mtutiger

That was fast

One thing I'd love to know is how, given all that transpired here, how did Gavin Newsom basically match his 2018 numbers in the California Recall Election.... Biden's #s weren't quite as bad in September, but they weren't exactly good either. Could just be the fact that Larry Elder was that bad of a face for the recall effort, but who knows.

Everyone has a take on what this means and it'd probably be wise to hold off until Catalist or some other group does a post-mortem on these elections. But my gut tells me that is that all the other stuff - Critical Race Theory, Insurrection, Abortion, etc. - is noise to most people. What it comes down to is that you have a President that is anywhere from 10-12 points underwater on average, and candidates that stood for the Ds last night in the two big races (McAuliffe, Murphy) are going to do around 10-12 points worse than the President did in 2020. It's a more nationalized environment, and it shouldn't be surprising that his unpopularity at the moment is having an impact on fortunes for his fellow Dems. And I suspect that unpopularity comes down a combination of economic pressures (such as inflation), concern that COVID isn't behind us and/or some fatigue with COVID restrictions, and to a lesser extent Afghanistan (not so much for the withdrawal - but rather that how it played out didn't reflect well on how the President campaigned on competence). The formula is pretty simple on paper but hard in practice.... if Ds want to at least reduce their losses next cycle, Biden's approval rating is going to have to go up. I think it's possible depending on whether inflationary pressures subside and if COVID increasingly becomes a distant memory in 2022 (I'm more confident in the latter than the former), but who knows. Everything they collectively do as a party though should be done with that in mind. And Biden himself should probably adjust how he is doing his job accordingly as well.

The sample size in-division is pretty large (ie. 18 games per team per year). But you may be right.

Teams inside the division as well. Have to beat your peers in order to make the next step

New Jersey isn't a toss up, most of the remaining vote is mail and big Dem areas. Murphy will probably gain most of the remaining votes. Still a terrible result, but he's gonna win by 2-4% in the end. In terms of why this happened, its pretty simple: President's party generally takes it in the chin during off year and Midterm elections. It happened to Trump, it happened to Obama, with the exception of Bush I first term, it generally happens to all of them.

No doubt. I'd almost argue New Jersey is a more alarming result than VA even if Murphy pulls it out, depending on where the margin lies when the dust settles.

Yeah, he'll survive

In other news, it appears the Dems somehow forced a draw in the VA House if Delegates

Nate Cohn is suggesting a lot of Dem leaning mail ballots out. The fact that NJ is this close makes all the hot takes about VA moot... this is just a terrible environment for the Ds.

Right, but that would be a smaller swing than what happened in Virginia over 2020. Again, it's an imperfect comparison to qualify how much candidate quality may have impacted Virginia.

Re. New Jersey

The lead will widen out some from where it is at the moment. They are two different races, and its flawed, but I am curious to see a comparison to tell how much of what happened in VA was national environment and how much was candidate quality.

It was mostly persuasion. The fact that the swing was largely uniform in all parts of the state kinda has me convinced on that

Probably not. I am curious to see what kinda swings we see in New Jersey now... does Murphy do a little better than McCauliffe relative to the states lean?

I wouldn't entirely trust the exit polls, tbh.

He'd get rinsed in a primary against Trump...

Come on...

As someone who lives in Texas (and has seen Abbott's poll numbers crater), I'd love for this to be reality lol

Yeah, Glenn's got this. It'll still be close, but he's got it.

Probably would rather be Youngkin atm, although the lack of clarity on what types of ballots are reporting in which counties kinda makes it hard to follow

And structurally, it makes sense. Virginia is one of the first elections after a President takes office or wins reelection - often a time when national environment for a sitting President isn't always the best. I think MB is right about Virginia's lean, but the fundamentals nationally do point to a close race here. And one that Youngkin can win.

This is the other pitfall of Wasserman's point.... there are some very large in population, Biden-voting counties that are also in the 110s of turnout right now.

The difficult part of Wasserman's math as well is that an increase in turnout in a larger county with over 1M is going to mean significantly more votes than it would a county of about 80k (like Rockingham). So, for instance, if Fairfax County is at 106% of 2017 and Rockingham at 117, without doing the math, that still means Fairfax is turning out more raw votes over the last election than Rockingham is. The question is whether the same pattern in Rockingham holds in other deep red counties in Virginia, and that we really won't know until they count the votes. I suspect he thinks that's the case, there's reason to believe that could be the case, but still. We don't know.