David Beard:
Hello and welcome. I'm David Beard, contributing editor for Daily Kos Elections.
David Nir:
And I'm David Nir, political director of Daily Kos. The Downballot is a weekly podcast dedicated to the many elections that take place below the presidency, from Senate to city council. We've mentioned this before, but we are closing in on 1,000 subscribers on Apple Podcasts and we would be particularly grateful if you would subscribe to us there. Apple Podcasts is sort of like The New York Times best seller list of podcasts, so it would really help get the word out for The Downballot if you could subscribe on there and leave us a five-star rating and review.
David Beard:
As we mentioned last week, we're having a mailbag episode this week, but we have a little bit of a twist, so how are we going to run it this week, Nir?
David Nir:
So we are inviting on Daily Kos Elections contributing editor Steve Singiser to answer questions from you, our listeners, along with myself, David Nir and my co-host David Beard. And stepping in front of a microphone this week is our producer Cara Zelaya, who will be asking us all of these questions. And because you had so many good questions for us, we are going to be skipping weekly hits and getting right to the Q and A. So please stick with us.
This week we are taking your questions. We asked our listeners to submit questions on any and all topics they would like to hear us discuss as we head into the 2022 midterms and we are going to be providing our best answers. Stepping in front of the microphone today is our producer, Cara Zelaya, who will be taking on the task of posing these questions to myself, David Nir, my co-host, David Beard, and Daily Kos Elections contributing editor Steve Singiser. Let's get started, guys.
Cara Zelaya:
Awesome. I'm so excited to be here. And Steve, thank you so much for joining us.
Steve Singiser:
My pleasure.
Cara Zelaya:
So I'm going to go ahead and start with a question from KJ. In 2020, we didn't know many of the most important results until days after the election. Can we expect to see the same thing again, and when might we know the final results?
David Nir:
This is an excellent question. I'm sure everyone remembers in 2020 that we did not find out the result of who won the Electoral College until the Saturday after Election Day. And that was actually totally awesome because at least in my neighborhood in New York City, people immediately poured into the streets and started celebrating Joe Biden's win and everyone was off because it was a Saturday. But I think we would all like to know the results sooner rather than later, though I think in a lot of key cases we won't. And some of those are for different reasons. We have some big important states where a lot of votes are cast by mail and votes are allowed to arrive after Election Day as long as they're postmarked by Election Day and they are therefore tallied often well after Election Day. This is particularly true in places like Nevada, in Washington, in Oregon, also in California, and that is just something that we have gotten used to.
But I think the bigger problem are some swing states, mostly in the East, where republicans are in control of the state government and they have deliberately refused to allow ballots to be processed early so that the votes can be tabulated more quickly. And the reason why they do this is because they know that these mail ballots lean to the left now and the Election Day vote, which is typically tallied on Election Day, leans to the right thanks to Donald Trump. And so you have these situations where the early counted vote leans heavily to the right and then these crazy conspiracy theorists led by Donald Trump say, "Oh, well the vote changed, it became bluer later," as though this is some evidence of a conspiracy theory and these states that, the biggest offenders really are Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, they could allow ballots to be processed earlier so that the votes could be tallied earlier, but they simply won't because they want to muddy the waters.
Michigan is in a similar boat. They recently made a small change to the law to allow county clerks to start processing votes two days ahead of time. A lot of clerks said they actually aren't going to take advantage of this. The change was made awfully late. So I think that those states that I mentioned before and especially Pennsylvania where the Senate control could come down to, those are states where I think we might be waiting many, many days. It's really impossible to say how long before we have the final results.
Steve Singiser:
Another factor to consider is that much as it was the case in 2020 and then into 2021, back in that election, you may be relying on a Senate runoff to determine who's going to control the Senate. Hypothetical situation that's very possible: the Democrats claim Pennsylvania, but they lose Nevada. Now you're waiting on the Georgia Senate race, which based on polling data, it is entirely possible that neither Warnock nor Walker will get the 50% and you're waiting on a December runoff to determine those things. Likewise, although to a lesser extent, if the control of the house is down to a few House races, we didn't know, for example, just to pick one race. We didn't know who won the 21st District in California in 2018 till almost Thanksgiving because the margins were so small and they were still counting ballots that late. So it may not be one of those things where we even get to wait till the Saturday after the election to figure out who controls Congress, even if most of the races are called.
David Nir:
That's such a good point, Steven. Warnock even started running an ad specifically saying, "Don't let another runoff take over your Thanksgiving." So he's essentially begging voters to get him over the 50% mark and polls indicate that that's certainly possible, but another runoff is definitely, definitely possible.
David Beard:
I'll add that we should probably be rooting for a late night and a long week, two weeks, possibly a runoff, because the alternative is that Republicans do very well on election night and even if we don't know the result of certain races ... because there will always be close races no matter what the overall national result is, some races will be at that margin and we won't know about them for a while. But it may be if Republicans have a really good night, then we'll know the Republicans have taken the House, have taken the Senate, and we'll know that on Wednesday and the rest of the results don't matter as much as we figure out the exact numbers. So really the better scenario is we go into Wednesday, we go into later that week, control is very tight. Democrats are still in contention to hold the Senate, potentially in contention in the House if it's a relatively good night for Democrats. So a late night and a long week is actually a good thing in the scenario.
David Nir:
And let me have one final point before we move on to the next question. On election night itself, some of these states that report fastest, almost always suck for Democrats. You might recall in 2018 the results came out of Florida, which counts very, very fast, quite early, and it sort of cast a pall over the rest of the night. And in fact, a lot of reporters even mistakenly thought that Democrats had a poor night because those Florida results were a disappointment even though the rest of the country turned out to offer very good results, including Democrats taking back the House. So don't draw conclusions on election night from those first results. They're going to be from Florida, also from Kentucky, obviously a very red state where the polls close super early. Hang in there, like Beard said; we want a long night.
Cara Zelaya:
Absolutely. And that lends itself to the next question that we have from Dante. Do we know what types of red or blue mirages we are likely to see on Election Day in different states this year? For example, in 2016, Hillary led in Pennsylvania for a good chunk of the night before losing it to Trump, but four years later Trump led for days before losing it to Biden. Given changes to election law and the receding pandemic, is there reason to expect an early lead for Oz or Fetterman that will then be chipped away at for the rest of the night?
David Beard:
I think the most likely thing we're going to see is replays of 2020 because of the change in how mail balloting has taken place where there's a lot more early vote and mail balloting, A—and B, Democrats now tend to dominate mail balloting because Republicans have convinced themselves of these massive conspiracy theories and refuse to vote except on Election Day. And the way particularly Pennsylvania and Wisconsin take a longer time to count those mail ballots, we should expect Republican leads in those states the way that we saw in 2020 to be what we see into the evening, and then as those ballots get counted, Democrats do close. And obviously then if it's a close race, the question will be, will Democrats be able to overcome them very late into the night or into the following days?
That's not the case in every state, of course. We'll see a state like Arizona, which counts a ton of its early vote first, we'll have a big drop and we'll probably have the Democrats significantly ahead and then Republicans will close in Arizona as Election Day votes are counted, which will be predominantly Republican. So it can vary state by state. A lot of it depends on whether or not they count Election Day votes or early or mail votes first. So you just have to have a good idea about how specific states are doing it and mostly just wait and see until we can get at the least completed counties. That's really important. And then obviously have a good sense then of how the election is going in each of those races.
David Nir:
And just to provide some specific numbers, Democratic data guru Tom Bonier, who we had on the show a while back, recently tweeted some numbers from Pennsylvania that show just how much voting patterns have changed in the state. At this time in 2018, you had almost an even split between the number of early votes cast by Democrats versus those cast by Republicans. But state law changed dramatically since then, Pennsylvania didn't allow early voting then. Now Democrats are responsible for almost three-quarters of the early vote and also the raw numbers of early vote are more than 10 times as much as they were four years ago. So that just underscores what Beard said about the early vote in Pennsylvania definitely favoring Democrats.
Steve Singiser:
I want to add one more state that it might be important to the House in at least a couple key races, and that's Virginia. I remember, and this is going to be the weirdest context, but bear with me. I have a good friend of mine at WorkInSports who is a degenerate gambler, and he had bet heavily on Biden to win Virginia and he was dying because for the entirety of election night, Trump was up in Virginia. Then the vote-by-mail got counted and of course as you guys all know, Trump went on to lose the state by 10 points, but in the evening it looked far, far worse. That might be another state where you look at the Luria race and the Spanberger race that might not look really great early for us, but over time should basically end up wherever it is, it's going to end up.
Cara Zelaya:
We have a couple of questions from Aaron B. As results come in on Election Day, what House districts should we look at as a barometer for how the election will go?
David Beard:
I actually think that Virginia, as Steve mentioned, is a good place to start. Their polls close early. It closes at 7 PM and results do start coming in relatively quickly after that. There is a bit of a skew, obviously, as Steve mentioned about when the Republican leaning versus Democratic leaning votes come in, but they're usually pretty complete or close to complete before midnight, which you can't say for some states on the East coast. That's a good place.
It also has two competitive races that are good to look at. The Virginia's 2nd District, where Elaine Luria is running for reelection in the Virginia Beach area, that's a very hard district, so that's the kind of district that if Democrats can hold, you can at least think about the idea of keeping the House or staying close in the House, something in that range.
And then we have Virginia's 7th District, where Abigail Spanberger is running for reelection in the Northern Virginia area. Her district is a little more Democratic, so you would really expect her to hold on to it unless it's getting to be kind of a bad or pretty bad night for Democrats. Those two seats, we should be able to know before midnight the results of those seats and sort of give us a general idea of where we're standing in the house.
Steve Singiser:
I'll throw one district out that's going to close not long after those, and that is the North Carolina 13th District. That is an open seat. Ted Budd’s running for the U.S. Senate. It pairs Bo Hines, who's a Republican former quarterback in North Carolina State with the state legislator, Wiley Nickel. Every poll taken there, and it's one of the few districts, by the way, where there's been quite a bit of polling, has been within a couple points either way. And the district is almost perfectly split between Biden and Trump. And so I would say that's a district that if the Democrats claim it, maybe it's a better night than we thought it was going to be. If Bo Hines goes on to a mid-single-digit victory, then you start to get a little bit nervous.
Cara Zelaya:
The second question that Aaron had was, we hear all the time about quality issues of public versus private polls. Do you ever see private campaign polling, and if so, has it deferred dramatically from public polls?
David Nir:
At Daily Kos Elections, we do not see very much private polling and the reason why is that campaigns tend to share that stuff with so-called nonpartisan analysts, the folks who issue the race ratings because they want to persuade those analysts to change their race ratings in directions that favor them because of course, that makes them look like they're winning their races and they can use that to generate more and more donations.
For folks like Daily Kos Elections, Daily Kos is a partisan site. We live to elect Democrats and at Daily Kos Elections, we have always, always struck to a rigorously dispassionate form of analysis. When Democrats are performing poorly, we will always say. If Republicans are winning, we will say so. But nonetheless, in the traditional media world, everyone gets grouped into boxes and so Daily Kos winds up in partisan box, and therefore campaigns just have less interest in sharing their private data with us. And that's certainly true for Republican campaigns. They definitely don't want to talk to us.
That said, we do sometimes see some private polling from allies, and I can tell you this, there obviously have, as Aaron B. points out, been all kinds of complaints about the quality of publicly released polls, especially from crappy pollsters, from pollsters with clear agendas, from a lot of these fly-by-night pollsters. And frankly, many of whom are on the GOP side, though Democrats are certainly not immune.
But the reality is there just is not much separation between these sets of numbers that we have seen. And also the way that we can be quite sure of this is there are no surprises on the house playing field in terms of where all the biggest groups are spending their money. There are no races that have appeared. And we tracked this very, very closely every single week where groups like the DCCC or the NRCC are spending heavily, and it's totally unexpected.
When that happens, then you think, "Oh, wow, well, these guys must have access to polling that shows something different than the public polling." But those kind of situations are very, very rare, and we really haven't seen any at all this cycle. I'm not saying that I necessarily trust the public polling. I think there's always a good chance that it could be wrong, especially given what we've seen in recent years. But no one, I don't think has access to any magical special better data just because they're paying top dollar for it and keeping it secret.
David Beard:
And the other thing to think about is that the goal of private pollsters and the goal of top quality public pollsters is the same, which is to provide accurate information as to the state of the race. The New York Times, CNN, the polls that they sponsor, they pay a significant amount of money to get an accurate view as best as possible of the state of these races. That's the same thing that the private organizations, the DCCC, et cetera, they do. They pay money to get accurate views of the state of the race.
Now, lower quality public pollsters, their goal may be attention or pushing a certain narrative other things; those maybe you necessarily can't trust as much. But when it comes to high-quality polling, the goal is always going to be the same, whether it's public or private.
Cara Zelaya:
This is from user Andrew M. Any ideas on which district might be the Oklahoma 5th of 2022? After a redistricting year, there should be a few surprises.
David Nir:
Yeah, there's always the chance for an OK-05 style upset no matter what the year. Hell, even in 2014, a terrible year for Democrats, the parties still managed to flip a seat like Nebraska's 2nd Congressional District that year. That's a pretty top-tier race for Democrats this year. I wouldn't say that it could qualify as a surprise.
But here's one that I definitely think folks should be keeping an eye on. California's 41st District, this is a seat that got redistricted quite a bit. It now includes the Palm Springs area, which is one of the most heavily gay areas in the country. And the congressman who is trying to seek reelection there is Republican Ken Calvert, who is a classic anti-LGBTQ conservative who has spent his entire career in Congress representing very red districts. He has no experience winning in swing seats, which this one now is. It has a lot of new turf to him, and he also has a very energetic opponent in Democrat Will Rollins. This is one of those classic seats that redistricting really changed a lot and threw Calvert into a totally new situation. And even on a rough night for Democrats, I definitely could see that one potentially flipping.
David Beard:
I'll give you another one, which is Arizona's 1st District where David Schweikert is a Republican incumbent who's had a lot of scandals in his years in office. His district got moved from a slightly Trump leaning district to a slightly Biden leading district. And I think folks still don't expect him to lose because it's still a very close district. It's expected to be a more Republican leaning year. They're like, "He's probably safe, he's an incumbent." But the scandals have really taken a toll. He had a primary challenger that he had to dispatch and so I think that that could be potentially an upset. The Democratic candidate there is Jevin Hodge.
Cara Zelaya:
This question is from Joy B; is there any polling on California’s District 3, and if so, who leads?
Steve Singiser:
The short answer to her question is no; there is no polling in California 3rd. And I think there's several reasons why. First of all, in the state of California, the Democrats more than not are playing defense. You've got the 9th District with Josh Harder, which his opponent is a county supervisor that's raised a good amount of money, although he's flagging; he's had a little scandal hit. There's an open seat in the 13th that the Democrats are pouring a ton of money in, that they're very nervous about. Katie Porter is taking a barrage of ads here in the L.A. area. I live in Los Angeles area, and I could tell you every commercial break is a Katie Porter ad.
A Trump plus-three or Trump plus-four seat, I just don't think is really on the radar this cycle. Doesn't mean it won't be the cycle after this one or in a more amenable environment, but right now I just think all their attention is focused on those defensive opportunities.
I didn't even mention Mike Levin in the 49th District, who also is in a tougher district this time around. They have a couple offensive opportunities in California, but the 3rd is down the list, quite frankly. The 27th district, which Christy Smith just barely lost in 2020. They'd like to make a run at that. And also, I'd say you also maybe look at the 41st, which was mentioned earlier.
The 41st is a district that definitely on paper the Democrats have a nice shot with and have a young, attractive, well-funded candidate. I just think that the 3rd is just down the list, unfortunately. And we know this cycle, especially House polling has been so scarce that I would say that the number 52 (or whatever it is) pickup opportunity for the Democrats just isn't going to get polled.
David Beard:
And just for clarification for our listeners, CA-03 is the district from the outskirts of Sacramento that goes down the California-Nevada border. It takes in a ton of rural areas. Obviously the parts close to Sacramento are a lot more competitive, but it does take in a ton of rural areas that'll probably vote heavily Republican, which makes it tough.
Cara Zelaya:
The next question comes from listener Elsa F. What's the state of play in Michigan's 10th Congressional District and why do national Democrats appear to have written this seat off?
David Nir:
This is a really tough draw for Democrats. This seat wound up being open for a very unfortunate reason that we have discussed on this show in the past. When Democratic Congressman Andy Levin decided to seek reelection by running in the primary against Congresswoman Haley Stevens, and that resulted in the redrawn 10th District being left open. This district was created by Michigan's new independent redistricting commission. It's extremely closely divided when you look at the presidential numbers. Republicans simply managed to land a very strong recruit here, Republican John James, who ran for Senate in both of the last two cycles, 2018 and 2020; in both cases he lost but performed better than expected, especially better than Republicans typically perform statewide in Michigan. He is a strong fundraiser. He is widely viewed as a young up-and-comer by the party. Republicans are also especially eager to promote candidates like James, who is Black, because of their very well-known diversity problems. As a result of James' popularity and name recognition, I think Democrats started this race off really behind the eight ball.
They had a primary, Republicans didn't, and it's really, really tough because Democrats only have a five-seat advantage going into election night. Michigan's 10th is by no means the only seat that the party is essentially writing off. There's quite a bunch of them around the country, so really, Democrats start in the hole when it comes to defending the House. They will simply have to pick up some Republican seats like some of the ones we were mentioning before, such as Arizona's 1st or California's 41st, if they're to have any chance. It sucks, but this kind of thing happens, especially in redistricting years.
Steve Singiser:
I think I'd also add that one of the things that I think ultimately hurt Carl Marlinga here is this is one of the rare places that did have a media-sponsored public poll, and it showed John James up in the high single digits with only about six weeks to go. So when you're behind, I assume that matches what the private polling showed. When you're behind, the question is, do you want to spend the resources it takes as a party to try to bridge that gap, playing whack-a-mole at this point of the cycle; they decided that that was one they could leave behind. It's not the only one, they also did the same thing, as many of our Midwestern listeners know, with Wisconsin's 3rd District and open seat that they decided to largely jettison and canceled a bunch of buys because that also is a tough district. It looks like in this cycle it's going to be a little too far out of field.
David Beard:
It's important to remember that the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is first and foremost an incumbent production organization, and so their priority will always be to help re-elect Democratic members of Congress over open seats. So Michigan's 10th being an open seat, Wisconsin's 3rd being an open seat, they are easier frankly to jettison. Then even a seat like Arizona's 2nd, which is probably one of the toughest seats that a Democratic incumbent is facing, post-redistricting, Tom O'Halleran, and he is been running a really good race, but it's a Trump-leaning seat now. But they're investing funds in that race, which I think many people would've thought would've been written off long ago when they're more willing to cut a seat like Michigan 10 because it's an open seat.
Cara Zelaya:
This question is from Timothy T. "Do any of the pollsters adjust their likely voter algorithms to reflect the post-Dobbs turnout trends?"
David Nir:
This is an excellent question, and we actually discussed this with our friend, Tom Jensen, who is a pollster. He runs the Democratic firm Public Policy Polling. We had him on the show last week, and while we were chatting with him in the green room, we discussed this very issue with him. He pointed out that even if you were to adjust turnout expectations to assume that the electorate would include a lot more women voters, including first-time women voters and women newly-activated by the Dobbs decision. Even if that changed dramatically, it would only affect the polling toplines a very small amount.
He did some back-of-the-envelope numbers that suggested that even if the women's share of the electorate went from 53-47 in favor of women to something like 56-44 in favor of women or 57-43, that would only move top lines in a typical race in Democrats favor maybe half-a-point. Now, that said, Tom pointed out to us that in a really close race that could make all the difference in the world. Someone like Senator Catherine Cortez Masto in Nevada, who is almost certainly going to see her race come down to the wire, that could be the difference between her winning another term and going home.
We have seen so many close races over the years, determinative races, the races that determine the control of the Senate and the Georgia runoffs that we were mentioning earlier. I think wise pollsters are definitely paying attention to this, especially after what we saw over the summer with the special elections and the Kansas Abortion Amendment election where the polls under-predicted Democratic performance, but ultimately, it's not likely to make a huge difference in the final numbers. That said, that said, we have seen two years in recent election cycles with big polling whips, both of them, of course, wound up excessively favoring Democrats. The polls under-predicted GOP performance in 2016 and 2020. It is not out of the realm of possibility that pollsters are biffing this one, and there could be an upside Democratic surprise. I am definitely not counting on it, but just given all the uncertainties, you cannot rule it out.
Steve Singiser:
One of the things I'd add there is that there is some reason to speculate about that because one of the things I noticed, very few pollsters these days will release both their registered voter numbers and their likely voter numbers. But CNN this week did. In Michigan, they had Gretchen Whitmer leading Tudor Dixon by six points among likely voters, but among registered voters it was double digits. Same thing was true in Wisconsin. Same thing was true in their Pennsylvania polling where there was a marked gap between the numbers they got among registered voters and the numbers they got among likely voters—which of course, tells us that they find the likely voter pool to be significantly more Republican this cycle than just the simple registered voter pool at large.
Now, could that happen? Of course, it could, but that's something to watch. If the Democrats do over-perform on Election Day, and like David Nir, I'm not predicting this. But if they do, you start to have to wonder, "Okay, did pollsters, all these big public pollsters, did they — very cognizant of what's happened in 2016 and 2020 — exercise some caution in this cycle and presume a Republican electorate?" They'll either come out looking like oracles or they'll have more explaining to do, but it is interesting to me, and this did not exist in 2020 or 2018. These gaps between registered voter screens and likely voter screens are just enormous this cycle.
David Beard:
One thing that's important to think about is the way in which likely voters are created, because that's different for different pollsters. Some pollsters use likely voting based on things like past registration or past history of voting. So if you've been registered in a state for six years and you voted for two of the past three elections or three of the past three elections, they'll include you in a likely voter. But if you only voted in one of the past three elections, they won't think that you're a likely voter.
As a result, those types of likely voter modes will not capture changes in enthusiasm or changes in the number of people who might come out to vote in a given year. Now, there are other likely voter modes that tend to focus on the responses of the people being polled, asking them how certain they are to vote, if they know where they're polling places or how they're going to vote, asking them how enthusiastic they are. So those types of likely voter questions and models would be more likely to incorporate any enthusiasm change or intention to vote change among voters either on the Democratic or Republican side than the ones that are more purely based just on vote history.
David Nir:
Though I should add that self-reported voting intention is a notoriously fraught issue among pollsters; lots of people say they're definitely going to vote and never show up. There are people who say they won't vote and do show up. The reason why we know this is because we can check the voter files to see who actually turned up at their polling places to cast a ballot. This is really as much art as science, and it's always, always a problem. There is no such thing as a perfect likely voter model. Pollsters are always going to fight over that one.
Cara Zelaya:
The next question is from Brett who asks, "Definitely want to hear about legislative elections and the outlook in competitive chambers. I'm going to specifically name drop the Alaska Majority Coalition prospects too."
