TIL that PNAS study about judges issuing harsher sentences before lunch was almost entirely driven by the fact that prisoners who didn't have legal representation went last before breaks
Just because Republican political elites think making it harder to vote somehow benefits them doesn't automatically make it so. It's a deeply seeded pathology on the right.
Democrats and Republicans are so deep into their dueling narratives about voting rights, they forgot to look at the data.
If they do, they'll see there's plenty of common ground.
My latest for the Washington
@monthly
🎉🎉🎉This month marks 8 years (!!!) at
@Catalist_US
. I started out as a Research Analyst and then became a 'Senior'. 3 years ago I was promoted to Lead Research Scientist, & as of this month, I'll be our new Director of Research. Just incredibly grateful to learn, grow & serve.
Something to monitor. The concern is always that news events anger Dem-leaning voters >> they take surveys at higher rates (in a way the flimsy weighting scheme can't handle) >> "illusory" 10-point swing in margin.
Congressional generic ballot, Marist
April
Republican 47%
Democratic 44%
June
Democratic 48%
Republican 41%
A 10-point swing to the Democrats post-Dobbs
45% of Black voters in Georgia think it will be somewhat or very difficult to vote -- only 7% in thought the same of the 2020 elections. This is the kind of thing that keeps me up at night.
This measure of partisanship is endogenous to the contents of the bill. Only the bills that get support from Manchin get on the agenda and put up for a vote
With 97% in, turnout in the NH Dem primary is 283,400. In 2016, it was 250,983. In 2008, it was 287,557.
With about two dozen towns left, the final number should end up above that 2008 level.
I feel confident (80%?) predicting that Tim Ryan is going to be one of the Senators who most overperforms the fundamentals this fall. Democrats should learn from candidates who do better than what the electoral baseline would suggest, not just who ekes over 50%
People will probably get angry at me for this, "the Democratic Party more or less knows what it is doing" & "Democrats are good" are two of my hotter takes
Netherland elections highlight ongoing collapse of traditional left and social democratic parties in Europe- a contrast with ideological shift of Democrats to left in U.S.
Democrats in U.S. now significantly to left of most countries in Europe.
“Democrats have already invested more than an estimated $124 million this year in television advertising referencing abortion. That’s … almost 20 times more than Democrats spent on abortion-related ads in the 2018 midterms.”
It was only a matter of time before spam calls cratering telephone survey response rates also bled over into our ability to fight a pandemic in a city full of vulnerable people
Oh, interesting. In Baltimore, health commissioner says residents are not taking contact tracing calls seriously, not answering, or not calling back. She said that absent a vaccine, contact tracing is the best tool to corral the virus.
After 10+ years, today is my last day full-time
@Catalist_US
. I am grateful to have learned & accomplished so much over my tenure -- all in the service of leaving the world in a little bit better place. I will miss most the camaraderie of my talented colleagues (esp
@yghitza
).
Weird seeing lots of articles about “bottoming out in rural America”when the Virginia results are best characterized as Democrats doing equally worse in almost every geography — a “uniform swing”
NEW w/
@AsteadWesley
: The Democratic collapse in rural, white America isn’t over.
In 2008, GOP topped 70% in only four VA counties — nowhere was it above 75%.
In 2021, Youngkin was above 70% in 45 counties — and above 80% in 15.
Latino voters support for Democrats is 63% of the two party vote in this poll, almost exactly what our
@Catalist_US
estimate of what Joe Biden received in 2020
Democrats lead by 24 points among Hispanic voters, according to an NYT/Siena oversample of Hispanic voters.
That's very similar to 2020. On the one hand, there's no GOP breakthrough; on the other hand, Democrats struggled among Hispanics in '20.
The original HR1 had no measures on election subversion because it was written in 2018. The Freedom to Vote Act has some but was only introduced in mid September. It’s also on life support. I’ll continue beating this drum: we need a stand-alone election subversion bill yesterday
Next month, we'll mark the one-year anniversary of a Democratic House, Senate, and White House failing to enact the voting rights laws that would avert the anti-democratic disaster that Trump is planning and that everyone else sees coming.
We gotta stop acting as if such & such demographic group "delivers" victory for one candidate or another. It takes a village and we need all our votes!
Democrats only took control in 2020 because of 18-29 year-old voters, so you'd think free community college, student debt, and climate would be top issues - not the 1st things dropped
Are Dems doomed for a generation by failing young voters? My new column
Interested in what _really_ happened in the 2022 election? Look no further, our team at
@Catalist_US
’s take combining our voter file, demographic modeling, large volumes of survey data, and precinct/county/CD election results is live!
Lots of folks are RT'ing this focus group thread, but unless it has orders of magnitude more participants than any focus groups I've witnessed (usually less than 10 people) I'm not sure how all of these numbers can be true & am worried that they may be fabricated
.
