Republicans won the popular vote, but they’re not used to it.


Where Are The Money Go? When Did Joe Biden Win the House? How Do Small States (and Why?) Have Electorates Voted?

Biden’s better showing in the popular vote, a 4.5 percentage point one, doesn’t mean Democrats are favored to hold the House. Recent polls have suggested roughly a dead heat between the two parties in the national popular vote. But Democrats do seem to have a legitimate chance to retain the House. The Times subscribers can sign up to receive his newsletter next week, in which he’s going to discuss that case.

State legislature districts are a problem for American democracy and have been documented by The New Yorker. If a Supreme Court case prevents the authority of state courts then some states, like North Carolina, may be forced to redo their congressional maps. The biggest threats to American democracy would not include boundaries drawn for congressional elections.

It would be the first movement of the Republican Party to refuse to accept defeat. The winner-take-all nature of the Electoral College, as well as the lack of congressional representation for residents of Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico are some of the things the Senate gives to residents of small states.

Democrats had a golden summer. The Dobbs decision led to a surge of voter registrations. Voters handed Democrats a string of sweet victories in unlikely places — Alaska and Kansas, and good news in upstate New York.

Republicans regained the lead for the generic congressional ballot, in which voters are asked if they will back Democrats or Republicans for Congress. Republicans have led by two to three percentage points in national polls of registered and likely voters over the last week or so, but they 888-492-0 888-492-0 888-492-0s even better among likely voters.

The numbers were eye-catching. Democrats hoped that their abortion rights issue would gain them support among female voters. It doesn’t seem to be working. Over the past month, the gender gap, which used to favor Democrats, has evaporated. In the month of September, women who are independent voted for the Democrats by 14 points. Now they favor Republicans by 18 percentage points.

Look at where the money is being spent to understand how the campaign is going. In The Washington Post last week, Henry mentioned that Democrats are pouring money into House districts that should not be risky since Joe Biden won by double digits. In the 13th District of California and the Sixth District of Oregon, the races have been rated as tossups by Politico. Two years ago, according to Politico, he won those areas by 11 and 14 points.

The final say on these questions will be given to the voters. We spend a lot of time going through the risks associated with polling error. But for this post let’s imagine that the polls are exactly right about the national political environment. If so, the race is in a very delicate spot. Everything from a Democratic hold in the Senate and a narrow House majority to a total Republican rout becomes imaginable.

Senate Republicans also were confident going into Election Day about their chances to break the 50-50 deadlock that has given Democrats control of the Senate on the strength of Vice President Kamala Harris’ tiebreaking vote. If the Democrats take the Georgia seat on December 6th, Harris may not need to vote at all.

The fight for control of the House is now the biggest unanswered issue after Democrats retained their majority in the Senate.

California, Oregon and Arizona have a huge amount of mail-in ballots, which can take weeks to identify winners in some races.

Another high-profile contest remains too close to call: The Arizona governor’s race — where Republican Kari Lake, the Donald Trump-supported election denier, is facing Democratic secretary of state Katie Hobbs, a defender of the state’s election process.

CNN projected that Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez would defeat the Republican Joe Kent in the 3rd District of Washington, which is considered to be a Republican stronghold.

Bill Gates, the Chairman of the Board of Supervisors, said in an interview with CNN that 190,000 votes have not been counted.

He believed most of the votes would be recorded by Tuesday. He said the county will continue to report about 85,000 votes per night until they are done.

Murkowski and the Axe Files: The Case For a Democratic Congressman Who Wins the House, Not the Senate. The Case for a Majority

The newly elected Democratic congresswoman is in good shape to surpass the 50% mark. Murkowski faces a challenge from Tshibaka, who is supported by Trump and who wants to punish her for her involvement in the attack on the US Capitol.

The senior CNN political commentator and host of “The Axe Files” was a top advisor to the president and strategist for the 2008 and 2012 Obama presidential campaigns. The opinions on this commentary are of his own. CNN has more opinion on it.

The politician was Joe Biden, who whispered that salty line to Obama at the signer of theAffordable Care Act, but had it captured on a hot mic.

If Biden had shouted it again from the rooftops of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where he is attending an Asian summit, he would be forgiven for thinking that the Democrats were in control of the US Senate.

It was the most recent turn in an astonishing mid-term election week in which Democrats scored unexpected victories all over the country.

Republicans taking the House was thought to be a slam dunk. It is clear that it will be by the barest of margins, with a slim majority hard to control and difficult to defend when the House is up again in two years.

