It impresses me that we're in a place where someone talking the way Talarico does can be cast by the media as a moderate. It's a great talent to be able to take progressive stances but convince most listeners that he's a moderate anyway. He's not AOC but I would not call him a moderate at all. I'm impressed that his way of communicating works so well.
I do hope he shifts to the center on some cultural issues after the primary. He will need some center-right voters to win. He can throw them a bone on guns or oil. His immigration stance is already pretty good for a general election audience.
I'm fine leaving it to his campaign to make sense of, but if voters and the media already perceive him as a moderate, he has no real reason to forcibly moderate himself.
To the extent where Talarico does that, he can have that capability if it means he is more interested in uniting Texans as opposed to trying to appeal to purists who want him to be the picture perfect progressive.
In TX, we really can't afford to focus on purity right now, especially considering the GOP is already being perceived as toxic to Hispanic voters.
It says a lot about the unprofessionalism of Jasmine Crockett that she's joined in some of the most insane attacks on James Talarico or her critics (Bowen Yang) that have been laundered by her supporters who think we're still in the Great Awokening.
Like before this dustup, Crockett's supporters were attacking Talarico for saying on Jubilee that Joe Biden failed on immigration. Even if you think Talarico went too far with that statement, do you really think defending Joe Biden in Texas of all places is a political winner?
Oh the outrage of saying something constructive about President Biden not being successful on immigration! Damn it be that Democrats learn from their mistakes.
If anything, this makes me want James Talarico as a Senator even more if it means he's not afraid to tell it how it is.
Good. She deserves to be replaced for that reason. I'm always for replacing worthless officials. Especially when they have such horrible political instincts.
“It should be an eye-opener to all of us that we all need to pick up the pace,” U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, a Republican from a majority-Hispanic district in South Texas, said in an interview. “The candidate has to do their part, the party has to do their part. And then those of us in the arena, we have to do our part to help them as well.”
Someone needs to tell Rep. Gonzales that making a statement like this is really a waste of his time considering he represents a Lean GOP district that is overwhelmingly Hispanic. Perhaps he should stop making public statements, get on the campaign trail and take action.
On second thought, forget it. No point anyway as he's potentially going to lose his House seat anyway in this already toxic political environment considering it's a Lean GOP district with an overwhelmingly Hispanic population. He's already wooden with his ICE views to begin with and probably gets along with Rep. Mike Lawler, who is another ICE ass kisser trying to be a voice of "reason." Not to mention he's showing the rioters he really doesn't care.
These kind of statements from Gonzales make zero sense to me. The answer, Tony, is to stop racially profiling and terrorizing brown people and shooting American citizens. Not whatever “pick up the pace” or “put in the work” is supposed to mean. It’s not that hispanics aren’t hearing the GOP message. It’s that they fucking hate it after flirting with it in 2024.
True although it was evident when the GOP did the autopsy of what happened when Mitt Romney lost the presidential election back in 2012 they didn't do shit. Absolutely nothing. If Trump did not suck the oxygen so much in the 2016 presidential election, the GOP still would not have done anything to change themselves anyway. A better approach post-2012 would have been for the GOP to have real balls in shifting toward being a more moderate party so they could genuinely appeal to changing demographics.
Instead, the GOP kept Reince Priebus on as RNC Chair through 2017 and has not really changed as a whole.
I don’t think money will be an issue for us. On top of Chris Taylor’s 10-1 fundraising advantage over Maria Lazar, the Wisconsin Democratic Party outraised the state Republican Party by over $10 million last year in their federal accounts. I don’t know if that money can only be spent on federal races, so if so, it might not be usable for the Supreme Court race.
I remember when Protosaewicz won the February 2023 primary, the WI Democratic Party transferred several million dollars to her campaign the following day. It wasn’t specified whether they used a federal account or not.
As promised, here's my essay speculating on a 2002 Minnesota Senate race counterfactual, coincidentally on a morning where another Minnesota Senate race is the headline topic of today's page. I welcome alternative opinions challenging my conclusion, and I especially welcome any polling data that backed up Wellstone's reported lead above and beyond what I found.
Simple question: if Paul Wellstone hadn't died in a plane crash 11 days before the election, would he have won a third term?
The conventional wisdom about this election has endured for nearly a quarter century, particularly in the minds of Democrats. The general breakdown of the CW is that Wellstone and Republican challenger Norm Coleman had been effectively tied for most of the year, but when Wellstone cast his vote against the resolution for military force in Iraq in October, Minnesotans respected his integrity and migrated in his direction. Wellstone was poised to win before he died, but when voters perceived his televised memorial service to have turned into a tasteless campaign rally, they recoiled in disgust and censured the Democratic Party by voting for Coleman.
I've never fully bought this conventional wisdom for a number of reasons. Foremost among them, I'm skeptical of the weight of individual events in generating wholesale transformations in voters' decisions. My skepticism about campaign missteps and media-fueled controversies moving voters in meaningful numbers has only hardened in the Trump era, but I suspect it was quite relevant in 2002 as well. The polling suggested Wellstone got a five-point bounce after casting his vote against military action in Iraq....and the election night tally suggested Coleman got a five-point bounce in the closing days of the election. Few people seemed to consider that the common denominator may have been questionable polling samples rather than dithering voters.
And far as I can tell, most of the narrative surrounding the momentum shifts was tied to a single Mason Dixon poll released by the Minneapolis Star Tribune in mid-October. Previous samples had shown Wellstone and Coleman deadlocked, but the poll released after Wellstone's Iraq vote showed him leading by 6 points. It was a relief to those of us on Team Wellstone but there was scant polling data beyond that backing up the premise of Wellstone pulling away.
Following the exasperated responses of local and national media, as well as then-Governor Jesse Ventura, to the tone of Wellstone's October 29 memorial service, Democrats were nervous that there would be fallout. They were relieved when the poll released the Sunday before the election, taken entirely after the memorial, had replacement Democratic nominee Walter Mondale leading by 5 points. The only problem: it was the same pollster (Mason Dixon on behalf of the Star Tribune). If there was additional reliable public polling backing up Mason Dixon's findings, I wasn't aware of it then and am struggling to discover any record of it now. The only other poll on my radar that late in the cycle was from the St. Paul Pioneer Press and showed the opposite outcome, with a 6-point lead for Coleman.
So were Minnesota voters really this fickle in October and early November 2002? Did they really flock to Wellstone to reward his courageous vote against invading Iraq only to do a heel turn back to Coleman in response to Wellstone's memorial service? That seems less likely to me than Mason Dixon simply having polling samples that were too friendly to Wellstone (in October) and Mondale (in November).
