Another take on the Six Republican Parties
Plus: It's not Reagan's party anymore, the post-Dobbs abortion landscape, Brown's path to re-election, Pew's 11 facts about Hispanics
No. 281 | August 18, 2023
🗳️ Elections
Nate Cohn: The 6 Kinds of Republican Voters (The New York Times)
“After eight years of Republican fealty to Donald J. Trump, few would argue that the party is still defined by Ronald Reagan’s famous three-legged stool of the religious right, fiscal conservatives and neoconservative hawks. But if the Republican Party is no longer in Reagan’s image, it’s not necessarily a populist-conservative MAGA monolith, either.
The last New York Times/Siena College poll found that only 37 percent of Republicans count as part of Mr. Trump’s loyal base. And while majorities of Republicans side with Mr. Trump on almost every issue, those majorities are often quite slim: Around 40 percent of Republican-leaning voters support aid to Ukraine, support comprehensive immigration reform or say abortion should be mostly or always legal.
But if the Republican Party isn’t quite a MAGA monolith, what is it? To better understand the party today, we split Republican and Republican-leaning voters into groups, based on the results of our Times/Siena poll. The groups were defined by how Republican-leaning voters felt on the issues — not how they felt about Mr. Trump.”
From
in May: The Six Republican Parties
Nate Cohn: It’s Not Reagan’s Party Anymore (The New York Times)
“For more than 30 years, the Republican Party was defined by Ronald Reagan’s famous three-legged stool: a coalition of fiscal conservatives, social conservatives and national security hawks.
It’s not Mr. Reagan’s party anymore.
Today, a majority of Republicans oppose many of the positions that defined the party as recently as a decade ago, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll released last week. Only around one-third of Republican voters takes the traditionally conservative side on each of same-sex marriage, entitlements and America’s role in the world — three issues that defined George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election campaign and correspond with each leg of Mr. Reagan’s stool.”
Geoffrey Skelley: Trump's Republican Opponents Are Still Refusing To Attack Him — Even After Four Indictments (FiveThirtyEight)
“On Monday, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis issued the fourth indictment of former President Donald Trump this year, this time for activities related to Trump and associates’ attempts to overturn the 2020 election result in Georgia. Have any of Trump’s presidential primary opponents who might have an actual chance of winning the GOP nomination taken this opportunity to attack Trump?
Not really, no. Trump leads FiveThirtyEight’s national polling average by nearly 40 percentage points ahead over the second-place candidate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. Yet much like after the first three indictments, it’s been the unmistakably anti-Trump candidates with little chance of victory who have mainly dinged Trump over the Georgia indictment. By comparison, the candidates who might have even a remote chance of defeating Trump — those with high favorability numbers among Republicans — largely eschewed attacking the front-runner and went after the legal system instead.”
Galen Druke: The 2024 Election, According To The Country’s Best Pollster (FiveThirtyEight)
“Tuesday is Election Day in Ohio and it’s a bit of an unusual one. Ohioans are voting on whether to increase the threshold to pass constitutional amendments from a simple majority to a 60 percent supermajority. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen Druke speaks with senior elections analyst Nathaniel Rakich about where the race stands and the broader trend of similar ballot measures.
Galen also digs into the New York Times’s first polls of the 2024 primary and general elections with Ruth Igielnik, the Times’s editor of news surveys. Their surveys with Siena College during the 2022 midterms earned them the distinction of the best pollster in the country, according to FiveThirtyEight’s ratings. At this point, their early data suggests that former President Donald Trump is far outpacing his rivals in the Republican primary and is tied with President Biden in general election polling. So, what should we make of that?”
Louis Jacobsen: Where Both Parties Overperform in the House, 2023 Edition (Sabuto’s Crystal Ball)
“In an era of sharp partisan polarization, it’s increasingly common to find a correlation among House, Senate, and presidential results. Still, differences exist — and those differences help explain why the Democrats control the White House but the Republicans control the House.
Two years ago, we looked at the states that produced ‘excess’ House seats for one party or the other — that is, states for which the partisan ratio in House seats exceeds what would be predicted by the state’s presidential vote in 2020. At the time, we found a rough parity: Republicans squeezed out an extra 32 seats beyond what their state-by-state presidential results would have predicted, while Democrats squeezed out an extra 28 seats.
Now, after redistricting and the 2022 election, the GOP has expanded that lead. Today, the GOP holds 39 excess seats in the House, compared to 24 for the Democrats. That net GOP edge of 15 excess seats is about triple the Republicans’ narrow edge in the House, as their 222-seat majority is just 5 seats away from being in the slim minority (217 seats).”
Harrison Lavelle and Armin Thomas: Evaluating Sherrod Brown’s Path to Reelection (Split Ticket)
“Senator Sherrod Brown has comfortably won three senate races and currently is the only Democratic statewide elected official in Ohio. His most recent reelection performance was impressive for a Trump-era Democrat in an increasingly-Republican state, but our 2018 WAR model suggests that it wasn’t particularly extraordinary. Brown overperformed by just 1.2 points relative to expectations, meaning our model would have expected a generic Democrat to have beaten a generic Republican by a similar margin.