Democrats will control the agenda in the Senate if the Republicans win the House, it’s not a small thing.

What’s more, the Senate has sole authority to confirm judicial nominations and key executive appointments, which is critical, even if a Republican House blocks other major Biden initiatives.

By allowing Trump, and not Obama, to fill the Supreme Court vacancy and speeding Barrett through in record time, McConnell and his Senate majority changed history.

Barrett and the two other conservative justices Trump named have profoundly reshaped the high court and opened the door to radical decisions such as the ruling that upended abortion rights, a half-century after the Roe v. Wade decision guaranteed them. (Ironically, the court decision overturning Roe caused a backlash that may have had much to do with Democratic victories in Nevada and elsewhere this year.)

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/13/opinions/nevada-democrats-senate-cortez-masto-axelrod/index.html

What have we learnt about Biden and the 2022 midterm elections? The lessons learned from a deeply divided era from the prime minister to the presidency

After the 1945 parliamentary elections in Britain, the prime minister lost his majority but he got assurances from his wife that it was a blessing.

Poor statewide candidates that were overshadowed by personal issues and fantasies of Donald Trump were the reason the Republicans failed in the Senate.

But perhaps the most important lesson as we head into the 2024 cycle hasn’t gotten enough oxygen: the closeness of the 2022 midterms. It has been revealed that there was a close election in the year 2022, in what is referred to as a historically divided era.

The typical referendum on the ruling party and President turned into a judgment of the opposition and its leader, Trump. It was a repudiation of the election denialism and coarseness.

Republican politicians who are afraid and opportunists have stuck with Trump despite knowing better. Watching the quick exodus from his camp is something to behold. For them, trespasses against democracy and decency may be tolerated, but losing cannot.

Some Republican politicians will be in place because of Trump’s continued sway with primary voters. They may follow his insistence that any cooperation with Biden is treason. But fear of Trump must now be weighed against the cost of Trump, and the result may be that more Republicans in Congress will have a freer hand to work with Biden on select issues. I don’t think that would be a good thing for the country.

While overseas, Biden was meeting with peers from all around the world and was ready to meet with the president of China.

The President may have been weakened by the thumping he received in the elections. It would have raised doubts about American democracy and the viability of Biden’s political career.

The people made a point of thumbing their noses at the conventional wisdom and dealt a blow to Trump and Republicans in the election.

Begala gave three reasons for his opposition. First of all, it undermines President Biden’s powerful message that Trump leads a mega-MAGA fanatical fringe that is a clear and present danger to our democracy. Second, “Trump is still a massive, major force in American politics — especially in the Republican Party. I didn’t want Trump near the White House. If the Democrats can’t beat Youngkin and Christie, we shouldn’t be in the White House.

If Democrats truly worry about the survival of American democracy, they shouldn’t try to help Trump return to office even if it means they lose the presidency. The slightly higher probability of holding the presidency with Trump as the G.O.P. nominee is surely outweighed by concerns about the threats to democracy should he win election.

What Happened When the G.O.P. Voting Turned Out More Than $300 Million More Votes (and Why Did The GOP Win)?

This year, however, it’s Republicans who got more votes – more than 3 million more votes for GOP House candidates – and don’t have as much to show for it.

There is not one narrative to come out of this election. While we usually think about nationalization, in this election, we saw quite significant differences across states. Pennsylvania and Michigan — and even Wisconsin and Arizona — ended up somewhat better than the pre-election polls suggested (in some cases, quite a bit better). From this perspective, Democrats should be happy. But they did much worse than expected in Florida and New York. So which lesson is the right one?

the G.O.P. puts up stunning vote percentages in rural America, margins that would not have been deemed possible a decade ago, to say nothing of three decades ago. A large number of votes are wasted because of this. As the suburbs become more competitive for Democrats and the cities become somewhat less competitive (but not enough to lose seats) as the minority vote percentage moves, Democrats lose the penalty they’ve suffered for running up overwhelming vote shares in urban districts in the past.

For Republicans, Wronski wrote, “appealing to Trump voters without Trump on the ballot may not be a winning strategy. The types of voters who are enthusiastic for Trump do not seem equally enthusiastic for his endorsees.”

In other words, it isn’t just that moderates and independents were scared off by extremist candidates; MAGA voters themselves were not fully animated by their own candidates. They want a candidate who is Trump, not someone like Don Lake or Mehmet Oz.

It is important for people to feel comfortable or in good shape. The national electorate is not happy with what’s happening. Ultimately, I believe turnout is going to matter more than persuasion.