No shade is intended to Mason Dixon if they did because it was a hard race to poll, with an unusually dynamic Minnesota electorate diverging in unpredictable ways. Wellstone's campaign was upfront that the only reason they were hanging in there against Coleman was Wellstone's strength in rural Minnesota. The Coleman campaign telegraphed the same dynamic as they were on the airwaves with ads lobbying hard to cut Wellstone's rural advantage and were funding full-page color ads about the "death tax" in weekly rural newspapers to further land a foothold among voters who were ambivalent toward him.
Anecdotally, I was observing the same thing working at the time as a farm reporter in southwestern Minnesota. Wellstone's decades of advocacy on behalf of farmers and workers had broken through and he won considerable crossover support from otherwise rock-ribbed conservatives in farm country in a race against the former mayor of St. Paul. Given the trajectory of ideological loyalties in the generation since, it seems all the more remarkable that a Senator as unapologetically progressive as Paul Wellstone put together such a comprehensive downscale coalition in a Midwestern state.
Every indication is that this rural advantage transferred to Mondale, who also punched above the DFL's weight in the majority of farm and factory towns throughout the state and across media markets. Mondale's coalition looked very similar to what Wellstone's campaign teased that they expected their own coalition to look like. There's no way of knowing if the familiar Mondale name increased that outstate Minnesota advantage by a tick or if Wellstone's absence on the ballot compelled some pro-Wellstone Republicans back to the GOP, but it's reasonable to assume the difference was negligible.
Whatever the case, the real action was going on in the metro area, which saw a massive swing to Coleman. The Minneapolis-St. Paul suburbs and exurbs experienced both blistering population growth and a political realignment in the late 90s and early 2000s. It was hard to get a good read on this realignment in 1998 because of the third-party factor with Jesse Ventura, but it was harder to ignore when George W. Bush managed double-digit gains in nearly all of the Twin Cities collar counties. Senator Rod Grams scored margins nearly identical to Bush that cycle, prevailing in every suburban and exurban county even while losing decisively statewide. It was a worrying pattern for Democrats that seemed likely to persist in 2002, but the magnitude of the GOP suburban advantage come election night was genuinely shocking even to those expecting the worst.
The double-digit swing toward the GOP in suburban Minnesota in 2000 was matched by another double-digit swing in 2002. And this one wasn't limited to the collar counties. It touched every corner of the metro area, with wimpy margins (slightly less than 2-1 Mondale) even in the city of Minneapolis. And all this in a midterm with a Republican President! What in the hell was going on in Minnesota in 2002?
Whatever it was, it seemed significantly bigger than backlash to Paul Wellstone's memorial service. The arithmetic was fuzzy because Wellstone had already banked thousands of votes before he died and it's not clear how many of his absentee voters cast another ballot, but the final outcome was by no means extremely close. Coleman beat Mondale by nearly 50,000 votes and a margin of 2.2%. Furthermore, turnout was high at 64.9%. That's a higher turnout percentage than any of the five midterm cycles since then.
Does it seem credible that Wellstone's memorial had THAT big of an impact? Did it promote a metro-specific turnout surge that went overwhelmingly to Coleman, a surge that didn't touch adjacent outstate counties in the same media market where Mondale outperformed Gore, and in most cases outperformed Dayton, two years earlier?
I mean...maybe. But it seems more likely that this cake was baked before Wellstone died and the polls showing him with a comfortable mid-single-digit lead three weeks before the election were just as wrong as the polls that showed Mondale with a mid-single-digit lead three days before the election. It seems more likely that polling models weren't accurately gauging the magnitude of suburban shift toward Coleman and the GOP that year. It seems more likely that Minnesota was on the tipping point of becoming a red-tilting state until Bush's misadventures in Iraq triggered a reversion to the Democrats beginning in the 2004 cycle.
I have 23 additional years of election nights and poll-watching under my belt since 2002, and they've led me to conclude that Norm Coleman would more likely than not have won this election against Wellstone just as he did against Mondale. The notion that backlash to the Wellstone memorial alone cost the Democratic Senate nominee scores of thousands of votes--almost all of them specific to a dozen counties in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area--is too far-fetched to accept in retrospect. The far more believable scenario is that those massive Coleman margins in the suburbs were gonna happen anyway.
Al Franken's book Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them has a great chapter on the memorial service and how the backlash to it was utterly astroturfed.
Exactly what I thoguht about when reading this comment.
Has any internal pollster who worked on the campaign for Wellstone (or Coleman, for that matter) every stated publicly that they saw these shifts in their own numbers?
I don’t think Wellstone would have let it get to the point where he was only winning Hennepin county by 7 points or Ramsey by 14. He would have gone pedal to the metal there if he knew he was being pressed.
That had always been my assumption as well until I rediscovered that turnout in Minnesota in the 2002 midterm was already the highest of any midterm in at least a quarter century. I question whether there was still 50,000 votes out there to pick up and/or flip in Hennepin and Ramsey counties.
There’s also the older suburban counties like Dakota, Washington and Anoka where Mondale lost by almost 20 while Gore (even with Nader taking a substantial number of votes) only barely lost. Even Kerry didn’t lose any of these by more than 5 in 2004, meaning that something fluky was happening in 2002 in that race. I don’t think Wellstone would have let it get this out of hand here either.
It’s almost as if Mondale (to be fair he didn’t have a lot of time) and Dems were asleep at the switch in this general area of the state in 2002.
Looking at other parts of the state like Rochester’s Olmsted county that used to be Republican leaning, Mondale’s 9 point loss was the same as Gore’s.
2002 was more or less a 50-50 election outside of two states: Georgia and Minnesota. Coalitions held up remarkably well at the Congressional level and nearly every Blue Dog in Congress who wasn't redistricted out of his seat (David Phelps) held on comfortably. Gubernatorial contests were incredibly dynamic with red states going blue and blue states going red.
I suppose it's true that 2002 wasn't a typical midterm because it didn't favor the out-party, but it was by no means a Republican landslide outside of the two above-mentioned states. In Georgia, one could argue that allegiance to Bush and his post-9/11 agenda was the driver. In Minnesota, it seems more likely something else was going on.
2002 has to be up there for weirdest election results this century. 2022 maybe as well, but that year was at least consistent with bad Republican candidates getting punished. In 2002 you had Republicans picking up Hawaii and a newcomer winning a third Republican term in Rhode Island by double digits while at the same time Democrats picked up Wyoming and Oklahoma. I doubt we’ll ever see an election like that again in our lifetimes.
Looking back at GA in 2002 and the margin Cleland lost by (7 points) and the fact that even Roy Barnes lost by 5, it’s clear that there was nothing Dems could have done to stop those losses that year. From 2002-2008, that state was at the worst possible place for Dems where the old rural Dems in the Northern and Southern parts of the state that used to prop Dems up were dying off while at the same time the Atlanta suburbs were growing and were still super Republican.
Cleland and Barnes just happens to be there right when the music stopped.
