The Biden Administration

In Defense Of The Mostly Pointless State Of The Union

By Kaleigh Rogers

Feb. 7, 2023, at 6:00 AM

The State of the Union is a little like New Year’s Eve. It’s an annual tradition that’s been practiced for more than a century. It can be a great moment to pause and consider the year to come. And if you expect it to be life-changing, you’re gonna have a bad time. 

As we’ve documented here (and here and here), the State of the Union address has increasingly become ineffective when it comes to achieving its ostensible goals. It doesn’t have much impact on what policies Congress pursues. It isn’t a good opportunity for the president to address all Americans. It doesn’t even impact the president’s approval rating. But there are some caveats to all of these shortcomings, and while it might not fully do what we expect it to, the State of the Union also isn’t causing any harm. Like New Year’s Eve, you might enjoy it a lot more if you adjust your expectations.

Yes, It Rarely Impacts Legislation …

The ostensible purpose of the State of the Union is to communicate the president’s agenda to Congress. Here’s what he thinks is important. Here’s what he would like Congress to prioritize. And while the president will certainly say a lot of those things tonight, whether Congress listens is another story. Political scientists Donna Hoffman and Alison Howard have analyzed legislation passed after every State of the Union address since 1965¹ to see which policy requests were partially or fully met by Congress in the year that followed. They’ve found it’s uneven at best, and on average only 24.3 percent of requests were fully enacted by Congress, with another 13.8 percent partially enacted. In some years, none of the requests were met at all. 

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/140-million-americans-live-states-controlled-democrats-fivethirtyeight-95547189

… But It Still Sets Policy Goals

While highlighting a policy goal in a State of the Union address doesn’t guarantee a president a new bill sitting on his desk a few months later, 24 percent is not nothing. Some of those goals do translate into action by Congress, particularly in years when the president’s party controls both chambers. For example, nearly half of the policy requests made by former President Barack Obama in his 2010 address were fully enacted by a Democratic-controlled Congress that year. In most years, at least some of the legislative actions requested by the president have later been enacted. And even in those rare years when they weren’t, the address still may have affected policy in terms of voter awareness — as long as it made the paper the next day. Research has shown that media coverage of the agenda laid out in the State of the Union increases public knowledge of policy initiatives. So even if Congress isn’t listening, voters might be. 

Yes, Fewer And Fewer Americans Actually Watch It …

There was a time when the State of the Union was, if not must-see TV, at least should-probably-tune-in TV. In 1993, an estimated 66.9 million viewers watched then-President Bill Clinton’s joint address to Congress, according to Nielsen. That’s about three-quarters of the more than 91 million people estimated to have tuned in to Super Bowl XXVII just a couple weeks prior. But since then, ratings for State of the Union addresses have mostly trended downward:

And the audience that does tune in is typically highly partisan: Democrats watch when a Democratic president speaks, Republicans watch when a Republican president speaks, but there’s little crossover. This means that during the address, the president is speaking live to an ever-shrinking sliver of the American population.

… But That Doesn’t Mean They Don’t Hear About It

Among the audience that does tune in are, well, journalists, and follow-up coverage of the State of the Union address can reach a wider audience. Fewer Americans get their news from live TV coverage than they used to, as they now use a variety of sources to stay informed. Thirty-nine percent of American adults still get at least some of their news from network broadcasts and cable channels, while a third get news through social media and 12 percent check national newspapers or their websites, according to a YouGov/The Economist poll conducted last year. Twelve percent also said they get at least some of their news from “Other national news websites, like Yahoo News, Axios, Vox.” As many as 13 percent of Americans get some of their news through podcasts or talk radio and 20 percent through YouTube. Preferences tend to differ by age, too. Older Americans are more likely to watch TV news, while younger Americans are more likely to catch up online or through social media.

All this to say that the message of the State of the Union can still trickle down to the American public of all ages and political stripes, even if they’re not tuning in live. 

Yes, It’s Mostly A Formality … But Maybe That’s Okay

Sure, none of these facts mean the State of the Union is a particularly effective American political tradition. The real reason it continues has less to do with any delusions of its influence and more to do with inertia. Every president since Woodrow Wilson has delivered this address to the nation around this time of year, making it one of the country’s most enduring political rituals. That’s not the most compelling reason to keep doing something, but there’s something to be said about continuity and tradition. And there are certainly more contentious political traditions that endure just because that’s the way we’ve always done it (*cough* caucuses *cough*). If the main reason the State of the Union exists is to keep some semblance of consistency in our increasingly chaotic political system, is that really such a bad thing?

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/americans-lonely-political-consequences-fivethirtyeight-politics-96858073

2024 Election

Is It Fair To Compare Biden's And Trump’s Classified Documents Scandals?

A FiveThirtyEight Chat

Jan. 24, 2023, at 3:19 PM

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, senior elections analyst): President Biden is in hot water over the discovery of classified documents from the Obama administration in his possession. In November, attorneys for the president discovered a handful of documents with classified markings on them at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., and immediately contacted the National Archives, who took back possession of the documents the next day. However, we didn’t learn this until a couple weeks ago, and since then, Biden aides have found more pages of classified material at Biden’s home in Delaware, and Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to look into the matter impartially. And this past week, at Biden’s invitation, the Justice Department searched Biden’s Delaware home and took away six additional items, some with classified markings. 

The story has drawn comparisons to former President Donald Trump’s possession of classified documents, which led to an FBI search of Mar-a-Lago last summer. (Editor’s note: This chat was conducted before Tuesday’s revelation that classified documents were also found at former Vice President Mike Pence’s home.) But given the important differences between the two cases, is that a fair comparison to make? Or is this just a trumped-up (pun intended) story driven by a slow news cycle? 

kaleigh (Kaleigh Rogers, technology and politics reporter): I think it’s a fair comparison. The differences in how each president responded to the revelation are certainly noteworthy, but I feel like they’ve been overemphasized a bit. At the end of the day, they both did the same wrong thing, which is keeping documents that they weren’t supposed to keep. Now, you can argue about whether the current system for determining how documents are classified even makes sense, but that argument doesn’t favor one president’s situation over the other’s.

ameliatd (Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, senior writer): It’s a comparison that people will inevitably make because both of the cases involve special counsels, and both involve classified documents. From a legal perspective, there are a lot of important differences, including — crucially — how the documents were discovered and how Trump and Biden responded. But once the special counsel has been appointed it’s harder for people to understand that nuance.

This is generally the issue presidents run into with special counsel investigations — it’s all well and good to say you want the role to exist, but they’ve nettled most modern presidents regardless of how the investigations actually turned out. In this case, Garland really had no option but to appoint a special counsel to investigate Biden because he had just appointed one to investigate Trump. And the mere act of appointing the special counsel sends the signal that these are equally serious cases.

nrakich: I think of it this way: These are fundamentally the same genre of scandal, but the degree of seriousness is different. As Amelia alluded to, Biden and Trump have responded very differently: Biden contacted the National Archives right away and invited the Justice Department to search his home. For Trump, it was actually the National Archives that contacted him, and a grand jury had to issue a subpoena to get the documents back. And even after Trump’s team said he complied with the subpoena, it turned out he still hadn’t handed over everything, prompting the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago — which Trump very much did not consent to.

kaleigh: But don’t you think Biden’s reaction was, in part, an attempt to create some daylight between him and Trump since, essentially, they both did the same thing? Biden had to kind of be over-the-top with transparency and invite investigators into his home because otherwise it just looks like Biden did the same thing as Trump, which Democrats and left-wing media had just spent months saying was Really Bad. 

nrakich: Yeah, Kaleigh, I think that’s right. But I also think there are questions of intentionality that, unfortunately, we may never get a definitive answer to. There have been allegations that Trump wanted to hold onto these classified documents after he left office, as mementos almost. By contrast, I don’t think there’s much reason to think Biden’s possession of these documents was anything other than carelessness (which, to be clear, is still really bad when you’re talking about state secrets!).

Interestingly, though, Americans may not distinguish much between Biden and Trump on the intentionality point. According to a recent survey from YouGov/The Economist, Americans said that Biden took the classified documents intentionally 39 percent to 28 percent. They said the same thing about Trump 50 percent to 24 percent. Of course, a lot of respondents were (rightfully, IMO) not sure about both questions.

kaleigh: Surely the special counsel investigation will reveal all the answers, Nathaniel!

nrakich: Amelia, you said earlier that Garland’s appointment of special counsels to investigate both Trump and Biden implies that they’re parallel cases even though the legal facts are different. So do you think Garland shouldn’t have appointed a special counsel in Biden’s case?

ameliatd: I don’t mean that he should or shouldn’t have — without knowing the details, it’s hard to say. As Kaleigh said, keeping classified documents in your home (or garage) after leaving the White House is bad. My concern is that the politics of the situation will overshadow the legal outcomes because the mechanism for figuring out what happened is so similar.

kaleigh: My own point is, the parallelism was already there, and that’s why Garland had to appoint the second special counsel. It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

ameliatd: There’s an argument that the role of special counsels is overblown anyway. They’re empowered to investigate with a measure of independence from the Department of Justice. Now, as we saw during Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference into the 2016 election, many of the rules surrounding special counsels are open to interpretation, and the attorney general can end up playing a significant role — as when former Attorney General Bill Barr wrote a misleading summary of Mueller’s report that ended up shaping the initial narrative. 

There’s also a history of special counsels overreaching and having their power curbed. In the 1980s and 1990s, independent counsels were much more independent than they are now (yes, “independent counsels” are different from special counsels — welcome to the word-soup nightmare that I lived in for several years), and Congress ended up clawing back their power. In fact, that’s how we ended up with the much more pared-down role that we have now.

Now, instead of being appointed by a court, special counsels’ credibility with the public is derived from the fact that they’re perceived as being independent from the executive branch, so their findings can be trusted. And my concern is that the more special counsel investigations happen, the less power they’ll have to do the thing they’re actually supposed to do — and the less trust there will be in the outcome — because the process has become so enmeshed with politics.

nrakich: Interesting. If you had to guess, Amelia, how do you think these special counsel investigations will end? It almost sounds like they will just release their reports and nothing will happen, no one’s minds will change — except maybe to think that the special counsel investigations were toothless from the start.

ameliatd: I’m not sure how they’ll end. It’s possible that they’ll result in charges. But from a public opinion perspective, I’m not sure it matters because people generally perceive that the two counsels are dealing with the same types of issues (the mishandling of classified documents), even though, from a legal perspective, how Trump and Biden responded actually matters a lot. 

nrakich: Well, we are a public opinion website, so let’s talk about that public opinion. Do we have any polls yet showing how Americans are thinking about Biden’s classified documents scandal vs. Trump’s?

kaleigh: Yeah, there was a YouGov/Yahoo News survey earlier this month that captured a striking dynamic, in my (non-public) opinion. When asked whether they thought Biden keeping classified documents was more serious than Trump or vice versa, 31 percent of Americans said Biden’s situation was less serious than Trump’s, 21 percent said it was more serious than Trump’s and 32 percent said the situations were equally serious. 

