Americans are spending more and more time alone, and more than a third reported experiencing “serious loneliness” in 2021. The director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development — the longest study of human life ever conducted — concluded in a new book that close personal relationships are the “one crucial factor [that] stands out for the consistency and power of its ties to physical health, mental health and longevity.” A lack of those relationships can actually have an impact on political behavior and interest in extreme ideologies. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast, Galen Druke speaks with the director of the Harvard study, Robert Waldinger, about the lessons his findings have for politics in America.

Americans are spending more and more time alone, and more than a third reported experiencing “serious loneliness” in 2021. The director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development — the longest study of human life ever conducted — concluded in a new book that close personal relationships are the “one crucial factor [that] stands out for the consistency and power of its ties to physical health, mental health and longevity.”

A lack of those relationships can actually have an impact on political behavior and interest in extreme ideologies. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen Druke speaks with the director of the Harvard study, Robert Waldinger, about the lessons his findings have for politics in America.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

2022 Election

How Our 2022 Midterm Forecasts Performed

Our model was always skeptical of the “red wave.”

By Nate Silver

Graphics by Ryan Best

Feb. 2, 2023, at 11:30 AM

Let’s get this out of the way up front: There was a wide gap between the perception of how well polls and data-driven forecasts did in 2022 and the reality of how they did … and the reality is that they did pretty well.

While some polling firms badly missed the mark, in the aggregate the polls had one of their most accurate cycles in recent history. As a result, FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts had a pretty good year, too. Media proclamations of a “red wave” occurred largely despite polls that showed a close race for the U.S. Senate and a close generic congressional ballot. It was the pundits who made the red wave narrative, not the data.

With that said, the polls weren’t perfect.

• Polling averages and forecasts did slightly underestimate Democrats, though the differences were modest — certainly less than the extent to which they underestimated Republicans in 2016 and 2020.
• Some pollsters — such as Trafalgar Group and Rasmussen Reports, which have a history of Republican-leaning polling — had a conspicuously poor year. 
• There are different methods of polling aggregation and forecasting. The margins in the polling averages from RealClearPolitics were on average 1.3 percentage points more favorable to Republicans in the most competitive Senate races¹ than those published by FiveThirtyEight. Similarly, RCP’s generic ballot polling average was 1.3 points more favorable to the GOP than FiveThirtyEight’s. In this article, I’ll only be evaluating FiveThirtyEight’s forecasts, but methodological choices made a difference.
• Finally, Democrats’ relatively strong year — although there were some precedents for it — defied a lot of midterm history. It’s not just that the polls did better than the conventional wisdom; they also did well relative to political science or “fundamentals”-based forecasting methods.

So let’s dig into the FiveThirtyEight forecast. As you may know if you follow our work closely, we publish three different versions of our congressional and gubernatorial forecasts. Version one is a Lite forecast that sticks as much as possible to the polls themselves. (In races that have little polling, Lite makes inferences from the generic ballot and from polls of other races.) Our Classic forecast blends the polls with other data — for instance, information on candidate fundraising, incumbency and the voting history of the state or district. Finally, our Deluxe forecast adds in another layer, namely race ratings from outside groups such as The Cook Political Report. Deluxe is the default when you pull up our forecast interactive and the version that we use most often when describing our forecasts.

But there was, in some ways, a fourth version of our model this year. Because of a data processing error, our Deluxe version was using outdated race ratings for House ratings from one of the expert groups, Inside Elections. Essentially, those ratings were frozen in time as of late September. The impact on the forecast was minor, but not to the point of being trivial. In this article, I’ll evaluate our Deluxe forecasts both as published (that is, with outdated Inside Elections ratings) and as revised with the correct ratings. (Ironically, the as-published forecasts were actually slightly more accurate than revised ones — more about that below.) 

