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theliberaltony · 5 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

As much as we try to remind you all about how uncertain elections can be — pleas that sometimes fall on deaf ears — it’s important to keep in mind in advance of the Iowa caucuses. To begin with, primaries are much harder to poll than general elections, and caucuses are even harder to poll than primaries, as they introduce a number of complications. Caucuses require a long time commitment, which can make turnout harder to predict. They aren’t a secret ballot, so voters can literally try to persuade their neighbors to change sides. And Iowa Democrats employ a viability check — we’ll talk about that more before the caucuses on Monday — that asks voters to switch candidates if their first choice doesn’t clear a certain threshold, usually 15 percent of the vote at that caucus site. That makes second choices important, and even opens up the possibility of strategic alliances between the candidates.

So even though Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden are doing a bit better than other Democrats in Iowa polls, everyone would need a bit of luck to win the caucuses. Per our model, as of 8 p.m. Wednesday, Sanders had a 37 percent chance of winning the most votes1 — which is the best in the field. But it also means there’s a 63 percent chance he won’t win. Our model forecasts Biden to win 35 percent of the time, meanwhile, followed by Pete Buttigieg at 16 percent, Elizabeth Warren at 9 percent and Amy Klobuchar at 3 percent. Even Klobuchar isn’t that much of a long shot. Her chances are about the same as — let’s go with a football analogy since the Super Bowl is this weekend — Brett Favre’s chance of throwing an interception on any given pass attempt.

Moreover, the plausible range of vote shares for the candidates varies widely. For Sanders, for instance, the 80th percentile range — meaning that in 80 percent of simulations, his numbers wind up somewhere in this range — runs from 11 percent to 44 percent of the vote. That also implies there’s a 10 percent chance he finishes with less than 11 percent of the vote and a 10 percent chance he finishes with more than 44 percent.

These ranges will narrow slightly by the time we actually get to caucus day on Monday. And our model will be more confident once we get to states that hold primaries, because those are easier to poll.

But the reason for these wide ranges is not to cover our asses. Instead, it’s strictly empirical. Take a look at what polls said a few days before previous Iowa caucuses and you’ll find they were sometimes much less correlated with the results than you might assume. Instead, there was often late movement, election night surprises, or both.

More precisely, I ran retroactive versions of our polling averages for all Iowa caucuses dating back to 1988, excluding the 1992 Democratic nomination, where the other candidates essentially ceded the caucuses to Iowa U.S. Senator Tom Harkin. (Before 1988, polling of the caucuses was fairly sparse, so we can’t really calculate a polling average in the same way that we do today — although there were a number of upsets, like George H.W. Bush coming from way behind to beat Ronald Reagan there in 1980.) I’ll compare what the polls looked like after allocating undecided voters2 as of 12:01 a.m. four days before the caucuses — so as of just after midnight on Thursday in years where the caucuses were held on a Monday, for example — against the actual caucus results.3

You can find all of this data in a table at the end of this article. But just to show how frequent surprises are — really, it’s a surprise when there isn’t a surprise or two! — let me briefly run through each race in reverse chronological order.

Polls at this point in the 2016 Republican race had Donald Trump at 31 percent, Ted Cruz at 26 percent and Marco Rubio at 14 percent. The actual results were Cruz 28, Trump 24, Rubio 23 — so while the polls nailed Cruz, they were 7 percentage points too high on Trump and almost 10 points too low on Rubio.

Polls in the 2016 Democratic caucuses did much better. Hillary Clinton led Sanders 49-46 at polls at this point, and she wound up winning the caucuses 49.9 percent to 49.6 percent, although it was close enough that you could essentially call it a tie.

The 2012 Republican caucuses brought another surprise, however. Rick Santorum was at just 11 percent in polls at this point — in fifth place — but he wound up winning the caucuses (after a vote-counting dispute) with 25 percent of the vote, narrowly ahead of Mitt Romney.

Polls in the 2008 GOP race were quite accurate, predicting Mike Huckabee’s victory there and Romney’s second-place showing.

But the 2008 Democratic race saw a late surge for Barack Obama. He was trailing Clinton 31-27 in the polls four days before the caucuses, but the final Des Moines Register poll showed Obama moving ahead. That proved prescient, as he won the caucuses with 38 percent of the vote to 30 percent each for Clinton and John Edwards.

The 2004 Democratic caucuses saw even bigger last-minute swings. At this point, the polls showed the race as: Howard Dean 28 percent, Richard Gephart 25, John Kerry 20, Edwards 15. The actual finish bore almost no relation to the polls; it was Kerry 37 percent, Edwards 33, Dean 17 and Gephardt 11.

In the 2000 Republican race, polls showed George W. Bush leading Steve Forbes 50-23. The actual result was much closer: Bush 41 percent, Forbes 31 percent.

Polls in the 2000 Democric race were spot on, showing Al Gore leading Bill Bradley 62-38; he actually won 63-35.

In the 1996 Republican race, our average four days before the race would have shown Bob Dole ahead with 39 percent, followed by Forbes at 24 percent and Phil Gramm at 11 percent. Although Dole did win, he did so with only 26 percent of the vote. The second- and third-place candidates were surprises, meanwhile: not Forbes and Gramm, but Pat Buchanan (23 percent) and Lamar Alexander (18 percent), who had each been polling at just 9 percent at this point.

In 1988, GOP polls again correctly predicted Dole to win. But Pat Robertson, who was in third place at 13 percent (trailing vice president George H.W. Bush in second with 30 percent), wound up beating Bush 25-19 for second instead, behind Dole’s 37 percent.

On the Democratic side in 1988, Gephardt was correctly identified as the winner, receiving 31 percent of the actual vote as compared to 29 percent in polls. But Paul Simon, at 18 percent and in third place in the polls, finished in a surprising second place with 27 percent, ahead of Michael Dukakis at 22 percent.

So out of 11 races, we have only three cases (the 2016 and 2000 Democratic caucuses and the 2008 Republican caucuses) where the polls at this point were more or less spot on. And two of those three cases were in races where there were essentially just two candidates, which are sometimes easier to predict. Every other race featured some kind of late polling movement or election night surprise involving the top three candidates.