One thing that stood out to me was the fact that Republicans were more likely than Democrats to say Biden’s and Trump’s transgressions were equally serious. Forty-two percent of Republicans said both cases were equally serious, while 41 percent said Biden’s was more serious, but a majority of Democrats (57 percent) said Biden’s incident was less serious than Trump’s and only 24 percent said they were equivalent.

You might expect the results to be more baldly partisan with a majority of Republicans saying Biden’s case is more serious and a majority of Democrats saying Biden’s is less serious. So the fact that a plurality of Republicans said they’re equal, I think, gets to the inescapable reality here, which is that it’s really hard to say what Biden did was awful and then turn around and claim Trump did nothing wrong. 

nrakich: Yeah, the official Republican Party line on this — among elites as well as voters — seems to be, “See, Biden did it too! They are just as bad!” Whereas the Democratic position is, “What Biden did is bad, but what Trump did is worse.”

ameliatd: That’s interesting, Kaleigh. So you think it does matter how it unfolds? And if the outcome is more serious in the Trump investigation, that won’t be seen as a political outcome?

kaleigh: I wouldn’t go that far. I think the reactions to both these cases are still going to break down along partisan lines, but I think they suggest that Republicans didn’t love how Trump handled things here, and Biden’s actions after the documents were discovered were a little more palatable even if, at the root, they both started off doing the same wrong thing.

ameliatd: My cynical view is that special counsel investigations are rarely going to move the needle anyway, but now they really won’t because Biden no longer has the ability to claim the moral high ground.

The lesson: Never criticize a past president’s behavior until you are absolutely sure there are no classified documents in your garage.

nrakich: I might go that far. Maybe this isn’t cynical enough of me, but I feel like the fact that the cases are initially being handled the same way will create more credibility if their findings diverge.

As we’ve already discussed, Garland appointing a special counsel in both cases does create this initial impression that they are equivalent, which is how a plurality of Americans feel, according to both Kaleigh’s YouGov/Yahoo News poll and the YouGov/The Economist poll I cited earlier. (That said, a poll from Ipsos/ABC News found that only 30 percent of Americans viewed the two scandals equivalently, while 43 percent believed Trump’s was worse.) But after counsels finish their work, Americans may feel differently.

ameliatd: But fundamentally they’re both happening under Garland’s watch. And that’s why I think the role is flawed — it’s kind of independent, but still enmeshed enough in the executive branch that it’s pretty easy for people to mistrust or misread. 

nrakich: Yes, true.

ameliatd: And if you make the investigation truly independent, then you run into the situation we had in the 1980s and 1990s, where members of the executive branch (and the president) were constantly being investigated, and one investigation on a completely unrelated topic led to former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment.

kaleigh: I wondered how long it would take us to get to Ken Starr!

ameliatd: To be clear, I don’t think there’s an easy answer here! There are certainly situations where independence from the Department of Justice is valuable and necessary, and maybe this is one of them. But the special counsel-upon-special counsel domino effect doesn’t seem great to me. 

nrakich: We’ve been putting a lot on poor Merrick Garland (hasn’t he been through enough???) and the special counsels, but I want to make sure we acknowledge our own role here — and by “we,” I mean the media. How would you guys grade media coverage of this story for Biden, especially in comparison to media coverage of Trump? How much responsibility does the media bear for many Americans thinking Biden and Trump are equally guilty?

ameliatd: I do think Kaleigh is right that Garland had no choice but to appoint a special counsel in part because of the media coverage. 

It’s hard, though. As journalists, we want to hold powerful figures accountable, and that certainly includes the president. And Biden did spend months talking about how bad it was that Trump kept classified documents — only to have it turn out that he did (sort of) the same thing.

kaleigh: To be honest, and maybe this is indicative of the media I consume, I’ve seen an effort from the media to try to differentiate the two. You can’t listen to an NPR hit or read a New York Times story about it without getting an obligatory mention of how Biden responded differently, alerted the National Archives right away, cooperated with investigators, etc., etc.

nrakich: Yep. CBS News, which broke the original story, had a whole section in its article about that:

The Penn Biden Center case has parallels to the Justice Department’s pursuit of Donald Trump’s presidential records — but the scope and scale are materially different. In August, the FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago that yielded hundreds of documents marked classified.

That unprecedented search followed more than a year of tussling between Trump’s representatives, the National Archives, and the Justice Department. The search warrant was sought and executed in August after multiple failed attempts by the federal government to retrieve what it considered to be sensitive documents at the former president’s personal residence that should have been turned over to Archives under law.

And the Associated Press, CNN and Washington Post have all done articles specifically comparing the two cases side by side.

kaleigh: I mean, look. That is part of the story, so this is partly due diligence. It would be negligent to not even mention that aspect. But at some point, it feels like a RIGBY situation, where there’s this obligation to caveat any coverage lest it comes across as equating the two in any way. 

nrakich: When you look at volume, though, cable news at least has been covering Biden’s story more. According to closed-captioning data from the Internet Archive’s Television News Archive, the three major cable news networks (CNN, Fox News and MSNBC) mentioned the word “classified” in an average of 357 15-second clips per day in the two weeks following the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago (Aug. 8-21, 2022). Meanwhile, the networks mentioned the same word in an average of 478 15-second clips per day in the two weeks after Biden’s own classified documents story broke (Jan. 9-22, 2023).

But the coverage gap is due to one channel in particular. CNN has covered the stories the most equally, with an average of 136 mentions per day over the August 2022 time period (Trump) and 154 this month (Biden). MSNBC covered Trump’s case a little more than it has covered Biden’s, with an average 153 mentions of “classified” per day in the August timeframe and 125 in the January one. But Fox News has covered Biden’s scandal way more than it covered Trump’s, mentioning “classified” an average of 199 times per day during the January time period but only 68 times per day during the August one.

kaleigh: Right, and it’s not shocking that MSNBC covered Trump’s documents more than it’s covering Biden’s documents and Fox covered Biden’s documents more than it covered Trump’s documents. What’s interesting to me is that in both cases there was kind of a frenzy right away, but it has tapered off at about the same rate.

ameliatd: I also wonder how much coverage the Biden story would be getting if we weren't in a slow news cycle...

kaleigh: And if Trump hadn’t just done the same thing, basically. The Democrats could wave this off as a nothingburger a lot more easily if they hadn’t just been dragging Trump for doing the same thing.

nrakich: Yeah, I think the slow news cycle is a big part of it. I'll get a little meta here and talk about how we’ve covered these scandals here at FiveThirtyEight: This is the third piece of content we have published about Biden's classified documents, but we only published two about Trump's. But it's not because we think Biden's case is more serious than Trump's; it's because last August was a much busier time for political news. If we had had unlimited resources, I think we would have written more about Trump’s predicament, but that was the thick of midterm-election season, and we had so much else to cover that we just didn't get to it.

Biden’s story has also come out in dribs and drabs — the first documents were found at the Penn Biden Center, and then a few more were found at Biden's home, and then a few more were found there, etc. I think that has given it a little more life than it otherwise would have. But I’m curious to see if it has staying power in the media’s and public’s minds even after new revelations stop coming to light.

kaleigh: That will partly depend on whether anything more newsworthy happens … or if the most exciting debate is still about kitchen appliances.

Congress

The Freedom Caucus Was Designed To Disrupt

By Kaleigh Rogers

Jan. 20, 2023, at 6:00 AM

At the beginning of this month, the House endured the longest contest to elect a speaker in 164 years. Rep. Kevin McCarthy ultimately was elected speaker, but only after he made several concessions to a small but influential faction of dissenting conservative Republicans. Though not every member of the Freedom Caucus — a far-right coalition of Republican lawmakers — voted against McCarthy, nearly every member who did oppose him was a member of the Freedom Caucus.² 

That commonality has drawn renewed attention to the Freedom Caucus and its role within Congress. Despite being a minority in the House, the Freedom Caucus has repeatedly punched above its weight and effected genuine change in the chamber. Powerful political factions are as old as American politics, and in most ways, the Freedom Caucus is just a continuation of that tradition. But in a few key ways, its members are doing something different: voting as a bloc, willing to go against their own party’s leadership and to gum up the works to make a statement. Those differences have allowed the Freedom Caucus to exercise influence over the better part of the past decade — and are why it’s only just getting started.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/whats-deal-freedom-caucus-fivethirtyeight-96551491

Modern congressional caucuses emerged in the last century, though less formal organizations of like-minded members have existed in Congress since the start, according to Ruth Bloch Rubin, a political science professor at the University of Chicago and the author of “Building the Bloc: Intraparty Organization in the U.S. Congress.” During the Progressive Era in the early 20th century, a group of insurgent Republicans worked alongside Democrats to strip away some of the powers that had been consolidated by the speaker. In the 1960s and ’70s, the left-leaning Democratic Study Group worked to push through civil rights legislation (along with, later, the Congressional Black Caucus), against bitter opposition from conservative Southern Democrats.

Typically, such influential intraparty factions emerge only when parties find themselves especially divided, Bloch Rubin said. “It’s usually because there’s enough of a cleavage within the party that these sort of factions have enough members and the distance between one faction and a competitor faction within the same party is enough that it warrants this kind of organizational work,” she said.

This was true of the Freedom Caucus. In the 2010 midterms, during former President Barack Obama’s first term, a Republican wave elected scores of conservative lawmakers to Congress, giving the party six more seats in the Senate and flipping the House. At that time, there was already a conservative caucus within the House, the Republican Study Committee, and many newly elected Republicans joined. But so did many of the more moderate members, according to former Rep. John Fleming, one of the founding members of the Freedom Caucus. 

“We noticed that the committee was growing rapidly. And we were seeing faces in there that we had never seen before. We saw people who were not known to be very conservative joining the group,” Fleming said, adding that he believed then-House Speaker John Boehner had been encouraging moderate members to join in order to “co-opt” the committee.

In 1995, just 7 percent of House GOP members were in the RSC. By early 2011, nearly three-quarters were. Fleming said he and some fellow conservatives tried to keep the group tied to its rightward roots, including by electing Rep. Jim Jordan as chairman of the group in 2011. But as the membership swelled, the ideology got a bit diluted. At the same time, many of these same members were growing increasingly frustrated with leadership in the House — particularly with Boehner — and the status quo. The far-right flank of the party felt Boehner wasn’t taking advantage of the GOP majority to get more conservative legislation passed, so they needled him. Boehner retaliated by, according to Fleming, punishing conservative members — including by removing them from committee assignments — to keep them in line. Boehner did not respond to a request for an interview.