But first, here were the topline numbers for the various versions of our forecast:

Both the Democrats’ one-seat gain in the Senate and Republicans’ nine-seat gain in the House were well within the 80 percent confidence intervals established by our various models.² True, the actual results were not in the dead center of the range: Democrats did somewhat better than the average forecasted result in both chambers. But it’s hard to hit an exact bullseye (although we get lucky and come close now and then) — that’s the whole reason to express uncertainty in a forecast.

In percentage terms, the forecasts gave Democrats somewhere between a 41 and 50 percent chance of keeping control of the Senate. Even using the 41 percent number, you would have had a decent-sized (and ultimately winning) bet on Democrats relative to prediction market odds, which put their chances at 32 percent. That is to say, the FiveThirtyEight forecasts were more bullish on Democrats than the conventional wisdom. And the Lite and Classic forecasts  — which rely entirely on objective indicators and not expert ratings — saw the Senate as a true dead heat.

Meanwhile, Republicans won the aggregate popular vote for the House by 2.8 percentage points. That is pretty close to the target established by our forecasts, which projected Republicans to win it by margins ranging from 2.4 to 4.0 points.

In other words, Republicans won about as many national votes as expected. There was not any sort of disproportionate youth turnout wave or other Democratic turnout surge. Instead, according to exit polls, more Republican-identified than Democratic-identified voters turned out in November. 

However, Democrats did an especially good job of translating votes into seats. How? Republicans ran up the score in uncompetitive races while Democrats eked out tight ones. A big part of the story is candidate quality. In many swing states and districts, Republicans offered voters far-right, inexperienced and/or scandal-plagued candidates, turning off independent voters. It may also have been that Democrats did a better job of directing financial and other resources to the highest-stakes races. Differences on the margin mattered: Democrats won four of the six Senate races and four of the five gubernatorial races decided by 5 percentage points or fewer.

Next, let’s check the calibration of the FiveThirtyEight forecasts, which is a way to see if the leading candidate won about as often as advertised. (For instance, did candidates who had a 70 percent chance win around 70 percent of the time?) We break our forecasts down into four categories: toss-up (where the leader had between a 50 and 60 percent chance of winning); lean (a 60 to 75 percent chance); likely (a 75 to 95 percent chance) and solid (a 95 percent or greater chance). Here were the numbers for the various versions of the forecasts — first splitting the results by whether Democrats or Republicans were favored, then showing all races combined.

Overall, calibration of the Lite forecast was pretty good, but with some asymmetries between the parties. Based on our forecast, Republicans were supposed to win 252 races (combining House, Senate and gubernatorial contests) and they in fact won exactly 252. Democrats were supposed to win 220 races and instead won 230. In the aggregate, the Lite forecasts were slightly underconfident — meaning there were somewhat fewer upsets than expected — although that’s what you might expect in a cycle where the polls had a strong year.

The calibration story is basically the same story for our Classic forecasts. Note that there were very few long-shot upsets. In races labeled as “likely,” the favorite won 55 out of 56 races. And they won 389 out of the 390 “solid” races.

And last but not least, Deluxe followed more or less the same script. I’ll present both the published and revised versions of Deluxe together since they make for a fun comparison:

Note that the as-published version of the Deluxe model actually made more correct “calls” (488) than the revised version did (481), even though the published version was using out-of-date Inside Elections ratings! Some of this probably just reflects luck in the closest contests. Deluxe (as published) identified the winners correctly in 32 of 43 “toss-up” and “lean” races (74 percent), while Deluxe (revised) went 30-of-53 (57 percent) in these categories.

However, the published version of the Deluxe ratings was also somewhat more optimistic for Democrats than the revised version. Since Democrats had a pretty good night overall, this helped it get a few more calls right. Mostly this reflects that the conventional wisdom grew more bearish on Democrats between late September and Election Day — and the conventional wisdom in September was closer to what actually transpired. So in some ways it was a blessing-in-disguise to use the late September version of the Inside Advantage ratings.

