Tag: Cruz

Do Democrats Really Have A Chance In Tennessee and Texas?

Predictions as of 10/1/2018:

1_10predictions

Tennessee has not had a Democratic Senator since Jim Sasser left office in 1995 having lost his re-election campaign by 14.3 percentage points, a huge defeat for an incumbent. The state hasn’t voted for a Democratic nominee for the presidency since 1996, and in 2016 Trump won in Tennessee by a full 26 points. Sure, it’s an open race, so Republicans don’t have the advantage of incumbency, but even so, any state-wide election in Tennessee should surely be an open goal for the GOP. And yet our model is giving Republican Marsha Blackburn only a 58.5% chance of winning its Senate race this year, why?

Firstly, Phil Bredesen is no normal Democratic candidate in a red state. He is a former Governor of Tennessee, and a successful one at that, winning re-election in 2006 with 69% of the vote, winning every county and more votes than any gubernatorial candidate in the history of the state, which stretches back to 1796. His reputation as a moderate Democrat makes him far more palatable amongst independents and moderate Republicans in Tennessee than a typical Democrat, and his political experience is practically unrivalled in the state. In 1991 he defeated Councilwoman Betty Nixon with 72% of the vote to become Mayor of Nashville, a position he used to invest heavily in education, building and renovating 75 schools throughout the city. In 1995, no one even ran against his campaign for re-election. His two terms as Mayor built him a formidable base in Nashville, which is incredibly significant given that Nashville’s metro area contains 1.9 million of Tennessee’s 6.7 million inhabitants (about 28%). Since his governorship, he’s been viewed as a potential Democratic presidential candidate, and was vetted for the position of Secretary of Health and Human Services in the Obama Administration. He is a political giant in only a modestly sized state.

Secondly, the national environment is leaning heavily to the left, with Democrats leading the generic congressional ballot by approximately 8.5 points. Tennessee tends to lean about 14 points to the right, taking away 8.5 from 14 leaves only a 5.5 point lead for the Republicans, which is significant, but by no means insurmountable. Add on to this Trump’s poor approval ratings and Tennessee, along with many other red states, looks a lot more competitive.

The national environment is of course also relevant in Texas (much to the distress of millions of pro-secession Texans), but intuitively speaking the state should be even more hostile to a Democratic Senate candidate than Tennessee. Texas hasn’t had a Democratic Senator since 1993 after incumbent Bob Krueger lost his re-election campaign by an impressively abysmal 34.7 points in what the Houston Chronicle called the worst campaign in the state’s modern political history. Texas hasn’t voted for a Democratic nominee for the presidency since narrowly supporting Jimmy Carter in 1976. Furthermore, the Senate seat up for election this year is guarded by none other than well known incumbent and 2016 presidential candidate Ted Cruz, armed with a net worth of over $3 million and a comfortable win in his previous election of 16.1 points, even though it occurred in a Democratic leaning national environment as it coincided with Obama’s re-election campaign. So far Cruz has raised a whopping $24 million, and is extremely keen to hold on to his seat as at the age of only 47, practically a child compared to much of the Senate, he could easily use his position as Senator to set himself up for running for President in 2024.

So how do the Democrats compete with a (comparatively) young man with a net worth of over $3 million? It’s simple, an ever so slightly younger man with a net worth of $9 million, and a proven track record of winning the unwinnable races in politics. In 2005, Beto O’Rourke defeated 2 term incumbent Anthony Cobos to win a seat on the El Paso City Council. In 2012, he ran for the Democratic nomination for the deeply left leaning 16th congressional district in Texas, facing off against 8 term Democratic incumbent Silvestre Reyes, who was endorsed by then President Barack Obama and former President Bill Clinton. Somehow, O’Rourke won the seat, and is now hoping to pull off a third extraordinary victory, seizing onto the key opportunity presented to him in 2018, with Cruz’s approval ratings as Senator going negative, Trump’s approval in Texas surprisingly low, and a heavily left-leaning national environment. Like Cruz, he’s raised $24 million, and he is swiftly fighting to gain the name-recognition he needs to compete with the now famous Cruz with talk show appearances and a campaign with an active social media presence.