“We were irritations for Boehner, and Boehner was an irritation for us,” Fleming said.

By Thanksgiving 2014, Fleming and a handful of other members were at their wits’ end, so they decided to form their own group. In early 2015, the Freedom Caucus was born. It was designed to be very selective about its closed, sometimes secretive membership — only ultraconservatives allowed —  in order to serve as what Fleming calls the conservative “anchor” of the GOP in the House. Its members would attempt to tow the party toward the right, and once they staked out a position, they wouldn’t budge. 

While the Freedom Caucus had policy goals in mind, most of its work has focused on disrupting and altering the internal workings of the House. If it could wrest away some of the speaker’s power, the thinking went, more conservative legislation might have a better shot at passing. One early and consistent way the Freedom Caucus did this was by voting against House rules, slowing down the legislative process and making it harder for bills that the caucus wasn’t happy with to come up for a vote. But it also took some bigger swings. While the Freedom Caucus didn’t agree to former Rep. Mark Meadows’s decision to file a motion to vacate the chair in the summer of 2015 in an effort to oust Boehner, it backed him after the fact, and that consensus was part of what led Boehner to resign as speaker.

Part of what makes the Freedom Caucus a unique intraparty faction is also its greatest strength. If 80 percent of its members agree to a position or action, everyone has to be on board. That’s different from other groups throughout American history, according to Matthew Green, a professor of politics at The Catholic University of America and the author of a book about the Freedom Caucus. It isn’t just a group of likeminded members; it’s also an effective, disruptive voting bloc that stands together. Members are willing to do this because in order to get to that 80 percent threshold, there’s a lot of debate and persuading internally, according to former Rep. Raúl Labrador, one of the founding members of the Freedom Caucus and now Idaho’s attorney general. “The best debates I ever had in Washington, D.C., were in the Freedom Caucus,” Labrador said.

Another difference is the caucus’s willingness to buck the speaker and establishment — a disposition that can come with political consequences, which is why intraparty factions have historically avoided such sparring.

“That’s a big ask. That’s a risky thing to do,” Green said. “The speaker is powerful, the speaker has powerful friends and you’re risking your committee assignments. You could put your fundraising abilities in danger.”

These differences are part of how the Freedom Caucus has leveraged its relatively small size (it’s estimated to have around 40 members currently, though exact membership numbers are not public) to have outsized impact. Perhaps most notably, it aligned behind former President Donald Trump more resolutely than the Republican Party establishment, gaining access and influence through the White House. (To wit: Many former Freedom Caucus members, including Meadows and Fleming, went on to hold positions in Trump’s administration.)

Now, with the GOP holding just a narrow majority in the House, the Freedom Caucus can wield its unity and antagonism to even sharper effect. As the vote for speaker demonstrated, a group even half the size of the Freedom Caucus can hold the chamber hostage for days. So when fully unified, just imagine what it might unleash.

Pollapalooza

Kevin McCarthy Doesn’t Have Enough Fans Inside The House … Or Outside It

By Kaleigh Rogers and Zoha Qamar and Kaleigh Rogers and Zoha Qamar

Jan. 6, 2023, at 6:00 AM

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

Many of us at FiveThirtyEight have been glued to C-SPAN this week, as we’ve watched the yet-to-be-sworn-in House repeatedly try — and fail — to elect a speaker. With a slim majority in the chamber, Republicans were held hostage by a far-right flank of the party that refused to support the establishment pick Rep. Kevin McCarthy, leading to multiple, redundant rounds of voting and some heated infighting. 

While this political stalemate is notably historic, it can also feel a bit inside baseball. It got me wondering how Republican voters are feeling about the party and its leadership as a whole. It’s a bit too early to have polling on this week’s dramatics, but some recent surveys have captured the general mood of Republicans heading into the vote for speaker. In a late November poll from Deseret News/HarrisX, Republicans were pretty evenly split on whether they thought McCarthy should continue to be a party leader: Thirty-five percent said he should maintain his role as a leader, 33 percent said the party should move on from McCarthy, and 32 percent said they were unsure or didn’t know. This ambivalence about McCarthy stood in contrast to Republicans’ feelings toward other party leaders, which were much more cohesive. Most Republicans said that former President Donald Trump should remain a leader and that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell ought to be replaced. Similarly, in another poll from November fielded by The Economist/YouGov, 39 percent of Republicans said McCarthy should remain a leader in the House, but a slim majority (51 percent) said they either didn’t know or didn’t care.

It’s not that McCarthy is wildly unpopular among Republicans, but he’s not exactly a fan favorite, either. In that Economist/YouGov poll, 45 percent of Republicans viewed McCarthy favorably, compared to 31 percent who viewed him unfavorably — not great, but not as bad as, say, McConnell, who had a 55 percent unfavorable rating amongst his party. A CNN/SSRS poll in December found McCarthy’s net approval was +30 points among Republicans, the second-lowest same-party net favorability among all first-time potential speakers in nearly three decades. That same poll also found 15 percent of Republicans had “never heard of” McCarthy, while 28 percent had no opinion of him. And the GOP rank and file’s relatively lukewarm feelings for McCarthy may be emboldening right-wing dissenters to continue their crusade against his speakership — polling suggests voters won’t be fussed too much whether McCarthy is speaker or not. 

And overall, Republican voters seem open to shaking things up when it comes to party leadership. In a late November poll from the Trafalgar Group/Convention of States Action, voters were asked, “After the results of the 2022 midterm elections do you think Republicans need new leadership in Congress?” and 73 percent of Republicans said yes (though, as you can see, the question was a bit leading). Another poll from Trafalgar Group/COSA released this week found Republicans overwhelmingly would like to see a new party chair: Seventy-three percent said the GOP should elect someone other than current Chair Ronna McDaniel at upcoming meetings, while just 6 percent said McDaniel should be reelected. That’s to say nothing of the ongoing debate over who ought to be the party’s presidential nominee next year: While Trump is still very popular among Republican voters, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has picked up some serious early steam, suggesting voters have at least some appetite for change even at the highest level of party leadership.

So given its disappointing showing in the 2022 midterms and voters’ stated desire for new blood, the GOP would be arguably unwise to not consider shaking things up a bit. Whether that helps drive someone other than McCarthy to the speaker’s chair is, as of publication, still yet to be seen.

Other polling bites 

• Recent polling from Gallup suggests that Americans aren’t too optimistic about the country’s prospects in 2023. The overwhelming majority of Americans (90 percent) said that this year will be one of political conflict, as opposed to political cooperation, while around three-quarters predict economic difficulty (79 percent) and increased crime rates (72 percent). That said, the general mood seems to split along partisan lines, with Democrats feeling more positively than Republicans and independents falling somewhere in the middle: For example, 53 percent of Democrats believe that the stock market will pan out positively this year, versus 15 percent of Republicans and 33 percent of independents. In contrast, it seemed like the two parties were most closely aligned in believing that Russia’s global dominance will dampen in 2023.
• A USA Today/Suffolk University survey conducted last month shed light on the traits and attributes that Americans would like in their ideal president come 2024. Half of the survey’s respondents said they’d prefer a president between 51 and 65 years old, while another quarter favored someone between 35 and 50. And while 55 percent of Americans said that gender doesn’t matter, 28 percent preferred a man — a number that rises distinctly among Republican respondents (50 percent). Further, Midwesterners were more likely than respondents from other regions to prefer the executive come from their own region: Twenty-seven percent of Midwestern Americans favored someone from the heartland, while 20 percent of East Coasters, 18 percent of Southerners and 16 percent of West Coasters said the same about a president from their home regions.
• Around half of Americans (49 percent) think that people are less comfortable being around those who are sick now compared with before the pandemic, per a Jan. 3 YouGov poll. Age seems to be a factor, as 57 percent of Americans age 65 or older were less comfortable. That checks out with other questions from that same YouGov survey, in which 50 percent of Americans said that parents have become more cautious about their children contracting and spreading illnesses since the onset of COVID-19.
• Since Buffalo Bills player Damar Hamlin went into cardiac arrest in the middle of a game earlier this week, there’s been a renewed focus on the dangers of football and the NFL’s role in ensuring its players’ safety. According to a Jan. 3 poll conducted by CivicScience, 40 percent don’t trust the NFL at all to address players’ safety concerns, while 41 percent have only a little trust. The lack of faith, however, doesn’t seem to affect whether people will tune in to watch. Among NFL viewers, a large majority (72 percent) said they haven’t considered not watching games in light of player safety concerns.

Biden approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker,³ 43.4 percent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president, while 51.1 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -7.7 points). At this time last week, 43.2 percent approved and 51.4 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of -8.2 points). One month ago, Biden had an approval rating of 41.6 percent and a disapproval rating of 53.1 percent, for a net approval rating of -11.5 points.

2022 In Review

The Numbers That Defined 2022

By Anna Rothschild

Dec. 30, 2022, at 6:00 AM

What a year 2022 has been. There was so … much … news. We saw record-high inflation, war in Ukraine, a landmark Supreme Court session, continuing effects of the pandemic, the Winter Olympics, the death of Queen Elizabeth II, the World Cup and, of course, the midterms. In typical FiveThirtyEight fashion, we’ve been reflecting on 2022 the way we do best: through numbers. Here, seven of our reporters share some of the most important stats of the year, highlighting big political decisions, feelings of the electorate and hints at what’s to come in 2023.

