This week on The Downballot, we take a look at what is happening. Join hosts David Nir and David Beard as they delve into the wild results from Alaska's special election for its lone House seat, money troubles at the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC)—showing how Republicans are indeed in disarray—and results from the Massachusetts primary. They’ll also preview the final primaries of the year coming up next week in New Hampshire and Rhode Island.
On yesterday’s episode, longtime Daily Kos Elections writer Steven Wolf joined as our guest to discuss a brand new data set that Daily Kos Elections was particularly proud to publish this week. It includes complete data for all 435 congressional districts, breaking down the results of the 2020 presidential election for the new districts that will be used in the November midterms.
You can listen below or subscribe to The Downballot wherever you listen to podcasts. You can also find a transcript for this week right here. New episodes come out every Thursday!
In Alaska, Democrat and former State Representative Mary Peltola defeated Republican Sarah Palin, the former governor, by a 51-49 margin in the final round of the ranked-choice voting in the special election. “It has been a wild time in Alaska and really for Democrats in general after the amazing result in NY-19,” Beard acknowledged. “To have this to follow so soon after has been really incredible.”
As Nir and Beard discussed a few weeks ago, Peltola had 40% of the vote in the first round, while Palin had 31% and fellow Republican, Nick Begich, had 28%. When Begich was eliminated, most of his voters could have gone to Palin and put her over the top, but that is not what ultimately happened.
Begich voters did go for Palin over Peltola, but only by a 50 to 29% margin. The rest exhausted their ballots—meaning that they didn't put either Peltola or Palin as a second choice, so their votes were simply eliminated for the final round.
Beard thinks that this is a far bigger upset than even in NY-19, which Biden won in 2020. Candidate quality was clearly a factor here, he ascertained, as Palin was a very unpopular Republican candidate, and Peltola was a very good Democrat.
“National Republicans are incredibly upset at ranked-choice voting for somehow causing this result, which doesn't make any sense because, as we saw, there were basically three main candidates; Peltola, Palin, and Begich,” Beard added. “And under a normal circumstance, Palin and Begich would've been in a Republican primary, and presumably Palin would've won that primary.”
Meanwhile, things are looking worse for Republicans as financial woes abound at the NRSC, the GOP's official campaign arm that is responsible for ensuring Republicans win a majority in the Senate. A few weeks ago, stories broke that the NRSC had cut more than $13 million from ad reservations in four key races, including Arizona, Pennsylvania, Nevada, and Wisconsin, because of fundraising issues within the committee.
“It's amazing that Republicans are having such a hard time raising money since the wind, in theory, should be at their backs. But now, the extent of, and in particular, the reason for those woes has really come center stage,” Nir said, referring listeners to a recent lengthy New York Times piece that dissects what has gone wrong at the NRSC. The story focuses, in particular, on the abysmal leadership of Florida Senator Rick Scott, the committee’s chair, and highlights the fact that the NRSC spent $23 million trying—and largely failing—to acquire new donors through online advertising.
The cohosts also covered the Massachusetts primary this week, the winner of whom will succeed retiring Governor Charlie Baker. In their primary for governor, former State Representative Geoff Diehl, who was endorsed by Trump and called the 2020 election rigged, defeated his more moderate opponent, 55 to 45 in the primary.
Beard warned that, while he is a Republican, Diehl is no Charlie Baker. In fact, he is much farther to the right of Baker and any of the many more moderate Republican governors that Massachusetts has had:
He lost the 2018 Senate race to Elizabeth Warren by a massive margin. He's going to be a massive underdog to Democratic attorney general, Maura Healey in the fall. And he joins other Republican gubernatorial nominees, including Maryland state rep, Dan Cox, Illinois state Senator, Darren Bailey, as Trump endorsed candidates in blue states who are marching their own party off a cliff.
“As much as I haven't liked it in the past few decades, the GOP has had a long history of successfully winning governor's mansions in blue states by nominating moderate or even independent-minded candidates who voters who normally vote for Democrats, particularly at the federal level, are willing to support at the state level,” Beard added. “In Massachusetts and Maryland, the GOP has held the office more often in recent years than the Democrats have. And they've been able to win in both red wave years and blue wave years.”
Nir and Beard also previewed one last set of primaries in New England—specifically New Hampshire and Rhode Island.