The trick is that … there doesn’t seem to be much of a pattern in which candidates surge and which ones don’t. In 2004, the establishment candidate, Kerry, overtook the insurgent liberal in Dean. But in several other races (say, Bush in 1988), the more establishment-type candidates underperformed. Sometimes, the late movement accelerated an existing trend, and sometimes it reversed one. Trump had been gaining ground in polls right up until a few days before the 2016 caucuses, for instance, before the last round of polls showed his lead slipping — and he further underperformed on caucus night. You can find several examples of Midwestern candidates overperforming on caucus night — but one of the biggest underachievers, Gephardt in 2004, was from Missouri, a neighboring state.

So you should be prepared for surprises on caucus night — and they may be genuine surprises, not necessarily the surprises that you’re hoping for or the ones that are easiest to conceive of right at this moment.

Iowa often produces last-minute surprises

Polling averages four days before the caucuses and actual results in competitive Iowa caucuses since 1988

Race Candidate Poll average before Iowa Actual result Actual vs. Polls 2016 (R) Donald Trump 31.2% 24.3% -6.9 2016 (R) Ted Cruz 26.5 27.6 +1.1 2016 (R) Marco Rubio 13.6 23.1 +9.5 2016 (R) Benjamin S. Carson 9.0 9.3 +0.3 2016 (R) Jeb Bush 4.6 2.8 -1.8 2016 (R) Rand Paul 3.7 4.5 +0.8 2016 (R) Chris Christie 3.3 1.8 -1.5 2016 (R) Mike Huckabee 2.6 1.8 -0.8 2016 (R) John Richard Kasich 2.4 1.9 -0.5 2016 (R) Carly Fiorina 1.7 1.9 +0.2 2016 (R) Rick Santorum 1.1 1.0 -0.1 2016 (R) James S. Gilmore III 0.3 0.0 -0.3 2016 (D) Hillary Rodham Clinton 49.4 49.9 +0.5 2016 (D) Bernard Sanders 45.8 49.6 +3.8 2016 (D) Martin O’Malley 4.8 0.6 -4.2 2012 (R) Mitt Romney 23.8 24.5 +0.7 2012 (R) Ron Paul 23.0 21.4 -1.6 2012 (R) Newt Gingrich 15.8 13.3 -2.5 2012 (R) Rick Perry 12.3 10.3 -2.0 2012 (R) Rick Santorum 11.2 24.6 +13.4 2012 (R) Michele Bachmann 9.1 5.0 -4.1 2012 (R) Jon M. Huntsman, Jr. 3.5 0.6 -2.9 2012 (R) Buddy Roemer 1.2 0.0 -1.2 2008 (R) Mike Huckabee 31.3 34.4 +3.1 2008 (R) Mitt Romney 28.1 25.2 -2.9 2008 (R) John McCain 12.5 13.1 +0.6 2008 (R) Fred Thompson 9.5 13.3 +3.8 2008 (R) Rudolph W. Giuliani 9.4 3.5 -5.9 2008 (R) Ron Paul 6.6 10.0 +3.4 2008 (R) Alan Keyes 1.4 0.0 -1.4 2008 (R) Duncan Hunter 1.3 0.4 -0.9 2008 (D) Hillary Rodham Clinton 31.4 29.5 -1.9 2008 (D) Barack Obama 27.3 37.6 +10.3 2008 (D) John Edwards 24.6 29.8 +5.2 2008 (D) Bill Richardson 8.0 2.1 -5.9 2008 (D) Joseph R. Biden Jr. 5.9 0.9 -5.0 2008 (D) Dennis J. Kucinich 1.4 0.0 -1.4 2008 (D) Christopher J. Dodd 1.4 0.0 -1.4 2008 (D) Mike Gravel 0.0 0.0 +0.0 2004 (D) Howard Dean 27.7 17.4 -10.3 2004 (D) Richard A. Gephardt 25.3 11.2 -14.1 2004 (D) John Kerry 20.4 37.1 +16.7 2004 (D) John Edwards 15.4 32.6 +17.2 2004 (D) Wesley Clark 3.8 0.0 -3.8 2004 (D) Dennis J. Kucinich 3.1 1.0 -2.1 2004 (D) Joseph I. Lieberman 2.4 0.0 -2.4 2004 (D) Carol Moseley-Braun 1.2 0.0 -1.2 2004 (D) Al Sharpton Jr. 0.7 0.0 -0.7 2000 (R) George W. Bush 50.1 41.0 -9.1 2000 (R) Steve Forbes 23.3 30.5 +7.2 2000 (R) John McCain 9.5 4.7 -4.8 2000 (R) Alan Keyes 8.7 14.3 +5.6 2000 (R) Gary L. Bauer 6.8 8.5 +1.7 2000 (R) Orrin G. Hatch 1.4 1.0 -0.4 2000 (D) Al Gore 62.4 63.4 +1.0 2000 (D) Bill Bradley 37.6 34.9 -2.7 1996 (R) Bob Dole 38.6 26.3 -12.3 1996 (R) Steve Forbes 23.9 10.2 -13.7 1996 (R) Phil Gramm 10.8 9.3 -1.5 1996 (R) Lamar Alexander 9.0 17.6 +8.6 1996 (R) Patrick J. Buchanan 8.6 23.3 +14.7 1996 (R) Alan Keyes 4.3 7.4 +3.1 1996 (R) Richard G. Lugar 2.2 3.7 +1.5 1996 (R) Morry Taylor 1.9 1.4 -0.5 1996 (R) Robert K. Dornan 0.9 0.1 -0.8 1988 (R) Bob Dole 42.1 37.4 -4.7 1988 (R) George H. W. Bush 29.7 18.6 -11.1 1988 (R) Pat Robertson 12.6 24.6 +12.0 1988 (R) Jack F. Kemp 9.0 11.1 +2.1 1988 (R) Pete du Pont 6.0 7.3 +1.3 1988 (R) Alexander M. Haig Jr. 0.5 0.3 -0.2 1988 (D) Richard A. Gephardt 28.8 31.3 +2.5 1988 (D) Michael S. Dukakis 20.7 22.2 +1.5 1988 (D) Paul M. Simon 18.3 26.7 +8.4 1988 (D) Gary Hart 11.8 0.3 -11.5 1988 (D) Jesse Jackson 9.7 8.8 -0.9 1988 (D) Bruce Babbitt 9.4 6.1 -3.3 1988 (D) Al Gore 1.3 0.0 -1.3

#IFTTT #Politics �� FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Nate Silver

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plusorminuscongress · 5 years ago

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New story in Politics from Time: The Democratic Party Is Making Early Endorsements in Senate Primaries. Grassroots Activists Aren’t Happy

For grassroots candidates running for the U.S. Senate, one big, national endorsement can make or break an entire campaign. That’s why the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee—a powerful, Washington-based organization that spends tens of millions of dollars each cycle supporting Democratic candidates—wields such outsized clout. An endorsement from it is in effect the Establishment’s stamp-of-approval for the party’s biggest donors to cut checks.