Poverty

In September, the U.S. Census Bureau released its annual supplemental poverty rate for the previous year. That’s the poverty rate after accounting for the impact of key government programs targeted at low-income families, among other things. For reporter and editor Santul Nerkar, the defining number of the year was 7.8 percent, the supplemental poverty rate for 2021 and lowest rate on record. It was the first concrete measure of how COVID-19 stimulus money affected poverty in America.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/us-poverty-rate-hit-record-low-expect-stay-95391465

Abortion

In June, the Supreme Court released its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, overturning Roe v. Wade as the law of the land. In short order, many states enacted abortion bans, including total bans without exceptions for rape or incest. For senior writer Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, the defining number of the year was 10,000 — that’s how many fewer legal abortions there were in just the first two months after Roe v. Wade was overturned.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/number-captures-impact-dobbs-decision-fivethirtyeight-95627922

Forever chemicals

Per- and polyfluorinated chemicals, or PFAS, are used in all sorts of household products, from nonstick pans to dental floss. These pervasive chemicals are dangerous to human health, and the government and industry are finally starting to crack down on them. That brings us to senior science reporter Maggie Koerth’s numbers of the year: four, the number of PFAS the Environmental Protection Agency released new guidelines for, and 4,700, the rough number of different PFAS chemicals out there.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/epa-finally-addressing-4-dangerous-forever-chemicals-4000-95750270

Election deniers

Denying the results of the 2020 presidential election was the cornerstone of many Republican campaigns this election cycle. Election denial is hardly a new thing, but it reached unprecedented levels in the 2022 midterms. That’s why 47 is the defining number of the year for politics and tech reporter Kaleigh Rogers. It’s the percentage of Republican candidates who ran for House, Senate, governor, secretary of state and attorney general this year and didn’t accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/number-election-denying-republicans-defined-2022-midterms-fivethirtyeight-95710927

Inflation

Heading into the midterm elections, Americans told pollsters that one issue was their top priority: the economy and inflation. For senior writer Monica Potts, the 9.1 percent inflation rate in June topped her list of most important stats of the year. Here she explores the ways — big and small — that historic levels of inflation affected American lives in 2022.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/inflations-41-year-high-impacted-american-life-fivethirtyeight-95850805

The Republican margin in the House

The results of the 2022 election were worse for Republicans than one might expect, given that the president’s party usually loses ground in the midterms. In the U.S. House, Republicans gained a majority but only a slim one. They won by only nine seats, which for editor Maya Sweedler is one of the most important numbers of the year. What Republicans will — and won’t — be able to do with that majority will define American politics for at least the next two years.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/number-shape-republicans-politics-2023-fivethirtyeight-95905408

Democratic trifectas

With Congress divided between Democrats and Republicans after the 2022 midterms, some of the most important political shifts of the next few years could be coming at the state level. Those new policies might lean liberal because, for the first time in 12 years, more Americans will live in states totally controlled by Democrats than by Republicans. That’s why senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich picked 140 million as his defining stat of the year. It’s the number of Americans who will soon be living in a state where Democrats will have total control over state government.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/140-million-americans-live-states-controlled-democrats-fivethirtyeight-95547189

Thanks for watching, reading and listening to FiveThirtyEight this year. We’ll see you in 2023!

2022 In Review

How 2022 Was A Win For Democracy

By Kaleigh Rogers

Dec. 29, 2022, at 6:00 AM

A few weeks before the midterms, I attended an election-denying group’s Zoom meeting. There had been alarming reports of a massive, well-funded campaign to place election deniers in voting centers that could cause havoc on Election Day. I wanted to know exactly what these groups were telling these volunteers, so I found one in Pennsylvania and quietly attended an open session. What I heard that night surprised me. The training session provided would-be poll watchers with accurate, useful information about the responsibilities and limits of their role. It was more bureaucratic than baleful. And the threat of an army of conspiracy-minded meddlers interfering in the voting process never materialized: There were few reports of disruptions on Election Day and no widespread internal efforts to hinder the voting or counting process. 

So, was this a win for democracy? On the one hand, free and fair elections form the bedrock of most people’s idea of democracy, so it’s, y’know, cool that there was no sinister behavior from conspiracy-minded poll watchers. On the other hand, groups that, with the encouragement of former President Donald Trump, tried to overturn the last election were recruiting and training volunteers to oversee this one, which isn’t very reassuring. Elsewhere, there were threats that never materialized, extreme candidates winning primaries but then losing general elections, candidates refusing to concede — but fewer of them than expected. 

This mixed bag makes it difficult to gauge where democracy stands as we bid adieu to 2022. In the great ledger of wins and losses, did democracy wind up in the black this year? I spoke to three experts who told me, basically, yes. There were enough positive signals this year of democracy’s endurance that we should all be reassured. But they also all noted that threats remain, and while we should collectively take the W for democracy, we shouldn’t let our guard down as we head into 2023. 

“A lot of us saw this kind of doomsday scenario coming where politicians just stopped conceding their losses and democracy in that case becomes pretty unworkable,” said Ryan Enos, a government professor at Harvard University. “We’ve only had one election since Trump started forcefully denying the election in 2020 but if you’re going to project out, it looks like 2020 was more of a blip and that wasn’t something that was becoming the norm. And that should make us feel a lot better about election denial.”

Over the past two years, American democracy has faced renewed threats. The most obvious has been Trump’s crusade to overturn the results of the 2020 election, which inspired the deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and led 147 Republican federal lawmakers to refuse to certify some of the results of that election. Lawmakers then passed a historic number of laws restricting voting in dozens of states, often explicitly in response to fears around election fraud. Election workers faced threats of violence and harassment like they’d never seen before. And to top it all off, hundreds of candidates who denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election ran for office in 2022, including for positions that hold meaningful authority over running elections and certifying their results. 

All of this made for a pretty grim outlook on democracy at the beginning of 2022. Experts repeatedly sounded the alarm over the ongoing threats and warned of a terrifying drift toward authoritarianism. But by the time the midterms finally came to a close, a number of signs reassured us that democracy in America is resilient. 

Notably (though it’s disturbing that it’s notable), the vast majority of candidates who lost their races in the November midterm elections conceded, including some of the more extreme Republican candidates who were poised to follow in Trump’s footsteps and refuse to accept an outcome where they lost. Though this is an admittedly low bar to clear, losers conceding their races is something experts believe to be essential to democracy. It’s also something many believed wouldn’t happen as widely in 2022, according to a survey conducted by Bright Line Watch, an academic group that studies democratic norms in the U.S. 

The election also brought several other encouraging signs, like the fact that voters largely rejected candidates who both denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election and were running for a position where they would have meaningful influence over elections. This happened even in states where Republicans won other statewide offices, suggesting that the rejection of anti-democratic candidates wasn’t simply a pivot away from the GOP. We also didn’t see widespread distrust in the outcome of the midterms like we saw in 2020, despite efforts from Trump and other right-wing influencers to sow doubts yet again. 

And this isn’t just a vibe — it’s been captured in polling. Another survey from Bright Line Watch following the election found that confidence in the results increased after the election, including among Republicans, while belief in widespread voter fraud continued to tick down. Back when Bright Line Watch asked Americans about their confidence in the 2020 election results immediately before and after the contest, they got significantly different answers, according to Gretchen Helmke, a political science professor at the University of Rochester and a co-director of Bright Line Watch.

“For Republicans, it just tanked,” Helmke said. “This time around, it went up slightly at the personal level and the state level, but the big story for me is that there was no downward change at the national level among Republicans, that seemed like really good news to me.”

And as I noted earlier, there were no widespread antics with the voting or vote counting process, as some feared. Part of that may have been due to election officials working with law enforcement to protect the process, according to Wendy Weiser, the director of the Democracy Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “There was a dramatic mobilization to rein in the risk and build up the guardrails that was very effective,” Weiser said. 

This isn’t to say that democracy is fine forever. The experts I spoke to all said there remain threats to democracy, and that vigilance and shoring up safeguards — such as reforming the Electoral Count Act — are just as important.

“The type of threats that make populist forces gain traction, like underlying inequality and people feeling powerless, those probably haven’t gone away,” said Enos. “The fact that the lies gained traction was more of a symptom than a cause.”

But as far as 2022 is concerned, let’s take the W for democracy.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/number-shape-republicans-politics-2023-fivethirtyeight-95905408

As the House Select Committee for Jan. 6 publishes its final report, the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast crew considers what the committee’s impact has been on American politics and former President Donald Trump’s standing with voters. They also look ahead to how the Department of Justice will navigate the complexities of deciding whether to bring charges against Trump and how a Republican majority in the House could respond.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Kaleigh Rogers: To me, one of the most significant numbers of 2022 was 47. That’s the percentage of Republican candidates in the midterms for House, Senate, governor, secretary of state and attorney general who didn’t accept the legitimacy of the 2020 election. That meant that at least 60 percent of Americans had at least one election denier on their ballot in November.

There have been candidates from both parties who questioned election results in the past, but this was unprecedented. Having our politicians accept the results of democratic elections and concede when they lose is a critical component of democracy. If candidates don’t accept the results, many of their supporters won’t either, and when voters believe elections aren’t free and fair, other, non-democratic means of installing their preferred candidates into power start to look a lot more appealing.

However, while many of these candidates did win their elections, there were some signs that election denial wasn’t a winning strategy. Most of those who won were incumbent members of Congress, many of whom voted not to certify at least some of the results of the 2020 election but also didn’t make election denialism part of their campaign. Most of the prominent election-denying candidates were rejected by voters, including in states where Republicans won other statewide races. This was particularly true for positions where the candidate would have had meaningful control over elections, like secretary of state. Just one of the seven secretary of state candidates who fully denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election won their race.

Still, the number of Republican candidates willing to deny the legitimacy of the last election was the culmination of former President Donald Trump’s crusade to sow doubt about his loss, and for me it was a meaningful encapsulation of the political landscape in 2022.

That — plus the fact that the majority of Americans dislike changing clocks to begin with — has led to efforts to eliminate standard time … and counterefforts to eliminate daylight saving time. Can either option squeeze more day out of the light we do have? Try your hand at optimizing daylight all year long:

Unfortunately, no solution will make every American happy. Even if you’ve found a combination that satisfies your personal preferences, you may have noticed that those preferences could negatively impact other parts of the country. And advocates for changing the system we currently have — whether pro-DST or anti — feel strongly that their personal preference is the best.

Those who want to permanently stay on standard time (the time we’re on from November to March) say it’s preferential to permanent daylight saving time because standard time more closely aligns the clocks with our natural circadian rhythm, which is dictated by light exposure. Such a change would be better for our health. For instance, daylight saving time has been associated with a host of negative health effects including worse sleep and cardiovascular disease, and permanent daylight saving time could lead to higher rates of depression — prompting groups like the American Academy of Sleep Medicine to endorse permanent standard time instead. “The problem is that we don’t adapt. Our bodies align to the sun,” said Dr. Karin Johnson, a sleep medicine specialist and a professor of neurology at the University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School.

Advocates for permanent daylight saving time, however, argue that Americans live by the clock, not the sun, and that brighter evenings fit with how we live in the real world. Perhaps that’s why in the past five years 19 states have passed a bill or resolution that would implement year-round daylight saving time. A bill that passed the Senate in March would also have made it permanent, but the measure has virtually no chance of being taken up by the House before the next Congress is seated.

There’s some evidence that people are more likely to shop or be active after work if it’s still light out. But the arguments aren’t just economic, said Steve Calandrillo, a professor at the University of Washington School of Law. With more people out and about in the evening hours, the chances for traffic accidents go up when the sun sets earlier. He pointed to a study from 2004, which found that switching to permanent daylight savings time could reduce pedestrian fatalities by 13 percent and motor-vehicle fatalities by 3 percent during morning and evening hours.⁴ Other studies suggest more evening daylight could help prevent street crime.