Next up, a chart you’ll love if you want to give us a hard time: the biggest upsets of the year.

The major upset here is in Washington’s 3rd Congressional District, where Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez defeated Republican Joe Kent despite having only a 2 percent chance in Deluxe (as published) and a 4 percent chance in Classic and Deluxe (revised). That’s a big upset, but it’s also about what you’d expect. As you can see from the calibration charts, an upset or two like this is par for the course given that we made forecasts for more than 500 races. So this is a sign of solid calibration.

What we might change — and what we don’t think we’ll change — for 2024 and 2026

I typically close these forecast reviews by considering what modifications I might make to our models in the future. In certain ways, though, this election lowered my stress level a bit. The polls had a relatively good year, even if that by no means rules out problems going forward. 

Moreover, one of the core hypotheses of our forecast is that polling bias is unpredictable: Polls will be biased against Republicans in some years and biased against Democrats in other years, but it’s hard to predict the direction of the bias in advance. That was the case in 2022, where Democrats were modestly underrated by the polls in 2022 — albeit with some misses in both directions — after Republicans considerably overperformed their polls in 2016 and 2020.

However, there are a few things that I’m thinking about:

1. Given that the Deluxe forecasts haven’t really outperformed Lite or Classic since we introduced the current version of the model in 2018, there’s a question of what utility they serve. In principle, the expert ratings used in Deluxe can add a lot of value by considering measures of candidate quality that may be hard to spot in objective indicators, or because the groups that publish these ratings have access to inside information such as internal polling. But they can also introduce a subjective or “vibes”-based element, which certainly didn’t help in 2022.

There’s also a potential issue of recursiveness. If the expert groups partly look to the FiveThirtyEight forecast for guidance in how they rate races, but the FiveThirtyEight model in turn uses the expert ratings, the two methods become less independent from one another.

I’m not sure what we’ll do about Deluxe quite yet, but it’s a fairly close call between keeping things as is, scrapping the Deluxe forecast, and keeping Deluxe but making it a secondary version and Classic the default version.

2. Our model has a pretty sophisticated method for considering how the results in different states and districts are correlated — for instance, it understands that demographically similar states and districts tend to move in the same direction. But it likely understates intrastate correlations.

That was an issue this cycle as Republicans experienced a localized “red wave” in Florida and New York despite having a disappointing election nationally. These effects were partly the result of turnout differentials caused by upballot candidates, such as the tailwinds for Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis in Florida or the lack of enthusiasm for Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul in New York.

The problems come because our model underestimates the degree to which a district in upstate New York and one in downstate New York are potentially correlated with one another, even if the districts are fairly different from one another demographically. Conversely, it slightly overestimates the degree to which a district in New York and one in Pennsylvania are correlated. We will do some due diligence on how common these patterns have been in past elections — and how much practical effect they have on the model.³

3. Finally, this is more in the category of “note to ourselves,” but we need to review our internal processes for double-checking that data inputs are working properly, given the error involving the Inside Elections ratings. Our models combine and aggregate a lot of different data sources, and that’s part of what makes them robust — but complex models can also introduce more opportunities for error.

There’s also one department where I’m not considering major changes, which is our process for determining which polls we include in our averages and forecasts.

Despite complaints both before and after the election about Republican-leaning polling firms “flooding the zone,” our overall forecasts and polling averages were both fairly accurate and relatively unbiased in 2022. It doesn’t seem prudent to me to have continued to “trust the process” after 2016 and 2020, when polling averages had a strong pro-Democratic bias, but then to panic and radically revise our method after polling averages had a slight pro-Republican bias in 2022.

That doesn’t mean we won’t consider changes around the margin. But I’ve been thinking about these issues for a long time, and our polling averages and our model already have a lot of defense mechanisms against zone-flooding. The most important is our house-effects adjustment: if a polling firm consistently shows Democratic or Republican-leaning results, the model detects that and adjusts the results accordingly. Expressly partisan polls (such as an internal poll for a campaign or the RNC) also receive special handling: basically the model assumes they are biased until proven otherwise. And our pollster ratings are designed to be self-correcting. When we update our ratings later this year with results from 2022, pollsters such as Trafaglar and Rasmussen will take a hit, which will give them less influence in the polling averages in 2024.