Steve Singiser:
Well, given the way everyone is ... the conventional wisdom is expecting the cycle to be, I think you can expect that Democrats are going to have to play some defense. There's a couple places where I think you'll be looking. Colorado is one of those states that counts pretty quickly and efficiently. We'll probably know election night where they are. They've got a good size majority, but it's not impenetrable. Minnesota House is, on the other hand, on a knife’s edge, and there's another state that can go either way and is quite swingy, particularly in midterms, so there's another state to watch. That's actually a state to watch for two reasons because the Democrats, that's one of their best offensive opportunities is the Minnesota Senate, which is just narrowly, by two seats, Republican.
You hope that they can play a little offense on election night. If they do, I would look at Arizona, which is only a one-seat, two-seat difference to gain the majority there. And since you asked about Alaska, the answer there is, you might as well get comfy because they did announce this week that they will not be doing the run of the instant run-off until over two weeks after election day. So it's going to be, I think it was the week of the 23rd. That's not going to probably matter, we don't think, and maybe the three statewides that all look like there's a pretty comfortable margin there. But in a lot of these state legislative races, particularly the State House races, I would expect you're going to have to wait until the 23rd to even have a clue of who's won them.
David Nir:
Something else to add regarding Alaska in particular, which is one of the most fascinating legislative chambers. For listeners who aren't familiar, the House has been governed by a bipartisan coalition of Republicans and Democrats and independents as well, so I guess you could say tri-partisan. That coalition keeps shifting after every election, and it has typically taken quite a while, even after the ballots are counted to figure out who is going to join this group and who isn't. So that one really, we could be waiting till January or later. There's certainly a couple of other chambers that you definitely want to keep an eye on for Democrats to go on offense. The Michigan House and Senate, there, things have dramatically changed because of the state's independent redistricting commission that we mentioned earlier, so decades of GOP gerrymanders have finally come to an end. Democrats have a real chance to take back majorities there. And also for a similar reason, the Pennsylvania state House, that also has an un-gerrymandered map for the first time in many, many years. Democrats face a bigger deficit there than they do in either of the Michigan chambers. So it might be more of a two-cycle play, but definitely that is another chamber to look for Democratic pickups on election night.
David Beard:
I'll add that Arizona, and the Arizona House specifically, has a really interesting experiment almost going on where the... Well, let me explain how the Arizona state legislature works because it's a little strange. Every district in Arizona elects one Senate candidate. So there's one state senator for each district, and there's two House members for each district, which means that everybody gets two votes for State House. Unlike most states where you have one state senator and one State House member, you get two State House members in each district. And so that means you go and you vote for two candidates under normal circumstances.
And one of the things that's been found over a number of years of this happening is that when there's only one candidate for a certain party, they will get more votes than if you have two candidates. Because some people, despite living in Arizona and you would think understanding how the Arizona process works, some people will go and only vote for one candidate, even though they could vote for two. And so when you have two candidates running, that gets split. Of those people who only vote for one candidate when they get could vote for two, it splits between those two candidates. But when you only nominate and run one candidate, what's called one-shotting, you then get all of those people who would only vote for one candidate to vote for just your candidate, and the opposition gets those one vote voters to split between their two candidates, making it more likely for your one candidate to get elected in a very close race.
Now the downside, of course, is that even if you succeed in this little experiment of only running one candidate when you could run two, you only get one candidate elected and you're guaranteeing that the other seat goes to the other party. And so the Arizona Democratic Party is doing this in four seats that are seen as competitive. But what that means is they need to win all four of those seats to get their one Democratic candidate through in those four seats. And then in another competitive district, have both of their Democratic candidates win. So they have to pick up all six of those candidates and have them win in order to take the majority. So it's a very narrow way to win the majority, but I think that it's the most likely way to make it happen by running these one-shots. So it'll be a really interesting thing to watch in the days after the election to see if it works.
Cara Zelaya:
The next question is from Ryan D. And he asks, "I'm a candidate in a nonpartisan school board contest. And I wanted to know what the general consensus was on how voters pick candidates in these races. Do voters seek out partisan cues and vote for who has been endorsed by their preferred party leaders?"