The problem is that both standard time and daylight saving time are fictions. Daylight saving time, which was introduced as a temporary measure for maximizing usable daylight during World War I, tends to get a bad rap for its artificiality, but standard time isn’t exactly natural either. According to Michael O’Malley, a professor of history at George Mason University and the author of “Keeping Watch: A History of American Time,” standard time was introduced in the late 19th century by railroad companies who wanted to standardize their timetables. Not everyone was happy about it. The city of Cincinnati, for example, initially continued to set its clocks to “Cincinnati time,” which was twenty-two minutes different from standard time. “Their argument was, ‘Noon is when the sun is overhead, not when the Pennsylvania Railroad says it’s noon,’” O’Malley said. Our current system of springing forward and falling back is a kludge designed to make everyone happy — which, of course, it fails at.

That’s the fundamental problem with trying to restructure time to fit our schedules. Whether it’s permanent standard time or daylight saving time, any attempt to standardize the clocks will be dislocating for someone. O’Malley’s dream is that the country could somehow return to solutions from before the 20th century, when local communities still responded to changes in daylight by shifting their own schedules to fit the season. That could mean schools might open or close earlier or later depending on when the sun rose and set in a specific place, he said. Adapting to seasonal darkness — and even finding joy in the coziness of the depths of winter — could mean living our lives differently depending on the local hours of light in the day. Slowing down, maximizing activity in sunlight hours and seeking warmth and comfort are ways that people have been coping with the long, dark, cold nights for centuries.

But the promise of daylight saving time — that we can somehow wring more productive hours of brightness out of the day — has always been a false one. No matter how we manipulate the clocks, this will always be a dark time of year. By trying to escape that reality, we may just end up making ourselves more unhappy.

Supreme Court

How North Carolina’s Political Warfare Could Impact The Entire Country

The Supreme Court will soon hear arguments for Moore v. Harper, a case whose roots are nested in North Carolina politics and may branch out to other states.

By Kaleigh Rogers

Dec. 5, 2022, at 12:48 PM

North Carolina is no stranger to making political waves, and in the weeks ahead, the Tar Heel State’s internal battles could create ripple effects across the country.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in Moore v. Harper, which stems from the North Carolina Supreme Court’s decision to reject a congressional district map drawn by the state legislature that the court found to be so extremely gerrymandered, it was unconstitutional. The former’s pending ruling could have major ramifications for the division of power over elections in every state in the country. It’s also the culmination of a decade-long effort by North Carolina Republicans to cling onto power. 

Depending on how it rules, the Supreme Court could give partisan state lawmakers even greater power to draw district lines and run elections, while weakening the authority of state courts to keep those powers in check. And in charting the course of this case, it’s clear exactly what the plaintiffs — North Carolina Republicans — hope to gain. The story starts over a decade ago, when the GOP took control of the Tar Heel State’s legislature, and winds up at the steps of the Supreme Court, where some of those same Republican lawmakers are hoping to shore up their power in a fast-growing and demographically shifting state.

North Carolina’s most extreme political maneuvers have threatened to seep out and radicalize other parts of the country before. Moore v. Harper could spring an actual leak.

Moore v. Harper emerged from a quagmire of political warfare that has been swirling in the Tar Heel State for decades. It all began … well, truthfully, it all began a few centuries ago, but for brevity’s sake, let’s start in the slightly more recent history: the 2010 midterms. Republicans rode a red wave to win control of both the North Carolina House and Senate for the first time since Reconstruction. The win was partially aided by REDMAP, a project helmed by former Republican National Committee Chairman Ed Gillespie that funneled funds into statehouse races with the explicit aim of gaining Republican control over the upcoming redistricting cycle following the 2010 census. And since North Carolina is one of a minority of states where the governor has virtually no power over drawing district maps, the newly GOP-controlled state assembly had total control over the redistricting process. 

They wasted no time getting to work, hiring a GOP strategist renowned for his skill at crafting expertly gerrymandered maps. He lived up to his reputation, helping the state legislature draw a map that would have likely given Republicans an additional four Congressional seats. It was quickly challenged in court by a coalition of voter rights groups including the state NAACP and League of Women’s Voters, kicking off a protracted saga of courtroom battles.

“Every single election after that, with the exception of 2020, […] every one of those maps adopted, state and congressional, were eventually tossed and ruled unconstitutional,” said Bob Phillips, executive director of Common Cause North Carolina, a nonpartisan government reform group that has frequently joined on court challenges over the maps. “And I don’t know if there’s any other state in America that can say that.”

As the legal ping-pong continued, it was no secret that state lawmakers were set on drawing maps that would favor the GOP. At the time, Rep. David Lewis, a Republican member of the General Assembly’s redistricting committee said: “I propose that we draw the maps to give a partisan advantage to 10 Republicans and three Democrats, because I do not believe it’s possible to draw a map with 11 Republicans and two Democrats.” These maps weren’t just theoretically skewed in the Republicans’ favor: In election after election, Democrats would receive a much lower share of seats compared to their share of the popular vote.

This legal battle eventually made its way to the Supreme Court in 2019 as Rucho v. Common Cause (Rucho being Bob Rucho, the former chair of the state Senate Redistricting Committee). In a landmark 5-4 ruling, the court seemed to put the whole issue to bed by essentially saying “actually, federal courts don’t have a say when it comes to cases around partisan gerrymandering,” closing down one avenue to legally challenge extremely gerrymandered maps. 

And while all that cartographical drama was unfolding, there were yet more power struggles happening in the statehouse. In the heady final weeks heading into the 2016 election, Hurricane Matthew made landfall in the southeast portion of the state, causing widespread, deadly flooding and otherwise wreaking havoc for weeks. By December, it was perfectly reasonable for the GOP-controlled General Assembly to hold an emergency session to avail disaster relief funds. And if it happened to use that session to also strip the incoming Democratic governor of various powers and responsibilities — notably the power to appoint members of the state election board — well, that was just the cherry on top. 

The election of former Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory as governor four years earlier had given Republicans in the state a rare trifecta, and they weren’t going to relinquish such power without a fight. After his defeat in 2016, McCrory’s campaign set up a legal defense fund and protested vote counts in 50 counties, citing “irregularities” and making allegations of voter fraud, for which some campaign supporters were later sued, before conceding a month after the election. Then the state assembly stripped incoming Gov. Roy Cooper of much of the powers the office had enjoyed — most of which Cooper clawed back through lawsuits. 

McCrory said this wasn’t a partisan move because that same legislature had actually tried to strip powers from the governor even while he was still in office — he, too, had to sue to keep certain powers under the administrative branch. “There are constantly power struggles between the legislature and the executive branch, and not just with the governor,” McCrory said in an interview with FiveThirtyEight. “That’s been a constant battle in North Carolina for years.”

In 2020, the pandemic ushered in a new drama. Republicans in the state legislature tried to get the Supreme Court to weigh in on a dispute over changes to election rules around the pandemic, but they were rebuffed. 

Just as disputes over the last district maps, drawn a decade earlier, finally came to a close, it was time to draw new maps once again. Thanks to the continued flow of new residents to the Tar Heel State, North Carolina gained a new district after the 2020 census. The state legislature approved a map that converted 13 districts — eight Republican-leaning seats, five Democratic-leaning ones — to 14, with three highly competitive districts, four Democratic-leaning seats and seven Republican-leaning ones. It went about as well as the last time the state went through redistricting. Voting rights groups sued, and the Democrat-controlled state Supreme Court threw the maps out and ordered the lawmakers to try again. When the state legislature presented new maps to a three-judge panel, the state House and Senate lines were affirmed — but not the congressional districts. At this point, with the primary elections looming, the judges enlisted a group of outside experts to draw up maps to be used in the meantime. The state Supreme Court ruled it was within the lower court’s authority to do so. The state legislature disagreed. 

But to get the Supreme Court to weigh in on these kinds of state-level issues, Republicans in the statehouse needed a constitutional hook. They had toyed with just such a legal hook when trying to get the Supreme Court to arbitrate the pandemic disputes, and while the court declined to take up the case, some of the more conservative justices signaled support for the legal theory Republicans put forward, emboldening the GOP to find another way to get it in front of the court. 

The independent state legislature theory is based on a very literal interpretation of a line in the U.S. Constitution (in Article 1, Section 4), which reads: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.” Disregarding the gratuitous use of capital letters, that basically means that states get to set up all the rules around election administration — like whether voters can vote by mail, or what time polling locations close — unless Congress has created a superseding rule, like the fact that elections must be held on the first Tuesday following the first Monday in November. The key words are “legislature thereof,” which proponents of the ISL theory take at face value: Legislatures alone are charged with determining how elections are run in their respective states.

Opponents of this theory argue that historical context and centuries of precedence show that “legislature” means all of the state bodies that are generally involved in setting laws, including not only legislatures but also constitutions, courts and election boards. And in fact, in its ruling in Rucho v. Common Cause, the Supreme Court explicitly noted that federal courts shouldn’t be weighing in on partisan gerrymandering … but state courts could, based on state statutes and constitutions.

Jason Torchinsky, a senior adviser and general counsel for the National Republican Redistricting Trust who has written an amicus brief for Moore v. Harper, said he didn’t see the case as aimed at stripping state courts of their role in redistricting. Instead, he said the main issue was whether the court overstepped its bounds by instituting new maps, rather than simply striking down the original maps.

“I don’t know that there would be a decision that would basically say, ‘No challenges under the state constitution may ever be brought in North Carolina,’ because I don’t think that that’s what this case is about,” Torchinsky said. “This case is about that line drawing that I mentioned. There’s a difference between interpreting a law and making a policy.”

Once again, political power struggles within North Carolina threaten to leach out into the rest of the country. If the Supreme Court decides to endorse even part of the ISL theory, it could sap the power state courts have to serve as a check on state legislatures when it comes to redistricting or elections more broadly. Already limited in what cases they could bring to federal court, voters unhappy with the laws their elected officials pass could lose yet another avenue to make their case. It could even mean that voter-led changes to election laws — like the efforts that brought ranked-choice ballots to Alaska or established an independent redistricting committee in Colorado — could be made illegitimate since they weren’t enacted by the state legislature. 

This case goes beyond the borders of North Carolina, but understanding the political climate that spawned it gives a clear picture of what’s at stake for the rest of the country. The ongoing political warfare to gain and hold power could be replicated in other states by politicians of both parties, if ISL theory — even partially — becomes the law of the land.  

In the run up to the 2022 election, FiveThirtyEight tracked what every single Republican nominee for House, Senate, governor, secretary of state and attorney general said about the legitimacy of the 2020 election. Thirty-five percent fully rejected Biden’s win and another 10 percent cast doubt on it. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen Druke speaks with reporter Kaleigh Rogers about how candidates who denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election did in the midterms.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

2022 Election

When Democracy Was On The Ballot In 2022, Voters Usually Chose It

Or at least rejected candidates who denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election.