Finally, we don’t want to have to make a lot of ad-hoc decisions about which polls to include or not, both because that would be extremely time-consuming and because it would introduce avenues for bias when everyone is stressed out in the middle of an election campaign.

Keep in mind that this is a long-term process: It takes many election cycles to determine which polling firms are most reliable. For instance, some of the polling firms that were least accurate in 2022 were actually the most accurate in 2020. I think it’s an enormous mistake in forecasting to constantly “fight the last war” when you have many years or a larger batch of data to evaluate. It’s exactly the sort of mistake that vibes-driven pundits make: They assume that whatever happened in the previous election or two will happen again. Our approach is to create a good process and to play the long game — and it works out pretty well more often than not.

2024 Republican Primary

How Donald Trump’s Unusual Presidential Comeback Could Go

History presents three possible paths.

By Geoffrey Skelley

Graphics by Paroma Soni

Feb. 2, 2023, at 6:00 AM

“I am not a candidate.
I will not become a candidate.
I will support the nominee of my party with all the energy I have.”

With this, former President Gerald Ford announced in March 1980 that he would not make a late entrance into the Republican presidential nomination race after long teasing a potential bid. For decades, this marked the nearest any former president had come to seeking a return to the White House in the modern political era — until former President Donald Trump announced his presidential bid in November.

Trump’s comeback campaign is unprecedented since the contemporary nomination system took shape in the 1970s.¹ Yet in the broader history of presidential elections, his comeback effort is unusual — but not unheard of. Former presidents like Martin Van Buren, Ulysses Grant, Grover Cleveland and Theodore Roosevelt each mounted serious post-presidency campaigns to return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue between 1844 and 1912. In fact, five former presidents have won at least some delegates at major-party national conventions, as the table below shows.²

The American political system has changed enough, at a structural level, that Trump can’t expect to retread the paths that any of these men took. And why would he want to? Only one of them successfully made it back to the White House. Still, the broad circumstances surrounding a trio of presidential comeback attempts offer three paths for Trump’s 2024 campaign. Like Grant in 1880, Trump could attract ample support for his party’s nomination but ultimately fall short after a majority of Republicans coalesce around an opponent. Alternatively, after seeking his party’s nomination, Trump could abandon the GOP and launch a third-party bid, as Roosevelt did in 1912. Or Trump could win his party’s nomination, as Cleveland did in 1892 — and maybe even reclaim the White House.

Trump’s Best-Case Scenario

Grover Cleveland

If Trump could choose to be in the same shoes as anyone come January 2025, it’d be those of Grover Cleveland, the only person ever elected to two nonconsecutive terms as president. Cleveland won the presidency in 1884, lost reelection in 1888, then won back the White House in 1892. It’s very hard to say how likely Trump is to win the GOP nomination at this early vantage point, but compared with Cleveland, Trump could have much greater trouble coalescing support from across different factions of his party.

Cleveland’s comeback developed thanks to a vindication of his views on economic policies. Cleveland, a conservative Democrat, narrowly lost reelection to Republican Benjamin Harrison in 1888 partly because of his support for lower tariff rates, which Republicans criticized. Two years later, though, Democrats won massive majorities in the House after slamming the excesses of the “Billion Dollar Congress” and connecting rising prices to higher tariffs.³ Buoyed by the role his core issues played in the 1890 midterm campaign, Cleveland began a comeback bid. His main rival for the Democratic nomination would be Sen. David Hill, a fellow New Yorker who embraced a more pro-silver, inflationary approach to monetary policy — a key divide within the party — whereas Cleveland opposed weakening gold as the prime guarantor of the dollar’s value.

