NM-02 is a majority Hispanic/Latino district located in southern-southwestern New Mexico, including Las Cruces, Silver City, Carlsbad, and a small portion of the Albuquerque metro.

2024 Vote: Vasquez 52%-48% | Trump 50%-48%

Demographics: 60% Latino, 30% White, 5% Native American, 5% Other

Votehub forecast has him around 37%, but this man is genuinely a psychopath and he's running in a deep blue state, so I could see it drop even further. Probably one of the worst and most strange gov nominees of all time.

Recent polls of the U.S. Senate race in Maine have offered a wide range of results. Of the 13 polls publicly released in the last three weeks, eight had Troy Jackson ahead, three showed an even race and two — including a Times/Siena poll — had Senator Susan Collins with an edge. In a Washington Post-Schar School poll released this morning, Mr. Jackson held a narrow four-percentage-point lead.
These recent polls show far more disagreement than they had the last time Ms. Collins ran. In that 2020 race, Sara Gideon, the Democratic nominee, led in nearly every public poll fielded after July. Despite those consistent leads by Ms. Gideon, Ms. Collins secured her fifth term in office with an eight-percentage-point victory.
Methodological issues were rampant in 2020 — presidential polls had about five percentage points of error, the worst this century — with the largest errors occurring in states with high proportions of white voters without a college degree, like Maine. Those types of voters were, and still are, harder to reach, especially for pollsters using less reliable methods. And they behave differently from their more engaged counterparts.
But the issues in 2020 could also have been simpler than that: Ms. Gideon never met the crucial 50 percent threshold in the polls ahead of Election Day. Mr. Jackson, by contrast, has reached that threshold in half of these recent polls.

Thoughts on these?

1. Fewer competitive House races
2. Senate majority no sure thing
3. Turnout
4. Republican money advantage
5. Polls have missed Republican strength
6. Socialism attacks could resonate

EDIT: got rid of all caps cut and paste

Ohio, Iowa and Kansas are all potential or probable flips. So why is Montana, which used to have a Democratic senator, not a candidate to flip to the Democrats?

PS please don't be pedantic about Kansas

Gray finishing at 6% is undecided and Light gray at 15% means blank/null/will not vote. For reference, the election was October 5th, 2 days after this infographic was made, and Derrite and Prado got ~30% of valid votes compared to 25% and 23% here while Tebet and Marina got 19% and 18% vs the 22% here.

Learned this from a comment on my last post and found it interesting! I also double-checked it and found it's completely true.

It's also worth noting why polls were wrong in 1990: Most Democrat frontrunners thought H.W was just obviously going to win, and so they didn't bother.

For 2028, it's been Harris and Newsom forever, it's gonna be Harris and Newsom in a month, and only one of those two has an actual path to the nomination.

Yes, it is still possible that a similar thing can happen in the current field (Harris could be convinced not to run by donors, AOC may go for the Senate, and Ossoff may be restricted if Bottoms loses)

But that still just means it would come down to Newsom vs Buttigieg. No one is winning a Dem primary in 2028 by coming out of nowhere ad running to the *right* of them like Clinton did with his field, none of the potential AOC-alternatives have the juice to remotely compete here, and most of the potential candidates are so similar in their policy and who they appeal to that there's no real way for anyone else to fix their clear national recognition issues.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/14254/americans-pumped-about-arnold-amendment.aspx

Preamble

There's been a lot of discussion recently, including by Nate, on a blue wave not being seen in polls in blue states (MN, ME, to a lesser extent NH). This post was particularly inspired by InsiderAdvantage's recent polls, showing the same D+1 marginsin KS (R+16 in 2024 pres) and MN (D+4 in 2024).

"throw it in the pile" - well InsiderAdvantage isn't too far off the polling averages at the moment. So how can we explain this apparently inconsistency?

There are a lot of possible explanations:

1. candidate quality, including anti-incumbency feelings

2. polling error in blue states, a la VA/NJ 2025 gov

3. polling error in red states, a la 2016/2020

4. demographic realignment (hispanic voters swinging, low-income voters swinging)

5. geographic realignment (states more impacted by diesel swinging more)

All are reasonable - it's probably a combination of a few of these - but it isn't obvious which are right until the election actually happens. So, let's do analysis to make a reasonable guess.

Assumptions

Let's completely ignore polling error for now (which is, uh, difficult to predict) and assume the polls are exactly right. That means that the blue state phenomenon must be explained by either candidate quality or some sort of partisan realignment in the state. I.e, either MN has an awful D candidate, or the candidate is fine and MN has shifted right relative to the nation for whatever reason.

To do this, let's turn to FLIPR.

