With all of Election 2018 finally done, it’s time for a wrap-up on predictions and outcomes and strategies for the past and future. I also get to tell you about Katie Hobbs!
The House: I thought we’d gain 36 seats. We got 40! Now we can investigate Trump, block major Republican legislation, and throw our weight around in budget battles. Nancy Pelosi will wield the gavel. No Speaker in my lifetime has swung it better.
I donated $250 to one House race on a tip from a friend, but no more. I was already pretty confident, and running up the score after about 230 seats doesn’t affect things that much. (Especially with Nancy optimizing on the inside, which is worth five seats easily over a replacement-level speaker). The House won’t be a major 2020 donation focus unless something weird and bad happens. I’m projecting economic and Mueller conditions to be worse for Republicans next time, letting us hold the House easily.
The Senate: This hurt. I thought we’d stay at 51R-49D. But we lost two seats, and fell to 53R-47D. Indiana, Missouri, and Florida are the losses that I thought we’d win. FiveThirtyEight had Joe Donnelly up over 3% in Indiana, and then he lost by 6%. Things were almost as bad for McCaskill in Missouri. Something weird is going on with Midwestern polling – over the last two cycles, Democrats have underperformed the polls there, even as they’ve outperformed the polls out west. But I expected Democrats to outperform in AZ, MT, and NV, and they did. The Mountain West trends our way.
I donated $11K to Senate races this year after $7K last year, mostly through Leadership PACs. (These are the awesome way to make Senate donations; I’ll explain later.) I expect that Senate contributions will be my big thing into 2020. If we beat Trump but can’t win three Senate seats, Mitch McConnell just blocks the Democratic President’s legislation and judges. That must not happen. I’ll talk to you about ways to stop it in the coming weeks.
Governors: I didn’t anticipate the losses in Ohio and Iowa – more bad Midwest. And I didn’t expect Andrew Gillum’s heartbreaking defeat in Florida. I did correctly pick a split between the two big vote suppression states. The sorrow was Brian Kemp suppressing the Georgia African-American vote hard enough to beat Stacy Abrams in Georgia.
The joy was Laura Kelly giving Kris Kobach the beating he deserved for shutting down Hispanic polling places in Kansas. We won Nevada too, as Jon Ralston’s masterful analysis of the early voting predicted. Fellow academics and union siblings rejoice, Scott Walker is beaten in Wisconsin!
I didn’t donate into gubernatorial races, because I don’t know state stuff as well as I know federal stuff. It would be good to know more. Governors are powerful. Also on the state level, winning state legislatures in 2020 is how you control redistricting and get gerrymandering power. I want to learn more about how to win those in 2020. But to win the 2020 battleground states, the big race to win in 2018 was…
…State Secretary of State in Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, and Ohio: These races control voting procedures in important states for 2020. The polling on these races is sparse and useless, so it’s hard to make any predictions. I thought we’d win Michigan and 3 of the next 5; I was 1 too optimistic. Losing Ohio hurts big, as that office has a lot of power. Iowa confirms the story about the interior Midwest moving away from Democrats.
On the awesome side, the new state Secretary of State in Michigan is marathon-running law school Dean and Ubermensch Jocelyn Benson, author of State Secretaries of State: Guardians of the Democratic Process (2010). Jena Griswold will oversee the 2020 presidential election in Colorado, and, I expect, the Democratic acquisition of Cory Gardner’s Senate seat. We lose the interior Midwest; we gain the interior West. Which brings me to Arizona, and Katie Hobbs.
I should say a little about her Republican opponent. Steve Gaynor opposed the use of Spanish (and local native languages like Apache and Navajo) in election materials, and called for repealing the sections of the Voting Rights Act that say that they should be printed in languages that the local population speaks. (Hello Arizona Republican, I see that you are trying to win elections by confusing Hispanics and Native Americans.) An intrepid reporter noted that the “no trespassing or else I call the police” signs outside his mansion were printed in both English and Spanish.
Meanwhile, Hobbs’ big idea was making it easier for people to vote. She ran in part on a platform of shortening voting lines. She also opposed dark money (anonymous political donations). My Facebook friends and I donated tens of thousands of dollars to state Secretary of State races – thanks to everyone who got involved. Katie Hobbs may have gotten close to 1% of her campaign funding from us.
On Election Night, it looked like we had lost. But the same swell of late-counted votes that won the Senate race for Kyrsten Sinema later carried Hobbs to victory. The final tally was Katie Hobbs 50.4%, Steve Gaynor 49.6%.
It’s always hard to tell where the tipping points are with these things, but there’s a slight chance that we collectively tipped the race for Katie Hobbs. And if we did, we gave Democrats control of voting for a Presidential battleground with a vulnerable Republican Senate seat in 2020. So if you donated and Arizona wins the White House for Democrats, or if a close Arizona Senate win lets us pass Medicare for All funded by a carbon tax, it might’ve been you.