But Cleveland’s profile as a reformer in an era of graft and machine politics also contrasted sharply with Hill, whose reputation as a machine politician loomed as a potential weakness with general-election voters. By the time of the June national convention, Cleveland had become the front-runner, and on the convention’s first ballot, he won enough to surpass the two-thirds share necessary to win the nomination.⁴ Cleveland went on to defeat Harrison in a rematch of the previous general election, albeit with just 46 percent of the national popular vote, as Harrison led a divided GOP — he’d struggled to win renomination — and third-party efforts by the Populist and Prohibition parties combined to win 11 percent, somewhat scrambling the electoral map.

Cleveland’s successful comeback offers a precedent — and hope — for Trump’s 2024 campaign. One broad similarity between the two is that Trump, like Cleveland, has remained his party’s most high-profile leader after losing a close presidential election. Trump’s reshaping of the GOP may not win him the 2024 Republican nomination — but it’s certainly not to the detriment of his candidacy. Under and since Trump’s presidency, the Republican Party’s congressional membership has changed substantially, and its members are more aligned with Trump’s style of politics. Similarly, more than half of the Republican National Committee’s membership has changed since Trump won the GOP nod in 2016, thanks to an exodus of old-school “establishment” Republicans. Among the broader electorate, a tad less than 40 percent of Republicans have told The Economist/YouGov in most recent surveys that they identify as a “MAGA Republican,” compared with a little more than 45 percent who didn’t. While larger, that latter group may still embrace some of Trump’s anti-establishment and combative approach that other Republicans have used to great effect. 

However, Trump and Cleveland do differ in some critical respects. For one thing, Cleveland’s standing ahead of the 1892 election improved after his party’s showing in the 1890 midterms; by contrast, Trump’s image has taken a hit in the wake of the GOP’s underwhelming performance in the 2022 midterms — highlighted by the defeat of many Trump-endorsed candidates in key Senate races. Additionally, concerns about Hill’s electability in the general election also helped Cleveland build widespread support — even among pro-silver southern and western Democrats — but Trump might suffer because of worries about his general-election chances. Recent polls suggest another Republican, such as Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, might be a stronger general-election contender against President Biden; although the value of such polls this far from November 2024 is highly suspect, donors and party activists are certainly looking at them.

At the same time, Trump has something going for him that Cleveland didn’t: the primary process. Trump doesn’t necessarily need to even win electoral majorities in presidential primaries to win a majority of his party’s delegates. In 2016, the GOP’s preference for primaries and caucuses that were “winner-take-all” — or at least “winner-take-most” — helped Trump win the Republican nomination even though he won only pluralities of the vote in most contests against a crowded field of opponents. We might be headed for a sequel if a sizable number of candidates decide to run in the 2024 Republican contest.

Falling Just Short

Ulysses Grant

It is entirely possible, on the other hand, that a majority — or larger plurality — of Republicans will coalesce around one of Trump’s opponents, an outcome that would broadly parallel Ulysses Grant’s failed bid for the GOP nomination in 1880. Given the two politicians’ factional support and critics’ concerns about electability, it is the Grant comparison that arguably looms largest for Trump among those we’re examining here.

The preeminent hero of the Civil War, Grant left the White House in 1877 after serving two terms. But his image had suffered from his administration’s myriad corruption scandals as well as his association with the turbulent Reconstruction era and a deep economic depression. Grant’s successor, Republican Rutherford Hayes, didn’t seek reelection, and favorable press coverage of Grant’s two-year world tour resuscitated his profile as the 1880 election neared. Grant had support from a faction of the GOP led by a group of political bosses, but he also faced substantial opposition within a party that had lost its once-dominant position following the Civil War. Many Republicans worried that he would struggle to unify the GOP, given his administration’s scandals and the fractures that had developed within the party during his presidency.

