🗳️ "How Democrats Defied the Odds"

Podcast’s Essential Bites:

[1:44] NC: "[For] the Senate, [...] there are three races that remain to be decided: Nevada, Georgia, and Arizona. The Democrats need to win two of those seats to keep the chamber. [...] Georgia will go to a runoff, which will occur in December. [...] In Nevada, in particular, it is very difficult to see how there could be a call anytime soon."

[2:50] NC: "The House is always hard. [...] But it's particularly messy this year, because there are still dozens of races where there is not yet a projection. And it will take days, if not weeks to make calls in those races, because mail ballots still are yet to be counted, especially out West. [...] The Republicans have a tiny edge if you ended the election today, but it is not a meaningful one."

[3:43] NC: "In the Senate, the Democrats have more paths to win at this point. They seem clearly favored in Arizona. And if that's true, they only had one of Nevada or Georgia. The House [...] is a mess. It would not surprise me if the race is not called in weeks or a month."

[4:13] NC: "The President's party almost always gets crushed in midterm elections. And historically, they have always been crushed when the President has an approval rating in the low 40s like Joe Biden does today. [...] Trump's approval rating [was the] same as Joe Biden's [and] they lost 40 seats. Barack Obama [had the] same approval rating as Joe Biden [and] lost 63 seats. Bush lost the House, Clinton lost the House by a huge margin."

[5:52] NC: "Our national poll showed that voters were caring a little bit less about abortion, or democracy as the most important problem facing the country, the issues that were seen as a favorable to the Democrats. While voters said that the biggest problem facing the country was the economy or inflation. [...] When you pour over the results, state by state, a really interesting pattern emerges, and one that I don't think we've seen in our era of deeply polarized national politics. The pattern is that the Democrats do very well in states where abortion and democracy really was on the ballot. And the Republicans do pretty well when it's not. And it all happens to cancel out and add up to a pretty even race overall."

[15:08] NC: "There are many Democrats who might [...] think Governor Ron DeSantis is [...] a very conservative politician, which he is, but by the measure of 'does he pose a threat to democracy or is abortion under threat,' I don't think he quite fits those characteristics. [...] It turns out that, at least in Florida, a very conservative ticket that avoided these two issues, could fare extremely well. DeSantis cruised to reelection and Republican House candidates posted really strong performances."

[17:18] NC: "There is one kind of exception that in some way proves the rule and these are individual House districts that deviate from the pattern elsewhere in their state. There are states where abortion and democracy are not under threat, but we see a specific congressional district, where a Republican nominee appears to pose a threat to democracy. And voters respond to it just as they would have or at the state level, perhaps even more."

[19:48] NC: "The normal theory for why the President's party does poorly is that it's a referendum in some way on the President. And we have a lot of cases where it wasn't really that. [...] In some states, it was explicitly a referendum on the last presidential election."

[20:41] NC: "The results show over and over again that Trump backed candidates fared systematically worse. And on the other end of the spectrum, we have an electorally effective model for a very conservative politician Ron DeSantis, who himself happens to be considering running."

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐⭐