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Downtown Central City, in Muhlenberg County, Kentucky.

(Photographs by David Kidd/Governing)

Trump won 74 percent of the 2020 vote in Muhlenberg County, where Greenville is the county seat. This represents a huge switch. Muhlenberg County has historically been dominated by Democrats and all of the countywide posts are still held by Democrats. It wasnt long ago that even the most conservative voters registered as Democrats, because there was practically nothing to vote for as a Republican during primary elections. Just for so many years, there were few Republicans and rarely, rarely a Republican candidate, says Harvey J. VanHook, vice chair of the county GOP.

He recalls that the first time he voted in the county, the clerk couldnt find his name, since she wasnt in the habit of looking at the list of registered Republicans. But Trump holds a special appeal to voters in parts of the country that feel left behind by big cities and the coasts, both culturally and economically. Thats certainly the case in Muhlenberg County.

Doug Thompson (left) had hoped to be the Republican candidate for county judge-executive in the fall.

Its not only economic issues that have pushed voters in Muhlenberg County, along with much of rural America, away from Democrats and into the arms of Republicans. Ive seen so many people that were strong Democrats but changed because they felt that Democrats were not Christian, says Greenville Mayor Jan Yonts. (Shes a Democrat but her office is nonpartisan.) They feel that Democrats are baby killers.

Along a commercial corridor in Central City, which is the most populous city in Muhlenberg County, a Baptist church is fronted by a 50-foot tall lighthouse with the name Jesus spelled out in enormous black letters along two sides. Churchgoers in Central City have plenty of other choices for places to worship. Religion makes a big impact here, says Jack Reno, who chairs the Muhlenberg County Democratic Party. Rural Kentucky is very much religion first, guns second.

Democratic county chair Jack Reno. Rural Kentucky is very much religion first, guns second.

Ive had a lot of discussions with my neighbor and he was actually surprised I was a Democrat, says Brittney Hernandez-Stevenson, the partys candidate for state House seat in the county. Some of the support that I think I would get, I may not, unless they pay attention to me as a person and the things Ive done, versus my party.

At times, this seems almost like a party strategy. Obviously, more people live in urban areas than rural the counties Biden won are home to 67 million more people than Trump counties and Democrats have seemed dismissive of the need to appeal to rural voters. The common refrain that demography is destiny (refers) to the misguided belief that any year now the swelling suburbs and urban centers will hit a tipping point enabling Democrats to overcome the lopsided votes from our declining rural communities, write Chloe Maxmin and Canyon Woodward in their new book Dirt Road Revival, about the need for Democrats to compete in rural areas. (Maxmin is a Democratic state senator from a rural district in Maine and Woodward was her campaign manager.)

Theres hardly an economic or health indicator by which rural America doesnt lag, whether its opioid addiction or life expectancy. During the decade between the Great Recession and the start of the pandemic, nearly all the economic growth took place in a fairly small number of metropolitan areas, making rural residents feel that the recession had never ended. The much smaller number of Biden counties accounted for 70 percent of the nations economy at the time of the election. Being told to check your privilege when youre struggling naturally grates.

Religion is a big influence in rural Kentucky politics.

During his first run in 2016, Trump spoke directly to small-town concerns, promising to bring back coal and steel jobs. That didnt happen, and even before taking office Trumps transition team was talking about eliminating the Tennessee Valley Authority. But Trump certainly delivered on cultural issues a fact punctuated by the recent Supreme Court decision overturning abortion rights under Roe v. Wade.

There are plenty of counties in Kentucky that, like Muhlenberg, supported Democrats for president until recently, but now are overwhelmingly Republican. Elliott County, in the eastern part of the state, had never once voted Republican for president over its 144-year history, the longest streak in the nation but Trump took 75 percent of the vote there in 2020.

Theres a car driving around Muhlenberg County with a bumper sticker that says LGBT, only the L stands for liberty, the G for guns, the B for beer and the T for Trump. Perry OBannon, who works for the Greenville Street Department, sums up Trumps appeal succinctly. I was raised a Democrat, he says, and Trump, he didnt take no crap.

Brent Yonts lobbied officials with the TVA and the EPA to keep local coal operations open, but to no avail. As a Democrat, he took the blame, or enough of it to lose his seat. Yonts got blamed because (a coal-fired power plant) didnt get built, says Reno, the Democratic county chair. There was nothing a state rep could do about it because the EPA wasnt going to grant a permit for it.

Scenes from Central City, Ky., the most populous city in Muhlenberg County.

Its an issue for the party throughout the region. Now, from I-65 westward, there is only one Democrat in the House in Kentucky, Mayor Yonts says, referring to the interstate that divides that commonwealth from Louisville to the north through Bowling Green to the south.

Its happened all across the South. For a century following the Civil War, the South was effectively under one-party, Democratic rule. But southerners started voting for Republicans in response to civil rights legislation, first for president, then U.S. Senate and on down the ballot. Just this month, the number of registered Republicans in Kentucky has exceeded the number of Democrats for the first time. Democrats still enjoy a hefty registration advantage in Muhlenberg County, but clearly many people who havent switched formally are voting for the GOP.

Republicans are convinced this is the year theyll make inroads in county offices, although the party didnt bother fielding a candidate for sheriff. Democrats arent the way they used to be, says a woman in Central City who asked to be identified only as Annie. Democrats, as far as the larger level, theyve gone so far to the left what sex are you, whats taught in schools.

A few days before the primary, Baize moved a portable billboard bearing his own likeness from a gas station along a frontage road to an auto parts store at the center of town. As he hitched the billboard to the back of his white pickup, Baize received plenty of friendly waves and honks. Small-town politics, he says.

Reno says that small-town politics still matter. He comes from a long line of Democratic activists his great-grandfather was Indiana coordinator for Harry Truman, his grandfather held that job for Robert F. Kennedy and his dad was a state party treasurer for decades. Reno is always begging candidates running for federal office to show up in the county, to look people in the eye to take credit for projects or let them know their concerns are being heard.

Breaking with family tradition, Jordan Baize ran as a Republican for county judge-executive.

Theres not as much talk as there used to be about getting parking tickets fixed if you vote the right way, but politics in Muhlenberg County remains informal. Everyone calls local officials by their first names. Reno himself seems to know just about everyone eating in the Mexican restaurant where his daughter works as a waitress, or taking a smoke break outside. Our jailer, his names Terry Nunley, Reno says. Hes related to every Nunley, Shemwell, Penrod and Whitehouse in the county. That right there is about 10,000 people. Im not kidding.

Hernandez-Stevenson runs the Muhlenberg campus of Madisonville Community College and sits on a slew of community boards. She hopes that reinforcing personal connections will help her win back the state House seat Yonts lost six years ago. She does share her fear that some people might not accept me or want to vote for me because she is a Black woman. Muhlenberg County is 93 percent white, but seven of the 20 people on the county Democratic committee are African American.

Democrat Brittney Hernandez-Stevenson is focused on local issues in her run for state representative.

Im here to serve this community, Hernandez-Stevenson says. I want people to realize that Im here to listen to them and figure out what they want done in this district, vs. focusing on some of the national issues that we really have no control over.

Her challenge is that all politics is not local. Politics are highly nationalized, making it difficult for Democrats not just in Muhlenberg County but throughout rural America to persuade voters they wont rubber stamp ideas being pushed by national party leaders from New York and San Francisco.

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How Rural America Learned to Love the Republican Party - Governing

During the COVID-19 pandemic, the link between politics and health became glaringly obvious. Democrat-leaning blue states were more likely to enact mask requirements and vaccine and social distancing mandates. Republican-leaning red states were much more resistant to health measures. The consequences of those differences emerged by the end of 2020, when rates of hospitalization and death from COVID rose in conservative counties and dropped in liberal ones. That divergence continued through 2021, when vaccines became widely available. And although the highly transmissible Omicron variant narrowed the gap in infection rates, hospitalization and death rates, which are dramatically reduced by vaccines, remain higher in Republican-leaning parts of the country.

But COVID is only the latest chapter in the story of politics and health. COVID has really magnified what had already been brewing in American society, which was that, based on where you lived, your risk of death was much different, says Haider J. Warraich, a physician and researcher at the VA Boston Healthcare System and Brigham and Womens Hospital in Boston.

In a study published in June in The BMJ, Warraich and his colleagues showed that over the two decades prior to the pandemic, there was a growing gap in mortality rates for residents of Republican and Democratic counties across the U.S. In 2001, the studys starting point, the risk of death among red and blue counties (as defined by the results of presidential elections) was similar. Overall, the U.S. mortality rate has decreased in the nearly two decades since then (albeit not as much as in most other high-income countries). But the improvement for those living in Republican counties by 2019 was half that of those in Democratic counties11 percent lower versus 22 percent lower.

The studys longitudinal approach and county-by-county analysis replicate and extend a clear pattern, says Jennifer Karas Montez, a sociologist and demographer at Syracuse University, who was not involved in the research. It joins an already existing, pretty robust literature showing that politics [and] polarization do have life-and-death consequences, Montez says.

The new study, conducted by researchers in Texas, Missouri, Massachusetts and Pakistan, covers the years 2001 through 2019 and examines age-adjusted mortality ratesthe number of deaths per 100,000 people each yearfrom the top 10 leading causes of death, as recorded in 2019. These include heart disease, cancer, lung disease, unintentional injuries and suicide. The researchers then analyzed county-level results in each of the five presidential elections that took place during their study period, identifying counties as Republican or Democratic for the subsequent four years. They found the gap in mortality rates between Republican and Democratic counties increased for nine out of 10 causes of death. (The gap for cerebrovascular disease, which includes stroke and aneurysms, remained but narrowed.) Political environment, the authors suggest in the paper, is a core determinant of health.

What is it about conservative areas that might lead to this disadvantage in health outcomes? Multiple factors probably contribute to the gap. Previous research has found differences between Republican and Democratic regions in health-related behaviors such as exercising or smoking. Those findings were nuanced. For example, Democrats had higher odds of smoking, and Republicans were less likely to exercise. But people living in Republican states, whatever their own political leanings, were more likely to smoke.

And an analysis of the new studys data by subgroups supports the idea that individual choices play a role. Hispanic Americans everywhere saw significant improvements in their risk of death. Black Americans still have the highest mortality rates of any racial group, but they saw relatively similar improvement. It didnt really matter where they lived, Warraich says. For white Americans, however, the difference was profounda fourfold increase in the mortality gap between those living in Republican and Democratic areas.

Still, experts say some policy choices may have a larger role than individual behavior in causing poor health. As health outcomes such as life expectancy have diverged in recent years, state policies have been becoming more polarized, says Steven Woolf, a physician and epidemiologist at Virginia Commonwealth University. In an editorial that accompanied the BMJ paper, Woolf wrote, Corroborating evidence about the potential health consequences of conservative policies is building.

In a study that focused on life expectancy in the U.S. between 1970 and 2014 and that also looked at some benchmarks beyond those years, Montez, Woolf and others showed that in 1959 a person in Oklahoma could expect to live, on average, about the same number of years as a person in similar circumstances who lived in Connecticut. And both states performed relatively well, compared to the other 48. But by 2017 Connecticuts citizens had a five-year advantage in life expectancy over their peers in Oklahoma, which is a politically conservative state. They were near the top of the chart, whereas Oklahomans were near the bottom.

In the intervening decades liberal states enacted more policies to address health concerns while conservative states went in the opposite direction, with inflection points in the early 1980s 1994 and 2010. Montez notes that those dates line up with Ronald Reagans election as U.S. president, Newt Gingrichs control of Congress and the rise of Tea Party politics. Political affiliation drives social policies and spending, says Lois Lee, a pediatric emergency physician at Boston Childrens Hospital and Harvard Medical School. Conservatives tend to see health as a matter of individual responsibility and to prefer less government intervention. Liberals often promote the role of government to implement regulations to protect health. The Democratic approach has included expanding Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act. Access to health care and having health insurance are important for well-being, Warraich says. Democrats also spend more on what are known as the social determinants of health. We know things like your housing situation, your socioeconomic status, your access to healthy foods and healthy lifestyles, as well as exposure to toxic stressall these things affect your overall physical as well as emotional and mental health, Lee says.

Several kinds of policiesaround tobacco, labor laws, the environment and gunsrepeatedly emerge as significant. Each party has bundled multiple policies together, Montez says. In Mississippi, for example, there are no statewide clean indoor air policies restricting smoking in bars, restaurants or workplaces, Montez says. In California, on the other hand, smoking is restricted in all three environments. Cigarette taxes also differ dramatically. The places where you cant smoke indoors are also the places where cigarettes cost a lot, Montez says.

As with COVID, the divergence between states over gun safety laws is dramatic. Firearms contribute to deaths from suicide and unintentional injury and to many nonlethal injuries. Blue states are more likely to require background checks, whereas red states more often allow concealed carry of guns. With gun laws, too, researchers are beginning to look at the effects of policies in aggregate, says Garen Wintemute, emergency physician and director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis. Before California enacted a suite of laws regulating firearms and their ownership and use in the late 1980s and early 1990s, firearm violence mortality rates here were higher than in the rest of the country, he says. After those laws were enacted, rates plummeted in California. The most likely explanation, which Wintemute hopes to test, is that the laws were in part responsible. Until recently, that kind of research has been severely curtailed by the Dickey Amendment, a 1996 addition to a federal spending bill that effectively prevented the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention from conducting research on firearm violence. Congress clarified the law in 2018, paving the way for research funding. Things are modestly looking up, Wintemute says. The CDC and [National Institutes of Health] both have small amounts of research funding and are using it.

Cultural differences between red and blue counties also likely contributed to COVID deaths. Youre affected by your neighbors, says Neil Sehgal, a public health professor at the University of Maryland and co-author of a recent study of the association between COVID mortality and county-level voting. Sehgal and his colleagues found that through October 2021, majority-Republican counties experienced 72.9 additional deaths per 100,000 people relative to majority-Democratic counties. To the researchers surprise, however, vaccine uptake explained only 10 percent of the difference. The finding suggests that differences in COVID outcomes are driven by a combination of factors, including the likelihood of, say, engaging in unmasked social events or in-person dining, Sehgal says. By February 2022 the COVID death rate in all counties Donald Trump won in the 2020 presidential election was substantially higher than in counties that Joe Biden won326 deaths per 100,000 people versus 258. COVID was probably the most dramatic example Ive seen in my career of the influence of policy choices on health outcomes, Woolf says.

A key takeaway from these studies is that the partisan mortality gap doesnt have to keep growing. As a public health expert and as a physician, it doesnt matter to me whether my patient is a Republican or Democrat, Warraich says. I want the best outcome for both of those patients and both of those communities. Acknowledging the mortality gap, as challenging as that is in our polarized environment, is the first step toward engaging with solutions, he says. The worst thing that could happen is that [the BMJ study] just becomes labeled as political or partisan, he saysand that the people who really need to look at these findings ignore it because it is providing a truth that is uncomfortable or difficult to interpret.

Read the rest here:
People in Republican Counties Have Higher Death Rates Than Those in Democratic Counties - Scientific American

In recent years Florida has voted reliably for Republican candidates at both the national and statewide level, with the 2022 midterm results looking likely to continue that trend until recently. Kevin Fahey writes that new political events including the conflict between the states Governor Ron DeSantis and the Disney corporation, the US Supreme Courts overturning of the right to an abortion, and revelations from the January 6th Commission mean that GOP electoral victories in Florida this November may no longer be a certainty. He writes that the Democratic anger these developments may engender makes predicting the midterm results in the Sunshine State near impossible.

I have an entire article written about the state of the Florida Republican and Democratic parties, about the anti-incumbent headwinds facing President Biden, about Republican advantages in Florida, and demographic issues that would confound the current Democratic coalition. It was a sober analysis that suggested the cost-of-living crisis would demobilize Democrats, while demographic changes in Florida would boost Republican vote share in several swing counties in the state. Inflation ranks as the top priority in most public opinion polls, and the only tool for reducing inflation sharply enough to benefit Congressional Democrats would be to trigger a recession, which would also be detrimental for Democrats political fortunes. In Florida itself, the Republican Party is benefiting from unique demographic advantages due to its aggressive recruitment of seniors, while the Democratic Party is unable to field effective candidates nor offer a coherent alternative message to rural and suburban voters.

And all my previous analysis is irrelevant, because Governor Ron DeSantis has decided to attack the states biggest employer, Justice Samuel Alito has decided to strike down federal abortion protections, and the January 6th Commission has revealed considerable evidence that former President Donald Trump and several prominent Congressional Republicans tried to illegally overturn the results of the 2020 Presidential election.

In light of these major simultaneous national stories, I wanted to instead discuss my decision-making process and how I have concluded that predicting Governor DeSantis and Senator Rubios performances in November is simply too difficult.

Political forecasting is based on the idea of predictability. Prediction in the sense of data scientists is not merely about correctly guessing the outcome in any given election, but minimizing the number of incorrect guesses across a number of forecasts. For example, a fair coin flip could have more accurately predicted Donald Trumps win in 2016 than many forecasts due to the randomness of fair coins, but that fair coin would have done very poorly predicting the outcomes of every Gubernatorial race in 2018. A heuristics-based approach say, relying on pundits to predict the future also has a poor track record.

Thus, social scientists create prediction models to improve upon random guesses. For decades, election forecasters have tried to use a combination of polling personal vote choice preference or approval of the incumbent and macro factors the strength of the economy, whether the country was at war, or if the incumbent party has been in office at least two terms to predict which party or candidate would win an election. These models leave things out they do not account for all potential attributes of a society or political campaign but comprise only those data necessary for accurate forecasts in order to predict election outcomes. This is critical, because such models are informed by existing academic theories of voter turnout and vote choice, meaning they are vulnerable to revolutionary political shocks.

These forecasts all point to a Republican sweep of Floridas statewide offices in November barring major changes to American politics. I believe we are seeing those changes now. Republican animosity towards big business may backfire and result in a fragmenting of their tenuous voting coalition, while the elimination of abortion and reproductive rights in many states should trigger substantial voter backlash. Yet the evidence of collective Republican culpability for the Capitol insurrection also suggests that efforts to manipulate the 2022 midterms to benefit Republicans is underway. Thus, the probability of so-called outlier outcomes a building Democratic wave or Republican dominance is substantially higher than prediction models would suggest. My rationale is as follows.

First, for decades, the Republican Party relied on being the party of big business. Republicans could count on large firms, and their top-ranking employees, donating large sums of money to the party and remain reliable voters, and in turn Republicans would offer businesses tax incentives and the opportunity to capture government policymaking bodies. Yet Republicans could not rely on large firms to win elections, largely because the executives of these firms could not constitute a majority in any electorate.

So Republicans also incorporated into their coalition social conservatives, who do not support the business wings laissez-faire approach to government. Instead, social conservatives articulate a vision of rule that involves heavy government involvement in the private lives of individuals. This included eliminating the right to abortion, restricting access to contraception, criminalizing same-sex activity, mandating Christian displays of faith in public spaces, and restrict immigration from non-Christian societies. These ideas were irreconcilable with the interests of the business wing, who saw these unpopular intrusions into government life as a threat largely in that it would keep them.

Republican party leaders had a solution that worked well for a long time: promise major rollbacks of individual rights for the social conservatives, allow the institutions of modern government the courts, legislatures, presidential vetoes to block these rollbacks, and then say that the struggle would continue. This was a game where everyone understood the rules: gin up social conservative votes, promise everything, deliver nothing, rinse and repeat.

But eventually the solution failed. Republican elites were overrun by successive waves of true believers the 1994 Contract with America, the 2009-2010 Tea Party, and finally with Donald Trump in 2016. These individuals did not understand the game, did not know that the goal was to block these proposals, and have now begun to implement radical policy changes. Governor DeSantis has targeted Disney for even tepidly standing up for LGBTQ+ rights in Florida. Samuel Alitos opinion is not nearly as explicit as Clarence Thomas concurrence, which argues that the rights to same-sex marriage, same-sex sexual activity, and even contraception should be rolled back. And the January 6th Committee has demonstrated conclusively despite having not even concluded its work that Republicans worked in concert with Donald Trump to exercise undemocratic means of holding onto power.

What does this have to do with political forecasts? While it is possible the traditional economic model applies, the Supreme Courts decision, Governor DeSantis decisions, and Donald Trumps culpability may encourage significant Democratic anger at the polls this year. These decisions will have lifelong and durable impacts as much so if not more so than inflation on the lives of hundreds of thousands of voting, and persuadable, Floridians. The executives of large corporations, concerned with Republican governance, may finally move with their wallets and their feet to Democratic campaigns. Uncertainty over Disneys future might make conservative Disney employees, and conservative employees of Disney-dependent firms, vote Democratic for the first time. And social conservatives, who have now caught the car, have fewer reasons to vote for the Republican Party and could stay home in November.

This makes forecasting much more difficult polls-based models use likely voter filters, which may miss out on large swathes of the eventual electorate in such an uncertain climate. Conversely, Democratic voters may react to this avalanche of unfavorable policy with apathy, not vote, and thus enshrine social conservative governance for years. And outright Republican manipulation of the election is now a reasonable expectation. The probability of such tail events is higher in 2022 than it was in previous elections.

Normal election forecasts might resemble the purely hypothetical Figure 1 below. In it, a statewide vote share is estimated with a range of uncertainty around it. You might represent this uncertainty in a histogram, showing the proportion of events that fall within a certain range, or the probability of individual outcomes. The most-likely outcomes will be clustered toward the center of a normal distribution, with less-likely outcomes tapering away symmetrically. Such an event would indicate a solid Marco Rubio win of between 5 and 15 percentage points based on current polling, but with a small probability of Democrats winning. I represent this graphic below:

Figure 1 Hypothetical model predicting Marco Rubio wins based on many simulations.

By contrast, what I believe these events point to is a world more closely resembling Figure 2 below. While there remain many outcomes located at our near the normal average outcome of a narrow-but-comfortable Rubio win, there are considerably more tail-end outcomes, including those where the Democrats win by large margins and those where Republicans win by large margins.

Figure 2 Hypothetical model predicting Marco Rubio wins based on many simulations, increased tail events included.

These tail-end outcomes represent added uncertainties as outlined above. Democrats may be energized to vote due to the Supreme Courts decisions, Republicans may splinter as a result of social conservatives attacking business conservatives, and Republican activists may be less motivated after winning policy concessions via the courts. Therefore we have more predictions of a Democratic win that wont manifest in prediction models, particularly polls-based models, for weeks or months. Or they might not at all, given recent Republican recalcitrance to participate in public opinion polling.

At the other end, these recent events may trigger mass Democratic apathy and disenchantment with politics. Republican activists may be emboldened by policy wins. And the January 6th Commission has clearly demonstrated that the Republican Party and its membership view electoral manipulation as acceptable, and recently information suggests election meddling is being institutionalized across the Republican party in its state and local branches. Therefore, we have more predictions of a larger Republican win that may not manifest in polling.

And for these reasons, I do not know whether Ron DeSantis or Marco Rubio will win their races this fall. They might win outright. They might lose, but be emboldened by the absence of an indictment against Donald Trump and therefore overturn a democratic election. They might lose outright and accept the outcome. A decade ago, I would have assigned an incredibly low probability to the latter two outcomes, but today the probability is substantially high enough that I do not have high confidence in any individual outcome.

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Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of USAPP American Politics and Policy, nor of the London School of Economics.

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Kevin Fahey University of NottinghamKevin Fahey is an Assistant Professor in Politics in the School of Politics & International Studies at the University of Nottingham, having previously worked at Swansea University and Cardiff University. He earned his PhD from Florida State University in 2017. He is interested in applying quantitative research methods to substantive questions, and has ongoing interdisciplinary work in criminology, psychology, and public administration.

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The 2022 Midterms: Why the triumph of Republican true believers means the outcome in Florida may be too hard to call - London School of Economics

On Thursday, four Arizona Republicans duked it out in a gubernatorial debate that can only be described as clowns trying to out-clown each other on live TV.

Candidates Karrin Taylor Robson, Scott Neely, Paola Tulliani Zen, and Kari Lake gathered to make their pitch to voters, who will cast ballots to replace Republican Gov. Doug Ducey, who is term-limited and cannot run again, in the Aug. 2 primary. The only televised debate of the primary election seemed like less of an opportunity to address the concerns of voters and more of an opportunity for the candidates to trash one another.

A highlight reel from Twitter user @endajodwod featured some choice quotes from the candidates, rife with childish interruptions.

"God they talk over me and I'm Italian, that shouldn't happen," Tulliani Zen says. Before she can finish her next sentence, she's interrupted by Neely who replies, "I'm Irish."

Other choice quotes include Lake, a former nightly news anchor for FOX 10 in Arizona, stating that "200,000 ballots were trafficked [into Arizona] by mules," a claim that has been widely debunked by auditors and Maricopa County officials. Later in the video, after arguments about election fraud in 2020, Lake says she "feels like I'm in an SNL skit," which many Arizonans probably wish were the case. Then Neely, who owns a concrete supply business in Mesa, notes "I haven't been on a stage with this many women since I've been to a baby shower." Yikes.

"I don't know how that's gonna go over Scott but I'll let that hang," responded Ted Simons, the debate moderator, who seemed at least moderately self-aware.

Reactions on Twitter ranged from disgust to horror and they came from voices on the left and right.

If there's anything to take away from all this, it's that it could be worse. Did you see Wyoming's Republican primary debate? Actually, on second thought, it is a lot worse.

Read more from the original source:
Twitter reacts to the pure insanity that was Arizona's Republican primary for governor debate - Mashable

Republicans are substantial favorites to take over the U.S. House of Representatives following this Novembers midterm elections, but the U.S. Senate is much more competitive, according to FiveThirtyEights 2022 midterm election forecast, which launched today. Democrats are also favored to hang on to the governorships in a trio of swing states in the Rust Belt Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan although they are significant underdogs to win high-profile gubernatorial races in Georgia and Texas against Republican incumbents.

The split diagnosis reflects the difference between macro- and micro-level conditions. The national environment is quite poor for Democrats. Of course, this is typical for the presidents party, which has lost seats in the House in all but two of the past 21 midterm elections. But Democrats are also saddled with an unpopular President Biden and a series of challenges for the country, including inflation levels that havent been seen in decades, the lingering effects of the still-ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and fraying trust in civic institutions caused, in part, by Republican efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Democrats, as a predominantly urban party, also face a longstanding problem in the Senate, where every state has equal representation regardless of its population, resulting in a substantial built-in bias toward white, rural states. And although Democrats are very slightly better off following the redistricting process in the House than they were under the 2020 maps, there are still more Republican-leaning seats than Democratic-leaning ones.

True, the political environment is dynamic. The Supreme Courts decision last week to overturn Roe v. Wade is too recent to be fully reflected in polls, but there are reasons to think it will help Democrats. Roe, which granted the constitutional right to abortion, was a popular precedent, and Democratic voters are more likely than Republican ones to say the decision will encourage them to vote at the midterms.

Moreover, in striking down Roe and other popular laws like restrictions against the concealed carry of firearms, the Supreme Court has in some ways undermined one of the traditional reasons that the presidents party tends to lose seats at the midterms. Typically, voters like some degree of balance: They do not want one party to have unfettered control of all levers of government. But the Supreme Court, with its 6-3 conservative majority, is a reminder of how much power Republicans have even if they dont control the White House.

The insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 can also serve as a reminder to voters about what might happen if the Electoral College certification process takes place in 2024 amid Republican control of both chambers of Congress. Democrats have had trouble getting the public to treat threats to democracy as a high priority, but polls do show that the public is sympathetic to the Democrats case, especially after the recent congressional hearings on the events of Jan. 6.

So, this is not a typical, low-stakes midterm election. On the contrary, there are strong forces tugging at each side of the rope, some of which are potentially of existential importance.

But Democrats majorities in both chambers of Congress are narrow, the historical precedent toward the presidents party losing seats is strong, and polls so far such as the generic congressional ballot, which asks voters which party they would support in an election suggest that voters slightly prefer Republican control of Congress.

Or at least thats the story in the House, where there are dozens of competitive races and candidates are relatively anonymous. There, big-picture factors tend to prevail. An unusually weak Republican candidate in one district might be counteracted by a strong one in another, for example.

In the Senate and gubernatorial races, by contrast, individual factors can matter more. And the GOP has nominated or is poised to nominate candidates who might significantly underperform a generic Republican based on some combination of inexperience, personal scandals or having articulated unpopular conservative positions. This is not a new problem for Republicans: underqualified or fringy candidates have cost them seats in the Senate in other recent cycles.

So lets briefly run through the models forecast for House, Senate and gubernatorial races. Then Ill describe some changes to the model since 2020 which are modest this year but reflect how congressional races are changing in an increasingly polarized political environment.

Republicans have an 87 percent chance of taking over the House, according to the Deluxe version of our model. Thats far from certain, but Democrats are fighting the odds: Their 13 percent chances are equivalent to tossing a coin and having it come up tails three times in a row.

Thats not to say House control will be a matter of luck, exactly. A change in the political environment could have ripple effects. For instance, sometimes one party wins nearly all the toss-up races, as Republicans did in 2020. However, even if Democrats were to win all 13 races that our model currently designates as toss-ups (meaning that no party has more than a 60 percent chance of winning), plus hold on to all the seats in which theyre favored, they would still wind up with only 208 seats, 10 short of the number they need for a majority.

Instead, Democrats will also have to win some seats where Republican candidates are currently favored, and that requires the national political environment in November to be more favorable for Democrats than our model is currently expecting.

On the one hand, the task isnt that daunting for Democrats. Our model calculates that Democrats would be favored to keep the House if they win the House popular vote or lose it by less than 0.7 percentage points something that Democrats did in both 2018 and 2020.

Moreover, Democrats are down by only about 2 points in our current average of generic-ballot polls. Given the inherent error in polling, and how much time there is between now and November, it isnt hard to turn a 2-point deficit in the polls into a 1-point win.

However, in important ways, that 2-point deficit understates the degree of trouble that Democrats are in. One reason is because many of those polls are conducted among registered voters rather than likely voters, and the electorate that turns out in November is likely to be more Republican than the broader universe of all registered voters. Historically, the patterns in midterm elections are that: 1) Republicans turn out more than Democrats, and 2) voters for whichever party doesnt control the presidency are more enthusiastic and turn out more. In 2018, those factors canceled one another out. Democrats, not controlling the presidency, were the more enthusiastic party, helping to neutralize the Republicans historical turnout advantage. This year, though, they both work in the favor of Republicans.

Thus, the model adjusts those registered-voter polls based on its estimate of what likely-voter polls would show, and when it does that, the Republicans generic-ballot lead is really more like 4 points than 2 points. I should note that this adjustment is not rigid in the model. Although the model uses historical turnout patterns as its baseline assumption, it will override that based on polls. In other words, if polls come out showing Democrats holding their own among likely voters such as because of increased Democratic enthusiasm in the wake of Roe being overturned the model will adjust to reflect that. Put another way, a very strong turnout would give Democrats a fighting chance of keeping the House.

But also, the generic ballot isnt the only input that the model considers, and some of the other factors look worse for Democrats than the generic ballot does. Based on the historical tendency for the presidents party to lose seats in the midterms and Bidens poor approval rating, for instance, the situation is more likely to get worse for Democrats than better. The model also evaluates factors such as polling and fundraising data in individual races.

Overall, the Deluxe forecast expects Democrats to eventually lose the popular vote for the House by closer to 6 points, about the margin that they lost it by in 2014. And it expects Republicans to wind up with 237 seats in an average outcome, a gain of 24 seats from the 213 they had at the start of the current Congress.

As I mentioned, this analysis is based on the Deluxe version of our model, which accounts for polling, fundamentals or factors such as fundraising and incumbency and expert race ratings such as those put out by the Cook Political Report. The Classic version of our model, which leaves out the expert ratings sacrificing the additional accuracy they add but sticking to purely quantitative factors tells a similar story, with Democrats also having a 12 percent chance of keeping the House. The Lite version of our model, meanwhile, which tries to forecast as much as it can based on polls alone, does paint a more optimistic picture for Democrats, giving them a 22 percent chance of keeping the House. But that version leaves out a lot of useful information, especially given that there isnt much polling in a number of competitive House races.

Democratic hopes of keeping the Senate are much more viable, however. Part of this, as I mentioned, is because they appear to have stronger candidates in a handful of key races. Pennsylvania, for instance which is an open seat after the retirement of Republican Sen. Pat Toomey is ordinarily the sort of seat that youd expect Republicans to win since Pennsylvania is a purple state in a Republican year. However, the Democratic candidate, Lt. Gov. John Fetterman, is ahead of Republican Mehmet Oz, the doctor and TV personality, in every poll conducted so far. The model, though, is trained to be a bit skeptical given the fundamentals of the race, so it hedges against those polls and, at this point, has determined that Pennsylvania is best thought of as a toss-up. Still, that means Democrats have roughly a 50-50 chance of gaining a GOP-held Senate seat, offsetting potential losses elsewhere.

Indeed, our forecast sees the overall Senate landscape to be about as competitive as it gets. The Deluxe forecast literally has Senate control as a 50-50 tossup. The Classic and Lite forecasts show Democrats as very slight favorites to keep the Senate, meanwhile, with a 59 and a 62 percent chance, respectively.

Part of this is because Senate terms last for six years, and so most of these seats were last contested in 2016, a mediocre year for Democrats in which they lost the popular vote for the House and also lost Senate races in swing states such as Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Arizona. Of the 35 Senate seats up for grabs in November, 21 are currently held by Republicans. True, most of these are not competitive, but in addition to their chances to gain a GOP-held seat in Pennsylvania, Democrats also have credible chances in Wisconsin and North Carolina (and outside chances in Ohio and Florida, although those are a stretch given how GOP-leaning both states have become).

Republicans dont have any surefire pickups, meanwhile. Our model regards their best chances as being in Georgia, but that race is rated as a toss-up. And the races in Arizona and New Hampshire merely lean toward the Democratic incumbent, meaning they are still highly plausible GOP pickup opportunities.

Still, the picture isnt as bad as you might expect for Democrats. If the political environment really deteriorates for them, theyll be in trouble, lose most of the competitive races and even blue states like Colorado could come into play. But if things are merely pretty bad for Democrats instead of catastrophic, the outcome of the Senate will remain uncertain enough that stronger candidates could make the difference for them.

