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There have been sooo many hot takes about the 2022 midterms, which is why we’re joined on this week’s episode of “The Downballot” by Michael Frias and Hillary Anderson of the progressive data firm Catalist to discuss their data-intensive report on what actually happened. They explain how they marry precinct-level election results with detailed voter files to go far beyond what the polls can tell us. Among the findings: Highly competitive races were much more favorable to Democrats than less-contested ones; Republicans paid a “MAGA tax” by nominating extreme candidates; and non-college white women shifted toward Democrats by notable margins compared to 2020.
Co-hosts David Nir and David Beard also do a deep, deep dive on the many implications of the Supreme Court’s shock redistricting ruling in Alabama last week. The Davids explain why the nay-sayers are wrong to minimize the impact of the decision, which will very likely lead to new districts where Black voters can elect their preferred candidates not only in Alabama but also Louisiana, Georgia, and maybe even Texas. They also discuss what those new districts might look like, and how we know.
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
David Beard: Hello and welcome. I’m David Beard, contributing editor for Daily Kos Elections.
David Nir: And I’m David Nir, political director of Daily Kos.
“The Downballot” is a weekly podcast dedicated to the many elections that take place below the presidency, from Senate to city council. Please subscribe to “The Downballot” on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review.
Beard: So, I leave for a week and the Supreme Court goes crazy, apparently.
Nir: Yeah. So, we are going to do a deep dive into the Alabama Supreme Court ruling, and then we are going to be talking with two folks from the progressive data firm Catalist, about their analysis using data and not relying on punditry, about what actually happened in the 2022 midterms and what made them so different from other similar elections. We have a fantastic episode. Let’s get rolling.
So, Beard, you were on vacation last week. I know that you are just getting back in the swing of things. So I’m going to give you a break this week and I’m going to get you up to speed on the most important news story of the last week, and it was not Donald Trump’s indictment.
Beard: As fun as that was, I would much rather hear what you’re going to tell me about instead.
Nir: So, we have to talk about the astonishing Supreme Court ruling on the Alabama redistricting case. We record “The Downballot” on Wednesdays. This ruling came out Thursday morning. We were gnashing our teeth about just missing the window to be able to discuss it last week. But we’ve since had a full week to think about it, write about it, analyze it, figure out what the implications are. So I want to dive right in.
And the first thing I want to address is kind of a meta point. There were some arguments in legal circles that the ruling was not actually good news because the state of the Voting Rights Act is still very precarious and the state of American democracy in general is still very precarious. But I really reject that point of view because I think you can have good news even in a bad environment, and that’s exactly what this was. And lots of people, for very good reasons, readily interpret news that could have been much worse as good news. This is a very common framework for lots of people, from Jews to Mets fans. And I qualify as both. So that’s certainly how I see the world.
And Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick wrote an excellent piece. I definitely recommend that you Google it. She said, “Perhaps we’ve reached the part of the show where simply not being punched in the face over and over at the high court counts as a good day.” Well, I think so. I think it was a good day. We didn’t get punched in the face by the far-right majority on the Supreme Court. I am extremely pleased with the result. And, to be fair, a lot of legal analysts also are and they are viewing this as good news.
Beard: Yeah. Anytime you have to rely on Brett Kavanaugh for your wins, your wins are going to be few and far between. But you got to take them. I think the idea of saying this is bad news or not good enough news to celebrate is just sort of dooming yourself to be down about everything that the Supreme Court does for the next 25 years, probably. So, take the win.
Nir: Take the win. And I think that lost in the elation last week, somewhat lost at least, is just how awful a maximalist far-right ruling would have been. And that’s exactly what the state of Alabama, the Republicans who run the state, had wanted. They wanted the Supreme Court to completely shred Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which was the part of the Voting Rights Act that was central to this case and many, many others over the decades. And had the Supreme Court done that, done what Alabama had asked, forget about creating new majority-minority districts, which is what the plaintiffs in the Alabama case were asking for. It would have allowed Republicans, in all likelihood, to eliminate existing majority-minority districts.
Right now, for instance, Alabama has 7 seats in Congress, Republicans drew a 6-1 map, meaning 6 seats that are almost certainly going to elect Republicans and 1 safely blue Democratic seat with a Black majority. If the Supreme Court had done what Alabama had asked, boom, there goes that 7th District, which is currently represented by Terri Sewell, a Black Democrat, and the GOP could have gone ahead and created a 7-0 gerrymander in their favor. And it’s not just Alabama. Multiply that by every other state under Republican control, and then multiply that not just by the congressional maps but by all of the state legislative maps, which are also governed by the VRA.