By Kaleigh Rogers

Nov. 29, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Kari Lake, the Republican candidate for governor of Arizona, made denying the results of the 2020 election central to her campaign this year. And while she hasn’t yet conceded, she lost that race to Democrat Katie Hobbs. It was one of the most high-profile examples of a pattern we saw over and over again in the midterms: When election deniers ran for offices that have significant oversight over elections themselves, voters rejected them.

There was a lot of talk about democracy being on the ballot this midterm cycle, with hundreds of candidates who refused to accept the outcome of the last nationwide election. And while many of those candidates (particularly incumbents) won their races, when it came to those who would have a direct impact on how elections are run and votes counted, the trend was clear. Voters chose democracy. 

While members of Congress obviously have a role to play — 147 Republicans voted not to certify some of the results of the 2020 election, and a handful of Democrats have done so in past cycles as well — state-level officials hold the most immediate authority over elections. In particular, secretaries of state serve as the chief election official in most states, and overseeing elections is a big part of their job. Voters recognize this and, when state-level candidates were adamant election deniers, they not only lost, they typically did worse than other state-level candidates. 

In Pennsylvania, Republican Doug Mastriano lost the governor’s race by more than 14 percentage points to Democrat Josh Shapiro. The governor of the Keystone State appoints its chief election official, so this is a role with an even more direct impact on elections than in other states. Mastriano was one of the most hardline election deniers running for office this year, and even attended the rally on Jan. 6, 2021, which later turned into the attack on the U.S. Capitol. Comparatively, Mehmet Oz, the Republican who ran for Senate in Pennsylvania, lost by less than 5 points. Oz not only ran for a position that would less directly impact elections in the state, but he also didn’t make the 2020 election central to his campaign — he never said it was stolen from Trump, though he did question the results at times. 

In Arizona, though Lake lost by less than 1 percentage point, the Republican candidate for secretary of state, Mark Finchem, performed much worse, losing by nearly 5 points. Like Lake, Finchem equally embraced Trump’s baseless election fraud claims, but unlike Lake, he was running for a position where overseeing elections is arguably the most important part of the job (no shade to keeping records and administering the Uniform Commercial Code, but, let’s be honest). Blake Masters, the Republican candidate for Senate, also lost by about 5 points. He, too, ran on false claims during the primary that Trump won in 2020 and that big tech and the media “conspired” to rig the election — though he later softened his stance ahead of the general election. However, in another statewide race, the Republican comfortably won by a wide margin. Kimberly Yee won reelection for the state treasurer, a role that has no direct impact on elections, by more than 11 points. This is another example of voters in Arizona not simply turning against the GOP this election cycle, but specifically rejecting certain candidates running for particular offices.

New Hampshire provides a similarly apt comparison of statewide races. Like Masters, the Republican candidate for Senate, Don Bolduc, originally campaigned on the false claim that Trump was the rightful winner in 2020 before later pivoting to say the election was not, in fact, stolen. Bolduc lost his race by more than 9 points, while Republican Gov. Chris Sununu — who rejected Trump’s claims from the get-go — won reelection by more than 15 points.

Finchem, Mastriano, and Lake were part of a group of 17 primary candidates endorsed by the America First Secretary of State Coalition, an organization run by a QAnon-supporting influencer that aimed to get election deniers elected to key positions like secretary of state. Of those 17 candidates, only one — Republican candidate for Indiana Secretary of State Diego Morales — prevailed (many of the candidates lost during the primary elections). And despite getting the seal of approval from this group, Morales has said that 2020 was “obviously” a “legitimate election.” 

There are still a lot of reasons to be concerned about the state of democracy in America — 2021 brought a massive wave of new voter restrictions, a disturbingly high share of Americans think political violence is justified, and pending court cases could severely limit efforts to curtail gerrymandering or restrictive election laws. But over and over again this fall, voters in this country made it clear that, given the choice, they’re still picking democracy. 

2022 Election

What Can The 2022 Midterms Tell Us About 2024?

A FiveThirtyEight Chat

Nov. 28, 2022, at 6:00 AM

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, senior elections analyst): The 2022 midterms just ended a couple weeks ago,⁵ but the 2024 election has already begun: Just a week after Election Day, former President Donald Trump announced he would run for president again. Given how little of a break we’re getting between the two campaigns, it raises the question: How could the results of the 2022 election influence the results of 2024’s?

To answer that, I’ve convened a meeting of FiveThirtyEight’s brightest political minds. How’s everyone feeling about the campaign whiplash??

geoffrey.skelley (Geoffrey Skelley, senior elections analyst): The permanent campaign is more permanent than ever.  

alex (Alex Samuels, politics reporter): Haha, our jobs are never boring — that’s for sure!

kaleigh (Kaleigh Rogers, technology and politics reporter): People often comment that my job is only busy every other year and I laugh and laugh.

Monica Potts (Monica Potts, senior politics reporter): It seemed like Trump was forever promising an announcement “tomorrow,” so by the time it happened it felt like it had already happened. But yes, it is a never-ending campaign season.

nrakich: OK, let’s get one thing out of the way. Democrats had a surprisingly strong showing in 2022, especially by historical standards: They kept the Senate, and they lost fewer than 10 seats in the House despite the president’s party losing over two dozen House seats in the typical midterm. Is this reason for Democrats to be optimistic about 2024 as well?

alex: I’m hesitant to make sweeping generalizations about 2024 based off Democrats’ performance in 2022. Sure, Democratic victories give President Biden something to brag about in the meantime, but historically, we haven’t been able to predict presidential results based on midterm elections. And I don’t see why this year would be the exception.

geoffrey.skelley: I mean, they might take it as a reason to be optimistic. But as Alex said, historically, there’s been little relationship between the result in a midterm election and the result of the next presidential contest. So what happened in November 2022 probably has little bearing on how November 2024 will pan out, at least in terms of votes. 

And that’s understandable: We don’t know who the candidates will be in 2024, we don’t know what the political environment will be like and the electorate will be different! Right now, the U.S. Election Project’s preliminary turnout figure for this year is around 46 percent of the voting-eligible population. With California still counting a lot of ballots, that’ll probably hit 47 percent. But in 2020, almost 67 percent of the VEP cast a ballot for president! So a lot of people who didn’t participate in 2022 will probably participate in 2024.

kaleigh: Yeah, I mean midterms generally have very little correlation with presidential elections. In addition to the changes in the electorate, people just think differently about voting for president compared to voting for governor or senator. It’s the highest office, and so much depends on what happens in the months leading up to the actual election. I wouldn’t use the midterms to make any predictions about 2024, personally, other than perhaps who else might run. 

Monica Potts: Two of the biggest issues motivating voters this year seemed to be inflation/the economy and abortion rights, and it’s just so hard to say what conditions will be like in two years. I can see red states continuing to push abortion bans or enforce the ones that already exist, but I can also see purple states moderating and blue states working to protect abortion rights. Who knows what the economy will do, but I think it’s safe to say it won’t be in the same place. I think so much depends on those conditions, who’s at the top of the tickets and what happens in the swing states where Democrats won this year, like Pennsylvania and Michigan.

alex: And the issues that motivated voters this fall could be way different than the issues that motivate voters in presidential election years. You might also see, for example, a Democratic backlash toward Trump if he ends up being the GOP’s presidential nominee, similar to what we saw in 2020.

nrakich: Great points all!

Yeah, for every midterm-presidential pairing like 2018-20 (when Democrats had a great midterm and then defeated Trump), there’s one like 2010-12 (when Republicans had a great midterm and then failed to unseat then-President Barack Obama).

geoffrey.skelley: Seriously, Nathaniel. Speaking of whiplash, one of the best examples is 1946-48, when Republicans swamped Democrats in the 1946 midterms to take back the Senate and House, but then former President Harry Truman surprised by winning reelection in 1948, bringing with him sweeping majorities for Democrats in the Senate and House.

nrakich: In fairness, though, 2022 is a different case — the rare example of a midterm where the president’s party did relatively well. What has happened in presidential elections after those midterms?

kaleigh: Ooh, that’s a good question … for Geoff!

(My brain holds very different esoteric knowledge.)

geoffrey.skelley: Nathaniel, a couple examples that come to mind are 1970-72 and 1998-2000. In 1970, Republicans actually gained a seat in the Senate and lost only nine seats in the House, but Democrats retained clear majorities in both chambers. Then in 1972, then-President Richard Nixon won one of the greatest landslide reelections in U.S. history. 

In 1998, Democrats gained five seats in the House and preserved the status quo in the Senate amid a backlash over GOP attempts to impeach then-President Bill Clinton, but then Republican George W. Bush captured the White House in 2000. 

Obviously these are two fairly different circumstances when it comes to an incumbent president running or not, which candidates were running (George McGovern was not the strongest contender for Democrats in ’72), and the events surrounding the election. But that speaks to how hard it is to know what’ll happen next!

nrakich: Yeah, and there’s also 2002-04, when Republicans had a good midterm in the wake of Sept. 11 and then Bush won a narrow reelection. But of course, we’re dealing with a very small sample size here.

Kaleigh, you mentioned that the midterms could influence who jumps into the race for president. Do you guys think the midterms change Biden’s reelection calculus at all?

kaleigh: I don’t know about change, but certainly influence. Biden has a lot of factors to consider and recently said he was going to discuss with family over the holidays. But he’s got to be feeling emboldened after such a strong showing in the midterms. 

Another influential factor has to be Trump’s announcement. Biden won against Trump once before, so there’s this underlying narrative of “he beat him once, he could beat him again,” if Trump wins the nomination.

alex: If Democrats had succumbed to the midterm curse that’s typical for the party in the White House, Biden may have faced outsized pressure to not run in 2024 (as he did before the midterms). But I think, to Kaleigh’s point, you could make the argument that the results of this year’s races, coupled with Trump’s presidential announcement, clear up any doubts over whether Biden is running for reelection.

geoffrey.skelley: Kaleigh, I think that’s right. I’ve said before that Biden’s chances of running again depended in part on whether Trump would run again, and now Trump is running. So I do think Biden may be somewhat more likely to run. 

At the same time, it’s also possible that Biden could decide this is a moment where the Democratic bench of potential candidates is stronger after the success of many big names in the midterms, especially governors of potentially competitive states like Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan or Jared Polis of Colorado.

Monica Potts: I still think it’s worth remembering that Biden remains pretty unpopular (his approval rating is currently below 42 percent), and voters chose their Democratic candidates in House and Senate races for many reasons. I think it would be reading too much into the results to say it boosts Biden’s chances. 

nrakich: Geoffrey, that’s a great point about Whitmer and Polis. Both have been talked about as future presidential contenders, and both absolutely crushed it in their reelection bids: Whitmer won by 11 percentage points, and Polis won by 19! I don’t think they would ever primary Biden, but if Biden doesn’t run, their theories of the case seem stronger than ever, especially if Democratic primary voters are concerned about electability again.

alex: Do we really think Whitmer or Polis stands a chance against Trump, though?