But that’s also why the DSCC’s pattern of endorsing candidates early in their primaries has sewn resentment among some grassroots campaigns and progressive activists in a handful of crucial states, including Iowa, Colorado and North Carolina.

“I think there’s a general feeling that we would put forward better nominees as a party to defeat Republicans if we let voters decide candidates, as opposed to trying to divine from within the confines of the Beltway who we think is most likely to win over, say, Kentucky or Colorado,” Karthik Ganapathy, a progressive strategist, told TIME. The DSCC should embrace a “role as sort of intermediaries and arbiters as opposed to kingmakers,” he adds.

At a time when the Democratic party is increasingly split between its moderate, Clintonian wing and a more revolutionary, progressive left—represented by the rise of presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren—DSCC endorsements also carry weighty implications for the future of the party. Some progressive critics argue that the DSCC mostly endorses moderate candidates.

“Their style seems to be [to choose] candidates who can stay on the phone all day to call big donors, do very few press events, and then put all of their money on television,” said Rebecca Katz, a progressive strategist, of the DSCC. “It’s their playbook.” (Republicans can be criticized on similar grounds, she says.)

A DSCC spokesperson says the organization endorses the most viable candidates as part of a broader, national strategic effort. “If we’re going to stop Mitch McConnell from gutting access to affordable health care, confirming partisan judges to lifetime appointments on the federal bench and Supreme Court, and attacking reproductive rights, then we need to win Senate seats,” Stewart Boss, a DSCC spokesperson, told TIME in an email. “We’re working with candidates who will do exactly that and help Democrats take back the Senate.” In recent years, some DSCC recruits have pulled out unexpected wins, including Sen. Kyrsten Sinema in Arizona in 2018.

The Democratic primary in Iowa, where at least four candidates are vying for the nomination to run against Republican Sen. Joni Ernst, is one example of where this tension is playing out. That race won’t heat up until after the Iowa presidential caucuses in February, and the field is still wide open. One October Emerson poll showed no clear front runner. Yet the DSCC has already endorsed a candidate: Theresa Greenfield, the president of a Des Moines real estate business.

Greenfield’s opponents accused the DSCC of anointing a winner from afar. “We shouldn’t rig elections,” retired Admiral Michael Franken, who is also running against Greenfield, told TIME. “And that’s a tough word—rig—but generally speaking the operatives in Washington, DC, do not have a track history in this state of choosing the most viable candidate.”

Kimberly Graham, who is also running against Greenfield, said the DSCC’s endorsement came too early. “Why not let the candidates who are going to get in the race get in, give them six months or whatever amount of time, and see what happens, see what they do?” she said in an interview with TIME. “If we really want a democracy then maybe we should back off a little bit and let the Iowa voters decide who is the best person to represent them.”

Early DSCC endorsements rankled outsiders in other states’ U.S. Senate races this cycle, too. In North Carolina, the DSCC backed army veteran and former state senator Cal Cunningham to take on Republican Sen. Thom Tillis, despite the fact that another Democrat, state Senator Erica Smith, is leading in polls. Smith has been running since January.

In a statement after the endorsement, Smith dismissed Cunningham an an “heir apparent” and accused the DSCC leadership, who she said she met with directly, of interfering in the democratic process. “Ultimately, the voters of North Carolina will decide who their next United States Senator will be — NOT a handful of DC politicians making back room deals in windowless basements,” Smith wrote.

A similar dynamic has played out in Colorado. In August, the DSCC endorsed former Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper just two days after he joined the race after his failed presidential bid. Some of the Democratic candidates who were already running to challenge Republican Sen. Cory Gardner attacked the DSCC’s decision. “Democrats: This is a moment of decision. Do we want DC to dictate our choice and buy this election before any ballots are even cast—or do we believe voters still matter?” tweeted Andrew Romanoff, one of the candidates running to the left of Hickenlooper, a moderate. Meanwhile, former Obama-era Ambassador Dan Baer, who had raised almost $1.4 million for his campaign for that seat ended his bid when the DSCC weighed in.

In his first fundraising quarter in the race, Hickenlooper raised $2.1 million. Both Hickenlooper and Cunningham have a slew of endorsements in addition to the DSCC’s.

In Iowa in particular, many DSCC critics say the issue is not whether Theresa Greenfield is the right candidate; it’s that they believe voters should have been given time to consider each candidate’s merits before the DSCC weighed in. Greenfield received the DSCC’s backing just three days after entering the race, alongside an endorsement from EMILY’s List. She has since banked more endorsements from both national organizations, including NARAL Pro-Choice America, and local ones, including AFSCME Council 61 and several other unions. A number of current and former Iowa elected officials, including U.S. Representatives Abby Finkenauer and Dave Loebsack, have also endorsed Greenfield.

Jordanna Zeigler, Greenfield’s campaign manager, did not respond immediately to questions about the DSCC’s early endorsement, but described broad backing for her candidate. “We’re proud that Theresa’s earned support from across the state, including endorsements just this week from labor unions representing nearly 12,000 hardworking Iowans,” she said in a statement. “Her hard work and the growing momentum for her campaign are how Theresa outraised Joni Ernst last month and why she’ll flip this Senate seat in November.”

In the last fundraising quarter, Greenfield pulled in more than $1.1 million —slightly out-raising Ernst. The DSCC sees that as a success: its endorsement can help make candidates competitive in fundraising against powerful incumbents. But Graham, Greenfield’s more progressive opponent, says it has given some of the voters she’s spoken with the impression that “Chuck Schumer and the DSCC put their thumbs on the scale.”

DSCC endorsements have broader implications at a time when the Democratic party, pushed left by the rise of popular liberal candidates, is in a period of self-reflection and reinvention. Many progressives complain that the DSCC’s tendency to select more moderate candidates fails to reflect an increasingly liberal Democratic base—which, they argue, might translate to electoral wins with the support of the party.

According to one recent Des Moines Register/CNN/Mediacom poll, a combined 40% of likely Democratic caucus-goers in Iowa are planning to caucus in the presidential primary for one of the two top moderates, Joe Biden or Pete Buttigieg. But nearly a third—a combined 31%—planned to caucus for Sanders or Warren. (The poll had a margin of error of 4.4 percentage points.)