Ohio’s 2018 Senate campaign dynamics explain much of Brown’s lopsided margin of victory. For one, the national environment clearly benefited Democrats, raising the floor in Ohio enough to enable him to win comfortably. The Senator also benefited from a weak opponent, Congressman Jim Renacci, whom he outspent significantly. Had the GOP run a stronger candidate for Senate, like then-Attorney General Mike DeWine, Republicans may have been able to pick up the seat.”
J. Miles Coleman: The Atlas of Post-Dobbs Abortion Ballot Measures: Part One (Sabuto’s Crystal Ball)
“Whenever we cover a major ballot issue at the Crystal Ball, we always caution that, even though some votes are framed through heavily nationalized lenses, not everything from these votes can be transferred to typical partisan races. That said, since the U.S. Supreme Court’s Dobbs ruling last year, seven states have held ballot measures that relate, whether directly or indirectly, to abortion rights. Abortion rights advocates have come out on the winning side of all seven contests, which is something that has been widely interpreted as a promising trend for Democrats — so the urge to compare ballot issues to partisan races is strong.
With that, we’ll be going through all seven states and seeing how the pro-abortion rights side of those ballot issues compares to the performances of Democrats in some recent key races. Aside from the obvious caveats, it’s important to note that each ballot issue — wording, timing, etc. — was unique. We’ll start with Kansas, Michigan, and Ohio this week, and tackle some other states in Part Two.”
👫 Demographics
Mohamad Moslimani, Mark Hugo Lopez and Luis Noe-Bustamante: 11 facts about Hispanic origin groups in the U.S. (Pew Research Center)
“In 2022, there were 63.7 million Hispanics living in the United States. The U.S. Hispanic population has diverse origins in Latin America and Spain.
Recently, the origins of U.S. Hispanics have begun to shift as patterns of immigration from Latin America change. Notably, the number of Mexican immigrants living in the U.S. has fallen as the number of immigrants who identify as Dominican, Venezuelan, Guatemalan, Honduran, Salvadoran or with another Hispanic origin has grown.
Here are 11 facts about the U.S. Hispanic population, its origin groups and how those groups differ from one another. This analysis is based primarily on data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2021 American Community Survey.”
Michael Podhorzer: Terrible Food, and Such Small Portions (Weekend Reading)
There’s an old joke about how two elderly women are at a resort, and one of them says, ‘Boy, the food at this place is really terrible.’ The other one says, ‘Yeah, I know – and such small portions.’
Terrible food and small portions is also an apt description of current political reporting on polls, particularly around demographic trends. The first part of this post explains why, with respect to results for commonly referenced demographic groups, the polling at this place is often ‘really terrible.’ The second part of the post shows that even if you want to think about politics in terms of demographics, the portions are unnecessarily small, because there’s more that could be done with the data.”
📊 Public Opinion
Katherine Schaeffer and Shradha Dinesh: 32% of Americans have a tattoo, including 22% who have more than one (Pew Research Center)
“Tattoos have become a more common sight in workplaces around the United States, even making appearances among members of the U.S. House and Senate. Amid this shift, a large majority of U.S. adults say society has become more accepting of people with tattoos in recent decades, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. And 32% of adults have a tattoo themselves, including 22% who have more than one.
There are no major differences by political party or whether Americans live in an urban, suburban or rural community. A third of Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents have a tattoo, as do 32% of Republicans and Republican leaners. And roughly a third of adults across urban, suburban and rural areas report having a tattoo. There are no differences between veterans and non-veterans, either.”
📈 Data Science
Vitalik Buterin: What do I think about Community Notes? (Vitalik Buterin)
“Community Notes is a fact-checking tool that sometimes attaches context notes, like the one on Elon's tweet above, to tweets as a fact-checking and anti-misinformation tool. It was originally called Birdwatch, and was first rolled out as a pilot project in January 2021. Since then, it has expanded in stages, with the most rapid phase of its expansion coinciding with Twitter's takeover by Elon last year. Today, Community Notes appear frequently on tweets that get a very large audience on Twitter, including those on contentious political topics. And both in my view, and in the view of many people across the political spectrum I talk to, the notes, when they appear, are informative and valuable.
But what interests me most about Community Notes is how, despite not being a ‘crypto project’, it might be the closest thing to an instantiation of ‘crypto values’ that we have seen in the mainstream world. Community Notes are not written or curated by some centrally selected set of experts; rather, they can be written and voted on by anyone, and which notes are shown or not shown is decided entirely by an open source algorithm.”
😂 Humor
@FrankLuntz: "The average U.S. president has been charged with 1.9 felonies." (X)
