Where Can You Send This Guy?
Every cycle brings chatter about the potential for polling errors – sometimes well-founded concerns about sampling, sometimes paranoia, sometimes idiotic “un-skewing” to bring published numbers into line with a partisan’s preferences. A nice thing about campaigns, though, is that we have lots of other data points that help us to evaluate whether those polls seem to be in the ballpark. One such data point: where are each party’s power players spending their time? And in the case of Republicans in 2026, we know that they are keeping the president far from the battleground – or at last the battleground as most analysts were defining it over the summer. Instead, he’s venturing into deep-red territory – presumably to stop the bleeding and prevent even bigger losses. Here’s what the White House’s official rapid response account laid out for this week’s travel plans:
Read more…A Moment of Pedantry, If You’ll Permit Me
Writing about any topic involves a series of choices about one’s audience – who it is, what to assume about their knowledge and interests, and how often to level-set with respect to our baseline understanding of the world around us. Writing about elections is something I do as a hobbyist, but with enough subject matter expertise (through practice and from extensive reading) to provide some value, I hope, to family and friends who are interested in how and why elections play out the way they do. I also try to bring some humility to the equation.1
Read more…Weak Candidates Make Hard Times
Every party has bad candidates…and a lot of them win. But in a cycle where Republicans face a massively difficult task in holding onto their razor-thin House of Representatives majority, five particularly egregious candidates are putting seats in considerably greater danger than “normal” nominees would be. What I’m looking for here is candidates whose newsworthy flaws are taking safe or likely Republican districts and moving them into a new tier of competitiveness through the magnitude of those flaws. Committing crimes, associating with violent criminals, warring with party leaders in your state or district, misrepresenting your military record, doing the various weird shit Boebert gets up to…that kind of thing. These candidates are making the already tough job of holding the majority and avoiding a blue wave even harder – and more expensive – for the GOP.
Read more…New Targets: Washington’s 5th
We finish up our look at the longshot seats added to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s list of target seats at the start of October among the alfalfa fields and Palouse hills of eastern Washington.
Read more…New Targets: Virginia’s 6th
We continue our look at the longshot seats added to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s list of target seats at the start of October in a scenic stretch of small-town and largely rural Virginia.
Read more…New Targets: Texas’s 9th
We’re continuing our look at the intriguing set of “reach” seats added to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s target list last week in the Lone Star State: let’s head to the greater Houston area’s dramatically-redrawn 9th District.
Read more…New Targets: Oklahoma’s 5th
We continue our tour of the longshot seats added to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s list of target seats at the start of October with a look at Oklahoma, fresh off the Sooners’ win over Texas in the Red River Rivalry. We’re casting our gaze not far from the OU campus, in the 5th District.
Read more…New Targets: North Carolina’s 13th
We’re continuing our look at the intriguing set of “reach” seats added to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s target list at the start of October in the fringes of the Raleigh metro area: North Carolina’s 13th Congressional District (NC-13).
Read more…New Targets: New Jersey’s 2nd
We continue our tour of the longshot seats added to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s list of target seats at the start of October with a trip to South Jersey.
Read more…New Targets: Michigan’s 1st
We’re continuing our look at the intriguing set of “reach” seats added to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s target list last week with Michigan’s 1st Congressional District (MI-1).
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