So you are talking about, potentially, hundreds of districts nationwide that have been drawn to ensure that, generally speaking, Black and/or Latino voters are able to elect their candidates of choice and not have their votes diluted by white Republican majorities. Those would have been in jeopardy. Those would all have been at risk of going away. And that is at the core of one of the possible reasons why John Roberts wrote the opinion that he did and maybe why he was able to get Brett Kavanaugh along for the ride with him.
Rick Hasen, who is a well-known election law expert, he wrote in an op-ed in the New York Times that it’s possible that Roberts shied away from completely eviscerating Section 2 of the VRA because he could “foresee the additional social upheaval and opprobrium that would have been generated against the Supreme Court had it ended significant minority representation in Congress and statehouses.” And that’s exactly what would have happened had they ruled Alabama’s way. It would’ve both shredded minority representation nationwide, and boy, people would’ve been even more furious at the Supreme Court than they already are today.
Beard: I do think there’s a degree to which it’s the situation where you keep shaving and shaving and shaving away parts of the Voting Rights Act, and, eventually, you get to the core of it, and you can’t shave it away anymore. I guess my assumption before the ruling came down is they would figure out a way to just shave it off again, just be like, “Oh, for whatever reason, Alabama doesn’t have to create this other district. Doesn’t have to make sense. They just have to shave it away a little bit more.” And I think ultimately what you found is that there wasn’t anything left, and you either had to chuck the whole thing or let something stand. And I think Roberts and Kavanaugh clearly were not in a place where they wanted to chuck the entirety of the Voting Rights Act, whether that was political pressure or whatever else. Thank goodness, they decided not to.
Nir: Yeah. And the Alabama case in particular was very, very carefully reasoned and written by this three-judge panel, which, by the way, included two Trump appointees at the district-court level. So it was going to be very difficult for even the Supreme Court to find a way in which the district court got it wrong. So, yeah, I think you make a really good point. It’s kind of an all-or-nothing situation now. That said, I wouldn’t put it past these guys to find a way to nuke this in the future, but for the moment at least, like you said before, a win is a win.
So now we have to look at what happens next. And there’s something very interesting about litigation under Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. In most redistricting cases, you can’t really know what a final map is going to look like, assuming a court strikes down a map that’s already in place. But in VRA litigation like this, one thing that plaintiffs have to do at the outset is demonstrate that minority voters can be drawn into a compact-enough district such that they constitute a majority of that district. And what that means in practice is that plaintiffs will go ahead and create hypothetical maps of their own to show that this can actually be done and submit them as evidence to the court. And because they’re submitting them in open court, we get to see them.
And even cooler, if you’re really hardcore into this kind of redistricting nerdery, you can play around with them. We will include some links in the show notes to illustrations that we’ve created of some of these hypothetical maps, and also links to versions on Dave’s Redistricting App, which let you see all of the demographics, all of the political data. It’s really fascinating stuff, if you’re into this sort of thing.
Beard: To be clear, Dave is neither David Nir nor David Beard, but yet another Dave that’s in election work.
Nir: Dave Bradlee, by the way, whom election Twitter and all redistricting nerds out there owe an extraordinary debt of gratitude to that he created this amazing free tool at Dave’s Redistricting App, that you can play with absolutely any map that you can dream of, with incredibly-sophisticated tools that used to be very, very expensive.
Beard: It’s really a great, great tool to have for anybody who’s interested in elections.
Nir: So, talking about Alabama’s current map, the one that the district court and then the Supreme Court said is problematic and, very likely, violated the VRA, what Republicans did there is something that they’ve done in a lot of other states. They took two areas with large Black populations, the city of Birmingham and the city of Montgomery, and they merged them together in one congressional district. That’s the 7th District that I was talking about earlier, represented by Terri Sewell. But Black voters in Alabama are also heavily concentrated in a rural area known as the Black Belt.
So, what Republicans did is they used a strip of the Black Belt to link up Birmingham and Montgomery and then carved up the rest of the Black Belt among other majority-white districts. And doing so, that dilutes the strength of Black voters. And what the plaintiffs in Alabama showed is you can very easily draw two districts in Alabama with Black majorities that would, therefore, be likely to elect the candidate of choice of Black voters. And that’s almost always going to be a Black Democrat.
So, we have versions of these maps where you can see… There’s a bunch of different ways to slice the pie. You can tweak this or tweak that. But, instead of having Birmingham and Montgomery together in one district, now they would each anchor their own districts. And the ultimate upshot of that is that, instead of having this 6-1 Republican delegation, once Alabama gets a new map, it’s very probably going to be a 5-2 map with two Democrats who are both almost certainly going to be Black Democrats.