Next, Wolf joined to share more information about the groundbreaking data set Daily Kos Elections just put out. It was a monumental project that involved calculating the results of the 2020 presidential election for the new congressional districts created in the most recent round of redistricting.
“Why don't you tell us a little bit about why this data is so important and so widely used, and in particular, if you're an ordinary person, how this data might be useful to you?” Nir asked, kicking off the conversation.
The presidential result in a district is one of the most important data points you can have about how competitive it might be in the next election, Wolf explained. That is because the decline in split-ticket voting among the electorate means that the presidential results have become very highly correlated with congressional results, especially in the last few election cycles.
According to Wolf, what this means is that these results can be very useful for readers because looking at any district in the country provides a sense of whether it's likely to be competitive,, simply based on the presidential margin. For instance, a district that voted for Biden or Trump by a single-digit margin is far more likely to be competitive than a district where either candidate won by 20 percentage points or more—and those sorts of districts are almost never competitive.
Nir then asked about ticket splitting and crossover districts, which occur when a district votes for one party for president, but the other for the House. In other words, it voted for Joe Biden at the top of the ticket, but then voted for a Republican member of the House or vice versa. Noting that that number has declined a lot in recent years, Nir asked, “Why did that use to be so high? Why were there so many crossover districts, and why have they cratered?”
Wolf offered this perspective:
In previous decades, candidates or incumbents who were very well known locally, had a moderate reputation or had a record of delivering a lot of tangible results for their district used to have a much greater advantage in vote share over a more generic candidate and ideologically extreme candidates used to face a much greater penalty ... In large part because politics has become so much more nationalized and polarized today, those factors can have a much smaller impact on vote choice. However, they can still be very important and closely divided districts for even a very small advantage could prove decisive.
The trio also covered the importance of the concept of the “median district.” As Wolf put it,
The median district aims to address the question of which party, if any, has an advantage over the other in terms of their share of the national popular vote in a hypothetically tied election. So the way we use it is by determining the margin between the two candidates in every single district and then sorting all the districts from Biden's biggest margin to Trump's biggest margin of victory and then looking at the one in the middle.
“So if we compare the median district to the national popular vote and they're out of sync with each other, it means that one party has an advantage over the other, and the difference between the median district and the national popular vote gives us a rough estimate of how big of a margin the disfavored party needs to win the popular vote by in order to win a majority of districts,” he added.
Based on the median district, Democrats would have to win the popular vote by about 2.4 percentage points to have a chance of winning just a bare majority of the districts nationally, Wolf noted.
”So put another way, Democrats could easily win a majority of the National House vote. In other words, you add up every candidate running as Democrat, every candidate running as a Republican nationwide, Democrats could win a majority of that vote, but still not win a majority of seats in the House?” Nir quipped.
“Yeah, that's exactly right. And this very thing happened 10 years ago in 2012, where Democrats won the popular vote by over a million more votes than Republicans but Republicans had a very solid majority because they had drawn many more of the congressional districts nationally than Democrats have,” Wolf replied.
An interesting trend to note, Nir pointed out, is that at the start of the decade, the median was more than five points to the right of the nation as a whole — and at the end, it was only two points to the right of the nation as a whole. “Is that a trend that you think we might see again in the coming decade?” he asked.
Wolf thinks it is difficult to say for sure, due to the potential of gerrymandering to create significant changes in district makeup. Gerrymanders do have a tendency to kind of decline in strength over time, as we saw in Texas in the last decade, but there is also a distinct possibility that the United States Supreme Court will make it much easier for a lot of these Republican legislatures to draw even more extreme gerrymanders as soon as even next year.
Lastly, Beard, Nir, and Wolf discussed the accessibility of elections data, which most people often expect to be easy to find. A common belief is that the federal government would have this data somewhere, or at least all the states would have the data that were easily accessible. However, that is not the case, as Wolf explained:
Many states don't have a centralized process or website where they process election results and publish them … instead, they rely on county or sometimes even municipal governments to do it for them. And oftentimes, these local election offices are very badly underfunded and they're relying on outdated technology, meaning some don't even publish results in their websites. And in those cases, we had to contact them individually to ask them for their results.
The Downballot comes out every Thursday everywhere you listen to podcasts! As a reminder, you can reach our hosts by email at thedownballot@dailykos.com. Please send in any questions you may have for next week's mailbag. You can also reach out via Twitter at @DKElections.