I think winning statewide office is one thing, but winning a presidential election against Trump is another story entirely. Biden already proved that he can beat him in 2020 and can campaign on Democrats’ success during the midterm elections, so I don’t see why he wouldn’t be seen as the strongest Democratic presidential contender (at least at this point in time). 

And if Whitmer thought Biden was a particularly weak president, she wouldn’t have campaigned with him earlier this year.

Monica Potts: Right, I think the really big question for Democrats is who should they nominate if not Biden? A rising star like Whitmer could be risky. Voters don’t really have a favorable opinion of Vice President Kamala Harris, for lots of reasons that include sexism and racism, but she hasn’t been a super visible VP. I’m having flashbacks to the crowded Democratic field in the 2020 presidential election, which didn’t have a clear favorite until House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn endorsed Biden. 

kaleigh: I think Whitmer or Polis could absolutely beat Trump. I think a lot of Biden’s win in 2020 was simply based on him being the “not Trump” candidate. Trump is basically just as unpopular now as he was before the 2020 election, and even some of his supporters are saying they don’t want him to run. There are many capable Democrats who could fill the “not Trump” role and defeat him in 2024 if Biden were to opt against running.

geoffrey.skelley: As Nathaniel said, I don’t think these candidates run if Biden does. But if he doesn’t seek reelection, they’d certainly have a decent shot of defeating Trump in a general election. For one thing, both Whitmer and Polis have put together impressive electoral track records in states that are either real swingy or at least not deep blue. Whitmer could make abortion a major issue, as she did in her reelection campaign, while Polis has a bit of a libertarian streak in him that could expand his appeal in a general election context. Plus, Trump is one of the great unifiers in history — for Democrats, anyway. So that would help the eventual Democratic nominee to some extent. Moreover, the country is starkly divided and close presidential elections are just sort of a matter of course these days, so barring a real catastrophe for one party, we should expect another highly competitive contest in 2024.

Monica Potts: Yes, I think so much depends on whether Trump is the nominee.

alex: I’m not totally convinced by the “not Trump” argument, Kaleigh. I think most of the Democratic field in 2020 campaigned on being the “not Trump” or “I’m best positioned to beat Trump” candidate. But there’s a reason why Biden was the victor in the end.

But I largely agree with your point, Geoff. I think Biden running will stop other Democrats from jumping in, so there’s not a split Democratic field. The flip side, though, is that I don’t think a Trump announcement will stop other prominent Republicans from throwing their hat in the ring.

kaleigh: The name on everybody’s lips is gonna be … Ronny!

nrakich: Haha, indeed, Kaleigh. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was another governor who turned in a really impressive reelection performance earlier this month. He won by 19 points in a state that, until recently at least, was considered the quintessential swing state! Do we think this strengthens his hand ahead of his widely expected presidential bid?

alex: That’s a good point, Nathaniel! With his landslide election in Florida, DeSantis was easily the biggest GOP storyline to come out of the 2022 election. I won’t cite exit poll data directly, but reporting suggests that he performed well with Latino voters and flipped Miami-Dade County, which is historically Democratic. I think his performance this year might convince Republicans that he’s the strongest alternative to Trump — if they’re looking for one. Plus, DeSantis has long been viewed as a rising star within the GOP, so it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that he takes on the challenge.

kaleigh: There’s no doubt: The results in Florida solidified DeSantis’s role as a popular Republican rising star, and at least some polls are now showing him ahead of Trump. An Economist/YouGov poll conducted just after the election found 46 percent of Republicans said they’d prefer to see DeSantis as the GOP nominee in 2024, compared to 39 percent who said they’d prefer Trump. 

And while a majority — 60 percent — of Republicans said they wanted to see Trump run in 2024 when asked before the election, just 47 percent did when asked after the election (but before Trump announced his candidacy).

nrakich: I’d be careful about those polls, though, Kaleigh. We often warn people to wait a while to interpret polls after major news events like debates, and the midterms definitely qualify.

kaleigh: That’s true! We’ll have to wait to see if any of these turn into actual trends.

Monica Potts: I can absolutely see Republican party leaders coalescing around DeSantis because they know Trump motivates Democrats to vote against them. DeSantis’s policies and positions are very similar to Trump’s, and he plays to the base on issues like immigration, education and voter fraud (which, as we know, is not a significant concern). Republican voters seem to like him — even before the midterms, 64 percent of registered Republican voters told Morning Consult they had a favorable opinion of him. And this is anecdotal, but Republican voters where I live seem to know who he is and also like him. 

In 2016, Trump didn’t really have any opponents who could get enough support to really challenge him. Many voters thought of him as a businessman and what he would do as a politician was unknown. Now he’s a known quantity, his successful run is six years in the past and there are alternatives like DeSantis. 

geoffrey.skelley: DeSantis might be in a position to make himself almost a co-favorite, assuming he does what everyone expects and runs. Granted, Trump has been ahead in pretty much all national polls that aren’t testing him and DeSantis head-to-head. 

And remember, if other candidates get into the field, they won’t be going mano-a-mano, at least not initially. The size of the eventual field is not a minor consideration either, considering Trump won with just a plurality in the 2016 Republican presidential primary. It remains to be seen if the many bigwig donors and influencers within the GOP who oppose Trump will rally behind one candidate or not. And it's not like Trump had their backing early in 2016, so even if they are unified, that isn't certain to stop him either.

nrakich: Trump has not emerged from the midterms covered in glory, though. Many of the candidates he endorsed in the primary lost the general election; in fact, The New York Times and Washington Post both calculated they performed 5 points worse than expected. And his intervention may have directly cost the GOP multiple seats. For example, he endorsed far-right Republican Joe Kent in the primary for Washington’s 3rd District over incumbent Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler because Herrera Beutler voted to impeach him. Kent won the primary but ended up losing the general election — which was a big shock, because this seat is pretty red. Now, many Republican elites are grumbling about him costing the party seats, or at least not embracing his presidential campaign. 

On the other hand, recent history is littered with examples of Republicans appearing to break with Trump, only to fall back in line later. Do you guys think that will happen again, or is this time really different?

geoffrey.skelley: I tend to see this as half a 2016 circumstance, if you will. Many party elites don’t want to get behind Trump and will look to DeSantis as a principal alternative. But depending on the contours of the GOP presidential primary, they could definitely come flooding back to Trump if DeSantis struggles against him for some reason. And Trump will start out with far more institutional support than he had previously. You already see various Republicans announcing their support for him, like Sen.-elect J.D. Vance. 

alex: Agreed, Geoff. I think if voters largely continue to back Trump, it’ll be hard for the party to step in and knock him down. To be honest, Trumpism is so ingrained within the GOP today that I almost forgot about all the intraparty grumbling during his 2016 run! 

Monica Potts: Yes, this is tricky because people underestimated Trump in 2016 and then kept declaring his campaign over — but it never was. But I do think this time is really different. Jan. 6 was a real turning point people haven’t forgotten. And as Kaleigh has written, the election denial that drove the insurrection did not win seats for Republican newcomers this cycle. Voters often have short memories, but I think voters remember that and want to move away from that. 

geoffrey.skelley: Monica, I think Jan. 6 might make Trump a weaker general election nominee, but how much it hurts him in the presidential primary on the GOP side is less clear. After all, for months, even years now, a consistent 60-ish percent of Republicans have said in polling that Biden didn’t legitimately win the 2020 election. If Trump didn’t lose in their eyes, they’re not necessarily going to view him as weaker.

Monica Potts: Geoffrey, that’s fair. I just wonder how much this year’s midterms quieted down those beliefs. I was prepared to see losing candidates claiming election fraud or refusing to concede, and that didn’t really happen. I just wonder if the midterm results might weaken those beliefs in all but the true believers, as voters move on to other issues.

kaleigh: There are Republican voters who love Trump but fear he can’t win, and they want the White House more than they want Trump to be the nominee. The question is how big of a contingent those voters are.

2022 Election

Why Lauren Boebert Didn't Cruise To Victory

By Kaleigh Rogers

Nov. 17, 2022, at 6:00 AM

UPDATE (Nov. 18, 2022, 4:21 p.m.): On Friday, Adam Frisch conceded the race in Colorado’s 3rd District to Rep. Lauren Boebert. Though she leads by just 0.16 percentage points — which means the race is set to go to an automatic recount — Frisch’s concession indicates that Boebert is likely to just hold on in this reliably red district.

At a local Republican assembly in Grand Junction, Colorado, last March, I watched Rep. Lauren Boebert receive not one, but two standing ovations: One for her unremarkable five-minute speech, the other just for showing up at all. It was a sympathetic audience, but still, among her base, it was clear she was beloved. That — combined with many indicators, including our own forecast, suggesting the Republican congresswoman would sail into a second term — was why I was shocked to see the race for her seat representing Colorado’s 3rd District turn into one of the closest elections of the midterms.

Colorado’s 3rd District is red and, thanks to redistricting, has gotten redder since the last time Boebert ran — it has a FiveThirtyEight partisan lean⁶ of R+19. As an incumbent Republican in a midterm cycle that looked like it would favor the GOP, Boebert was expected to easily win: Our forecast gave Boebert a 97-in-100 chance of winning. As of 5 p.m. Eastern on Wednesday, Boebert had a slim, 1,122-vote lead over Democrat and former Aspen City Council Member Adam Frisch. But even if she prevails, it’ll be a photo finish in a race that was absolutely not expected to be close. So what the heck happened? While Republicans overall performed poorer than expected this midterm cycle, certain things about this race made it particularly susceptible to a potential upset — and help explain why Boebert wasn’t popping Champagne on election night. (Boebert’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment.)

Part of the story here is the fact that Colorado as a whole was hit with a blue wave this election, which washed out even into Boebert’s red district. Not only did Democrats win big-ticket races for governor and Senate, they also won competitive House races in the 7th District and newly created 8th District and flipped seven seats in the state legislature, giving the state GOP the smallest minority it ever had. Republican state Rep. Colin Larson, who lost his seat, called it an “extinction-level event,” according to Colorado Public Radio: “This was the asteroid that ended the reign of the dinosaur, and in this case, the dinosaur was the Republican Party.” 

Though the district overall is red, there are blue counties and pockets within it, and enthusiasm for Democratic candidates up and down the ballot may have helped buoy Frisch’s campaign. We saw this effect in other red districts in Colorado, too, like the 3rd: Incumbent Rep. Doug Lamborn, a Republican, won his race by 16 points, 4 points less than in 2020. In the 4th District, Rep. Ken Buck won his election by the same margin (24 points) as in 2020, but that was after redistricting made his district even redder. 