Steve Singiser:
Well, I'll take this one because actually, my day job is I'm a high school teacher, and I've actually worked on some school board campaigns. And the answer is it varies on a number of factors. One factor that's essential is, if it's a small community, these things really do devolve into ‘friend and neighbor’ contests. So you will see the district that I work in is in a city that is 67/31 Biden, but could very well wind up electing a slate of very conservative school board members on the grounds of their people who folks know from Little League and from AYSO soccer, and the like. You don't see a lot of partisan endorsements in most school board races in smaller communities. You do see them in larger, like L.A. Unified, Long Beach Unified, and places like that, big urban districts. But in smaller communities, not only is it not that common, it's almost frowned upon.
So I don't think that there's a ... For partisan cues, you have to really look for them. You really have to investigate the school board candidates and their platforms and their names. Really what it comes down to is those really become retail politics. How many doors did you knock on? How many friends do you have from Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts that your kids are in, and things like that. Money matters because you do ... Mailers matter in a way, and even, God forbid, I cannot believe I'm saying this, but yes, in this case sometimes with these small elections, yard signs actually do vote because they do seem to be more impactful in these smaller community races.
So I don't know if that helps with your campaign, Ryan, but I think it's not ... partisan cues are harder to come by in those elections. You just don't have the same information network that you do for congressional races and statewide races.
David Beard:
I'll also add that there's just a ton of variance across the country in how these races play out. In some places, they do have greater partisanship. And candidates get allied with one party or another and it becomes more well-known, and that becomes a big cue for how voters vote. But in a lot of places, that doesn't. And that's often in places where there are a very strong Democratic or Republican lean, the candidates don't tend to associate themselves with one party because they're probably all of the same party. And then you get into other factors, like Steve mentioned, how prominent somebody is, how much money they have, how big is the city that they're running in. There's just a ton of factors, so you really have to figure out race by race and city by city or town by town, what it is that actually is mattering and in terms of getting folks elected.
David Nir:
And we have seen across the country that these officially nonpartisan races, at many levels of the ballot, have become increasingly partisan. One of the most extreme examples are the state supreme court races in Wisconsin, where there really is just no doubt anymore who the progressive or liberal choice is and who the conservative choice is.
And I think in some of these lower salience races, there are these right-wing networks that really help propel certain types of school board candidates or other local candidates, including things like election clerks. And these partisan cues get shared totally out of view of many mainstream voters. But these networks can be really, really effective. I'm sure everyone remembers getting email forwards from your right-wing aunt. Well, now that stuff is all on Facebook, and so the approved candidates get the seal of approval from the MAGA brigades, and that is how these cues are circulated. I think there's probably less of that on the left, as is often the case. I feel like the right is much better at these super-in-the-weeds further down-ballot races than we are. And I think it's definitely an area where progressives need to focus on and improve because, man, some of these maniacs taking over school boards, it is obviously terrifying.
So Ryan, thank you for running and we certainly hope you win.
Cara Zelaya:
Pretty cool that we have candidates listening to The Downballot.
David Nir:
I think that's completely awesome. And I am sure that Ryan is not the only candidate who has listened today and submitted questions, and listen on many other days. I want to close us out by saying that Daily Kos Elections will, as always, be live blogging the results of the 2022 midterms. You can find us at elections.dailykos.com. The first polls close at 6 PM Eastern time that night. Things will really get underway more like around seven o'clock. You, of course, can also find us at DKElections on Twitter. We'll have really blow-by-blow granular coverage. But if you want to come, hang out in the comments, come to Daily Kos, again, elections.dailykos.com.
We really thank all of you for submitting your questions, and for listening to The Downballot all year long. And next week, we will have a fantastic preview with Daily Kos Elections editor, Jeff Singer. So much more to come before Election Day.
David Beard:
That's all from us this week. Thanks to Steve Singiser for joining us. And to our own producer, Cara Zelaya, for stepping in front of the microphone. The Downballot comes out every Thursday everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing thedownballot@dailykos.com. If you haven't already, please subscribe to The Downballot on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks to Walter Einenkel for stepping in as producer this week, as well as editor Tim Einenkel. We'll be back next week with a new episode.