Ohio, NC, And A Crisis Of Confidence

Why Do 2 Senate Races Cause Me Such Trouble?

Friday night was a lot of fun - I decided to ask for some Twitter questions because why not, and I think about 60 answers later, I was tapped out. (Also, if I didn't answer you directly, I just wasn't repeating topics.) It was a fun process - mostly off the cuff answers, but it's me, so it's not to say that my off the cuff answers aren't thought through. Trust me, I've spent far too much time thinking about the topics in the past - it's all that I really do.

There were two questions that I got fairly frequently that I don't like answering - will Sherrod Brown win in 2024, and will Democrats win in North Carolina in 2022? For some reason, when asked those two seats, my energetic exuberance becomes quiet displeasure, the confidence which many of my detractors would call arrogance becomes anxiety and doubt. And, worst of all, the more I think about both, the further I get from an answer and deeper into the hole I get. It's not a fear of being wrong - seriously, I just spent an evening giving a series of falsifiable predictions about elections everywhere under the sun for the next 3.5 years, I'm going to be wrong a bunch, I'm sure. This is different, and weird - it's a weird crisis of confidence.

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Is Sherrod Brown going to win again in 2024? Boy, I don't know. 

He's a popular incumbent in a red-trending state in an era of immense polarization and the 2024 nominee, who I expect to be Kamala Harris, probably does worse in Mahoning than even Biden did this year. He's facing an electorate that increasingly doesn't care who you are, but what the letter beside your name is, and that probably means he loses.

He's also a popular incumbent who just outran a losing Democrat by 10% in a non-Trump environment that was less non-degree white, and if you think that suburban trends continue then the path is pretty clear. Clean up in the three metros - whose power in lower turnout years increases - and then just do well enough in the part of the state South of the I-71, and he can pretty easily outrun Harris or whoever.

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Head to North Carolina, and my brain doesn't have much of an easier time.

North Carolina is an even less appreciated Democratic cocktease than Florida, but in many ways it has been a more reliable one. Kay Hagan almost won it in 2014, Democrats thought they could win it at both Presidential and Senate levels in 2016 and struck out, and then in 2020, well, fuck Cal Cunningham. Or, maybe, not, as it were. Why should a state where Democrats have only won in a landslide (2008), against a top-tier terrible incumbent (2016 Governor), or with a Gubernatorial incumbent (2020 Governor) be a state where I have any faith? If it's Fuck Florida, why isn't it Fuck North Carolina?

Oh, but the state went from 33% non-degree white to 43% non-degree white in the four years between 2016 and 2020, which means that if it were to fall even to 40%, Democrats probably win the state in 2020. If it really was Trump's unique ability to pull out rural whites, then this looks less flippable than it is. Obviously, candidates will matter here a lot, in a state that is so tight, but that rural turnout surge was pretty clearly what killed Biden (again, we're not talking about Cal… even I have limits to how profane I'll let myself be in public), and if I don't think the GOP get that surge broadly, then why the hell aren't I willing to say Democrats are favoured?

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Ask me right now who I think will represent the Low Country in 2023 and I'll tell you that Joe Cunningham does. Ask me when I expect the Filibuster to go away and I'll tell you I expect it by the end of Q1 at this rate. Ask me any other difficult question, and you won't have any difficulty getting an answer out of me - even if it's a controversial answer. I just plainly don't care enough about being liked by internet people to hold back the takes, or to care about having to change my mind. My mission statement is intellectual honesty, because I believe showing my process - and how my incredibly weird and fucked up mind processes events and data - is better than pretending to know all the answers. I've done that, and been on both sides of the success/failure divide. The problem is, the failures feel worse than the successes feel good.

I don't care about having to change my mind - having loosely held priors that I am willing to change easily is a much better system than either holding your priors tightly and barely ever changing them (see the people who started the Georgia cycle at Lean R and then ended at Tossup, despite, you know, all the data) or hedging so deeply that there's no actual take, and everything is just intellectual mush. Both of the alternatives leave you in the position of being less publicly wrong, which I suspect many people feel is important. What it also does is leaves you bereft of any intellectual or moral clarity - when your position is to speak your mind, letting those kinds of concerns influence you is a form of bankruptcy. Letting potential downsides concern you is intellectual cowardice, and yes, a moral failing - be honest with people or don't propagate the notion of yourself as someone who should be taken seriously.

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At the end of the day, if this - Scrimshaw Unscripted, my public facing commentary, anything - is to have any value, I just have to go down with the arguments I actually believe, and not the ones that sound like something I should believe. Democrats are favourites in North Carolina and Sherrod's done in Ohio. I don't feel great about either of those calls - I really, really, really don't - but that's just how this goes. Could I be wrong? Knowing my luck, I'll somehow go 0/2 on these, and just for kicks Tom Brady will go into Lambeau and destroy my Packers on Sunday just to kick me in the nuts. But, at the end of the day, if all of this is supposed to be an exercise in good process, then yeah, polarization and partisanship fucks Brown and Democrats win North Carolina because rural whites fuck off in a midterm.

Crisis averted, it seems, if only for one night.