@Nate_Cohn
really drove home for me something that has unsettled me for a bit about HR1 but I couldn't quite place. It's a very...2017 bill. As written it doesn't engage much with 11/3/20 - 1/6/21.
This
@Nate_Cohn
piece is a must-read, on the analytically distinct question of whether new laws like Georgia's allow for the subversion of election results, an analytically distinct question from voter suppression. /2
So let's say you are recruiting for a real-life (very much not fake) Zoom focus group of suburban women in VA & you start out w/ 30k LANDLINE phone #'s of women who live in suburban Census tracts who voted in `17,`20 & `20 & contact them via automated IVR to participate, a 🧵
JPMORGAN: “Trump’s re-election chances are rising, .. due to two effects: 1) the impact of the degree of violence in protests on public opinion and voting patterns and 2) a bias in polls due to Trump voters being more likely to decline or mislead polls.” -
@MarkoKolanovic4
My latest for the
@NYTmag
is a story about moderate Democrats--their plight, their potential, and whether they can even articulate what it means to be one in 2022.
I've listened to journalists like
@ZachLowe_NBA
&
@HowardBeck
talk about how it's common knowledge how many NBA governors commit big sums of $ to causes in direct opposition (in many cases) to the interest + well being of it's players,
@DataProgress
is making sure everyone knows
Fascinating
#PolMeth
paper by
@trounstine
on racial origins of historical land use regulations and their effect on racial segregation and political outcomes today.
After four years of silence and a settlement with Fox News, Seth Rich's parents are ready to talk about the harm conspiracy theories do
My interview, from NPR’s
@MorningEdition
🚨🚨🚨New
@Catalist_US
report on the KS abortion ballot measure victory last week. Lots of nuggets on partisan turnout trends, hints at voter engagement from voter reg. trends (w/ caveats), & imp discussion of crossover voting & partisan implications
I spent some time in '21 trying to figure out if Anne Selzer had figured out how to fix polling in '20. Despite her track record, Selzer is notoriously non-transparent & has taken 0 part in many conversations on how to improve polling, but I think I know what she did: a 🧵
IOWA POLL: Republican U.S. Sen. Chuck Grassley’s lead over Democrat Mike Franken has narrowed to 3 percentage points with less than a month until Election Day, signaling Grassley’s toughest reelection fight in 40 years.
Looking like another big polling miss tonight AGAIN in the R primary for Trump. Michigan 538 average had Trump in the high 70's (near 80!) and he will instead be in the low 70's.
Looking like another 5pp polling underperformance for Trump among Republican primary voters AGAIN tonight in South Carolina (looking to get 60 but polling suggested he'd get ~65% if you two-way the 538 avg)
Among the five Democratic candidates near the top of the primary field, Biden has the widest lead against Trump at 7 percentage points, 50% to 43%, according to a survey of 600 likely Michigan voters by the Glengariff Group and provided to The News.
The Supreme Court just threw out a challenge to Virginia’s state legislative maps, keeping in place a new map that boosts Democratic chances of retaking the Virginia House of Representatives in 2019.
I’d read a political science journal where all the articles are just extensions of previously published articles published 10+ years ago with citations above a certain threshold to see if the results still hold up.
I think there is this belief that third party voting hurt Hillary Clinton in 2016. Given the extent of the Johnson vote and what we know now and knew then, it’s pretty clear on balance it hurt the Trump campaign more in 2016
The key difference between now and 2016 in Wiscy — fewer undecideds & less interest in third-party candidates.
The number of third-party votes in Milwaukee Co *alone* was bigger than Trump’s statewide margin last time
Election law academics are, at the moment, playing fan-fic/war sim games about outcomes in Nov via the press, w/ little to no context for how likely these outcomes are. Reminds me of `Hitchens's razor`: "what can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence."
"the biggest single political problem in the United States right now," Mike Davis tells the
@latimes
, "has been the demoralization of tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands of young activists."
Do COVID vaccination incentives work?
We analyzed 24 different statewide incentives programs using diff-in-diff. Some lotteries, some guaranteed rewards. Some very large and some much smaller incentive amounts.
Pre-print up now
@SSRN
.
1/
So the band Wheatus (of Teenage Dirtbag fame) just defended my honor in the replies of a post about the methodologically correct uses of voter file data?
I want to lightly push back on Shor's drumming on this. I've talked to several folks who do high-quality web + poll data often who haven't been able to replicate this. It might be endemic to some modes/data sources/analytical frameworks but not others
Lack of social trust causing polling error has been
@davidshor
’s theory for awhile. His chart showing that education adjustment doesn’t do the work pollsters wanted is here.