While Obama didn't win Georgia in 2008, his campaign was wise to heavily invest in it, picking up on the favorable demographics starting to take shape. I was surprised how close he got.
Wow, this was an amazing read. Do you think that Wellstone makes a comeback in 2008 and launches a primary against Hillary Clinton in 2016 in this timeline?
I have read about his disease (MS in right leg) which some say would have prevented this, but it was reported to be minor, pretty slow progressing which could be controlled with physical therapy and medications. He joked that it was fitting for a progressive to have a progressive disease.
Note: 2006 was also open so he could have run instead of Klobuchar.
Good question about a Wellstone comeback playing out in 2008. There probably would have been a push to convince him to run again for his old seat, but since he'd already vowed to run for only two terms and he was struggling with MS, he may have been harder to convince to run again than one would think.
If his health had held up, I think it would have been just as likely that he'd become a Cabinet secretary (agriculture or labor) under Obama in 2009.
“He decided last year to run again, breaking his pledge to serve only two terms.
The disease, he said, hasn't affected anything but his right leg.
"Currently, Senator Wellstone is in excellent physical health and leads a very active lifestyle," Bartleson said. "Patients with this type of multiple sclerosis typically are able to maintain normal activities over the long term.”
Assuming he maintains his health and his doctor’s prognosis is correct, I believe if he decided to continue his career in 2008, he would have certainly chosen the Senate over a cabinet role since he saw himself as the lonely voice representing the left wing of the party. Warren hadn’t been elected at that point (she had worked with Wellstone) and Bernie wasn’t prominent enough to play that role.
That didn't surprise me, considering that Kirk wasn't terribly well-known in life outside of his online echo chamber, and maybe college campuses (he was rapidly aging out of the latter shtick, too).
The attempts to turn him into some kind of martyr for a noble cause quickly fell flat after people simply started quoting him verbatim. What a horrible legacy to leave behind.
Kirk wasn't running for anything and wasn't identified with a particular state as Wellstone was with Minnesota, so it's not comparable.
I don't think that most voters noticed or cared much about the memorial service. What backlash there was might have been related to Trump officials, including the FCC chair, trying to use Kirk as an excuse to force Jimmy Kimmel off the air. But that probably had little electoral impact, as the Dem wins in various states, cities, and other constituencies were likely to happen anyway.
Thanks for that great post. I always had the impression that Mondale lost that race because he was overly bland compared to the fiery Wellstone and seemed like his heart wasn't in the campaign, but your analysis is more sophisticated than that and probably right.
FYI, If you aren't sure, you can copy and paste the abbreviated link into a new window to make sure you have a valid link before including it in a post.
That is very impressive!! We need more of this in other red states.
I'm in NC which, as we all know, is heavily gerrymandered. But once again, Anderson Clayton and her NCDP team did a great job on candidate recruitment!
We have several important state-wide races including the US Senate and the NC Supreme Court as well as several other judicial races. There are also some General Assembly races that are hopefully flippable and a couple more that Dems need to hold onto!
For any NC readers, the NC Democrats have rolled out anytime canvassing for the upcoming Judicial races. They are calling this effort "Field Team Justice" in honor of Justice Anita Earls who we MUST reelect in November. It uses the software canvassing tool to identify people in your neighborhood that need to be canvassed. You can request a list of 16 voters that will be valid for the next 7 days. Read up on this effort here and join the team:
I would be interested to hear how these candidates approach economic development and revitalization.
When 2024 Senate Candidate Glenn Elliott was in the race, he had been riding high on success in being able to reinvigorate Wheeling’s economy. He had good ideas coming into the race, which I think would had been better addressed if perhaps he had run for Governor instead of the Senate.
Hopefully Flanagan and Klobuchar win and when Klobuchar resigns, Walz appoints Franken to replace her, if he will accept the role. He was a given a raw deal by his own colleagues, particularly Gillabrand. We need his frank wisdom in the Senate again.
Franken is 74. It is exceeding unlikely Klobuchsr resigns before she is sworn in, and would appoint her own replacement. She is going to appoint someone younger than Franken, for sure. Yes, Franken was a victim of a dark era of virtue signaling within Democratic politics, but we can't turn back the clock as a party or as a society.
Personally, I'd prefer we get a placeholder senator so that the voters can decide who they want, but I'd be super down with Franken as a placeholder. As Oggoldy noted, he's already retirement age, so appointing him would give him back some dignity while not installing someone in the seat.
Agreed, the placeholder makes sense, particularly since he has the experience and may not want to keep serving, but he’s a spring chicken compared to Grassley, McConnell and Feinstein before her passing. Still, the question would be whether he wants the job
I see others here bringing up the metoo episode, as if the allegations had any merit. Let’s be honest — much of Metoo became a witch hunt, with non offenders getting caught up in it through specious accusations. He was railroaded, period. Having him in the senate for the midterm would indeed restore the dignity he deserves.
I doubt it will happen though. The Dems have no backbone.
I am a fan of Franken politically (I referenced his book upthread!) but it's not hard to find Democrats that haven't had allegations of groping against them; no thank you.
Indiana: the Morning Consult results for Braun were pretty bad and have been for a few quarters. Maybe there’s a narrow path where Beau Bayh topples Diego Morales this year in the Secretary of State’s race and then runs for Governor in 2028 against an unpopular Braun? It’s what his dad did from 1986-88.
I actually think a lack of a gubernatorial and Senate race really helps Bayh’s chances of an upset there. No polarization of Republicans to turnout low-propensity voters. Add that to Bayh’s legacy name, impressive background, and a disastrous incumbent. I think an upset there is pretty high. Maybe that’s delusional optimism.
Makes sense. Kalawao County has a far higher high school and college graduation rate than the rest of Hawaii. Not that particularly many parts of Hawaii are Red...
I agree. And if Bayh loses, he now has a base from which to run for another office in Indiana. Too many Hoosier candidates do not take the long view. Sometimes, candidates must lose elections before they can win them.
Politico is trying to make a mountain over a molehill with a clickbait article, ie the Talarico/Crockett/Allred nonsense. I don't want to give them clicks so I'm not linking to it.
Rachel Bitecofer, who can be very accurate, thinks that will hurt Talarico in November. But he hasn't won the primary! Nor has Crockett!
She's panicking on Xitter. She has a few good takes on her Substack (mainly post elections) but a lot of it is really fear mongering and saying Democrats aren't doing enough.
The old days of the media being able to effectively gatekeep had it's advantages. One is that people like Bitecofer would have had their mics taken away instead of allowed to spread their takes to too many people.
Bitcofer is our version of Robert Cahaly. Was right a single time in a single election, and has been alarmingly wrong every other time. Broken clock hacks, at best.
