David Poms

I would like to see someone take a look at what happens to “progressive” vs “moderate” electoral performance when controlling for same- or opposite-party control of the state government (maybe someone has and I haven’t seen it) MN in particular makes me wonder about this: Flanagan has been held up as a major progressive underperformer, but Klobuchar also underperformed the national shift by ~4pp (and only did about ~2pp better than Flanagan—not nothing, but not gigantic). MI has a similar story, FWIW; Dems up and down the ticket mostly didn’t put up the kind of colossal shifts that we saw across the South—including the moderates. There’s an obvious plausible explanation—Walz was a drag for MN Dems, and in a general anti-incumbent environment, being the state party in power attenuated some of the anti-federal-incumbency energy against the GOP. And just broadly, the biggest shifts we saw were in places like Texas, Mississippi, South Carolina, Kansas—places where the GOP has been deeply entrenched for a long time. All of which is to say, because progressives are more likely to run in and win primaries in already-blue states (and moderates disproportionately likely to run in red districts) it seems to be that there could be a confounding factor in progressive “underperformance” in the form of thermostatic reaction to whatever party is in power in a given state. Has anyone done an analysis looking at this specifically? @lxeagle17 @JakeMGrumbach