I am also incredibly confident in this heuristic: if a local TV news organization releases a poll with no information or demographics at all about a survey they commission or conduct other than the topline, I automatically completely ignore any information therein
When you've been listening to
@davidshor
so much that a wildly good West Virginia poll makes you nervous that all the other polls are missing people with low levels of societal trust.
“In a head-to-head matchup, 68% of Jewish voters say they would support President Biden over…President Trump who would have the support of only 22% of Jewish voters – an eight-point decline in Jewish voters’ support for Trump compared to a similar poll before the 2020 election.”
NEW POLL ON JEWISH AMERICAN VOTERS:
- Biden vs Trump in 2024: 68% - 22%
- View Trump Unfavorably: 77%
- Support Biden’s handling of Israel-Hamas war: 74%
- Trust Biden over Trump to fight antisemitism: 60%
Read the full results.
Today marks 10 years working at
@Catalist_US
, where I started as an Analyst taking over for
@BradSpahn
when he headed off to get his Ph.D. The mission is as important as ever, colleagues continue to be fantastic & the work continues to be intellectually challenging & enriching!
I do worry about the effects of remote work on younger workers who don't get the benefits of in-person mentorship that were so critical to me when I was straight out of undergrad.
This article makes a lot of tendentious points but none as tendentious as the insinuation that Jay Powell was selling stocks based on inside info.
Here are the cumulative returns that Jay Powell missed out on by selling when he did--he lost big time!
IMO this is why you should be highly skeptical of exits; the odds that the electorate is actually 40% white college+ voters is very, very low. In 2018, this was 31% according to
@catalist_us
.
@mellowfever
Acknowledging that people can be passionate about multiple issues but also acknowledging that climate organizations coming out with demands on foreign policy disputes in fact makes them not climate change exclusive and does not advance climate solutions
The statewide rejection rate of mail-in ballots was more than 12 percent in this year's primary — six times what it was in the last midterm year in 2018.
Election officials now say they've found a way to bring that rejection rate down.
Great talk from
@Nate_Cohn
, including this quote from early-ish that spoke to me. The failure to properly measure public opinion, misleading political elites about the opinions of the lay public, by not properly capturing the views of the white working class is devastating
NEW: a few days before
@Nate_Cohn
dropped his game-changing poll about 2024, we hosted him at UC Berkeley's Citrin Center for the 2023 Citrin Award Lecture.
We just posted the video, and it's well worth a watch:
An amazing *randomized trial* on Twitter+academia:
112 papers were randomly chosen to be shared on twitter by a group with ~58k followers or to not be shared. Papers that were tweeted accumulated 4x more citations compared to non-tweeted papers over 1yr.
I have yet to see some smart election lawyer talk through what to actually do on this front despite, I think, pretty reasonable concerns about invalidating results, etc. Pretty telling IMO.
So...about that AP piece that went viral on Monday about party registration switches. My colleagues at
@Catalist_US
went deep on the claim & found some problems with that story. Great 🧵below & memo w/ graphs for those interested:
Democrats running in hopeless state legislative races were associated with better Biden performance in those areas, but it is much harder to show causality than the article implies (candidate entry decisions might be a product of factors that helped Biden)
I learned so much working on this project over the past months with
@yghitza
& our team (h/t
@aaronhuertas
) of insanely talented analysts, engineers, & comms pros at
@Catalist_US
. There's so much to learn & share together but I'll share 2.
@JosiahParry
I’m not even sure that these are anti genocide activists tbh. They aren’t deep on Uyghur issues or what’s been going on in Tigray. It’s left Israel politics.
Rather than thinking of this as me taking paternity leave right before (and after) a key election, think of it as a potentially pivotal vote becoming available right before a key election 18 years from now.
A proposed six-story condo building in Shaw, one that would set aside 18% of its units as affordable, appears to have met the trifecta of characteristics for a cyclone of neighborhood opposition.
We flipped GA and have a shot at taking back the Senate thanks to the nonstop work of Black women organizing across the state. Now, we must finally deliver them a progressive agenda focused on racial, social, economic, and environmental justice for all.
I want to push back a little on the scores of academics & analysts taking a "victory lap" for thermostatic public opinion "voodoo" for "explaining" the results from Tuesday. A🧵
The typical Ohio home is $182K but in this new area homes would be $300K to $600K. That would fundamentally change this small town. The main issue for Chappelle & locals is gentrification and unwanted suburban sprawl. It's out of state developers changing their town forever.