Republican incumbent Warren Limmer of Maple Grove is retiring sfter 32 years in the Senate. This is the most noteworthy retirement yet, as Limmer is a remnant of a time when Republicans dominated suburban Hennepin County. Even before the retirement, Limmer was the #1 Senate target for the DFL in the currently 34D-33R chamber.
Holy cow, it’s Harris +8. “Autoflip” might be too strong, but is there really a replacement Republican that could hold a seat like that in a year like this? I imagine the Democrat would have to be a convicted felon or something to lose it, right?
If the GOP could not turn Klobuchar’s win back in 2024 to below 15% points and in single digits, they really have no chance at all not just at he gubernatorial race but in running a truly competitive race.
Of course, it’s a difference race for Governor vs being a Senator.
Interesting that Doc Jensen fares the least poorly of the GOP candidates after his 2022 embarrassment. Slightly better name familiarity is all it is I'm sure.
NY-Gov (Siena poll) - Hochul leads Blakeman 54-28, 49-40 favorability. Mamdani's favorability at +16 in NY state, the highest of any politician in the state.
I’m guessing Hochul wins something like 58%-40%. Maybe a little less. That likely means she’s winning NY-17 by greater than five, which is probably too much for Lawler to survive.
Seems to me that the concern over Mamdani’s ability to lead in the snowstorm doesn’t seem to factor here.
How could this possibly be? A popular politician for Gen Z NYCers being competent on the job. I’m sure Mamdani will be questioned as to his ability to fix his own car or put a plunger in his toilet at home.
Derkmc shared this post in the weekend thread yesterday. It shows Morning Consult's governor approval ratings for November-December (the post says quarter 4, but looking at the timeframe for previous polls it seems like this is instead just November and December?):
Some things that stood out to me that I figured would be better to share today when more people would see it:
1.) Mike Dunleavy went from +15 approval in August-October to -11 approval in November-December. What happened in Alaska to cause this? I would be curious to know if this collapse in approval exists for other Republicans in the state as well, or if it's unique to Dunleavy as that could give insight into whether Democrats could do well across the board in Alaska elections this year.
2.) Glenn Younkin had a +16 approval in the timeframe that included the election, up from +12 in the August-October poll. Yet his party still lost overwhelmingly in the elections. While I know that Youngkin wasn't on the ballot, he is/was the most prominent VA Republican. Does this indicate that even popular Republican politicians can't alleviate the electoral backlash?
3.) Walz had a +7 approval, down from +12. Indicates that he may have been correct to end his run for re-election. Of course a lot can happen before the end of this year, so maybe he could have brought his approvals back up, but it also seems like the fraud scandals were really able to impact his standing, and they definitely could have continued to do so. Reflecting as a Minnesotan, I am glad he ended his run for re-election. Not because I think he was a bad governor (he wasn't), but because this means he is able to focus completely on the issues facing our state while giving our party almost a full year to run a new candidate for governor who could likely have greater coattails than he would. I want to think this an example of Walz seeing the cards early and making a selfless, team-player decision rather than waiting until the last minute, hoping his approvals would rebound, to drop out.
4.) Hochul is at +18, up from +15. This seems to indicate Hochul doing well in November, and potentially even wth coattails in congressional and state legislative districts.
I'd be curious to know what stands out to other people from the numbers in these polls.
Other polling had Youngkin's approval lower, though still generally positive. He was fairly popular, or at least respected, personally but that obviously wasn't enough for his party to overcome negative opinion of the national administration.
Would he have won if he could have run again? Quite possibly, but not certainly. He certainly could self finance and would probably have run a better campaign than Earle-Sears, whose campaign was often disorganized and emphasized issues that weren't that important to voters. There's also the question of if Spanberger or a similarly strong Democrat would have wanted to run against an incumbent. But personal popularity isn't always enough to fend off a wave, even at the state level, and Youngkin's wasn't overwhelming (MC is a bit of an outlier here, and that probably isn't unique to VA.)
I don't think there was any way a Republican was winning a statewide race in VA in this environment. Maybe he could have pulled Jason Miyares over the line against Jay Jones
anyone have a handy explainer or link to MN caucus protocol FAQs? is it run like Iowa caucuses, ie lots of small events across the state and people phone in the result so it takes a while to get the results that evening? and does it constitute "the party endorsement" or does the party endorsement go on after that? I believe both Craig and Flanagan have committed to staying in til August regardless.
Its anachronistic as hell, to be honest. There are several rounds of thousands of straw polls across thousands of precincts that are reported, but ultimately what comes out of the caucuses are delegates that approximate the straw polls of each precincts, and they go to their organizational unit conventions in a few weeks (county or Senate district, depending). So there is likely not going to be certainty coming out of today's caucuses, just the first of a ~4 step process that all culminates at the end of May at the State Convention.
I doubt it. He'll place 3rd or 4th
It's terrible to see this level of support for an openly antisemitic fascist.
Wow. That’s a more severe response than I expected
It impresses me that we're in a place where someone talking the way Talarico does can be cast by the media as a moderate. It's a great talent to be able to take progressive stances but convince most listeners that he's a moderate anyway. He's not AOC but I would not call him a moderate at all. I'm impressed that his way of communicating works so well.
I do hope he shifts to the center on some cultural issues after the primary. He will need some center-right voters to win. He can throw them a bone on guns or oil. His immigration stance is already pretty good for a general election audience.
I'm fine leaving it to his campaign to make sense of, but if voters and the media already perceive him as a moderate, he has no real reason to forcibly moderate himself.
To the extent where Talarico does that, he can have that capability if it means he is more interested in uniting Texans as opposed to trying to appeal to purists who want him to be the picture perfect progressive.
In TX, we really can't afford to focus on purity right now, especially considering the GOP is already being perceived as toxic to Hispanic voters.
He was a Warren volunteer lol.
It says a lot about the unprofessionalism of Jasmine Crockett that she's joined in some of the most insane attacks on James Talarico or her critics (Bowen Yang) that have been laundered by her supporters who think we're still in the Great Awokening.
Like before this dustup, Crockett's supporters were attacking Talarico for saying on Jubilee that Joe Biden failed on immigration. Even if you think Talarico went too far with that statement, do you really think defending Joe Biden in Texas of all places is a political winner?
https://bsky.app/profile/parkermolloy.com/post/3mdvq5q26d22h
Oh the outrage of saying something constructive about President Biden not being successful on immigration! Damn it be that Democrats learn from their mistakes.
If anything, this makes me want James Talarico as a Senator even more if it means he's not afraid to tell it how it is.
Good. She deserves to be replaced for that reason. I'm always for replacing worthless officials. Especially when they have such horrible political instincts.
Nice to see a “GOP in disarray” article for once from Politico.
“It should be an eye-opener to all of us that we all need to pick up the pace,” U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales, a Republican from a majority-Hispanic district in South Texas, said in an interview. “The candidate has to do their part, the party has to do their part. And then those of us in the arena, we have to do our part to help them as well.”
