How SWEET it is!
Early voting data: Forget Trump. Now down-ballot Republicans are toast, too
By DocDawg
Thursday Oct 20, 2016 · 2:47 PM PDT
In the words of the classic New Yorker cartoon: "See that chart? Don't you believe it!" Except, yeah... believe it.
The best-loved cliche among candidates whose polling numbers are in the tank is “there’s only one poll that matters...” Specifically that would be the one completed biennially on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November — a little thing we like to call “the election.” But chances are you won’t be hearing that line any time soon from beleaguered Republicans like North Carolina’s governor, Pat McCrory, or its senior senator, Richard Burr. Because early voting data from the state Board of Elections is signaling ever more compellingly the strong likelihood of looming disaster not merely for Trump, but for those hapless down-ballot incumbents as well.
Faced with the patently obvious existential threat presented by Trump’s nomination, the smart money in Republican circles has long figured that the safe play was to avoid antagonizing his passionate followers by ever actually disavowing him, while courting more rational Republicans by not really embracing him either. Write off the top of the ticket, but defend the House, the Senate, and a host of state races. Live to fight another day.
It’s a perfectly rational strategy, but one with a dangerous Achilles Heel: it only works if your voters aren’t so thoroughly disgusted that they simply give up, and fail to vote at all. Because the one unbreakable chain that ties down-ballot candidates by their necks to the top of the ticket, whether they like it or not, is the ballot itself. Turnout jumps in presidential election years, compared to mid-term elections, precisely because presidential candidates are the secret sauce that lures fair weather voters to the polls.
A little over two weeks ago, we at Insightus — along with many prognosticators at other news outlets — began carefully attending to the daily data dumps coming out of the North Carolina State Board of Elections’ computers, which detail the progress of absentee voting by mail in the Tar Heel State. Others chose to flog the story that requests for absentee ballots from registered Republicans were way ahead of requests from Democrats (which is a non-issue because this is true every year; absentee voting by mail is a Republican thing in NC). Looking at the same data, we saw another and decidedly more interesting story: ballots actually completed and mailed back to the NC Board of Elections were falling behind 2012’s pace. And we found hints that the deficit could be specifically and exclusively traced to registered Republicans, who simply weren’t sending their completed ballots back in at anything like a normal rate.
By October 10th that tantalizing hint had become a solid trend: Republican returns were lagging about 50% behind their 2012 levels, while Democratic returns were a few points ahead of their typically modest performance. And the same was true when we looked again on October 13th, and yet again on on the 18th. And now with our just-published October 20th update there can be no other interpretation but that faced with a choice between one candidate they have been taught to despise and another they find utterly appalling, it appears that over 40% of Republican voters are just tuning out.
It feels unlikely that this would prove to be just a North Carolina thing, so we expect to see much the same play out across numerous states. And that’s not exactly “good news for John McCain,” nor for his Tar Heel colleague Richard Burr, nor NC governor Pat McCrory either, and so on and on. If your voters won’t vote at all, there’s no down-ballot defense strategy that can amount to a bucket of warm spit.
The simple and increasingly apparent fact is that Trump’s calamitous campaign is kryptonite for every candidate in his party — even those like Burr and McCrory who have tried to finesse things to make the best of a bad situation.
Early voting data: Forget Trump. Now down-ballot Republicans are toast, too
By DocDawg
Thursday Oct 20, 2016 · 2:47 PM PDT
In the words of the classic New Yorker cartoon: "See that chart? Don't you believe it!" Except, yeah... believe it.
The best-loved cliche among candidates whose polling numbers are in the tank is “there’s only one poll that matters...” Specifically that would be the one completed biennially on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November — a little thing we like to call “the election.” But chances are you won’t be hearing that line any time soon from beleaguered Republicans like North Carolina’s governor, Pat McCrory, or its senior senator, Richard Burr. Because early voting data from the state Board of Elections is signaling ever more compellingly the strong likelihood of looming disaster not merely for Trump, but for those hapless down-ballot incumbents as well.
Faced with the patently obvious existential threat presented by Trump’s nomination, the smart money in Republican circles has long figured that the safe play was to avoid antagonizing his passionate followers by ever actually disavowing him, while courting more rational Republicans by not really embracing him either. Write off the top of the ticket, but defend the House, the Senate, and a host of state races. Live to fight another day.
It’s a perfectly rational strategy, but one with a dangerous Achilles Heel: it only works if your voters aren’t so thoroughly disgusted that they simply give up, and fail to vote at all. Because the one unbreakable chain that ties down-ballot candidates by their necks to the top of the ticket, whether they like it or not, is the ballot itself. Turnout jumps in presidential election years, compared to mid-term elections, precisely because presidential candidates are the secret sauce that lures fair weather voters to the polls.
A little over two weeks ago, we at Insightus — along with many prognosticators at other news outlets — began carefully attending to the daily data dumps coming out of the North Carolina State Board of Elections’ computers, which detail the progress of absentee voting by mail in the Tar Heel State. Others chose to flog the story that requests for absentee ballots from registered Republicans were way ahead of requests from Democrats (which is a non-issue because this is true every year; absentee voting by mail is a Republican thing in NC). Looking at the same data, we saw another and decidedly more interesting story: ballots actually completed and mailed back to the NC Board of Elections were falling behind 2012’s pace. And we found hints that the deficit could be specifically and exclusively traced to registered Republicans, who simply weren’t sending their completed ballots back in at anything like a normal rate.
By October 10th that tantalizing hint had become a solid trend: Republican returns were lagging about 50% behind their 2012 levels, while Democratic returns were a few points ahead of their typically modest performance. And the same was true when we looked again on October 13th, and yet again on on the 18th. And now with our just-published October 20th update there can be no other interpretation but that faced with a choice between one candidate they have been taught to despise and another they find utterly appalling, it appears that over 40% of Republican voters are just tuning out.
It feels unlikely that this would prove to be just a North Carolina thing, so we expect to see much the same play out across numerous states. And that’s not exactly “good news for John McCain,” nor for his Tar Heel colleague Richard Burr, nor NC governor Pat McCrory either, and so on and on. If your voters won’t vote at all, there’s no down-ballot defense strategy that can amount to a bucket of warm spit.
The simple and increasingly apparent fact is that Trump’s calamitous campaign is kryptonite for every candidate in his party — even those like Burr and McCrory who have tried to finesse things to make the best of a bad situation.