Linn County Supervisor Stacey Walker, who endorsed Sen. Bernie Sanders for the 2020 primary, noted that a DSCC endorsement—or the lack thereof—affects who enters the race in the first place. He considered running in the Senate race himself, but decided against it on the grounds that the primary was “orchestrated by Washington elites, instead of being left up to the voters.”

“I don’t have the privilege of challenging institutional forces on this scale without incurring significant damage to my political career,” Walker wrote in a post announcing he wouldn’t run for the Senate, “and at the end of the day, this fear won out over my courage and I’m not proud about that.” Walker has since endorsed Graham.

Penny Rosfjord, a former Iowa Woodbury County chair, dismissed concerns about DSCC’s effect on state elections. “I think that people are reading too much into it. I think that anybody can run for the Senate,” she told TIME. “I think this is a nonstory for me.”

But Ganapathy, the progressive strategist, argued that a DSCC endorsement can distort who gets into a race, who rises, and who receives fundraising dollars. “The whole idea behind a primary is just [that] we’re going to get better nominees if we actually let voters decide,” he said. In an ideal world, the DSCC would play a broader role: “Don’t direct resources to any single candidate, and if you’re going to help a candidate, help all candidates equally,” he said.

In 2016, Katz, another progressive strategist, worked for progressive Senate candidate John Fetterman in the Pennsylvania primary. Fetterman lost to DSCC-backed Katie McGinty—but McGinty went on to lose the general election. Two years later, Fetterman ran for lieutenant governor and won the state race. (Katz later added she sees what she characterized as a strategy to keep candidates out of trouble as the Republican playbook too.)

Iowa state Sen. Rob Hogg argues that because the DSCC is a national organization, it often fails to identify the candidate most appealing to in-state voters. In 2016, he emerged as a formidable primary opponent against DSCC-backed Patty Judge, who was ultimately defeated soundly. “I believe to this day that that was a mistake by the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee to intervene in that race,” Hogg said. In 2014, the DSCC endorsed Bruce Braley, who ran what most Democrats agree was a bad campaign. He too lost to Ernst.

“I don’t think Iowans have much confidence in the ability of the DSCC to pick candidates,” Hogg told TIME, describing DSCC endorsements as “meddling” in state primaries. “Unquestionably people want the DSCC to stay out of our primary,” he added. Hogg has not endorsed in the current primary.

Bryce Smith, the chair of the Iowa Dallas County Democrats, defended DSCC support as important to statewide candidates. But added that Iowa voters, who are used to using a very personal caucus system, are particularly sensitive to the notion of Washington selecting a nominee. “I definitely feel as though it kind of rubs against the grain,” he told TIME.

“In my personal view and what I hear from people is that that help comes once the nominee has been picked by Democratic voters,” he added. “I think that’s kind of the hurdle that’s being skipped by the DSCC.”

Eddie Mauro, who, like Greenfield, unsuccessfully ran for Iowa’s third district nomination in 2018 and also entered the Senate race this year, said that in conversations with Schumer and Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, the chair of the DSCC, in the spring, he was also told that they did not want a primary. “We talked about the prospects of me running for the US Senate,” he told TIME. “They were concerned about having a primary, they preferred not to have a primary at all.”

In June, TIME reported that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer also attempted to dissuade J.D. Scholten, the candidate who nearly beat Rep. Steve King in Iowa’s fourth district in 2018 who was at the time considering jumping into the 2020 Senate race, from running for Senate in an attempt to clear the way for Greenfield. “We don’t need a primary,” Schumer told Scholten, according to a source familiar with the situation. Scholten eventually chose to run in the fourth district again.

Greenfield ran in the Iowa third district primary in the 2018 cycle, a seat now held by Democratic US Rep. Cindy Axne, but dropped out after a campaign staffer faked signatures for her petition paperwork. The staffer later publicly apologized in an ad in the Des Moines Register.

What’s clear is that Democrats have their work cut out for them in 2020. Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina and Maine are among the most competitive races, although some Democrats argue that Iowa is within reach. The state voted for Trump by about 10 points and the nonpartisan Cook Political Report rates the 2020 race as “Likely Republican,” but President Barack Obama won the state twice and it wasn’t so long ago that Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin represented the state. And as the saying goes, Democrats have to fall in love.

By Lissandra Villa on November 25, 2019 at 05:00AM

#Time #politics #PlusOrMinusCongress #±Congress #Indega±#IndegaPlusOrMinus #TimeMag #TimeMagazine

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itsfinancethings · 5 years ago

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November 25, 2019 at 05:00AM

In his first fundraising quarter in the race, Hickenlooper raised $2.1 million. Both Hickenlooper and Cunningham have a slew of endorsements in addition to the DSCC’s.

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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

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Election Night 2018 didn’t provide a story of a dramatic blue wave, but it was still a big night for Democrats, who won the House of Representatives, marking the end of the Republican legislative agenda and the beginning of an era of accountability for President Trump.

Democrats feared early on that a handful of Senate races foretold a night of gloom. Amy McGrath lost in Kentucky, while Andrew Gillum underperformed his polls in Florida and Joe Donnelly lost a Senate race in Indiana. Republicans ultimately kept control of the Senate.

But things quickly turned around for Democrats in the main arena — the House — where, though they didn’t smash expectations or shock the world with their electoral performance, they did win a lot of races and took control of the chamber. Democrats also gained ground in governor races and state legislatures, albeit not to the degree that they had hoped.

Deb Haaland made history on Tuesday night by becoming one of the first Native American woman elected to Congress. Juan Labrech/AP

The overall results suggest a nation that continues to be deeply divided along geographical lines, with rural areas and Southern exurbs tilting ever more strongly toward the Republican Party while cities and suburbs with highly educated populations lurch to the left.

But the 2018 version of divided America shows the Democrats with a clearly larger half. Republicans essentially matched Trump’s 46 percent of the vote, but House Democrats consolidated the other 54 percent behind them in a way that Hillary Clinton did not. And while Trump skated by on a narrow Electoral College win in 2016, the Democrats of 2018 held strong in the key Midwestern swing states.

Ramifications of this election will reverberate for years, fundamentally realigning power in Washington in critical ways.

Here’s who won and who lost.

In the end, Democrats didn’t do as well in the House as they’d been hoping to, and they did quite a bit worse in the Senate. But beyond the noise and the expectations game, the fundamental reality is they did what they needed to do — win a majority of House seats and end the Republican Party’s monopoly on power.