Someone needs to tell Rep. Gonzales that making a statement like this is really a waste of his time considering he represents a Lean GOP district that is overwhelmingly Hispanic. Perhaps he should stop making public statements, get on the campaign trail and take action.
On second thought, forget it. No point anyway as he's potentially going to lose his House seat anyway in this already toxic political environment considering it's a Lean GOP district with an overwhelmingly Hispanic population. He's already wooden with his ICE views to begin with and probably gets along with Rep. Mike Lawler, who is another ICE ass kisser trying to be a voice of "reason." Not to mention he's showing the rioters he really doesn't care.
https://news4sanantonio.com/news/local/congressman-gonzales-defends-detention-of-5-year-old-liam-ramos-immigration-illegal-dilley-texas-minnesota-ice-ecuadorian-family-political-spin-border-mexico
These kind of statements from Gonzales make zero sense to me. The answer, Tony, is to stop racially profiling and terrorizing brown people and shooting American citizens. Not whatever “pick up the pace” or “put in the work” is supposed to mean. It’s not that hispanics aren’t hearing the GOP message. It’s that they fucking hate it after flirting with it in 2024.
True although it was evident when the GOP did the autopsy of what happened when Mitt Romney lost the presidential election back in 2012 they didn't do shit. Absolutely nothing. If Trump did not suck the oxygen so much in the 2016 presidential election, the GOP still would not have done anything to change themselves anyway. A better approach post-2012 would have been for the GOP to have real balls in shifting toward being a more moderate party so they could genuinely appeal to changing demographics.
Instead, the GOP kept Reince Priebus on as RNC Chair through 2017 and has not really changed as a whole.
I don’t think money will be an issue for us. On top of Chris Taylor’s 10-1 fundraising advantage over Maria Lazar, the Wisconsin Democratic Party outraised the state Republican Party by over $10 million last year in their federal accounts. I don’t know if that money can only be spent on federal races, so if so, it might not be usable for the Supreme Court race.
https://www.wispolitics.com/2026/wisconsin-dem-party-outraises-state-gop-6-1-through-federal-account/
I remember when Protosaewicz won the February 2023 primary, the WI Democratic Party transferred several million dollars to her campaign the following day. It wasn’t specified whether they used a federal account or not.
Absolutely not. Haven't we already gone over how almost nobody identifies as a acronym that lists a series of possible identities?
Hi, gay person here; gay is not incorrect for lesbians. Quit trying to police language.
Would Wellstone Have Won?
As promised, here's my essay speculating on a 2002 Minnesota Senate race counterfactual, coincidentally on a morning where another Minnesota Senate race is the headline topic of today's page. I welcome alternative opinions challenging my conclusion, and I especially welcome any polling data that backed up Wellstone's reported lead above and beyond what I found.
Simple question: if Paul Wellstone hadn't died in a plane crash 11 days before the election, would he have won a third term?
The conventional wisdom about this election has endured for nearly a quarter century, particularly in the minds of Democrats. The general breakdown of the CW is that Wellstone and Republican challenger Norm Coleman had been effectively tied for most of the year, but when Wellstone cast his vote against the resolution for military force in Iraq in October, Minnesotans respected his integrity and migrated in his direction. Wellstone was poised to win before he died, but when voters perceived his televised memorial service to have turned into a tasteless campaign rally, they recoiled in disgust and censured the Democratic Party by voting for Coleman.
I've never fully bought this conventional wisdom for a number of reasons. Foremost among them, I'm skeptical of the weight of individual events in generating wholesale transformations in voters' decisions. My skepticism about campaign missteps and media-fueled controversies moving voters in meaningful numbers has only hardened in the Trump era, but I suspect it was quite relevant in 2002 as well. The polling suggested Wellstone got a five-point bounce after casting his vote against military action in Iraq....and the election night tally suggested Coleman got a five-point bounce in the closing days of the election. Few people seemed to consider that the common denominator may have been questionable polling samples rather than dithering voters.
And far as I can tell, most of the narrative surrounding the momentum shifts was tied to a single Mason Dixon poll released by the Minneapolis Star Tribune in mid-October. Previous samples had shown Wellstone and Coleman deadlocked, but the poll released after Wellstone's Iraq vote showed him leading by 6 points. It was a relief to those of us on Team Wellstone but there was scant polling data beyond that backing up the premise of Wellstone pulling away.
Following the exasperated responses of local and national media, as well as then-Governor Jesse Ventura, to the tone of Wellstone's October 29 memorial service, Democrats were nervous that there would be fallout. They were relieved when the poll released the Sunday before the election, taken entirely after the memorial, had replacement Democratic nominee Walter Mondale leading by 5 points. The only problem: it was the same pollster (Mason Dixon on behalf of the Star Tribune). If there was additional reliable public polling backing up Mason Dixon's findings, I wasn't aware of it then and am struggling to discover any record of it now. The only other poll on my radar that late in the cycle was from the St. Paul Pioneer Press and showed the opposite outcome, with a 6-point lead for Coleman.
So were Minnesota voters really this fickle in October and early November 2002? Did they really flock to Wellstone to reward his courageous vote against invading Iraq only to do a heel turn back to Coleman in response to Wellstone's memorial service? That seems less likely to me than Mason Dixon simply having polling samples that were too friendly to Wellstone (in October) and Mondale (in November).
No shade is intended to Mason Dixon if they did because it was a hard race to poll, with an unusually dynamic Minnesota electorate diverging in unpredictable ways. Wellstone's campaign was upfront that the only reason they were hanging in there against Coleman was Wellstone's strength in rural Minnesota. The Coleman campaign telegraphed the same dynamic as they were on the airwaves with ads lobbying hard to cut Wellstone's rural advantage and were funding full-page color ads about the "death tax" in weekly rural newspapers to further land a foothold among voters who were ambivalent toward him.
Anecdotally, I was observing the same thing working at the time as a farm reporter in southwestern Minnesota. Wellstone's decades of advocacy on behalf of farmers and workers had broken through and he won considerable crossover support from otherwise rock-ribbed conservatives in farm country in a race against the former mayor of St. Paul. Given the trajectory of ideological loyalties in the generation since, it seems all the more remarkable that a Senator as unapologetically progressive as Paul Wellstone put together such a comprehensive downscale coalition in a Midwestern state.
Every indication is that this rural advantage transferred to Mondale, who also punched above the DFL's weight in the majority of farm and factory towns throughout the state and across media markets. Mondale's coalition looked very similar to what Wellstone's campaign teased that they expected their own coalition to look like. There's no way of knowing if the familiar Mondale name increased that outstate Minnesota advantage by a tick or if Wellstone's absence on the ballot compelled some pro-Wellstone Republicans back to the GOP, but it's reasonable to assume the difference was negligible.
