Ohio, Alaska, And Candidate Quality
How Much Of Vance's Troubles Are Self-Imposed?
Here are two news stories which, at first blush, seem disconnected, but actually aren’t.
· A Suffolk/USA Today poll has Tim Ryan up 47/46 on JD Vance in Ohio
· We got the full accounting of RCV from Alaska, which showed that Nick Begich would have won by 5% if he had made the final 2 against Mary Peltola
Why do they matter together? Because a lot of ink has been spilled on Alaska, and the all important question of “What Does It Mean?” since Peltola became the first Democrat to win the state since the original Nick Begich back in 1972. A lot of ink has been spilled about how much of Alaska was about Sarah Palin being terrible versus national trends, and now we know.
Alaska swung 13% left from 2020 to 2022, but if you use the Begich-Peltola numbers, it swung 5% left. So, we have a decent proxy for what deeply unpopular candidates can be worth in this day and age – about 8%. (Is Begich an above average candidate, and therefore compared to an average candidate, the effect is closer to 6%? Sure, I won’t quibble with that.)
A 5% swing left is still amazing for Democrats, given that 2020 was a D+4 environment, and would be more in line with New York 23, Minnesota 1, and Nebraska 1 in showing a blue wave result, if replicated. That caveat is important – nobody believes that those specials are particularly representative of the national environment in totality, and anyone arguing it’s really some D+6 or D+8 environment is probably high as a kite. It’s not, in all likelihood. But Alaska does tell us what candidate failures can be worth, and Ohio is probably the race where that matters most.
Look, let’s be honest here – I don’t think that Suffolk is correct, in that I don’t think Ryan is winning right now, I really don’t. Polls in Ohio are almost always wrong, but it is the case that Ryan being at 47% is important here – because if he’s at 47% on election night, then Democrats are probably winning the Senate, and at least have a chance at the House.
…
Trump won Ohio by 8 in a D+4.45 environment, so in a neutral environment with neutral candidates, the GOP should win by ~12.5%. Tim Ryan’s a good candidate, so knock the notional benchmark for a neutral environment down to 10. Vance is a bad candidate, so maybe knock that down to 5%. But that’s still not this.
Yes, the Ohio polls have been bad in the past, and I think assuming that Ryan will win because he has a polling lead is absurdist nonsense, but Vance is probably for a 4-6% win at this point given that Ryan is at least flirting with the mid to high 40s in polled vote share and the fact he has a 2% lead right now. If that’s true, it’s not a red year, even with how unpopular Vance is. And that’s where the GOP’s problem lays.
I’m not going to get caught on Ohio this year, plainly – I will keep Vance ahead even if Ryan somehow ended up with a 65/35 lead by election day, even in every poll. I am not willing to put Ryan ahead in any way, I’m just not – the trauma of 2020 is too much for me, and there’s something about the definition of insanity which is ringing in my ears at this point. But that all said, too much attention is paid to “Ohio is seemingly close because Vance sucks” and not enough is paid to “Ohio is seemingly close because there’s not much national swing happening.”
Take out the polls, and think about what the static metrics of a national environment are at this point (so no, fuck your “Virginia 2021 means post-Dobbs red wave” takes). The post-Dobbs specials have swung 7% left, on average – and plug in the Begich number for Alaska, they’ve swung left by 5%. The Washington Top 2 Senate primary saw a 4.7% swing right – compared to 2018, which would be a D+3 environment. (You have to use the Senate data for this because of Democrats crossing over to vote for the two impeachment voting Rs in WA-03 and WA-04.) Throw in the California primary results, which were post-Dobbs leak but pre-Dobbs ruling, and that swung 5.1% right – again, against the 2018 Senate primary.
The non-polling case for a red wave is primary turnout in the other states – states where, in many cases, Republicans had competitive Primaries and Democrats had coronations (and, by which metric Democrats should have won Iowa in 2020 by 6%, based on the August primary data), and then the 2021 November elections. But even then, the races for Federal office in November 2021 – the two special elections in Ohio – only had swings to the GOP of 2.7% and 2.4%. The indications of a red wave were Virginia and New Jersey, and pollsters who corrected (and potentially even overcorrected) for what that Virginia race meant for the nation as a whole.
If you want to dismiss the polls go right ahead, but the idea that the non-polling fundamentals point to some red wave just isn’t true – the average swing in the Federal specials this whole cycle is 1.2% to the GOP, the CA and WA Top 2 primaries have been roughly in line with small Dem environments. The evidence of female surges in voter registration, the Kansas referendum results pointing to a more female than normal electorate, and the fact that the GOP ads have abandoned economics for crime messaging all also suggest that the old status quo isn’t here anymore.
None of this is to say that Democrats will win the House, but yes, Democrats should win the Senate, as I’ve written before. Is Tim Ryan going to join the Democrats going back to Washington? I’d still be stunned if he were – but the fact that he’s managing to keep himself in the frame is a horrible sign for the broader GOP position.