election – Wonkness Blog

The Case for a Democratic Environment

UPDATE (9/9/22): FiveThirtyEight updated their partisan lean metrics hours after I published this. The story has been updated to reflect the new data.

Special election charts and results as well as the above generic ballot polling average are by FiveThirtyEight. I wanted to credit them in the captions but WordPress is being dumb.

I think people are underestimating how likely it is that we’re in at least as favorable an environment for Democrats in 2022 as we were in 2020. Yes, Democrats are only ahead on the generic ballot by 1.2% at the time of this writing, whereas in 2020 they were ahead by 7.3%. But the polling in 2020 was notoriously bad. Democrats only wound up winning the House popular vote by 3.1%. That’s a 4.2% miss! In 2018 – when Trump was not on the ballot – the generic ballot got things exactly right. It predicted Democrats winning by 8.6% and they won by 8.6%.

The ‘Trump effs up the polls’ theory is going to be tested again this year (it makes sense since he destroys everything else that I love!) but in the meantime, let’s assume the generic ballot is correct, or at least close to correct (lets say for the sake of argument ±2%, which is in between the 4% error 2020 and the 0% error in 2018). Then the environment is anywhere from R+1 to D+3. So either slightly worse than 2020 or about the same.

But we also have other figures to go by, namely special elections. The advantage of special elections is that they aren’t polls. They’re actually elections where people go out and make a choice. The disadvantage is that they are usually low turnout affairs that attract only the most politically engaged. Still, they usually are pretty predictive. In the special elections since Dobbs, Democrats have been overperforming by between 7 and 11 points (depending on how you count Alaska).

So based on the generic ballot and special elections we can say that we’re in anywhere from an R+1 environment to a D+11 environment. To be clear, I don’t think we’re in a D+11 environment, so let’s use D+7 (the conservative calculation of special elections) as our high. So the environment is anywhere from R+1 to D+7, for a median of D+3. That puts us in basically the exact same environment we were in in 2020, when Democrats won 222 seats.

So Democrats should expect to win 222 seats? Not so fast. You forgot about redistricting! There’s a number of different ways to calculate the effect of redistricting but I think the easiest way is to look at how many districts Biden won. On the old map Biden carried 224 districts. On the new map he would have carried 225, according to Redistricter.

But Democrats ran 1.5% (or 2 seats) behind Biden; one of the reasons their House majority is so thin. So instead we can look at each district’s partisan lean or (PVI) using data from FiveThirtyEight. In a D+3 year Democrats should expect win every district with a PVI <R+3. This would give us a final result of 220D-215R. In an R+1 year it would be 206D-229R. A D+7 year would give Dems 237 seats, one more than they won in 2018, which makes me think we’re not in a D+7 environment (though stranger things have happened). So going by PVI we’re looking at Democrats winning anywhere from 206-237 seats, with the median being 221.5.

Another way of looking at it is to use FairVote’s Monopoly Politics Projections, which allow you to estimate each party’s share of seats based on different environments. I like this better because it uses toss-ups (so I have less likelihood of being wrong). In a D+3 environment there are 218 safe/lean D seats and 181 safe/lean R seats, with 36 toss-ups. 218 is the exact number you need to win the House. An R+1 environment gives us 209R-183D with 43 toss-ups. They don’t allow you to calculate D+7 but back of the napkin calulation tells me there’d be about 232 lean/safe D seats.

So going by FairVote, Democrats could expect to win anywhere from 183 seats (an R+1 environment where Republicans win all the toss-ups) to 254 (a D+3 environment where Democrats win all the toss-ups) with the median being 218.5. In a D+7 environment, Democrats would win close to 280 seats if they won all the toss-ups, but nobody’s had that kind of majority since the 1970s so I’m going to assume that’s not going to happen. Let’s stick to 254 (D+3 w/ all toss-ups) as our high.

So based on my read of the current environment Democrats are favored to win around 221.5 seats using PVI or 218.5 seats using FairVote’s projections. I guess this was all a long winded way of me saying that things are really freaking close! Also, someone’s going to have to be chopped in half. I suggest Marah Palintola.

Ranked choice voting is hard!

What the California Recall Means for 2022

Gavin Newsom’s landslide victory in California’s gubernatorial recall election is obviously good news for Democrats, but let’s not get too carried away with extrapolating from the results. A Democrat won in a state where registered Democrats outnumber Republicans 2 to 1, Biden won by 29 points, and Newsom has an approval rating of 57%. Plus Larry Elder was perhaps the worst candidate Republicans could have run.