Whatever the case, the real action was going on in the metro area, which saw a massive swing to Coleman. The Minneapolis-St. Paul suburbs and exurbs experienced both blistering population growth and a political realignment in the late 90s and early 2000s. It was hard to get a good read on this realignment in 1998 because of the third-party factor with Jesse Ventura, but it was harder to ignore when George W. Bush managed double-digit gains in nearly all of the Twin Cities collar counties. Senator Rod Grams scored margins nearly identical to Bush that cycle, prevailing in every suburban and exurban county even while losing decisively statewide. It was a worrying pattern for Democrats that seemed likely to persist in 2002, but the magnitude of the GOP suburban advantage come election night was genuinely shocking even to those expecting the worst.
The double-digit swing toward the GOP in suburban Minnesota in 2000 was matched by another double-digit swing in 2002. And this one wasn't limited to the collar counties. It touched every corner of the metro area, with wimpy margins (slightly less than 2-1 Mondale) even in the city of Minneapolis. And all this in a midterm with a Republican President! What in the hell was going on in Minnesota in 2002?
Whatever it was, it seemed significantly bigger than backlash to Paul Wellstone's memorial service. The arithmetic was fuzzy because Wellstone had already banked thousands of votes before he died and it's not clear how many of his absentee voters cast another ballot, but the final outcome was by no means extremely close. Coleman beat Mondale by nearly 50,000 votes and a margin of 2.2%. Furthermore, turnout was high at 64.9%. That's a higher turnout percentage than any of the five midterm cycles since then.
Does it seem credible that Wellstone's memorial had THAT big of an impact? Did it promote a metro-specific turnout surge that went overwhelmingly to Coleman, a surge that didn't touch adjacent outstate counties in the same media market where Mondale outperformed Gore, and in most cases outperformed Dayton, two years earlier?
I mean...maybe. But it seems more likely that this cake was baked before Wellstone died and the polls showing him with a comfortable mid-single-digit lead three weeks before the election were just as wrong as the polls that showed Mondale with a mid-single-digit lead three days before the election. It seems more likely that polling models weren't accurately gauging the magnitude of suburban shift toward Coleman and the GOP that year. It seems more likely that Minnesota was on the tipping point of becoming a red-tilting state until Bush's misadventures in Iraq triggered a reversion to the Democrats beginning in the 2004 cycle.
I have 23 additional years of election nights and poll-watching under my belt since 2002, and they've led me to conclude that Norm Coleman would more likely than not have won this election against Wellstone just as he did against Mondale. The notion that backlash to the Wellstone memorial alone cost the Democratic Senate nominee scores of thousands of votes--almost all of them specific to a dozen counties in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area--is too far-fetched to accept in retrospect. The far more believable scenario is that those massive Coleman margins in the suburbs were gonna happen anyway.
Al Franken's book Lies and the Lying Liars who Tell Them has a great chapter on the memorial service and how the backlash to it was utterly astroturfed.
"An event that feels like it happened in another universe now: the 2002 funeral of Paul Wellstone, where Democrats were seen as acting really gauche and Republicans benefits from the backlash https://minnpost.com/politics-policy/2008/10/six-years-later-wellstone-memorial-host-latimer-still-agonizes-over-events-p/"
https://x.com/daveweigel/status/1307703780809551873
Exactly what I thoguht about when reading this comment.
Has any internal pollster who worked on the campaign for Wellstone (or Coleman, for that matter) every stated publicly that they saw these shifts in their own numbers?
I don’t think Wellstone would have let it get to the point where he was only winning Hennepin county by 7 points or Ramsey by 14. He would have gone pedal to the metal there if he knew he was being pressed.
That had always been my assumption as well until I rediscovered that turnout in Minnesota in the 2002 midterm was already the highest of any midterm in at least a quarter century. I question whether there was still 50,000 votes out there to pick up and/or flip in Hennepin and Ramsey counties.
There’s also the older suburban counties like Dakota, Washington and Anoka where Mondale lost by almost 20 while Gore (even with Nader taking a substantial number of votes) only barely lost. Even Kerry didn’t lose any of these by more than 5 in 2004, meaning that something fluky was happening in 2002 in that race. I don’t think Wellstone would have let it get this out of hand here either.
It’s almost as if Mondale (to be fair he didn’t have a lot of time) and Dems were asleep at the switch in this general area of the state in 2002.
Looking at other parts of the state like Rochester’s Olmsted county that used to be Republican leaning, Mondale’s 9 point loss was the same as Gore’s.
It was not a typical midterm because of 9/11.
2002 was more or less a 50-50 election outside of two states: Georgia and Minnesota. Coalitions held up remarkably well at the Congressional level and nearly every Blue Dog in Congress who wasn't redistricted out of his seat (David Phelps) held on comfortably. Gubernatorial contests were incredibly dynamic with red states going blue and blue states going red.
I suppose it's true that 2002 wasn't a typical midterm because it didn't favor the out-party, but it was by no means a Republican landslide outside of the two above-mentioned states. In Georgia, one could argue that allegiance to Bush and his post-9/11 agenda was the driver. In Minnesota, it seems more likely something else was going on.
2002 has to be up there for weirdest election results this century. 2022 maybe as well, but that year was at least consistent with bad Republican candidates getting punished. In 2002 you had Republicans picking up Hawaii and a newcomer winning a third Republican term in Rhode Island by double digits while at the same time Democrats picked up Wyoming and Oklahoma. I doubt we’ll ever see an election like that again in our lifetimes.
Looking back at GA in 2002 and the margin Cleland lost by (7 points) and the fact that even Roy Barnes lost by 5, it’s clear that there was nothing Dems could have done to stop those losses that year. From 2002-2008, that state was at the worst possible place for Dems where the old rural Dems in the Northern and Southern parts of the state that used to prop Dems up were dying off while at the same time the Atlanta suburbs were growing and were still super Republican.
Cleland and Barnes just happens to be there right when the music stopped.
While Obama didn't win Georgia in 2008, his campaign was wise to heavily invest in it, picking up on the favorable demographics starting to take shape. I was surprised how close he got.
He got some very terrible numbers in the suburb/exurbs for 08/12.
Georgia 2002 probably had not much to do with W. The final collapse of the old South urban-rural coalition for Democratic.
Wow, this was an amazing read. Do you think that Wellstone makes a comeback in 2008 and launches a primary against Hillary Clinton in 2016 in this timeline?
I have read about his disease (MS in right leg) which some say would have prevented this, but it was reported to be minor, pretty slow progressing which could be controlled with physical therapy and medications. He joked that it was fitting for a progressive to have a progressive disease.
Note: 2006 was also open so he could have run instead of Klobuchar.
Good question about a Wellstone comeback playing out in 2008. There probably would have been a push to convince him to run again for his old seat, but since he'd already vowed to run for only two terms and he was struggling with MS, he may have been harder to convince to run again than one would think.