That started with an early win in a northern Virginia district that voted heavily for Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Ralph Northam in 2017, continued with a couple of Miami-area races, and plowed ahead throughout the evening into the favored quarter suburbs of Minneapolis, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, and beyond. This is often glossed broadly as a “suburban” backlash to the GOP, but in a country where at this point the vast majority of the population lives in suburban-style neighborhoods, this was actually something more specific — a backlash grounded in the section of every metro area where the college-educated professionals and the upscale shopping malls are.

Most of these GOP losses had been “expected” by forecasters before they came, so they didn’t necessarily provide Democrats with an emotional high. But they did provide them with concrete wins — votes in hand — that, paired with a few more pickups here and there in the Northeast and Midwest, were good enough to make a majority.

This risk of a massive backlash against Trump in suburbs with high numbers of college graduates has been apparent for years, but House Republicans largely avoided it in 2016 by distancing themselves from Trump and promising to be independent of him. They didn’t deliver on that promise, and they paid the price.

Back in 2002, then-Sen. Max Cleland lost his reelection to Saxby Chambliss and became a very rare example of an opposition party incumbent senator losing an election. This is so rare that it didn’t happen to anyone in 2004 or in 2006 or in 2008 or in 2010 or in 2012 or in 2014 or in 2016. But Tuesday night, at least three incumbent Democratic senators lost.

Party leaders will tell you, rightly, that this mostly reflects an almost comically unfavorable map and in no way undermines the sense that the overall result of the election was a strong popular rebuke of Trump.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that Trump’s personal focus during the closing months of the campaign was on defeating incumbent Democratic senators, and he pulled it off in an unprecedented way.

President Trump arrives at a campaign rally for Republican Senate candidate Mike Braun in Fort Wayne, Indiana, on November 5, 2018. Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images

And while losing the House is the death knell for the Republican Party’s legislative agenda, Trump himself has rarely seemed to care that much about the GOP legislative agenda. Indeed, the death of the GOP legislative agenda could even be good news for Trump politically since much of that agenda was toxically unpopular. An expanded majority in the Senate, meanwhile, will let Trump do things he actually cares about, like replace Cabinet members and other executive branch officials who’ve displeased him while continuing to keep the judicial confirmation conveyor belt that’s so important to his base moving.

Trump’s personal unpopularity is, of course, a problem for him going forward, and GOP losses in the House underscore that. But while it’s always tempting to assume that a president who suffers midterm blowback is doomed to future failure, the pattern of 1996 and 2012 when presidents bounce back from midterm defeat — and in many ways benefit from the contrast with congressional opposition — is actually the more common one historically.

Hillary Clinton was supposedly invincible in 2016 because not only did she hold a lead in the popular vote polling, there was a solid “wall” of blue states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota — that hadn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since Michael Dukakis was the Democratic nominee.

That proved not to be the case. Trump got a meager 46 percent of the vote nationally, but he overperformed in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin and wound up with an Electoral College victory.

Former President Barack Obama with Michigan victors Sen. Debbie Stabenow (left) and Gretchen Whitmer (right) in Detroit on October 26, 2018. Bill Pugliano/Getty Images

This time around, however, the tables flipped back again. Even as Democratic Party senators in the truly red states took a beating, Pennsylvania’s Bob Casey, Wisconsin’s Tammy Baldwin, and Michigan’s Debbie Stabenow won fairly easy victories. Clinton only narrowly eked out a win in Minnesota, but Tina Smith and Amy Klobuchar both won landslide reelections. Over in the significantly redder Ohio, Sherrod Brown won reelection, and the governors’ mansions in Michigan and Wisconsin look poised to flip.

Obviously, none of this is a guarantee of Democratic victory in 2020 — really, it is not — but it is an important sign of Democratic resilience in an electorally critical region.

The country turned pop-country turned just pop star pivoted her image to a kind of bland, semi-political “girl power” stance about a year before the 2016 presidential campaign pitted the first female major party nominee against a gross misogynist and Taylor Swift sat it out. That earned her a chorus of criticism, though given her considerable audience on both sides of the partisan divide, it probably made sense for her in business terms.

That changed in 2018, when Swift rather unexpectedly Instagrammed an endorsement of former Gov. Phil Bredesen’s senate campaign against Rep. Marsha Blackburn.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) celebrates as her husband Chuck Blackburn gives her a kiss during an election night party in Franklin, Tennessee, November 6, 2018. Alex Wong/Getty Images

Swift pulled no punches in her endorsement, specifically advising her fans not to let bland semi-political girl power considerations lead them into voting for Blackburn, whose “voting record in Congress appalls and terrifies me.” She didn’t claim to agree with Bredesen about everything, but observed that that’s the nature of politics and said she’d be voting for him enthusiastically because “I cannot vote for someone who will not be willing to fight for dignity for ALL Americans, no matter their skin color, gender or who they love.”

Bredesen’s strong name recognition and the fact that he was broadly popular when he left office eight years ago gave him some solid early polling leads and created Democratic hopes of picking up an unlikely Senate seat in a deep-red district. But as Blackburn continued to get her name out there, the polling began to revert to baseline partisanship with a clear Republican lead. Swift’s endorsement came at a time when Democrats had increasingly given up hope here and served as a kind of symbolic shot in the arm, but it proved to be entirely in vain, as in the final analysis, Bredesen got absolutely swamped by Trump voters coming out in droves to back the GOP.

The New York Times’s loved-and-loathed needle was simply out of commission during the early, uncertain period of the evening. By the time their team got the bugs fixed and were ready to launch it, the final outcome of a House Democratic majority and an expanded GOP Senate majority was already pretty clear for anyone to see.

The New York Times

Meanwhile, the rival model from FiveThirtyEight that simply spit out numbers rather than a cool graphical presentation was seemingly useless. It massively overreacted to the GOP winning a couple of Lean Republican House seats in Florida, to the point that Nate Silver himself threw the model under the bus and said he was going to reprogram it.

In the end, Democrats took the House by a comfortable though not enormous margin, which is exactly what poll-based pre-election analysis had suggested they would do. And they did it almost entirely by winning races that polling suggested they would win. The live-updating models did very little besides add noise and confusion to our understanding of what was happening.

Democrats look set to have a solid but unspectacular House majority.

But they do so on the back of a really big majority in the popular vote, of what looks to be at least 8 percentage points. In practical terms, nobody’s going to care that the majority of seats is a bit small compared to the majority of votes. But had Democrats come up a bit shorter and won the popular vote by “only” 4 or 5 points, they’d be stuck in the minority, and the evening would have been a huge victory for the Republican Party.