Both of these races are looking extremely close, with O’Rourke trailing Cruz by only 3 or 4 points and Bredesen actually ahead of his opponent Marsha Blackburn by about 1 point. Needless to say, if Republicans were to lose either one of these seats, the consequences for them would be extreme. As discussed in a previous article on RedvBlue, Democratic incumbents in deep red seats are an absolute necessity to Democratic hopes of controlling the upper chamber of Congress. O’Rourke in particular is a huge threat to the GOP, if he were to win, he could potentially stay on in the Senate for a long time. He is young, he’s proving himself an adept campaigner, and with the advantage of incumbency could well hold on to the seat in Texas in future elections, especially as the state is becoming less and less Republican as time goes on. These two elections could very well determine who controls the Senate for the next two years or more, and both are extremely competitive.

Introducing RedvBlue’s Senate Model

Predictions as of 9/29/2018:

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On November the 8th 2016, 129 million Americans went to the polls in one of the most bitterly fought and important elections of the 21st century. Over the course of the following night, Donald Trump’s huge upset victory was gradually unveiled to tens of millions of people watching with baited breath. The result defied almost all predictions, and left the GOP utterly dominant in the political landscape. There were 33 Republican governors, and the GOP held reasonable majorities in both chambers of Congress. As if this weren’t enough, there was an open seat on the Supreme Court, which Trump promptly filled with conservative Neil Gorsuch. With the recent retirement of Justice Anthony Kennedy, Trump and the Senate Republicans are rushing to replace Kennedy with Brett Kavanaugh, whose confirmation would create a conservative majority in the Supreme Court which could last over a decade, securing control of all three branches of government for the GOP.

There’s just one fly in the ointment for the Republicans. The 2018 midterms are just a week and a month away, and various indicators are looking good for the Democrats. Trump’s approval ratings are barely beating 40%, and the Democrats are at an 8-9 point advantage in national polling. Republican structural advantages, such as gerrymandering of house districts, help to mitigate some of this Democratic lead, but there is still a strong possibility that Democrats will be able to wrest control of at least one chamber of Congress. These elections will determine whether or not Trump’s GOP will have 2 years of total control of the federal government. The stakes couldn’t be higher.

RedvBlue’s Senate model attempts to accurately predict the outcome of 2018’s highly competitive battle for the upper chamber of Congress. The model is probabilistic, meaning that it runs hundreds of thousands of simulations of the election, counting the results of each, to eventually arrive at a set of results including the probabilities of various outcomes. The model takes into account the following factors:

  • Polls of individual races, the nation as a whole, and presidential approval. Polls are adjusted according to sample size and the pollster who published them, then weighted against one another, with higher quality polls being attributed more weight than lesser polls and polls with a smaller sample size.
  • Similarity between races. This is a particularly important factor in races with minimal polling. Races are compared against one another according to the nature of the state in which they are taking place, and the candidates running in them. For each race, predictions for similar races are used to infer additional information to assist with accurate simulation.
  • Typical expectations for each race. These are the factors one would look to if there were no polling at all. Most prominent amongst these is the incumbent Senator, their party, and their previous margins of victory. Other factors assisting in weighting the expectations include the partisan lean of the states in which each race is taking place, demographic factors, the population of the state, congressional approval ratings, and fundraising.
  • The time until election day. As the election draws closer, uncertainty will decrease, and the model will weigh polling increasingly heavily.

Currently, the model is showing Republicans slightly ahead in the race for the Senate, despite a seemingly large Democratic lead in the popular vote. This is due to 2018’s Senate map. Of the 35 seats up for election, 26 are already held by Democrats. This gives them few opportunities to make the 2 gains they need to win the Senate. Furthermore, many of these 26 seats are in red states which overwhelmingly voted for Trump in 2016. Races in North Dakota, Indiana, Montana, Missouri and West Virginia all present very real opportunities for Republicans to make gains of their own, which the Democrats can ill afford given their limited options. But if we learned only one thing from 2016, it is that in American politics, just about anything can and will happen.