If his health had held up, I think it would have been just as likely that he'd become a Cabinet secretary (agriculture or labor) under Obama in 2009.
“He decided last year to run again, breaking his pledge to serve only two terms.
The disease, he said, hasn't affected anything but his right leg.
"Currently, Senator Wellstone is in excellent physical health and leads a very active lifestyle," Bartleson said. "Patients with this type of multiple sclerosis typically are able to maintain normal activities over the long term.”
Assuming he maintains his health and his doctor’s prognosis is correct, I believe if he decided to continue his career in 2008, he would have certainly chosen the Senate over a cabinet role since he saw himself as the lonely voice representing the left wing of the party. Warren hadn’t been elected at that point (she had worked with Wellstone) and Bernie wasn’t prominent enough to play that role.
Was there a backlash to the grotesque politicization of the Charlie Kirk memorial service?
Didn't seem to be. But there also wasn't an election one week later so we have no real way of knowing.
It didn’t seem to produce a backlash, per se - but that may because the funeral itself became something of a non-event culturally
That didn't surprise me, considering that Kirk wasn't terribly well-known in life outside of his online echo chamber, and maybe college campuses (he was rapidly aging out of the latter shtick, too).
The attempts to turn him into some kind of martyr for a noble cause quickly fell flat after people simply started quoting him verbatim. What a horrible legacy to leave behind.
Kirk wasn't running for anything and wasn't identified with a particular state as Wellstone was with Minnesota, so it's not comparable.
I don't think that most voters noticed or cared much about the memorial service. What backlash there was might have been related to Trump officials, including the FCC chair, trying to use Kirk as an excuse to force Jimmy Kimmel off the air. But that probably had little electoral impact, as the Dem wins in various states, cities, and other constituencies were likely to happen anyway.
The Great Kirkification memes? Erika Kirk memes?
Thanks for that great post. I always had the impression that Mondale lost that race because he was overly bland compared to the fiery Wellstone and seemed like his heart wasn't in the campaign, but your analysis is more sophisticated than that and probably right.
Great post. This would have been a diary on DKE.
I noticed that WV Democrats did a great job of fielding candidates for state legislature races this year.
https://www.wvdemocrats.com/news/historic-slate-2026
I was going to post the same thing!
FYI, If you aren't sure, you can copy and paste the abbreviated link into a new window to make sure you have a valid link before including it in a post.
Thanks!
Edited my post.
We sure did! Doing the best I can to get the word out
That is very impressive!! We need more of this in other red states.
I'm in NC which, as we all know, is heavily gerrymandered. But once again, Anderson Clayton and her NCDP team did a great job on candidate recruitment!
We have several important state-wide races including the US Senate and the NC Supreme Court as well as several other judicial races. There are also some General Assembly races that are hopefully flippable and a couple more that Dems need to hold onto!
For any NC readers, the NC Democrats have rolled out anytime canvassing for the upcoming Judicial races. They are calling this effort "Field Team Justice" in honor of Justice Anita Earls who we MUST reelect in November. It uses the software canvassing tool to identify people in your neighborhood that need to be canvassed. You can request a list of 16 voters that will be valid for the next 7 days. Read up on this effort here and join the team:
https://www.fairjudgesnc.com/
Awesome!
I would be interested to hear how these candidates approach economic development and revitalization.
When 2024 Senate Candidate Glenn Elliott was in the race, he had been riding high on success in being able to reinvigorate Wheeling’s economy. He had good ideas coming into the race, which I think would had been better addressed if perhaps he had run for Governor instead of the Senate.
Hopefully Flanagan and Klobuchar win and when Klobuchar resigns, Walz appoints Franken to replace her, if he will accept the role. He was a given a raw deal by his own colleagues, particularly Gillabrand. We need his frank wisdom in the Senate again.
Franken is 74. It is exceeding unlikely Klobuchsr resigns before she is sworn in, and would appoint her own replacement. She is going to appoint someone younger than Franken, for sure. Yes, Franken was a victim of a dark era of virtue signaling within Democratic politics, but we can't turn back the clock as a party or as a society.
Personally, I'd prefer we get a placeholder senator so that the voters can decide who they want, but I'd be super down with Franken as a placeholder. As Oggoldy noted, he's already retirement age, so appointing him would give him back some dignity while not installing someone in the seat.
Agreed, the placeholder makes sense, particularly since he has the experience and may not want to keep serving, but he’s a spring chicken compared to Grassley, McConnell and Feinstein before her passing. Still, the question would be whether he wants the job
I see others here bringing up the metoo episode, as if the allegations had any merit. Let’s be honest — much of Metoo became a witch hunt, with non offenders getting caught up in it through specious accusations. He was railroaded, period. Having him in the senate for the midterm would indeed restore the dignity he deserves.
I doubt it will happen though. The Dems have no backbone.
I am a fan of Franken politically (I referenced his book upthread!) but it's not hard to find Democrats that haven't had allegations of groping against them; no thank you.
I do *not* want to see people relitigating Franken here—not today, not ever. Jesus christ, it was nearly a decade ago. Find something better to do.
Indiana: the Morning Consult results for Braun were pretty bad and have been for a few quarters. Maybe there’s a narrow path where Beau Bayh topples Diego Morales this year in the Secretary of State’s race and then runs for Governor in 2028 against an unpopular Braun? It’s what his dad did from 1986-88.
I actually think a lack of a gubernatorial and Senate race really helps Bayh’s chances of an upset there. No polarization of Republicans to turnout low-propensity voters. Add that to Bayh’s legacy name, impressive background, and a disastrous incumbent. I think an upset there is pretty high. Maybe that’s delusional optimism.
I too am glad Beau Bayh is running. The only elections Democrats are absolutely sure to lose are those in which they fail to have a candidate.
I applaud the fact that we keep getting closer and closer to a 50-State Strategy. And better yet: a 3,143-County Strategy!
They voted for Kamala 83-17 in '24, I think they're doing great!
Makes sense. Kalawao County has a far higher high school and college graduation rate than the rest of Hawaii. Not that particularly many parts of Hawaii are Red...
I agree. And if Bayh loses, he now has a base from which to run for another office in Indiana. Too many Hoosier candidates do not take the long view. Sometimes, candidates must lose elections before they can win them.
Slight correction: it’s Diego Morales.
Politico is trying to make a mountain over a molehill with a clickbait article, ie the Talarico/Crockett/Allred nonsense. I don't want to give them clicks so I'm not linking to it.
Rachel Bitecofer, who can be very accurate, thinks that will hurt Talarico in November. But he hasn't won the primary! Nor has Crockett!
Her latest crusade is criticizing party primaries since the party cannot pick its own blue dog candidates.
People still listen to Rachel Bitecofer?