Protesters in front of the Supreme Court while the justices hear arguments on gerrymandering, on October 3, 2017. Bill O’Leary/The Washington Post via Getty Images

The gerrymandered maps that Republicans drew after the 2020 census, which let them hold the House majority in 2012, continued to pay dividends. And Democrats’ odds of winning the House were greatly boosted by a Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision that led to the creation of fair maps in one critical state.

Likely Democratic success in winning governors’ mansions in Michigan, Wisconsin, Kansas, Maine, and New Mexico, combined with earlier victories in New Jersey and gains in the New York state Senate, mean that Democrats should have a larger hand in map drawing next time around and a chance to draw some less unfavorable maps, with important consequences for the road to come.

Original Source -> 4 winners and 2 losers from the 2018 midterm elections

via The Conservative Brief

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theliberaltony · 5 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Black voters effectively delivered Hillary Clinton the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016. She and Sen. Bernie Sanders ran about evenly among white voters, but black voters overwhelmingly backed Clinton. So did the Democratic establishment.

That team-up — black voters and the more establishment candidate — is not unusual.

We don’t have detailed exit polls of Democratic primaries for most other offices, but according to pre-election polls and precinct results in a number of high-profile House and gubernatorial primaries since 2016, black voters have tended to back the candidate from the party’s establishment wing over a more liberal alternative. And at least for now, we’re seeing the same pattern in the 2020 Democratic presidential race: Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Sanders are fairly competitive with Joe Biden among white Democrats, but trail the former vice president substantially among black Democrats.

Why, though? After all, African Americans have dramatically less income and wealth than white Americans, so messages of “big, structural change” (Warren) or a “political revolution” (Sanders) should, in theory, be particularly appealing. Because a higher percentage of black Americans than white Americans don’t have health insurance, a program like Medicare for All, for example, would disproportionately benefit black people.

So what gives? I’m going to offer some potential answers to that question, but let’s first get a couple caveats and complications out of the way.

First, it’s hard to come up with a definitive explanation for the establishment-black voter alliance because the “establishment” is a fuzzy concept. Exactly which candidate is a center-left, establishment Democrat and which is anti-establishment or “the liberal alternative” is all a bit subjective.

Second — and this is important — black Democrats are not a monolith and are divided in some of the same ways white Democrats are divided. Young black voters are less supportive of Biden (and were less supportive of Clinton in 2016) compared to older black voters. Similarly, black voters without college degrees are more supportive of Biden than those with degrees.

That said, blacks of all demographics are more supportive of Biden than their white counterparts, according to Morning Consult polling data. Young black voters are more supportive of Biden (and were more supportive of Clinton) than young white voters. Older black voters were more supportive of Clinton than older white ones in 2016 and now are strongly behind Biden. Black college graduates are more supportive of Biden than white college graduates. Nuances aside, the weakness of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party with black voters is a well-known phenomenon that people in the Warren and Sanders camps and anti-establishment liberal activist groups are openly grappling with.

So here are a few explanations for why black voters have tended to side with the establishment wing of the Democratic Party. I have tried to order these explanations from strongest to weakest (in my view, at least):

Establishment candidates typically have existing ties to the black community

This will sound tautological, but an establishment candidate is … well … established. A candidate who is part of the establishment wing of the Democratic Party likely has fairly strong ties to major constituencies in the party, such as labor unions, women’s rights groups and, of course, black leaders and voters. So when black voters backed Gov. Andrew Cuomo over Cynthia Nixon in New York’s Democratic gubernatorial primary last year, or Andy Beshear over Adam Edelen in Kentucky’s Democratic gubernatorial primary earlier this year, that was not shocking. Not only did Beshear and Cuomo spend years developing their own ties with the black communities in their states, but their fathers did, too. (Steve Beshear was governor of Kentucky, Mario Cuomo the governor of New York.)

Clinton in 2016 and Biden in 2020 similarly entered the primaries with longstanding ties to black voters. It’s worth considering if the story here is not that establishment candidates are smarter in appealing and connecting with black voters during the campaign, compared to anti-establishment candidates. Maybe it’s that the establishment candidate in a race is likely to be the person who enters the campaign with the strongest support among black voters.

Black voters are pragmatic

White Democrats are significantly more likely than black Democrats to describe themselves as liberal. Perhap that’s the simple explanation for why most black voters eschew more liberal candidates. But scholars of black voters argue that the liberal-moderate-conservative framework does not apply well to predicting the actual policy positions and voting behavior of black Americans.

In other words, it’s not clear that “moderate” black Democrats are moderate in the way that the word is most often invoked in white-dominated, elite settings, such ascable news and Twitter. They’re not demanding David Brooks-style centrism on economic and cultural policy. If, for instance, Biden endorsed Medicare for All and the elimination of most private insurance plans — the position of Sanders and Warren — I think it’s likely that black voters who like Biden would begin to feel more favorable about Medicare for All rather than breaking with Biden to find an anti-Medicare-for All candidate. Similarly, if Biden were out of the race, I’m skeptical that much of his support among black voters would go to Mayor Pete Buttigieg or Sen. Amy Klobuchar who are also positioning themselves as centrists on policy issues.

“The fact that blacks describe themselves as moderate or conservative on these measures is virtually meaningless, and results mostly from the fact that these ideological labels carry such little currency among black voters,” Hakeem Jefferson, a political scientist at Stanford University who studies black political attitudes, told me.

Instead, in interviews with black Democrats in 2016 and 2020, I’ve seen more pragmatism than moderation. In 2016, black primary voters were very fearful of Trump getting elected and felt Clinton was the best person to face him in a general election. They were skeptical that the broader electorate would like Sanders’s farther-reaching ideas, and even more doubtful Sanders could execute them if elected. During the 2020 cycle, black voters have regularly told reporters that they like Sen. Kamala Harris and other Democratic candidates but view Biden as the person most likely to defeat Trump.

Why would black Democrats be more pragmatic than white Democratic voters? In interviews, black voters often suggest they have a lot to lose if a Republican takes office. They don’t necessarily say this explicitly, but the implication is that they have more to lose than white voters, making them more risk-averse. That’s at least partially true. A higher percentage of black Americans (compared to white Americans) use government programs like Medicaid, for example, so cuts to those programs by Republicans are more likely to affect blacks than whites.