This was in many ways an expected result. Polls and models performed well. The Democrats overperformed expectations slightly, but as others have pointed out, their performance is better in seats than in votes.

The parties, Tausanovitch continued, “are very evenly matched and this doesn’t look like it is on a path to change quickly. This was a close election. I expect the next presidential election to be close as well.” He acknowledged that Trumpendorsed candidates.

This doesn’t mean that either the Republican Party or Trump cannot win. He almost did in 2020. If he is the nominee, I still expect the election to be close in 2024.

Republican Party elites are becoming more concerned with the prospect of a Trump candidacy. I asked Ed Goeas, a Republican pollster, what would happen if Trump is the nominee, and he replied by email: “Assuming that the economy is out of the ditch by the end of ’23, I would have to believe a Trump nomination would be devastating.”

In a clear slap at Trump, New Hampshire’s Gov. Chris Sununu told a meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition that he didn’t like the president. We should stop supporting the candidates in the primaries and get behind the winners that can finish the job in November.

The cruel truth of American democracy, usually experienced by Democrats, is that a political party can get more votes than the other without winning much power.

Democrats will hold onto their slim majority in the Senate. The majority of the GOP House is small and spread across a broad spectrum of political views, making it hard for any one person to use the majority to go after the White House.

“Simply put, Republicans picked up the votes they needed, just not where they needed them most. The Cook Political Report founder said that something had affected the outcome of the election in the places that mattered.

Both Trump and Bush won the White House with lower votes than their Democratic opponents. Republicans were able to keep the House majority in 2012 despite being reelected President Barack Obama.

Georgia, which had a Senate and governor election that the Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said set a record for midterm turnout, was one of the states that had good turnout.

In places like California, where there were statewide races that were not so high-stakes, turnout was lower. The California Secretary of State’s office pegs turnout at 50.8% of voters, far below the more than 64% turnout it reported in the last midterm in 2018, but above the 42% turnout in 2014.

In 1900, the Republicans out of power nationally lost control of at least one state assembly, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Republicans still control a majority of state houses, despite making gains in state politics over the past decade. Republicans will still control both legislative houses in 27 states, compared with Democrats, who will control both houses in 19.

There will be debate about the controversial voting laws in key states, such as Texas and Georgia, that may have kept people from voting. Read more on that from CNN’s Fredreka Schouten, who covers voting rights.

In a separate report, CNN’s Edward-Isaac Dovere notes that Black voter turnout was down in 2022, which has alarmed Democratic operatives as they look ahead to the coming presidential election.

It’s also important to note here that while American voters have gotten more tribal in recent years, split-ticket voting is an important feature of the system.

Maryland and Massachusetts went the other direction in 2022, replacing Republican governors with Democrats to match their senators. Republican senators were chosen by Kansas and Democratic governors by Wisconsin.

A lot of people have tried to draw lessons from the 2022 elections, which ended earlier this month. The takes have been easy to come by, whether it be Democrats’ historically strong performance for a party in power or the lack of Senate incumbents losing.

What is unusual is to have all three be so closely divided. The last time there was more than half the seats held by one party in the Senate, governorships, and House was in the year 1814.

The Senate races were not as close as they had been. Republican candidates for Senate won more votes than Democratic candidates – by 0.1 points. If the Democrats had endorsed Evan McMullin instead of running a candidate in Utah, they could have gotten more votes.

Not every state held a Senate or gubernatorial race this year, but those that did are representative of the country as a whole. In 2020 they voted for Joe Biden, comparable to his actual national popular vote advantage.

The popular vote has not been decided by more than 10 votes in a presidential election since 1984. This is the longest single-digit election since most states began electing presidents in the 1820s.

Political scientists debated the reasons for the recent elections. Arguably, the best explanation is political polarization. The era of liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats is mostly gone. The pool of swing voters have been reduced.

Swing voters have not been made any less valuable because of that. These voters, who go back and forth between the parties, remain highly sought after by Democrats and Republicans, and they can make all the difference. For instance, a number of purple states (such as Nevada, New Hampshire and Wisconsin) elected candidates of different parties for governor and senator this year.

The election in ten years will see both parties trying to win over swing voters. The early read suggests neither party can feel secure about their chances. There are polls that show both Biden and his opponent within a few percentage points of each other among this group.

There is a conclusion to be drawn: Neither party has a majority in the public. That was true in the historically close election of 2022 and in the historically divided era of the last 35 years. And it could very well also be also true in the next presidential election.