be counted or still be “in the mail”?  The early count from a state may appear to be lopsided, but — without knowing the answers to these questions — it will be more difficult to determine if we have enough of the vote counted to know who is going to win.  In states that are used to large mail-in vote totals, it is not unusual to not know the winner of the closest race for a day or two after the election as we finally get enough mail-in votes counted. Continue Reading...

Posted in Elections, General Election Forecast | Also tagged , , , , , , , , Comments Off on Election Night Preview — Part 1 (6 PM to 8 PM EST)

Delegate Math 2020 — March 17

By tmess2 | Published March 15, 2020

After the sprint of twenty-four contests in fifteen days, this week’s four primaries represents a slowing of the pace.  After the March 17 contests, there will be only seven contests over the next three weeks concluding with the Wisconsin primary before there is a three-week break between Wisconsin and the Mid-Atlantic primary on April 28.  (EDIT:  Now six contests, with Georgia’s primary being postponed until May.)

In the last two weeks, in the states that vote by mail, we have seen the early results showing significant number of votes for candidates that are no longer in the race.  As counting has continued, however, the later arriving ballots have swung away from the candidates who have suspended their campaigns and toward Senator Sanders and Vice-President Biden.  There will have been some early voting in the states that are voting on March 17.  As such, the initial release of numbers will probably include some votes for these candidates, but that number should decline over the evening as election day returns are added in.

With the narrowing of the field, delegate math is now a state-by-state struggle.  And this state-by-state battle is different for the Democratic primaries than it is on the Republican side.  The media likes to focus on who wins a state.  And, in the general election (and in many states on the Republican side), the winner-take-all rule makes winning a state very important.  On the Democratic side, the proportional allocation of delegates means that it matters more whether somebody wins a state by a large margin than who wins the state.  As we have seen over the past seven days, a narrow in by Vice-President Biden is currently netting him around seven delegates in a large state, but his big win in Mississippi (less than half the size of Washington) is netting him over thirty delegates. Continue Reading...

Posted in 2020 Convention, Delegates, Primary Elections | Also tagged , , , , , , Comments Off on Delegate Math 2020 — March 17