Today I turned 30. Since 2013, I've hosted a big pizza party w/ a dip in a lovely public pool down the street. This year...not so much. I had grand designs...but it wasn't in the cards. At the same time, w/out COVID my wife wouldn't have rediscovered baking & made this cheesecake
I wish “testing messages” meant RCTs and survey experiments, not asking which message is convincing or likely to change your mind, when we have good research suggesting those metrics have problems
Wisconsin is critical to taking back the White House. That's why our latest poll asks Wisconsin general election voters what a campaign would ask to craft its strategy on the ground. Here's the latest from
#PollerCoaster2020
:
It brings me so much naches to see
@yghitza
&
@StatModeling
are being honored by
@AAPOR
for their important work on MRP, from the extensive applications to voter files
@Catalist_US
& around the world — we better understand so much in very profound ways because of this research
Worth noting that at this point in time, while the macro-forecasting models of Pres. elections were not high on Obama, his polling (both RV + LV) was on avg. strong going into the calendar year 2012.
(Source: , God I miss
@pollsterpolls
)
Seeing a lot on here today about Biden’s poll numbers. I happen to know a thing or two about this. Polls this far out are a distraction. This same time before the '12 election, pollsters were crawling over each other to call it for the GOP. BTW, Obama won.
Biden two-way vote share per AJC poll: ~73%.
Biden two-way vote share per AP Votecast (2020): ~69%.
Looks like Biden's made gains w/ Jewish voters to me!
NEW American Jewish Committee poll of Jewish voters:
Biden 61
Trump 23
Largely unchanged from 2020 exit poll (AP VoteCast), which showed Biden winning Jewish vote over Trump, 68-30%.
Do you think this enterprising grad student discovered that the WI voter file has a great deal of missing age information, no data on party registration to speak of, & almost no information on partisan primary vote history?
This "progressive" coalition rent control bill proposal in Howard County, MD is possibly the WORST bill on this topic I have seen.
❌3% cap OR CPI (whichever is lower) on rent
❌NO exemptions(!!!) for new construction
❌Vacancy control (rent stays the same from tenant to tenant)
Trump's election was a massive surprise -- projected to lose handily & won w/ an unexpected coalition. Biden's win was a surprise, but only in that he was projected to win handily & still won but by less & w/ a coalition similar enough to Hillary Clinton's to not be a sea change
"Reporters don’t do safaris to 'Biden Country,' seeking to understand the voters who put him in the White House ...There’s nothing approaching the ongoing coverage of white men in Ohio diners."
Recommended.
Once again, a major news outlet's headline omits the rather important detail that *every* state routinely removes moved/inactive voters from their rolls as a best practice of election administration.
Beyond excited we can share what our team
@Catalist_US
(lead by
@yghitza
) is up to right now. TLDR: we're using historical voter files, large-scale survey, granular election results data, & v. mart statistical analysis to produce an exit poll alternative!
White voters without a college degree in states like GA are just soooooo heavily Republican, that it's actively difficult/impressive for polls to be very wrong there as a result of the broader non-response issues we've seen plague polls over the years.
A new analysis from the Joint Economic Committee Today finds that in EVERY SENATE SWING STATE,
@TheDemocrats
and
@JoeBiden
created new manufacturing jobs over the last two years!
🧵 below of the jobs created — and savings provided — by POTUS and Dems:
Matt Haney scored a dominating win over David Campos in the state Assembly special election Tuesday.
How did he do it?
Haney underwent a big ideological shift on housing, which has proven to be the key issue. Campos also did himself few favors. (1/2)
James Carville called Sen. McMorrow's speech: “(an) enormously effective piece of comms...there’s really no comeback”.
@Swayable
ad tested that speech. TLDR + a 🧵below: parts of the speech are prob. modestly persuasive, more so among college-educated, likely, & Biden voters
This speech by State Senator McMorrow gained attention in recent days for its direct rebuttal of "CRT" and homophobic attacks. But did it persuade?
The short answer: Yes.
The full results:
Huge win: GOP-appointed federal judge refuses GOP's request to throw out 127,00 drive-thru votes that were ALREADY CAST in Texas' largest county.
GOP has gone to new extremes trying to suppress votes in Texas, & this was rightly rejected
@JakeAnbinder
It's wild to talk about how "most Americans can't afford a $500 additional expense" and poo poo adding an extra $2400 dollars to a working person's savings
Following political news obsessively is like checking your stock portfolio multiple times a day. Some things are just best off ignored for long periods of time — set it then forget it
@admcrlsn
We've been looking into this - about half of voters think it will be Biden/Trump 2024 (up from ~35% in August), but still 1/3 of voters think it's too soon to say. We'll see how this changes after the R primary starts kicking into high gear
I am a big booster of empirical poli. sci. & its continued relevance, but can't freaking believe
@BradSpahn
&
@SimonJackman
's paper on unlisted voters (unregistereds who do not exist in commercial databases & _were_ largely "invisible" to campaigns) is STILL not published (1/2)
A new Brennan Center report projects the predicted Democratic takeover of the House is nearly out of reach, blaming Republican gerrymandering.
“Even a strong blue wave would crash against a wall of gerrymandered maps," the report says.