She's panicking on Xitter. She has a few good takes on her Substack (mainly post elections) but a lot of it is really fear mongering and saying Democrats aren't doing enough.
The old days of the media being able to effectively gatekeep had it's advantages. One is that people like Bitecofer would have had their mics taken away instead of allowed to spread their takes to too many people.
Bitcofer is our version of Robert Cahaly. Was right a single time in a single election, and has been alarmingly wrong every other time. Broken clock hacks, at best.
MN-SD-37
Republican incumbent Warren Limmer of Maple Grove is retiring sfter 32 years in the Senate. This is the most noteworthy retirement yet, as Limmer is a remnant of a time when Republicans dominated suburban Hennepin County. Even before the retirement, Limmer was the #1 Senate target for the DFL in the currently 34D-33R chamber.
https://kstp.com/kstp-news/local-news/gop-sen-warren-limmer-to-retire-after-38-years-in-minnesota-legislature/
This was a Harris seat too, no? So an autoflip basically?
Autoflip is too strong of a word, but favored to flip, to be sure.
Holy cow, it’s Harris +8. “Autoflip” might be too strong, but is there really a replacement Republican that could hold a seat like that in a year like this? I imagine the Democrat would have to be a convicted felon or something to lose it, right?
MN-Gov:
Amy Klobuchar leads Republican opponents by 14-20 points each.
https://kstp.com/kstp-news/top-news/kstp-surveyusa-klobuchar-leads-all-gop-candidates-by-double-digits/
2012 style Klobuslide incoming
I can sense that.
If the GOP could not turn Klobuchar’s win back in 2024 to below 15% points and in single digits, they really have no chance at all not just at he gubernatorial race but in running a truly competitive race.
Of course, it’s a difference race for Governor vs being a Senator.
More like 2024-style Klobuchar landslide I suspect. Too many 2012 voters are no longer available even in the best-case scenario.
There will be in a midterm wave year
Polarization is so much higher than in 2012 so I doubt that
Interesting that Doc Jensen fares the least poorly of the GOP candidates after his 2022 embarrassment. Slightly better name familiarity is all it is I'm sure.
NY-Gov (Siena poll) - Hochul leads Blakeman 54-28, 49-40 favorability. Mamdani's favorability at +16 in NY state, the highest of any politician in the state.
https://sri.siena.edu/2026/02/03/hochul-with-her-best-ever-favorability-rating-49-40-continues-to-hold-commanding-leads-over-blakeman-54-28-among-dems-delgado-64-11
I’m guessing Hochul wins something like 58%-40%. Maybe a little less. That likely means she’s winning NY-17 by greater than five, which is probably too much for Lawler to survive.
Regardless of Hochul, Lawler will not survive a Trump presidency unless his opponent is very weak.
Lawler's seat is pretty low-hanging fruit, IMO.
Seems to me that the concern over Mamdani’s ability to lead in the snowstorm doesn’t seem to factor here.
How could this possibly be? A popular politician for Gen Z NYCers being competent on the job. I’m sure Mamdani will be questioned as to his ability to fix his own car or put a plunger in his toilet at home.
About the only positive that Blakeman brings to the race is that he'll have more coattail potential on Long Island than, say, Stefanik.
Derkmc shared this post in the weekend thread yesterday. It shows Morning Consult's governor approval ratings for November-December (the post says quarter 4, but looking at the timeframe for previous polls it seems like this is instead just November and December?):
https://x.com/IAPolls2022/status/2018439535466606693
Some things that stood out to me that I figured would be better to share today when more people would see it:
1.) Mike Dunleavy went from +15 approval in August-October to -11 approval in November-December. What happened in Alaska to cause this? I would be curious to know if this collapse in approval exists for other Republicans in the state as well, or if it's unique to Dunleavy as that could give insight into whether Democrats could do well across the board in Alaska elections this year.
2.) Glenn Younkin had a +16 approval in the timeframe that included the election, up from +12 in the August-October poll. Yet his party still lost overwhelmingly in the elections. While I know that Youngkin wasn't on the ballot, he is/was the most prominent VA Republican. Does this indicate that even popular Republican politicians can't alleviate the electoral backlash?
3.) Walz had a +7 approval, down from +12. Indicates that he may have been correct to end his run for re-election. Of course a lot can happen before the end of this year, so maybe he could have brought his approvals back up, but it also seems like the fraud scandals were really able to impact his standing, and they definitely could have continued to do so. Reflecting as a Minnesotan, I am glad he ended his run for re-election. Not because I think he was a bad governor (he wasn't), but because this means he is able to focus completely on the issues facing our state while giving our party almost a full year to run a new candidate for governor who could likely have greater coattails than he would. I want to think this an example of Walz seeing the cards early and making a selfless, team-player decision rather than waiting until the last minute, hoping his approvals would rebound, to drop out.
4.) Hochul is at +18, up from +15. This seems to indicate Hochul doing well in November, and potentially even wth coattails in congressional and state legislative districts.
I'd be curious to know what stands out to other people from the numbers in these polls.
I'm not sure about adding net 10 to every one but yes MC's state level polls have always been pretty garbage.
Good to know!
+7 is still solid.
I believe Walz would have won fairly comfortably, if not by as much as Amy.
In this environment he would have been favored.
Kinda wonder if he'll get appointed to the Senate
He'd be a great Senator, but I think he's exhausted and just done with public life.
Other polling had Youngkin's approval lower, though still generally positive. He was fairly popular, or at least respected, personally but that obviously wasn't enough for his party to overcome negative opinion of the national administration.
Would he have won if he could have run again? Quite possibly, but not certainly. He certainly could self finance and would probably have run a better campaign than Earle-Sears, whose campaign was often disorganized and emphasized issues that weren't that important to voters. There's also the question of if Spanberger or a similarly strong Democrat would have wanted to run against an incumbent. But personal popularity isn't always enough to fend off a wave, even at the state level, and Youngkin's wasn't overwhelming (MC is a bit of an outlier here, and that probably isn't unique to VA.)
I don't think there was any way a Republican was winning a statewide race in VA in this environment. Maybe he could have pulled Jason Miyares over the line against Jay Jones
anyone have a handy explainer or link to MN caucus protocol FAQs? is it run like Iowa caucuses, ie lots of small events across the state and people phone in the result so it takes a while to get the results that evening? and does it constitute "the party endorsement" or does the party endorsement go on after that? I believe both Craig and Flanagan have committed to staying in til August regardless.
Its anachronistic as hell, to be honest. There are several rounds of thousands of straw polls across thousands of precincts that are reported, but ultimately what comes out of the caucuses are delegates that approximate the straw polls of each precincts, and they go to their organizational unit conventions in a few weeks (county or Senate district, depending). So there is likely not going to be certainty coming out of today's caucuses, just the first of a ~4 step process that all culminates at the end of May at the State Convention.