Beard: Yeah, and ultimately, this is not that difficult. Republicans and a lot of their filings made it be like, “Oh, you have to go way out of your way to make these two Black districts. You’re just gerrymandering to make yourself a second Black district.” And that’s just not true. There were plenty of maps that divided as many or fewer county lines as the map that the Republicans passed. So there’s no need to do anything crazy. Like you said, you just take Birmingham, some of the Black Belt; you take Montgomery, some of the Black Belt; very easy, there’s your map. So, Republicans who are claiming this is some sort of impossible task, it’s just silly.
Nir: Yeah. And you raise a really good point, which is that, oftentimes, these hypothetical maps that plaintiffs put forward in cases like these, score much better on various mathematical methods of measuring compactness, because Republicans usually have to go out of their way to do things like split up closely-knit communities, like the Black community in Alabama. So, a lot of these plaintiffs maps, certainly if you’re just looking at them with the naked eye, they seem to make much more sense. Now, of course, that is by no means the only or the right way to judge maps, but really, Republicans have to go to great lengths for their gerrymanders and a proper VRA compliant map is going to be just simply a much more representative one.
Beard: Yeah. Though I do expect Republicans are not going to just pass a map that complies with the VRA, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the district court ends up having to step in and draw the map themselves or appoint a special master, which is the usual process.
Nir: Yeah. And though we have these hypothetical maps from plaintiffs, we can’t say for sure what the exact map will look like. Like you said, there’s a lot of different ways this could go down, whether the court draws one, gives the legislature a chance to draw one, adopts one that the plaintiffs decide to submit as a proposed remedial map. But ultimately you’re almost certainly going to have the one Montgomery district and the one Birmingham district. The other part of this that goes way beyond Alabama is the fact that the VRA has lived to survive another day, [which] means that other similar cases in other states, mostly in the South, have a real chance of success. And in particular, the two at the top of the list are Louisiana and Georgia.
Like I said, there are similar cases there, and in fact in Louisiana, a court last year similarly ruled that the state had failed to create a second Black majority district and that it was obligated to do so except the Supreme Court like it did in Alabama last year, stepped in and said, “No, no, no, no. Too close to the election; can’t have any changes this late.” And therefore, allowed elections to proceed under an unconstitutional map.
The circumstances in Louisiana are very similar. Louisiana Republicans took New Orleans, they took Baton Rouge, and they stuck them together in the same district. These again are two cities with large Black populations. The plaintiffs here have proposed dividing those up, and having each of those cities anchor their own district. Again, they would both have Black majorities and both be likely to elect Black Democrats. And it’s the same thing in Georgia, there, last year, a judge also said that plaintiffs were likely to prevail on their argument that the state should have to create an additional Black district in the Atlanta area.
That judge, though, put his own ruling on pause because he basically knew that the Supreme Court was going to tell him, “No, you can’t order a new map to be put in place for 2022.” But those two cases are about to pick up steam once again. There is every reason why they should follow exactly what happened in Alabama. In Georgia, by the way, the Atlanta area is home to one of the largest Black populations anywhere in the country. For decades, it’s been known as the Black Mecca of the South. That’s what Ebony magazine called it all the way back in 1971. Atlanta already has three districts that elect Black Democrats either with Black majorities or something very close to it, and you won’t be surprised to learn that you can readily draw a fourth such district in the western Atlanta suburbs centered on Cobb County. Again, that would elect a Black Democrat in all likelihood.
Beard: So I think obviously Alabama and Louisiana are two of the clearest cut cases where additional Black districts need to be drawn. It’s very easy. Georgia is right there as well. And that’s why the litigation in these states are the ones that have progressed the farthest. And so I think you can see pretty clearly if this ruling stays with us, the Supreme Court doesn’t decide to backtrack or do anything crazy about timelines, and has implemented the way that it should be. There should be three additional Democratic-leaning African American districts across these three states. All of which should increase the size of the Democratic caucus after the 2024 elections.
Nir: Yeah. And everyone listening to “The Downballot” is extremely aware that Republicans have just a five-seat majority in the House. And so, that was three seats across those three states, and we haven’t even spoken about Texas yet. There’s similar litigation pending there. We’re not going to get into the weeds on that one. Ten different lawsuits, literally ten were consolidated into one case with just dozens and dozens of claims, including the Voting Rights Act and other allegations as well. Some have been rejected by the court, some are still alive. It’s very, very complex.