All that being said, if you were looking for signs that the tide was turning against Democrats you didn’t get them here. Special elections are often a harbinger of what’s to come and so far results have been pretty good for Democrats. The only dissapointment has been Texas’s 6th but the party wasn’t really engaged in that race. Democrats are still leading the generic ballot by 2-3 points, even as Biden’s approval rating has plummetted 5 points.

Then there’s Orange County which, like many suburban counties used to be a Republican stronghold but has moved to the left in the Trump era. Democrats flipped all four of Orange County’s Republican-held seats during their wave election in 2018 only to have two of those seats flip back in 2020, despite Biden winning the Orange County by 9 points. In fact, of the nine districts that voted for Biden and a Republican in 2020, two of them (CA-39, CA-48) were in Orange County. The vote is still being tallied but as of this writing Newsom leads the recall 52-48 in Orange County with 92% of the vote counted. If that holds it would actually improve upon his 2018 margin, when he won Orange County by .2 points in a Democratic wave year. Democrats will mostly be playing defense in 2022 but but if they were to pick up one or both of those seats, or win back CA-25, which was decided by 333 votes in 2020, that would offer them some breathing room.

There’s a long way to go until 2022 and a lot can happen between now and then but so far, we haven’t seen the telltale signs of a backlash against the President’s party. Even with the Delta surge and the withdrawal from Afghanistan weighing Biden down, Democrats seem to be holding steady. The next big tests will be in Virginia and New Jersey, where voting in those governor’s races is already underway. If you thought you were going to get a break from election season, think again.

How to (Actually) Steal the Next Election

I used to be of the mind-set that the threat of Republicans stealing the next election was overstated. After all, the system held in 2020. All of the Republicans in charge of our elections, the ones who could actually do something to overturn the results, stood up to the pressure and did their jobs admirably. The people most vocally supporting the “Big Lie” were exactly the ones who had no power to actually do anything about it. I’m sure that was not a coincidence. But with the former President telling people he’s going to be “reinstated” by August (no, that’s not a thing), and Michael Flynn openly advocating for a violent coup, plus some of the Trumpiest Republicans, like representative Jody Hice (R-GA), running to replace the Republicans who stood up to Trump, like Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, we might not get so lucky next time.

Now normally I’d say to just ignore the crazies, but it’s not just the crazies. Senate Republicans voted last week to block a bipartisan commission to look into the January 6th insurrection, and GOP state lawmakers in states across the country are pushing bills giving themselves more power over election officials, and allowing courts to more easily overturn election results. Republicans are amassing the kind of power they would need to overturn the next election and they seem like they just might have the appetite to do it. Simply put, the people promoting the next “Big Lie” might actually have the power to do something about it.

The slide to autocracy doesn’t happen overnight, and nobody announces that it’s coming. It happens gradually, under the guise of “law and order” and “election integrity.” It happens when nobody is watching. When people let their guards down, and more often than not, you don’t realize it’s happening until it’s too late. So it’s worth taking a look at what that slide might look like.

First, let’s assume there isn’t going to be a violent coup that reinstates the former President by August. I hope that’s a safe assumption. That brings us to 2024. For simplicity sake, let’s say that 2024 will be a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump and that the vote will be exactly the same as in 2020, i.e. Joe Biden wins the same states by the exact same amount which, using the new allocation of electoral votes, would produce the following map.

A clear Biden victory, or so we thought. This time Republicans control the House and Senate. As I said earlier, nobody announces they’re ending democracy, Republicans aren’t going to just say, “Hey, Joe Biden won Pennsylvania but we’re going to go ahead give it to Trump anyway.” But what happens if we’re in another situation where Repubicans are upset about changes made to Pennsylvania’s election law, or false claims of fraud in Philadelphia, and they decide that the results can’t be trusted? They could essentially say, “we don’t know who won Pennsylvania. It’s impossible to know! Therefore, we should throw out the results!” For a refresher (sorry if you’re getting flashbacks) if a Senator and Representative sign an objection to the electors from any state, the Senate and House each go back to their respective chambers for two hours of debate before voting on whether to accept or reject the electors. A majority of both chambers must vote to uphold the objection. This time though, Republicans control both chambers, so in this instance they vote to reject Pennsylvania’s electors. Now let’s assume the same thing happens with Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, Nevada, and Michigan, all of which Biden won by less than 3 points in 2020. All tainted by fraud! The results can’t be trusted! Donald Trump has just won the election 235-226.