Like Grant, Trump remains relatively popular among those in his party: His favorability among Republicans sits in the low 70s in Civiqs’s tracking poll, while only around 15 percent have an unfavorable view of him. While he’s lost ground in recent national primary polls, Trump still leads DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence — Trump’s most-polled potential opponents — with a plurality across most surveys. And again like Grant, Trump also has received some early backing from Republican officials in Congress and around the country, a departure from Trump’s first run back in 2016.

But one potentially critical difference is that Trump could benefit from his party’s delegate rules — just as he did winning pluralities in the 2016 primaries — whereas Grant ended up losing in part because a pivotal rules decision went against him. At the 1880 Republican National Convention, the anti-Grant faction — which was larger than the pro-Grant group — defeated implementation of the “unit rule,” which would’ve required delegates to vote for the candidate preferred by most of their state’s delegation. Grant’s backers had supported the proposal, which would’ve been analogous to a winner-take-all primary in some delegate-rich states where Grant had the most support, putting him close to the majority necessary for the nomination.

And unlike in modern times, the classic convention setting also gave Grant’s opponents a chance to find an alternative choice — even one who wasn’t actively seeking the presidency. After 35 ballots, as no candidate managed to overtake Grant, some delegates began turning to Ohio Rep. James Garfield, who had earlier made a strong impression when he gave a nominating speech for another candidate. Sensing things were turning toward Garfield and wanting to avoid Grant’s nomination at all costs, Grant’s main opponents called for their delegates to back Garfield on the 36th ballot. As the vote came down, Grant again captured more than 300 votes, but Garfield won 399, a majority that earned him the party’s nomination and blocked Grant’s comeback.

However, as with Grant, many current Republican leaders, donors and voters would like to turn the page on the Trump era in the face of the former president’s struggles in the 2022 midterms, as well as legal proceedings concerning his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, his business interests, his personal life and his alleged mishandling of classified documents. Similarly, a majority of Republicans could rally around a Trump alternative, such as DeSantis, whose strengthening poll numbers, support from party leaders and plaudits from conservative media could make him the most likely preference for Trump opponents.

The Third-Party Option

Theodore Roosevelt

Last and definitely least likely, Trump could leave the Republican primary race and run as a third-party candidate in 2024. Such a move would undoubtedly bring to mind comparisons with another former president who opted to run outside the two-party system after losing his party’s nomination: Teddy Roosevelt, whose unsuccessful run in 1912 remains the strongest performance by a third-party presidential candidate in U.S. history.⁵

Roosevelt became president following the assassination of William McKinley in 1901, and then won four more years in 1904. But having promised not to run again, Roosevelt positioned his handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, to win the Republican nomination and the presidency in 1908. Out of office, however, Roosevelt became frustrated with Taft’s more conservative governing approach, and the Republican Party’s divisions and losses in the 1910 midterms created space for a Taft opponent — one Roosevelt filled when he decided to challenge Taft in the 1912 Republican nomination race.

The ensuing campaign broke new ground as some states (13 in all) would select most of their convention delegates via a presidential primary. Roosevelt had previously expressed skepticism toward primaries, but he embraced the popular movement to create direct primaries and encouraged many states to implement them as it became apparent they were the only way he could gain more delegates than Taft, whose allies controlled the party machinery in states where delegates would be picked by local and state conventions. In an unprecedented, popular campaign for president, Roosevelt ended up dominating at the ballot box: He won the popular vote in nine of the 12 primaries that had results, garnering 52 percent to Taft’s 34 percent overall.⁶ However, heading into the 1912 GOP convention, Roosevelt’s primary success couldn’t win the nomination on its own: Only about 2 in 5 Republican delegates came from the primary states (in 2016, that figure was about 4 in 5). Taft’s allies also controlled the convention committees, including the credentials committee, which backed the Taft-supporting delegates on most of the numerous credentials challenges that had resulted from the contentious campaign. Taft narrowly won the nomination on the first ballot, so Roosevelt’s campaign decided to implement the third-party option.