But taking a conservative view, it is certainly possible that the courts could order the State of Texas to draw not one, but two new VRA compliant districts, one in Dallas, one in Houston. These unlike the other districts we’ve spoken about, would have Latino majorities. And I know you’re doing the math three plus two. Hey, that’s five. Those are the five seats we need.
Now, obviously there’s a ton of ballgame left. We don’t know how all these cases will play out, like you were just saying, Beard. And also of course, as we’ve mentioned on the show before, there’s still Ohio and North Carolina where Republicans are set to re-gerrymander both maps. So all of the redistricting that’s likely to happen ahead of 2024. It could be a wash in partisan terms. But no matter what, A, this is super important for just counteracting what we can expect to happen in North Carolina and Ohio. But also let’s not lose sight of the fact that first and foremost, this is a huge victory for the Voting Rights Act, and for the cause of representation of minority communities across the country.
Beard: Absolutely. Yeah. Thirty years ago in the wake of the 1990 through 1992 redistricting, that was when many of these southern states elected their first African American representatives since Reconstruction. And for a lot of those states, it’s been one district, even as the member may have changed over the past 30 years. And a lot of these states have 30 plus percent African American populations and they deserve congressional representation that reflects that.
Nir: Well, that was quite the ride. Coming up after the break, we are going to be joined by Michael Frias and Hillary Anderson from the progressive data analytics firm, Catalist, and they are going to be talking about their fascinating data heavy report called “What Happened in 2022” that is designed to bust up all the hot takes and tell us what actually happened. Stay with us.
Joining us on The Downballot today are two members of the leadership team at Catalist, a progressive data firm. Michael Frias is the CEO of Catalist, and Hillary Anderson is the firm’s director of analytics. Thank you Michael and Hillary, both of you for joining us today.
Michael Frias: Thank you for having us.
Hillary Anderson: Thanks. It’s great to be here.
Nir: In the wake of every big election, like the one we had last year, there are always a ton of hot takes, that may or may not be supported, by the data. At Catalist, though, you’ve published a very data intensive report trying to understand the midterms called What Happened in 2022. So I’d like to hear from you, what makes your analysis unique and worthwhile and what would you say are the most important top lines from that report for our listeners?
Frias: First and foremost, the report that we put together has now been in existence for several cycles now. And I think the difference is, you’re right, there are hot takes that have to fill the air and answer some why questions and what just happened, and that is often left to the exit polls, and so it serves that purpose. The project that we have embarked on since 2018 is to really dig down, and not rely on polling and exit polling, to tell us what the composition of the electorate was, where support levels were, and ultimately what the turnout was. What we do is the painstaking process of waiting for precinct election results to be certified and verified, and then our team collects those, aggregates them, cleans them, and helps produce this analytic report. Which is really different than polling because what we’re doing is actual election results and looking at the actual vote outcome. And so that’s something that’s different.
One of the things that’s unique about Catalist is, as a data utility for the progressive community, lots of voter file vendors often drop and replace voter files. What we do is go through the painstaking process of stitching it together cycle after cycle, year after year at the statewide congressional and precinct level. And so what we’re able to do is create a very rich longitudinal data set. And so that is what gives us the most confidence in our report when it starts to get into the composition of the electorate, and who voted, and at what levels they supported a candidate, and what their turnout was. And so I think that’s a unique product that we offer to the community. So that’s kind of the report.
The top lines I think we’ve talked a lot about, and people had a suspicion about this, which is first, there was no national election. Oftentimes, these midterm elections move and you can look at the national vote and see whether or not Republicans or Democrats performed plus or minus two or three points.
And what we saw is two different stories. We saw a story where there were competitive states, which is places where we had top tier candidates and were competitively contested both on the Republican and Democratic side, and then places where we weren’t actually contesting those races both on the Democratic side or the Republican side. And what became very clear is the expectation was this would be a traditional midterm. And what we ended up witnessing was something dramatically different.
And it is fair to say that the Dobbs decision was an earthquake that reshuffled the trajectory of the election in very dramatic ways. And so we saw these two different elections both in competitive states and non-competitive states. We saw the composition of electorate look a lot like 2020 and even meet and exceed 2018 historic levels of turnout and support in performance for key constituencies among the democratic electorate.
And then three is, we also saw what I’ve started calling the MAGA attacks, which is those candidates that were MAGA Republicans, they were election deniers, they were trying to follow or mimic in the wake of Trump. That didn’t pan out for them. They weren’t as good as Trump, and they also lagged behind their GOP counterparts who had pushed away from the MAGA extremism. And so obviously, they did poorly against their GOP counterparts that were not extreme, and they did even worse against good high-quality Democratic candidates as well. So those were some of the bigger top lines.