Its hard to talk about gubernatorial races on a systematic basis since theres no particular prize for winning a majority of governorships. But, for the record, our model does run these calculations, and the Deluxe version estimates that theres an 83 percent chance that Republicans end up with a majority of governorships following this Novembers elections, compared with a 7 percent chance for Democrats. (There is an 10 percent chance that neither party has a majority.) However, a lot of these governorships are in smaller, lower-population states, and the model thinks theres a 73 percent chance that the majority of the U.S. population will reside in states run by Democratic governors.

Overall, though, gubernatorial contests take the theme from the Senate a step further: Individual candidates can matter a lot. Indeed, partisanship matters less in gubernatorial races than in races for Congress, even if it matters more than it once did. Consider, for instance, that there are currently Democratic governors in Kansas and Louisiana and Republican ones in Massachusetts and Maryland, although several of those seats could flip parties this year.

However, incumbency is a powerful force in gubernatorial races. For instance, even though Michigan is a slightly red-leaning state, its incumbent Democratic governor, Gretchen Whitmer, is a clear favorite against a Republican field marred by fraudulent attempts to access the ballot and the arrest of a leading candidate for his participation in the Jan. 6 insurrection. Meanwhile, Wisconsins Tony Evers, also a Democratic incumbent, is a favorite against a Republican field where the most likely nominee is Rebecca Kleefisch, the former lieutenant governor. This is the sort of race where abortion could matter: Technically, Wisconsins 173-year-old abortion ban which outlaws all abortions, except in cases to save the life of the mother is now in effect following the Dobbs decision, although the Democratic Attorney General Josh Kaul has said he wont enforce the ban. But Kleefisch has said she opposes abortion even in cases of rape and incest.

However, Republicans also have some strongly positioned incumbents. Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp is an 86 percent favorite to hold on against Democrat Stacey Abrams, and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is a 95 percent favorite against Democrat Beto ORourke. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a co-favorite with former President Donald Trump to be the 2024 Republican presidential nominee, is also a 94 percent favorite to win a second term.

Perhaps the most important gubernatorial race is in Pennsylvania, an open-seat race as the Democratic incumbent governor, Tom Wolf, is term-limited. There, the Republican nominee, Doug Mastriano, was present outside the Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection and worked to overturn Bidens win in Pennsylvania, potentially yielding a constitutional crisis if hes governor in Pennsylvania and the election outcome is close again there in 2024. But Mastriano is an underdog against Democrat Josh Shapiro, the Pennsylvania attorney general.

Overall, were happy with our congressional and gubernatorial forecasts, which last underwent a major revision before the 2018 elections. They performed very well in 2018 and fairly well in 2020 (despite a challenging year for the polls in 2020; it helped that our model also considers a number of other factors in addition to the polling). Therefore, the overall methodology is largely the same. However, after assessing the performance of the models, we did make a few changes around the margins:

Finally, a couple pieces of housekeeping. A number of states havent held their primaries yet, so in those cases, we guess at the most likely nominees based on polling, fundraising and other factors. These presumed nominees are designated with an asterisk in the interactive. If you see anything egregiously wrong such as a candidate listed as a presumptive nominee when theyve dropped out of the race please drop us a line.

Were also still thinking about how best to handle Alaska, which has a new system in place this year in which the top-four finishers in the primary advance to the general election regardless of political party, and then the general election outcome is determined by ranked-choice voting (or, as some call it, an instant runoff) if no candidate receives a majority. This is not entirely dissimilar to the way elections are conducted in Louisiana, in which all candidates from all parties appear on the ballot in a blanket nonpartisan primary in November, and then theres a runoff later between the top-two candidates if no candidate gets 50 percent of the vote. In fact, were currently taking a bit of a shortcut by using the Louisiana code for Alaska, essentially treating the instant runoff as though its an actual runoff where voters go to the polls again.

We may revisit this assumption later, but it does avoid one potential pitfall. In Alaskas House, Senate and gubernatorial races, its fairly likely that well end up with one Democratic candidate but two or three Republican candidates following the Aug. 16 primaries. If the Republican vote is divided two or three ways, it may well be that the Democrat initially receives the plurality of the vote. However, this lead is unlikely to survive the instant-runoff process assuming voters for one Republican rank the other Republicans ahead of any Democrat. The process we use for Louisiana assumes that votes mostly tend to stay within the same party in the event of a runoff, and this same assumption is in place in Alaska. Thus, we have Republicans as fairly heavy favorites in the Alaska races, although the new system introduces some uncertainty.

The forecast itself will update continuously whenever new polls or other information are added to our database. Well also publish a written update to the forecast once per week or so, usually on Fridays, to review new data and other changes in the landscape, before upping the frequency as the election draws closer. We hope youll regularly visit FiveThirtyEight as part of your midterms rotation.

Originally posted here:
Why Republicans Are Favored To Win The House, But Not The Senate - FiveThirtyEight