Third-party bids usually struggle, but Roosevelt’s Progressive Party — often called the Bull Moose Party — had both serious financial support and proof of popular support demonstrated by his showing in the GOP primaries. In November, Roosevelt went on to win 27 percent of the popular vote to Taft’s 23 percent. But because Roosevelt and Taft largely split the Republican vote, Democrat Woodrow Wilson easily won the presidency with just 42 percent.

As with Cleveland and Grant, the political circumstances surrounding Trump and Roosevelt differ on many fronts. For one thing, in the 2024 campaign, Trump won’t face an incumbent from his own party like Roosevelt did. Trump will also have far more access than Roosvelt to winning support through primaries, as those contests determined only a minority of delegates at the 1912 GOP convention. But if Trump were to actually pursue a third-party bid, he’d likely have to make that choice much earlier in 2024 than Roosevelt had to in 1912, thanks to more rigorous and time-sensitive requirements for qualifying for the general-election ballot across the 50 states and Washington, D.C.

But while the idea of a Trump third-party bid is unlikely, we can’t completely laugh it off. After all, he has repeatedly raised the prospect himself, most recently in late December when he shared on his social media platform an article from a pro-Trump website advocating such a move. This is in keeping with a long-running pattern: Following the 2020 election, Trump talked of a new “Patriot Party” or “MAGA Party,” and during the 2016 cycle, Trump complained of being treated unfairly by the GOP hierarchy and suggested he might attempt an independent bid. Although this has perhaps been a bargaining tactic — a split GOP vote would all but guarantee victory for Democrats — it’s also true that a Trump third-party bid could win a significant number of votes. More plainly, Trump has often claimed that political opponents are conspiring against him. Roosevelt may have had more cause for such feelings in the face of Taft’s control of the convention in 1912, but Roosevelt famously summed up his new party’s platform as “thou shalt not steal.”

Today’s presidential primary is night and day from the smoke-filled rooms and convention politics that decided the nominations 100-plus years ago. However, one thing remains true: The rules of the nomination, and how campaigns respond to them, matter. Cleveland won because he managed to unify the party sufficiently — including support from those who disagreed with him on silver — to win the two-thirds majority required by the Democrats. Grant failed in large part because his campaign couldn’t outplay the anti-Grant faction to enact the “unit rule.” And while Roosevelt won smashing victories in the primaries, that wasn’t the main mode of delegate selection yet, and his campaign’s inability to make sufficient inroads in caucus-convention states cost him the nomination. For Trump in 2024, the party’s delegate rules necessitate winning (at least) pluralities in primaries in the early and middle part of the nomination calendar to build up a delegate lead and to push out rivals. He did it once before — it remains to be seen whether the GOP’s anti-Trump forces can outmaneuver him this time around.

Story editing by Maya Sweedler. Copy editing by Andrew Mangan. Photo research by Emily Scherer.

House Republicans

The 5 Main Factions Of The House GOP

And how they’re likely to govern for the next two years.

By Alex Samuels

Feb. 1, 2023, at 6:00 AM

In the first few years after former President Donald Trump assumed office, he essentially became a one-man litmus test for the Republican Party. Conservatives’ bona fides hinged less on their voting records, and more on their fealty to him.  

Then something weird happened. Rep. Kevin McCarthy, who worked hard over the years to establish his loyalty to Trump, was suddenly being called a “moderate” as he suffered through more than a dozen unsuccessful votes for House speaker. The defectors who initially refused to vote for him were now part of the “hardline” or “extremist” faction of the party — depending on which news article you read. That group also included Trump boosters who nevertheless said when it came to the speaker vote, the former president should be taking cues from them. 