Anderson: Yeah, the main thing that I would add on there is, in particular, looking at young voters, and how their participation this time around looks different than how it has historically looked in midterm elections. As Michael was alluding to, their performance for the youngest cohort of voters in the highly competitive, highly contested states — their turnout score or their turnout was higher than it was even in 2018, which is a high watermark for turnout. We also noticed very high levels of support among that youngest cohort of voters so that support was in the 60% range, which is not something that has historically been the case, but something that we have observed over the past few election cycles, with younger voters having a more consistent pattern of support for Democratic candidates.
Beard: So I want to dive into all of those points that you all just made, and I want to start with where you started, which was the distinction between the heavily contested races in these heavily contested states and sort of the rest of the country. And we saw that play out on election night, which I think surprised me and I think surprised a lot of people. We saw how poorly comparatively Democrats did in a state like New York and some other states where there wasn’t really a driving race — and how well they did in a state like Michigan, which had competitive races up and down the ballot. So, had we ever seen that before? Is there a cycle previously that had a similar situation or is that really a unique result? And then drilling down into what groups or what specifically drove that distinction that made it different in those two groups of states?
Anderson: Yeah. So, to answer your question, it is unique. It’s something that we noticed in this election cycle, but when we compare past presidential support to the following midterm support, this time around it is a little bit different. When we looked at that transition going from the 2012 to the 2014 cycle, we saw that regardless of whether it was a competitive or not competitive state, Democrats performed about four points worse in 2014. When we looked at that difference between ’16 and ’18, we saw that Democrats, regardless of the competitiveness of those districts, were performing about three points better than in that previous presidential election in 2016.
However, when we look at 2022, what we find is that in places with the highly competitive elections, that performance was on par with what Biden did in 2020. And when we look at the places with less competitive elections, that performance was about four points worse. So, it’s clear that in this particular cycle, we are seeing this distinction between where those elections were the most competitive and where there was just not that same level of competitiveness in those races.
Frias: Yeah. And I would add to that, that this goes to the point that really underlies the midterm, in particular, is in an environment we knew when we were doing polling and looking at the election, we knew going in that if this was a traditional midterm and Republicans were going to be more enthusiastic, more engaged in this election, that it would behave and act a lot like a traditional midterm election. I think the Dobbs decision totally reversed that. And so, what we were monitoring throughout the election was where’s the enthusiasm? Is there an enthusiasm gap? And where was it moving?
And I think you clearly see the movement in August really is when we started to notice there was a growing enthusiasm parity. There was growing enthusiasm parity. And so I think, to Hillary’s point, we saw that evident in the most competitive states. And in the other states where it wasn’t competitive, it behaved a lot, like Hillary just said, like a traditional midterm election.
Nir: So, since you mentioned Dobbs, do you think that that difference in enthusiasm among Democratic voters in the competitive states versus the less competitive states had to do with a sense that abortion rights might be more on the line in a state like Michigan as opposed to a state like New York where I’m from, where people generally take it for granted, that Democrats are always going to be in charge?
Anderson: I would say that… so, typically, we call the report what happened because we typically try to just stay to the facts of what we’ve observed and do a little less commenting on why we might have observed those changes. But I think to Michael’s point, it seems very evident that the stakes were very high when it came to abortion rights and when it came to what was happening in these various states. And from my perspective, it’s hard to deny that that played a role in what we saw.
Frias: One of the things that I would add is we’re talking about the what happened report, and I think this data suggests all the things that we’ve mentioned about competitiveness, the saliency of the race, but we were also doing polling at the same time. And I think one of the things that I would mention and observe is what was really odd in our polling was we noticed that there was a tremendous amount of undecided voters very late in the cycle. And we did significant polling in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Minnesota. And when we looked at the undecided, when we looked under the hood to see who these undecideds were, it was shocking because, historically, the undecideds are just kind of evenly split along the political distribution.
But what we did see, I think to Hillary’s point, is in these competitive places, the Republicans were undecided. Sometimes, they were 60%, 65%, almost 70% of the undecided voters when we were doing the traditional ballot question at the top of the poll. And so, I just think to highlight that, I think in these places, we also saw a tremendous amount of Republicans trying to figure out what they were going to do with their vote. And I think the data suggests that we had a lot of folks from the Republican side either stay home or come over and support Democrats. And I think that’s where you start to see the difference both in these competitive states versus in the non-competitive states where I don’t think that that dynamic or that phenomenon was as evident.
