No big news or even original analysis in this post, just a general observation. I was just looking at the VoteHub Senate predictions. This is a relatively new entrant into the election modeling/forecasting world. They’re a bit more cautious than Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin, seeing the most likely outcome as Democrats taking 52 seats versus 53. That’s probably actually technically the median result of running numerous modeling simulations. In any case, I was looking at the categories in which they place different races. For instance, they put Texas, as “Lean D”, so more likely to flip than Ohio, Maine and Iowa. I’m not sure that’s wrong. But it’s just wild to see.
A year ago the conventional wisdom was that only Maine was a plausible pick up opportunity, maybe North Carolina. But Democrats have been disappointed by North Carolina plenty of times in the fifteen years or so. And Democrats would be lucky just to hold on to Georgia. We’re simply talking about a range of states that no one was even considering a year ago.
What struck me, though, looking at this, was how hard it is for me to even have a hunch on some of these states because they’re just so Republican that I have no baseline for even evaluating them in partisan terms.
Let me restate the obvious which is that I don’t work with data analysis and modeling like all the folks in that space do. These are my own efforts to figure things out, which are a mix of experience, intuition, etc., not really data-driven in any sophisticated sense. But like Kansas? Who knows? That’s a seriously Republican state! The thing about Kansas is that it’s more Republican than the Republican party, by which I mean that Kansas was Republican when the GOP was a predominantly northern party. It’s still totally Republican when the GOP is a predominantly southern party. It hasn’t elected a Democratic senator in almost a century. We have a range of different data points which make it seem like this really might be happening there. In fact, if you really strain to look at the data in just the right way maybe it’s not even a toss up. But those are just shards of evidence here or there. There are plenty of plausible ways that Republican Roger Marshall could end up winning by mid- or even high single digits and the whole thing was a mirage.
But what baselines, what frameworks do you use to evaluate when and whether a state like Kansas is primed to elect a Democrat. Truly who knows? It hasn’t happened in a century. And it’s not just Kansas. A number of these states are similar, at least to the extent that recent history, at least to me, provides very little frame of reference for evaluating a competitive partisan race.