The House: I thought we’d gain 36 seats. We got 40! Now we can investigate Trump, block major Republican legislation, and throw our weight around in budget battles. Nancy Pelosi will wield the gavel. No Speaker in my lifetime has swung it better.
I donated $250 to one House race on a tip from a friend, but no more. I was already pretty confident, and running up the score after about 230 seats doesn’t affect things that much. (Especially with Nancy optimizing on the inside, which is worth five seats easily over a replacement-level speaker). The House won’t be a major 2020 donation focus unless something weird and bad happens. I’m projecting economic and Mueller conditions to be worse for Republicans next time, letting us hold the House easily.
The Senate: This hurt. I thought we’d stay at 51R-49D. But we lost two seats, and fell to 53R-47D. Indiana, Missouri, and Florida are the losses that I thought we’d win. FiveThirtyEight had Joe Donnelly up over 3% in Indiana, and then he lost by 6%. Things were almost as bad for McCaskill in Missouri. Something weird is going on with Midwestern polling – over the last two cycles, Democrats have underperformed the polls there, even as they’ve outperformed the polls out west. But I expected Democrats to outperform in AZ, MT, and NV, and they did. The Mountain West trends our way.
I donated $11K to Senate races this year after $7K last year, mostly through Leadership PACs. (These are the awesome way to make Senate donations; I’ll explain later.) I expect that Senate contributions will be my big thing into 2020. If we beat Trump but can’t win three Senate seats, Mitch McConnell just blocks the Democratic President’s legislation and judges. That must not happen. I’ll talk to you about ways to stop it in the coming weeks.
Governors: I didn’t anticipate the losses in Ohio and Iowa – more bad Midwest. And I didn’t expect Andrew Gillum’s heartbreaking defeat in Florida. I did correctly pick a split between the two big vote suppression states. The sorrow was Brian Kemp suppressing the Georgia African-American vote hard enough to beat Stacy Abrams in Georgia.
The joy was Laura Kelly giving Kris Kobach the beating he deserved for shutting down Hispanic polling places in Kansas. We won Nevada too, as Jon Ralston’s masterful analysis of the early voting predicted. Fellow academics and union siblings rejoice, Scott Walker is beaten in Wisconsin!
I didn’t donate into gubernatorial races, because I don’t know state stuff as well as I know federal stuff. It would be good to know more. Governors are powerful. Also on the state level, winning state legislatures in 2020 is how you control redistricting and get gerrymandering power. I want to learn more about how to win those in 2020. But to win the 2020 battleground states, the big race to win in 2018 was…
…State Secretary of State in Arizona, Colorado, Iowa, Michigan, and Ohio: These races control voting procedures in important states for 2020. The polling on these races is sparse and useless, so it’s hard to make any predictions. I thought we’d win Michigan and 3 of the next 5; I was 1 too optimistic. Losing Ohio hurts big, as that office has a lot of power. Iowa confirms the story about the interior Midwest moving away from Democrats.
On the awesome side, the new state Secretary of State in Michigan is marathon-running law school Dean and Ubermensch Jocelyn Benson, author of State Secretaries of State: Guardians of the Democratic Process (2010). Jena Griswold will oversee the 2020 presidential election in Colorado, and, I expect, the Democratic acquisition of Cory Gardner’s Senate seat. We lose the interior Midwest; we gain the interior West. Which brings me to Arizona, and Katie Hobbs.
I should say a little about her Republican opponent. Steve Gaynor opposed the use of Spanish (and local native languages like Apache and Navajo) in election materials, and called for repealing the sections of the Voting Rights Act that say that they should be printed in languages that the local population speaks. (Hello Arizona Republican, I see that you are trying to win elections by confusing Hispanics and Native Americans.) An intrepid reporter noted that the “no trespassing or else I call the police” signs outside his mansion were printed in both English and Spanish.
Meanwhile, Hobbs’ big idea was making it easier for people to vote. She ran in part on a platform of shortening voting lines. She also opposed dark money (anonymous political donations). My Facebook friends and I donated tens of thousands of dollars to state Secretary of State races – thanks to everyone who got involved. Katie Hobbs may have gotten close to 1% of her campaign funding from us.
On Election Night, it looked like we had lost. But the same swell of late-counted votes that won the Senate race for Kyrsten Sinema later carried Hobbs to victory. The final tally was Katie Hobbs 50.4%, Steve Gaynor 49.6%.
It’s always hard to tell where the tipping points are with these things, but there’s a slight chance that we collectively tipped the race for Katie Hobbs. And if we did, we gave Democrats control of voting for a Presidential battleground with a vulnerable Republican Senate seat in 2020. So if you donated and Arizona wins the White House for Democrats, or if a close Arizona Senate win lets us pass Medicare for All funded by a carbon tax, it might’ve been you.