Nir: I got to say, if you had told me before the election you were seeing polls with tons of undecided Republican voters, that would’ve made me very nervous because I would have generally assumed that they were just eventually going to come home like they always do. We had Tom Jensen from PPP on the show last year, and he said, “You could never really trust those Republican undecideds to do the right thing in the end.” And yet somehow in 2022, they did.
Anderson: Yeah, I think it’s a combination of the abortion issue, as Michael mentioned earlier, but also just how extreme the MAGA candidates were and even turning off some Republican voters. As we look at the heavily competitive places, we noticed that the MAGA candidates underperformed what we would consider to be the more traditional types of Republican candidates. And, in particular, those really strong MAGA candidates even underperformed Trump’s performance in 2020 in those same geographies. And so, there’s something that is clearly happening where that brand of Republican extremism just is not connecting with voters in those areas.
Nir: There’s so much there in what you both just said to dive into further, and I want to talk about the MAGA attacks some more. I love that term. But before we move on to that, let’s talk a little bit more about abortion and Dobbs and, in particular, women voters. Now, whenever you have conversations like this, it’s always very tempting to talk about large blocks of voters as a shorthand. We say women voters, Black voters, etc. And it’s understandable that you do that when you’re just having a casual conversation on podcast. But you guys have, obviously, taken a deep dive, like you were saying at the top of the show, you really dug into the precinct results and tied it into your longitudinal analysis of the voter file. So, I’d love to know if there are any demographic breakdowns within the broader universe of women voters that you feel are worth highlighting from your findings for 2022.
Anderson: If it’s okay with you all, I kind of want to take this in two directions, one around women registration and then also talking about changes.
Nir: Absolutely, love it.
Anderson: Okay. One of the big effects that we saw in our data was this noticeable spike in the registration of voter registration of women after the Dobbs decision came out in the summer. What is particularly of note in that, is that prior to the decision, we saw women’s registration hovering at around 50% of the total registrants that were coming. So about 50% women, 50% men. When we have the Dobbs decision come down, we noticed this spike in the percentage of women registering to vote. So now, women are making up about 55% of the total registrants and new voters. After that moment, we see a decline, which is to be expected. But however, that decline did not go back down to that 50%, kind of hovering up 50%. It stayed still comfortably higher than 50%, around 53%, 52% of registrants, even going into the November election. And I think that that is something that undoubtedly had a major impact just bringing that many new women voters into the electorate.
The other important thing to note is that among white non-college women, there was a four-point swing in support towards the Democratic candidates. When we look at the highly competitive geographies, we observed a four-point swing in support for Democratic candidates among white, non-college educated women. This is incredibly notable in the 2020 presidential cycle, in these same geographies, the support was around 40%. Among white, college-educated women, we also saw a bit of a shift. That was a two-point shift in Democrats’ direction. Biden in 2020 was already performing pretty strongly with white, college-educated women with about 56% support. But even going into 2022 and this midterm year, that support went up a little bit to about 58%.
Beard: Now in a midterm where there was a number of unusual results, another unusual result was that Republicans finally got punished for some of their extremist positions. You mentioned the MAGA attacks earlier. We’ve seen it over the years. Republicans get crazier and crazier. It doesn’t seem to matter. This year, it finally did. Take us through how you actually proved that in the results and how you were able to analyze this to compare these MAGA extremist candidates versus the Republicans who didn’t deny the election and other things?
Anderson: Yeah. So, our definition of election deniers was taken from an analysis done by the Washington Post. And so, what we did here was we looked in those really competitive districts to see what was the change in support, where there were those competitive districts with a candidate with that election denier label, and to see how their performance compared to Trump’s performance in 2020. And what we observed was that in those highly competitive places, those extreme MAGA candidates performed even worse than Trump did. When we look at the performance among those who were not branded with that extremist MAGA label, those more “sane” Republicans, we saw that they performed about… those Republicans in the highly competitive places performed about 2.8% better than Trump.
So, you can see that in these highly competitive places, that Trumpian brand was a drag on those candidates. When we look at the House national, however, so this is kind of the little bit of the bad news to that, is nationally we did see that those places where there was an election denier, they actually performed a little bit better than Trump. And so, it just goes to show that where the races were the most competitive was really where that drag happened.
Nir: So, even if some election denier candidates for the House performed a little bit better than Trump, does that necessarily mean that they also would’ve performed better than a more mainstream Republican candidate? Because, obviously, we have a number of examples in hand of races that Democrats definitely won only because Republicans nominated lunatic House candidates like Washington’s 3rd District.