“On doorsteps in South Carolina, black voters sensibly asked me why I thought Bernie Sanders could accomplish more than Obama, whom the Republicans had done everything they could to stop,” wrote Ted Fertik, in a study of the Vermont senator’s campaign.1

“They saw no reason to believe that Sanders would be more effective, and given the fulminating racism of so many leading Republicans, they sensibly felt that the costs of a Republican presidency would fall more heavily on them,” he added. “They were therefore not inclined to take a risk on Bernie Sanders … even when they agreed with his proposals.”

Black leaders are part of the establishment and support its candidates

This is a slightly different point than No. 1, above. It’s not just that Sanders in 2016 and Warren in 2020 entered those races with weaker connections to black leaders than Clinton or Biden. During the primary process, black leaders weighed in — on the side of the establishment candidate.

In February 2016, fairly early in the primary season, the Congressional Black Caucus’s PAC formally endorsed Clinton. Eight black caucus members have endorsed Biden this year. None are behind Warren or Sanders. You might say that politicians just like to endorse front-runners, so they can be on the side of the winner. Not quite. Ten black caucus members have backed Harris, another candidate whose politics are best described as center-left establishment. (More on her in a bit.) And Biden and Harris are also getting the vast majority of endorsements from other high-profile black figures, such as state representatives and prominent mayors.

Why are elected black officials more likely to side with establishment candidates? Many of these candidates have long courted black community leaders, including elected officials, as I mentioned in No. 1. But I also think it’s the case that many black Democratic elites spent much of the last several decades courting the establishment, and are thus tied to it. You see this on Capitol Hill, where black House members are among the strongest defenders of Speaker Nancy Pelosi in her internal battles with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and the progressive wing of the House. Black elites also express the same pragmatism that black voters do and are wary of pushing forward candidates they view as unable to win a general election.

It’s not clear that black voters follow high-profile endorsers. That said, the lack of high-profile black support for Sanders, Warren and other anti-establishment Democrats creates a self-reinforcing problem. They don’t have much support among black voters or black elites, so the press covers their lack of black support. A candidate defined by the press as lacking black support is going to have a hard time getting black voters to support her or black elites to endorse her.

The liberal wing of the Democratic Party appeals to the well-educated more than other groups, and the vast majority of black Democrats don’t have college degrees

Education has become an increasingly powerful predictor of voting behavior in U.S. politics in recent years. That’s proving true in 2020 as well. Warren, in particular, has significantly more support among Democrats with college degrees than those without them. But if education is a dividing line, it’s likely to divide white and black Democrats. Only about 24 percent of black Democrats have college degrees, compared to about 42 percent of white Democrats, according to Gallup data.

In other words, the alliance between black voters and establishment candidates may be partly about education, not race. Perhaps Warren’s limited support among black Americans is simply indicative of her broader challenge with people without college degrees.

We don’t have great data about how Sanders or other liberal Democrats did among black college graduates compared to non-college educated black voters, so I’m reluctant to emphasize this point too much. But there is a lot of evidence that the activist left wing of the Democratic Party is more educated than the rest of the party and perhaps is not connecting with voters — both black and non-black — who don’t have degrees.

The left wing isn’t running enough black candidates

There is some evidence that African Americans are more likely to turn out to vote if there is a black candidate. (These studies are generally of general elections of congressional races, so they’re not perfectly analogous to a presidential primary.) In recent Democratic primaries, the candidate who is well-liked by the white liberal activist wing of the Democratic Party has struggled with black voters (Bill Bradley in 2000, Howard Dean in 2004, Sanders in 2016, Sanders and Warren in 2020.) The exceptions were two black candidates: Jesse Jackson in 1988 and Barack Obama in 2008.2

So it would probably be helpful if the liberal wing of the Democratic Party was running more black candidates. It’s not that the liberal bloc of the party has no prominent black voices. Rep. Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts is a part of the Ocasio-Cortez bloc on Capitol Hill. Andrew Gillum ran to the left and defeated a more establishment candidate in last year’s Democratic primary for governor in Florida, with black voters playing a key role in his victory.

But aspiring black politicians often need to downplay their liberalism to advance in elected office so that they can seem “electable” in a general election. This probably rules out some black candidates — Sens. Cory Booker and Harris, potentially — from becoming “liberal alternatives.” You might say that’s a problem for Booker and Harris, who are trailing Warren and Sanders in most polls. But it’s a problem for the anti-establishment wing of the Democratic Party, too. If the anti-establishment wing of the party were backing a black candidate in 2020, that person would likely present a stronger challenge to Biden, because he or she could more easily cut into his advantage among black voters.

We could come up with some other explanations, but I think those are the strongest. And this analysis points to a blueprint for the left wing of the Democratic Party if it wants to win more black votes:

Align with black candidates or non-black candidates with strong ties to black voters and leaders

Aggressively court black leaders for endorsements

Directly address black voters’ concerns that more liberal candidates have a greater chance of losing races to Republicans

And target black voters under 45 and those with college degrees, who might be less inclined to vote for establishment candidates.

So could that approach work for Sanders and Warren against Biden? Maybe. You could imagine Warren in particular getting endorsements from younger liberal black figures like Gillum or Pressley (particularly if Warren wins one of the early primary states and Harris finishes far behind and is no longer viable). And maybe those endorsements and Warren’s campaigning then lead her to become the candidate of black voters under 45 and those with college degrees, even if Biden still gets most votes from older and less educated black voters.

Remember, Sanders or Warren don’t necessarily have to win the black vote to become the Democratic nominee — they just can’t lose it by 60 percentage points, as Sanders did in 2016. (Biden is getting between 40 and 50 percent of the black vote in most polls now, so nowhere near Clinton 2016 levels. But Clinton was in a two-candidate field, and I would expect Biden’s support among black voters to go up as this gigantic field shrinks.)

But even if Sanders or Warren gets more support among black voters in 2020 than the Vermont senator did in 2016, I tend to think Biden will remain fairly popular with black voters overall — because of his ties to Obama and other black leaders and the perception that he can defeat Trump. So there is a very real possibility that black voters will play the same role in the 2020 presidential primary that they have played in Democratic politics over much of the last four years: blocking the path of the liberal left as it attempts to dethrone the party’s establishment.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Perry Bacon Jr.

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itsfinancethings · 5 years ago

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In his first fundraising quarter in the race, Hickenlooper raised $2.1 million. Both Hickenlooper and Cunningham have a slew of endorsements in addition to the DSCC’s.