But the blue wave clearly isn’t enough to explain such a razor-thin margin in Boebert’s race. She also had some weaknesses that were exploited by a surprisingly strong Democratic candidate. Like the rest of the state, a plurality of voters in the 3rd District — 40 percent — are unaffiliated, according to an analysis by the Colorado Independent Redistricting Commissions. Some of those voters still reliably vote for one party or the other, but a portion are swing voters or moderates who don’t find candidates too far down either end of the political spectrum appealing. After the 2020 election, we noted that Boebert’s district didn’t look like the districts where some of the other more hardline Republicans won: It’s less white, less evangelical Christian and less Republican. This may be why Boebert won with just 51 percent of the vote in 2020 (and why former President Donald Trump carried it by just 5.5 points). Even though the 3rd District has a solid Republican lean, it has been represented by a Democrat as recently as the early 2010s (Democrat John Salazar served 2005-2011), and the last two elections point to some fissures in the Republican stronghold. 

Boebert’s modest win in 2020 is what inspired her challenger, Frisch, to run, he told FiveThirtyEight: “I started to think, ‘If 5 percent of the people had switched their vote in 2020, Boebert would have lost.’” He says he figured he would need to carve away closer to 10 percent of voters to have a shot, given the redistricting changes, but that was a margin he felt confident he could sway. “It was never supposed to be a kamikaze suicide mission,” Frisch said. 

Throughout the campaign, Frisch billed himself as a moderate, “conservative businessman” who would get things done, in an effort to sway more centrist Republicans who were disenchanted with Boebert’s headline-grabbing stunts. Though Boebert has her fans, she is a polarizing figure, said Zack Roday, the campaign manager for Joe O’Dea, the Republican candidate for Senate in Colorado. “A lot of people like her, and a lot of people don’t,” Roday said. “There are a lot of strong opinions about her, and certainly she is seen as a Trump-like figure, and so obviously she’s connected to that brand, for better or for worse.” That includes critics within her party like state Sen. Don Coram, who challenged Boebert in the primary and ended up endorsing Frisch in the general election. Boebert also doesn’t have a strong track record from her first term in Congress. She sponsored a few dozen bills, most of which were stunts and none of which gained any traction. 

The dollars around this race help fill in some of the blanks as well. Frisch and Boebert’s campaigns were pretty evenly funded, with her campaign raising $6.7 million to his $5.2 million, thanks in no small part to Frisch’s own pocketbook: As a millionaire former currency trader, he bankrolled his own campaign to the tune of $2.2 million. Where the funds diverged was in outside spending. In 2020, outside spending against both Boebert and her opponent was fairly even. But this year, over half a million dollars was spent to oppose Boebert, while none was spent opposing Frisch, according to data from OpenSecrets. 

All of this points to one last potential factor: This race may have been overlooked, particularly by pollsters and Republicans who saw Boebert as a shoo-in. Aside from three partisan polls (two of which were sponsored by Frisch’s campaign), pollsters ignored this race. And despite Boebert being a diehard Trump loyalist, the former president never came out to Colorado to campaign for her as he did for candidates in other races, according to Kevin McCarney, the chair of the GOP in Mesa County, the second-most populous county in the 3rd District. “He really wasn’t vocal about Lauren at all. It could have been complacency, that they just thought she was going to win, but it’s a little disappointing,” McCarney said.

Frisch’s centrist platform and his ability to self fund prodigiously seem to have helped him exploit Boebert’s weaknesses in a district that has a not-inconsequential contingent of moderate voters who were turned off by the congresswoman’s extremism. Regardless of the result, this race has shown that the Colorado Western Slope can be competitive, given the right — or wrong — candidates, and neither party is likely to overlook it in 2024. 

2022 Election

Denying The 2020 Election Wasn’t A Winning Strategy For Political Newcomers

By Kaleigh Rogers

Nov. 10, 2022, at 4:51 PM

Doug Mastriano has been one of the most ardent supporters of former President Donald Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election was fraudulent. As state senator, he attempted to launch a forensic “audit” of Pennsylvania’s election results. He attended the “Save America” rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. And on Tuesday, he lost his race for Pennsylvania governor, according to ABC News projections.

As our forecast predicted, the majority of candidates who denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election are projected to win their races. But the bulk of those wins are from incumbent Republicans, in particular members of Congress who voted not to certify some of the 2020 election results. Many of the most vocal election-denying candidates who made claims of voter fraud central to their campaigns failed to break through, as did most newcomers who aligned themselves with Trump’s stolen election narrative. While many factors have influenced these results, the overall trend suggests that playing to voters who don’t trust the results of the 2020 election wasn’t a winning strategy by itself. 

Of the 199 Republican candidates for the House, Senate, governor, secretary of state, and attorney general who deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election, so far 134 (67 percent) are projected to win their races, 52 are projected to lose, and 13 have yet to be called, as of Thursday, Nov. 10, at 4:30 p.m. Eastern. Of those 134, 112 are incumbent members of the House, many of whom voted not to certify the results of the 2020 election and still haven’t said the election was legitimate, but who also did not make the issue of election fraud central to their campaigns. Take Rep. Doug Lamborn, the Republican representing Colorado’s 5th District. Lamborn voted to not certify the 2020 election results but then seemingly dropped the subject entirely. Lamborn managed to fend off more vocal election-denying, hard-right challengers during the GOP primary in June, and ABC News now projects him to win reelection in the deep-red district. But it also includes some vocal election deniers, like Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey, who released a campaign ad where she claimed “the fake news, big tech, and blue state liberals stole the election from President Trump.” Ivey, who has been Alabama governor since 2017, is projected to win reelection.

Election-denying newcomers running in open seats or against Democratic incumbents had a harder time on Tuesday — in the races that have been called, the majority of these candidates have lost. Of the 80 non-incumbent Republican election deniers who ran for House, Senate, governor, secretary of state, and attorney general, just 22 are currently projected to win (28 percent), while 49 (61 percent) are projected to lose, and nine are in races that have yet to be called. Many of these losses were in races where the Democrat had an advantage but were far from guaranteed slam dunks. J.R. Majewski, the Republican candidate for Ohio’s 9th District who attended the Jan. 6 rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol, told FiveThirtyEight in an email that there were “irregularities and illegalities that occurred across multiple states” in the 2020 election. Heading into the election, our final forecast gave Majewski a 22-in-100 chance of winning, but he began the campaign with much stronger odds. Majewski is projected to lose to incumbent Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur. 

In at least one race so far, an election denier who was favored to win is projected to lose. Bo Hines, a former college football player and the Republican candidate for North Carolina’s 13th District, said he believed the 2020 election was “stolen.” Hines was polling well heading into the election, and our final forecast gave him a 77-in-100 chance of winning, but he is now projected to lose to Democrat Wiley Nickel, a state senator. There’s also a chance that Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado’s 3rd District, who has said voting not to certify the 2020 election results was one of the things she was “most proud of,” might lose her reelection bid — she’s currently in a nail-biter finish with Democratic challenger, former Aspen City Councilor Adam Frisch. If Frisch wins, it would be the most dramatic upset of the election so far. Boebert had a 97-in-100 chance to win, according to our final forecast.

Perhaps most meaningfully, voters almost universally rejected election deniers who ran for secretary of state, an office that is typically a state’s top election official and responsible for administering elections, enforcing election laws and certifying results. Having a secretary of state who doesn’t accept the results of the last democratic election, with a total lack of evidence of fraud, raises questions about whether or not they would act to overturn the results of a future election — even without evidence. In seven states, the Republican candidate for secretary of state denied the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and four are projected to lose. Only one election-denying secretary of state candidate — Chuck Gray in Wyoming — is projected to win. Of the races yet to be called, it looks like the election denying candidates are likely to lose, too. In Nevada, Jim Marchant, who has said he would not have certified Nevada’s 2020 election had he been secretary of state, is currently leading by a slim margin, but the remaining ballots are expected to favor his Democratic opponent, Francisco Aguilar. In Arizona, Republican candidate for secretary of state Mark Finchem has been deeply involved with Trump’s effort to overturn the election. He attended the Jan. 6 rally, worked with Trump’s campaign lawyer Rudy Giuliani and signed a resolution with fellow state lawmakers to send illegal alternate electors to the Electoral College. He’s currently trailing Democratic candidate Adrian Fontes, former recorder for Maricopa County.

This isn’t to say that Republicans who won last night mostly accepted the results of the 2020 election: Nineteen candidates who are projected to win at least questioned the results and many more refused to take a stance. There are also many races yet to be called — including for some of the most high-profile election deniers, like Finchem, Marchant and Kari Lake, the Republican nominee for governor in Arizona who has made claims of fraud in the 2020 election central to her campaign. But for many Republicans on Tuesday, making election denialism central to their campaign wasn’t enough to carry them over the finish line. And many of the most ardent supporters failed to win, suggesting that denying the 2020 election wasn’t the campaign strength that many of these candidates may have hoped.

Watch: https://abcnews.go.com/fivethirtyeight/video/2020-election-deniers-2022-elections-fivethirtyeight-93072681

Transcript

Kaleigh Rogers: In the midterms this year, 185 Republicans running for House, Senate, and governor seats are election deniers — they’ve either said the 2020 election was stolen or took legal steps to overturn its results. Of those 185 contenders, 122 of them – or 66 percent – are clear favorites in their races. As of Tuesday, Nov. 1, FiveThirtyEight’s forecast gives them better than a 95-in-100 chance of winning — they’re what we call “Solid R.” And while Republicans overall are projected to do well in the midterms, a bigger share of election deniers are in races they’re very likely to win, compared with Republicans overall. In fact, less than half of all GOP candidates are running in Solid R races.

Election deniers running for House seats have the best odds – 69 percent of those candidates are in Solid R races. Among the seven election deniers running for governor, only two — Alabama Gov. Kay Ivey and Idaho Gov. Brad Little — are running in Solid R races. And of the eight election deniers running for Senate, only three have better than 95-in-100 odds.

Look, complaining about the results of an election after the fact is basically an American pastime, but this is something unprecedented. Hundreds of candidates on the ballot are refusing to accept the outcome of a democratic election two years after it happened, and some actually tried to overturn the results. Now, it looks like a lot of those candidates will be sitting in Congress and governors’ mansions next year, and that leaves a lot of questions around what could happen if we have another election dispute in 2024.

Then, they turn to the issues that both parties have spent the most advertising money on and listen to a few examples. Lastly, the team breaks down which candidates who deny the legitimacy of the 2020 election are most likely to win their races and how they could impact future elections.