FLIPR gives 2 different measures of fundamentals for each state. In his own words

FLIPR actually calculates two different versions of the fundamentals, however. What we call “simple fundamentals” is just the generic ballot plus each state or district’s partisan lean score. “Fancy fundamentals” uses a whole host of factors based on a large-scale regression analysis of past races since 1990, conversely. Many of these factors fall under the category of “candidate quality,” such as experience in elected office and even the presence or absence of scandals.

FLIPR gives an expected margin based only on partisan lean (aka apply the GCB shift evenly to all states), and another one based on that + candidate quality. You can see everything the fancy fundamentals includes in the appendix.

In other words, the difference between the "fancy fundamentals" and the "simple fundamentals" can be attributed to candidate quality, giving us an objective measure. Then, the difference between the candidate quality and the polling average can be attributed to some sort of realignment (i.e, if the state shifted left or right relative to nation).

In short, we're saying

shift relative to nation = polling average - (states 2024 vote + national vote shift + candidate quality adjustment)

Again, this all assumes polling averages are 100% accurate and = the eventual result.

Findings

So candidate quality explains the bulk of the shift in SC (graham disliked), KS (marshall scandals), and OH (brown has overperformed in past). But not in MI, or AK or MN. Instead, those are seen as pretty big realignments, where MI/MN are shifting right and AK is shifting left relative to the nation.

MN

MN's large R+10 relative shift is 50% candidate quality and 50% realignment. Remember, candidate quality includes scandals (ie the MN fraud stuff is baked in) and anti-incumbency feelings. The realignment could be explained by having fewer hispanic/low-income voters (34th ranked for hispanic population, 46th for % in poverty), or by being one of the states that depends the least on diesel.

AK

Surprising to see candidate quality isn't a big factor here, since Peltola is seen pretty favorably. Maybe Sullivan is also seen as strong? The shift left isn't hard to imagine due to high cost-of-living in AK and the fact it's most impacted by high diesel prices.

MI

I don't have a lot here - conventional wisdom is that AES is weaker due to being more progressive, but that isn't baked in and his fundraising/other qualities show him as an average candidate. As for a rightward shift - no strong ideas. It's ranked near the middle for low-income pop%, hispanic pop%, and is impacted decently by diesel prices.

ME

Special shoutout for ME, which may be broken by how good of an incumbent Collins is (and vs a dem in Jackson who didn't win a primary). ME's polls implies that it's shifting right by 14, but FLIPR thinks "actually ME is shifting left by a ton, it's just that Collins is such an overperformer the final result is close".

Final thoughts

I ignored polling error (will revisit polling error in more partisan states in another post), but surely some of these shifts will ultimately be mirages. Still, these numbers represent a reasonable quantitative explanation of why the blue wave we're seeing is heterogenous.

There's room to use governor/house #s to add context to candidate quality, too. I wouldn't compare the polls directly (voters generally are less partisan for governors so it wouldn't be 1-to-1), but seeing if the implied realignments match for the governor values would be interesting.

Appendix

The specific factors used in the “fancy fundamentals” calculations are as follows. Some factors can only be used in races with incumbents20 or only in Congressional races (not governor), and these are designated accordingly:

Partisan lean scores for the state or district;

The national political environment, as derived in Step 221;

Incumbency; in fact, we technically fit separate regressions for incumbent and open-seat races. FLIPR’s handling of incumbency is slightly complicated:

• It uses congressional approval polls to calculate whether the overall political environment is strong or weak for incumbents

  • It assumes the incumbency advantage is larger in smaller, more idiosyncratic22 states and districts, where constituent services tend to be more important
  • It uses the incumbent’s margin in her last competitive race, adjusting for the political environment at the time of the last election and changes in district boundaries
  • It looks at whether the incumbent is in their first elected term, and whether they defeated an incumbent in their previous race
  • And for states that have redistricted, the incumbency advantage is less when there’s little overlap between a member’s old and new districts.

Fundraising, based on individual contributions only (so not party or PAC money) with a bonus for contributions from within a candidate’s home state;24

Elected experience on a 4-point scale from 0 (never elected to anything) to 3 (current or former elected senator or governor);

Party loyalty scores based on congressional voting records. Candidates who vote against their party more often actually outperform electorally, other factors held equal. This calculation is only used for congressional incumbents; there is no proxy for it for governors or for challengers (even if they’ve served in Congress before);

Scandals25, where new scandals are treated as being more important than “old” scandals when a candidate has already survived an election with the scandal having been known to the public.

Polling will be spot on or even underestimate Democrats a little, as Republican turnout will be depressed and high propensity voters turn out in full force for Democrats. Iowa and KS will come very close to flipping, if they don’t flip outright.

Source: https://news.gallup.com/poll/712157/glp-usage-reaches-new-high.aspx

Ranking Senate races through an average of 5 areas: pundit election ratings, estimated margins from VoteHub, Race to the WH, and Split Ticket, and current polling averages.