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itsfinancethings · 5 years ago

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In his first fundraising quarter in the race, Hickenlooper raised $2.1 million. Both Hickenlooper and Cunningham have a slew of endorsements in addition to the DSCC’s.

#IFTTT #Blogger

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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

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PHOENIX, Arizona — Rep. Martha McSally, the winner of Arizona’s Republican primary for Senate, is doing something few women in the GOP have done this cycle: She’s putting gender at the forefront of her campaign.

It’s a move that Republican women have by and large shied away from — likely due to concerns about being too closely affiliated with identity politics. This doesn’t seem to be the case for McSally — the first female fighter pilot to fly in combat, who’s up against Democrat Kyrsten Sinema, another woman — in the general election this fall.

McSally first highlighted gender in her campaign announcement, and has continued to focus on it in the course of her Senate run. “I’m a fighter pilot and I talk like one,” she says in her announcement video. “That’s why I told Washington Republicans to grow a pair of ovaries and get the job done.”

“She’s broken so many barriers in her career,” says Lisa Askey, the president of the Chandler Republican Women, noting that “there was such prejudice against her and she’s made great strides.”

Since she joined the race, McSally has made her groundbreaking service in the Air Force a cornerstone of her campaign and debuted a Women’s Coalition made up of Arizona women leaders including former Gov. Jan Brewer and former Secretary of State Betsey Bayless. (Some of the women who support her have taken to offering a pithy nod to her military service and referring to themselves as her “Wing Women.”)

[embedded content]

Her approach to gender is in stark contrast to Marsha Blackburn and Diane Black, two Congress members who ran in the Tennessee Senate and governor’s primaries while skirting the issue.

McSally’s emphasis on gender could offer key advantages in this race. One of the main demographics that she’ll have to win over in November is women, a group that makes up 52 percent of Arizona’s registered voters. A growing proportion of women are also identifying as independents who are increasingly looking to be the deciding factor in the upcoming Senate race.

With two women going up against one another — gender is no longer a liability.

For many McSally supporters, her mentions of gender don’t read so much as an overt effort to draw attention to it as they do a straightforward way to describe her professional record, and highlight her qualifications.

McSally has said she was shocked by the way the Air Force was set up when she first enrolled in the Academy after graduating high school. “I find out when I get to the Academy that it’s against the law for women to be fighter pilots, and I’m like, What? I’m going through the same training as you. I’m kicking a lot of these guys’ asses, and somehow, just because I have ovaries, I can’t be a fighter pilot?” she told Elle in a 2016 interview. “That doesn’t even make sense to me.”

In 1995, McSally became the first female fighter pilot to serve in combat, while flying in a mission in Iraq. Less than a decade later, she went on to become the first female commander of a fighter squadron. While overseas in Saudi Arabia, McSally also challenged a rule that required servicewomen to wear traditional abayas — long-sleeve floor-length dresses — when they traveled off-base. She ultimately sued then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld over the requirement, noting that servicemen were not required to wear the formal dress of their host country in the same circumstances — and secured a change in policy.

During her time in the House, the two-term Congress member has continued to champion gender equality, establishing a working group to examine disparities in the workplace around pay and confronting the House’s stringent dress code.

“From a personal standpoint, she’s a highly accomplished woman,” says Scottsdale Mayor Jim Lane, an Arizona official who has endorsed McSally. “I don’t know that there’s an overemphasis on [gender].” In her approach toward gender, McSally seems to be doing something that’s seen more frequently on the Democratic side: simply noting how it informs her life experience and perspective.

The Republican party has long been criticized for its lethargic approach to promoting women among its ranks, and this year the GOP could see the number of Republican women in the House go down even as Democrats experience an unprecedented slew of wins among women candidates.

For some GOP women, there’s also a concern that being too outspoken about issues like gender equality could associate them with identity politics, something the party has actively strove to distance itself from. As Tennessee Republican Party communications director Candice Dawkins said earlier this year, “We don’t need to highlight our otherness. … The Republican Party has a track record, and that’s what we’re running on.”

Multiple Arizona Republicans noted that McSally is just the latest in a series of female Republicans that state voters have backed. “I know that people will look at our party and say we suppress women,” Askey says. “And I find it laughable here in Arizona.”

As a state, Arizona has a long pattern of promoting women in public office. As the New York Times’s Susan Chira writes, Arizonans have consistently elected women for key state and local positions, even though the Senate seat has remained elusive.

Arizona, long an emblem of conservatism, also has a history of shattering stereotypes about women in power. The state leads the nation in electing women as governor — two Democrats and two Republicans — and ties with Vermont for the highest proportion of women in legislatures at 40 percent.

Perhaps most interestingly, because the final election will consist of two women facing off for the seat, this dynamic offers both candidates the freedom to discuss gender on both sides of the aisle in a way that’s different from other primaries.

“We have strong women here. People laugh and say it’s the wild west. We have great internal support,” Askey says. “I think because we’ve always had so many strong women, it’s been part of the landscape.”

There are strategic reasons for McSally to emphasize gender equality, an issue that could be key for appealing to women and independent voters, especially those who are turned off by Trump’s allegations of sexual misconduct and rhetoric toward women. According to a July analysis of just over 70 voters by Phoenix-based polling firm, OH Predictive Insights, women who identified as independents were more likely to back Sinema by a large margin.

A January Washington Post-ABC News poll found that women and independent voters were flocking to the Democratic options in congressional races.

In a head-to-head race against Sinema, gender is seen as a likely asset not only when it comes to voter support, but also for GOP optics. “The [Republican Party] has a gender gap,” says Larry Sabato, the head of the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. “By nominating McSally, they’re hoping to close the gap a bit.”

Regardless of whether McSally or Sinema win in November, the election is also due to mark a major milestone for the state and that’s worth noting, many Arizona Republicans say.

“It’s an issue in the race for a couple of reasons. It’s pretty clear that whoever gets out of the primary, it’s going to be a woman,” says McSally supporter Kim Owens, a public relations professional in Phoenix. “This is a first in Arizona, we’ve never had a female Senator. That’s in and of itself, something of note.”

“You’re seeing McSally talk about her gender because it’s going to be historic,” says Derrik Rochwalik, chair of the Maricopa County Young Republicans.

And even if she doesn’t end up winning, McSally’s approach to gender has already made a dent in existing Republican norms.

Original Source -> Martha McSally is the rare Republican woman putting gender at the forefront of her campaign

via The Conservative Brief

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