Anderson: So, yeah, that’s correct. So, when we look at the candidates who performed or the candidates who were not labeled the extreme MAGA candidate, those candidates performed 2.2% better than Trump did. So, when you’re looking at those less competitive places, what you’re seeing is there was a slight overperformance of about 0.7%, so not even a 1% overperformance for the extreme MAGA candidates in the less competitive places, but for the more mainstream candidates, their overperformance was 2.2 points.
Nir: So, I’ll still take that as good news then.
Anderson: Yeah. It still is good news, but I mean, it’s always a little scary when you have candidates like that who are still performing well, even in places that aren’t as contested, right? I think the other thing that I would note on this is that these candidates were not only extreme on one issue, they were not only extreme on being anti-democracy. They’re also extreme on anti-abortion. It’s hard to fully tease apart the exact reason around that, but we do know that they all did embody this very similar MAGA label and brand.
Frias: I think putting into context, what do we make of 2022, and how do we put it in context of 2024, I think is really part of what we hope people do. To help explain that, you can take these two gubernatorial candidates, Kemp in Georgia and Mastriano in Pennsylvania. You have somebody like Kemp, who hugged Trump, then distanced himself from Trump, and then benefited, at least, electorally from being classified as a non-election denier, a non-MAGA candidate, as a Washington Post classification. You see that in his performance, right? He did about four points better. Then, you flip it and you look at a Mastriano, who couldn’t hug Trump tight enough, and he really paid a price. Obviously, Shapiro was a very good candidate as well, but I think when you’re looking at this Republican primary in 2023, and what it means for 2024, you’re really looking at… there’s a choice that these Republican primary voters have.
I think, from our perspective, at least what the data suggests is this “MAGA tax” is extreme when you get to the general election. The real question is what do they do in this primary? I think that’s the thing that we continue to observe with great interest, as do many of us who are watching how this plays out, but we think there is clear evidence that would suggest that a non-MAGA extremist would do better in a general election than Trump himself, or somebody who’s trying to run very closely in his wake.
Nir: Changing gears a bit, one issue that comes up constantly is this idea or fear that voters of color are leaving the Democratic Party, especially as this notion of the Democratic Party becoming more and more focused on white college-educated voters takes hold. What kind of evidence did we see either for or against these claims in 2022?
Anderson: First of all, we don’t want to be overly positive about all the developments in 2022. We want to acknowledge that there really is one party and that we are a multicultural, diverse… and Democrats have a broad coalition of support. The one shift that is observable in our data is a decline in support among Black men in particular. When we look at the changes in support from 2020 to 2022, nationally, we see about a four-point drop in support among African-American men. It went from about 83%, or from 87% support for Biden in 2020, to around 83% in 2022. However, once again, it’s a similar pattern when you break that down at the state level. There are some differences in what Black support looked like. For example, in North Carolina, there was a higher level of support for Democratic candidates among Black voters there than Biden got in 2020.
In Georgia, too, things were on par, maybe a little bit more optimistic among Black voters, but outside of those particular elections, there is somewhat of a trend around that support, which Democrats should pay attention to. However, with all of that said, Black voters still do support Democratic candidates at the highest rate of any other racial group, and that’s true even with the declining trend line in support. I think there’s a lot of work to be done in investing in the Black electorate, and making sure that all Black people are getting represented, reached out to, and participating, but also, too, to acknowledge that differentiation in support and turnout is observed, and the competitive versus non-competitive, even among Black voters, with them performing on par in the more competitive places with 2020, and a little bit under in the less competitive places.
Frias: If I could add to this, to your question, it’s a popular sentiment. The Republicans are growing this broad diverse coalition that’s going to reshape and remake the Republican Party, and make them a force to be reckoned with. On the other side, you have this other sentiment that demographics is destiny. We’ve also seen evidence that that’s not something that we can… so we’re balancing between these two baselines. Then, when you look at just the composition of the electorate, for who voted for Democrats, who voted for Republicans, it is very clear that the Republicans have a long way to go to actually prove and show that they actually have this broad coalition of support. In our report, we break down the coalition. 33% of the electorate that voted for Democrats were white non-college. 33% were white college, 18% among Black voters, 10% among Latinos, and 5% among AAPI voters.