Remember, the winner only needs to recieve the majority of the electoral votes that are actually counted, normally that’s 270 but because in this scenerio Congress has rejected 79 electoral votes from 6 states, Donald Trump can win with only 235.

With the firehose of falsehoods we saw after the last election and the sizeable segment of the population that still believes the false narrative that the election was stolen, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Congressional Republicans, under considerable pressure from Trump and his allies, would overturn the results in 2024 and throw the election to Trump. And with Republicans well positioned to take back the House in 2022, and the Senate in 2024, it’s fairly likely that they will find themselves in the position where they have to make a choice: Donald Trump or democracy? Do you trust them to choose wisely?

An Olive Branch to Republicans

When Republicans were objecting to the election in the House and Senate, they often liked to cite people’s faith, or lack thereof, in the legitimacy of the election as their motivating factor. More recently it’s been used to justify new voting restrictions being put in place in states like Georgia and most recently Florida. While I disagree with their solutions, and frankly question their earnestness, I will give them one thing: there are a lot of people out there who still question the legitimacy of the election and that is a huge problem. We can’t simply dismiss that fact and allow it to fester. That is a very legitimate concern and one that needs to be addressed.

Okay, now that I’ve extended an olive branch it’s time for me to beat you over the head with it. The solution to a large swath of the American public not trusting the legitimacy of the election isn’t to make it harder to vote, it’s to stop lying to them. Tell them the truth. There was no widespread fraud in 2020. You know it, and I know it. That was just a lie created by a desperate man to soothe his battered ego. Does anyone really believe that if Trump runs again in 2024 and loses that he’s going to say, “Well Georgia and Florida required ID to vote absentee so it looks like I did lose!” Of course not. He will lie again and make something new up to complain about because that’s what he does. And that is why no election restriction is going to fix this problem, because no election restriction addresses the underlying cause: a serial liar with a lot of sway over a huge swath of the American public, has shown he’s more than willing to do anything to avoid the humiliation of having to admit defeat, even attack the legitimacy of the very democracy he hopes to lead.

And look, I know it’s not going to be easy. I know that any Republican who admits that the election was fair will be castigated as a RINO and excommunicated from the party. But that is your burden. You got us into this mess, you need to get us out. Trust me, I would love to help, but I know that nothing I say is going to convince anyone. As a proud Biden supporter, my word doesn’t carry much weight with these folks. It has to come from you. From someone they trust.

Since I’m asking you to sacrifice, it’s only right for me to sacrifice too. I am a huge fan of the For the People Act. I think it has long overdue democracy reforms that will make voting easier, our government more ethical, and reduce the power of big money in our politics. That being said, I also know that passing it on a party-line vote will probably only make people less trustful of the election. So I’m willing to make a deal. Let’s focus on the things most of us can agree on, like putting an end to partisan gerrymandering, expanding early voting, online and same-day voter registration, stronger disclosure rules for online ads and secret money organizations, enchancing election security by instructing states to use voting machines made in the America, providing grants for states to conduct more thorough audits, updating old voting machines with ones that print paper ballots so every vote has a paper trail, creating stronger testing requirements for voting systems to prevent hacking, and enhancing oversight over election vendors. That’s all in the bill!

I’ll sacrifice things like automatic voter registration, vote by mail for all who choose, restoring voting rights to former felons, and prohibiting voter purges, if you all will start telling your voters the truth about the election. We both know that no change to our voting laws is going to matter if we don’t have the most fundamental thing for a democracy to function; the people’s trust in it’s legitimacy, and as long as the “big lie” is allowed to percolate unchallenged, we aren’t going to have that.

Most of this piece has been directed at Republican politicians, so let me take a second to speak to Republican voters, mainly, those of you who still believe the election was stolen. Don’t worry, I’m not here to try and convince you that it was fair. Let’s get that out of the way first. I’d like to offer some advice, if I may, and you can either take it or leave it. I’ve seen talk recently that in order to win you need to “beat Democrats at their own game,” i.e. cheat. Let me just say as clearly as I possibly can; do not do that. That is a terrible idea. You will get caught and you will find out the hard way just how difficult it is to commit voter fraud. Though on the bright side, after spending some time in prison, you might come around to restoring voting rights for former felons.