Then, when you look at the Republicans, it’s 55% white non-college, and then it’s 31% white college. Then, to piggyback off of what Hillary said, it’s 2% Black voters, and then 6% among Latinos, and 3% among AAPI. I think when we’re looking at this and observing it, the thing that I think we want to be centered on is we do have that actual multiracial, multicultural, socioeconomic support and coalition, but we can’t take it for granted. To Hillary’s point, we can say that about Black voters. We certainly need to say that among Latino voters and also AAPI voters, as well.
I think when we think about how we move forward as a party into 2024, we have a much stronger, diverse foundation than the Republicans do heading into the 2024 election. However, just because we did well in 2022 doesn’t mean it’s just automatic. I think that’s the message that really has started to resonate and echo from cycle to cycle, when we talk to groups on the ground and some of our clients that are doing the hard work in and out of election cycles is, “Pay attention. Invest early. Stay committed, and stay through the election, and then past the election.” We’re starting to see the benefit of that.
Beard: You mentioned that Georgia and North Carolina were two examples where Black voters did as well or better in 2022 for Democrats than they did for Biden in 2020. Of course, those were two states where Democrats nominated African American candidates for Senate, and of course, in Georgia, also for governor. This may not be something you’ve studied in the report or have hard data on, but it certainly seems like having African American candidates lead the ticket logically leads to higher turnout, more support for Democrats when that happens, and it’s certainly something for Democrats to think about moving forward.
Anderson: Yeah. I think that that’s absolutely right. It’s something that Democrats should be mindful of as we move into future elections. It’s not anything that we can definitively show in our report, but logic would lead you to think that that would be the case. I think it’s also always great when the Democratic Party can have candidates that are as diverse as the coalition that Michael was just mentioning. We want to not just have a set of voters who is reflective of the true diversity of the nation, but also a set of candidates who reflect that diversity as well. Hopefully, as we build up more of this evidence, we’ll be able to see that more clearly over time.
Beard: Now, obviously, Catalist spent months working on this report, a lot of great information there, but we’re already needing to look to the next thing, to the next election, the next avenue. What is Catalist going to be working on for the next few months and leading up to 2024 that might be of interest?
Frias: Quite a few things. First and foremost, Catalist is doubling down and investing in demystifying data and analytics. For too long and too often, the folks with the numbers keep it secret and keep it hard to understand. I think Hillary’s done a great job leading an effort with Dr. Janay Cody and others to have 101 lessons, and having office hours where folks on the ground, the users of our data that are working in all these communities across the country, have an opportunity to ask practitioners and experts, “Hey, what do I make of a vote propensity model? What do I make of the race and ethnicity modeling that’s available on your file? How do I think about it in terms of the various… I want to do community building, I want do electoral outreach, I want to identify a representative universe that I can go and talk to?” I think that we’re going to continue to do more of that.
Two is we’re going to continue to double down on… our team of experts on polling are going to continue to take a look at how we can make more it transparent, and advise folks on what are the best practices in polling and methodology so that we can get better, more accurate results. I think there’s always a lot of contention about whether… are we moving more to polling, or is it analytics? What’s the right equation? Our team will continue to invest in that. Then, lastly, I think we’re interested in being a utility for the entire community. I think you can anticipate bigger efforts like we did a joint cell phone acquisition that provided all the cell phones we could purchase to the community in partnership with our friendly competitors, TargetSmart, with the support of some of the biggest actors in our space.
I’m really excited about our progressive ecosystem maturing and developing, and figuring out ways that we can partner and collaborate, not for our own individual best interests, but fundamentally, what we realized post-2016, and it certainly became very stark and clear in 2020, is we’re all in this together. There are times when we are competitive, but there are times when what is going on in this country matters more, and we should be doing everything we can to build as many partnerships, and to do as much as we can, to benefit the entire progressive ecosystem.
Nir: We’ve been talking with Michael Freas and Hillary Anderson of the progressive data firm, Catalist. Michael and Hillary, where can folks find out more about your work? Where can they find the “What Happened in 2022” report that we have been talking about on this show, and where can they follow you on social media?
Anderson: Folks can find our report on our website, catalist.us/whathappened2022. Folks can also find us on Twitter with the handle @Catalist_US.
Nir: That’s Catalist with an “I,” obviously, because you guys are all about the voter list. Michael and Hillary, thank you so much for joining us on The Downballot this week. This was fascinating.
Anderson: Thank you.
Frias: Thank you for having us.
Beard: That’s all from us this week. Thanks to Michael Freas and Hillary Anderson for joining us. “The Downballot” comes out every Thursday, everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing thedownballot@dailykos.com. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to “The Downballot” on Apple Podcasts, and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks to our producer, Walter Einenkel, and editor, Trever Jones. We’ll be back next week with a new episode.
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