So what does it actually mean to be a “moderate” or “conservative” U.S. House member in the Republican Party of 2023? Don’t look for big policy divides to explain the difference — members are largely unified around an agenda of cutting certain spending programs, limiting abortion and keeping a lid on taxes. That’s not a new phenomenon: Four years ago, when my former colleague Perry Bacon Jr. analyzed what he believed were the five wings of the Republican Party, the categorizations revolved around Trump because, well, Trump defined the party.

The goalposts for what makes a “moderate” versus “conservative” lawmaker are always shifting. But as Republicans settle back into control of the House of Representatives, I set out to update Perry’s analysis — and concluded that while Trump still holds outsized influence over the party, he’s no longer its central pivot point.

Instead, I’d argue that a number of important fissures define the current House congressional GOP — and the embrace of Trump and Trumpism is just one of them. Voting records, ties to the establishment and caucus membership, for instance, all played a role in how I measured Republican House members against one another, drawing on data as well as expert opinion.

I’ll be honest and say that these categories may not be perfect and that there’s a potential for change in just a few years (Perry’s article was only written in 2019!) as loyalties switch and new issues come to the fore. And, as I’ll explain in more detail below, some members have their feet in multiple camps — or at least a pinky toe. Still, I’d put congressional Republicans in five main camps. I’ve ordered from most moderate to most conservative — or extreme:

Moderate establishment

• These Republicans side with the broader GOP on most issues but are the members most likely to find common ground with Democrats. They’ve been known to attack leadership or their colleagues who are further to the right — or at least disagree with them. They’re often members of bipartisan groups like the Problem Solvers Caucus.
• Prominent members: Reps. David Joyce of Ohio, Young Kim of California, Nancy Mace of South Carolina. 

Don’t expect members of this shrinking, often quiet group to rise into notable positions of party leadership anytime soon. “It seems like they’re increasingly becoming an incredibly endangered species,” said Julia Azari, a FiveThirtyEight contributor and political science professor at Marquette University.

Case in point: If I were writing this story last year, I probably would have put former Ohio Rep. Anthony Gonzalez or Illinois Rep. Adam Kinzinger in this camp. But after both publicly assailed the former president and advocated for his impeachment, neither ran for another term.

These members have to toe a fine line to keep their jobs. They likely won’t agree with the mainstream GOP on everything — just look at how Mace spoke about abortion messaging costing Republicans in the 2022 midterms, or how Joyce said that he’s on the fence about kicking certain Democrats off of Republican-led committees — but expect to see them largely in line with Republicans’ anti-Biden messaging, or be outspoken about things important to their base, like preserving “family values” or slowing inflation. In short, the people I’d put in this category are those who are willing to buck party leadership sometimes — but not so much that they’re in imminent danger of losing their seats. And, in general, their voting records tend to be more moderate compared with other Republicans. 

Conservative establishment

• They’re part of the establishment and/or party leadership but still boast conservative records. They’re sometimes willing to speak out against members to their right, but generally try to be peacekeepers. In a nutshell: These Republicans straddle the line between the moderate and pro-Trump wings of the party.
• Prominent members: Reps. Elise Stefanik of New York, Tom Emmer of Minnesota and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy.

I would put most Republicans in prominent leadership positions (regardless of whether they’re in the House or Senate) in this group. While they do adhere to some tenets of Trumpism — like admonishing the “fake news” media, at least in Stefanik’s case — they simultaneously need to be seen as having the best interests of the GOP’s ideologically diverse caucus at heart. You likely won’t see these members attacking the former president like more moderate Republicans, or driving a wedge within the caucus like the pro-Trump insurgent wing does. But it’s clear that these members still espouse some type of loyalty to Trump, as they’ve been known to broker deals for him — or on his behalf.

Part of getting to a position of leadership in the first place is moderating your views so that a larger swath of members think you’ll prioritize their interests. In practice, that could mean pushing a fairly traditional Republican agenda, like cutting taxes or entitlements, without wading too much into the culture wars that have animated the furthest right House members. McCarthy is a great example of this. The current House speaker entered Congress as a conservative “Young Gun” but moved toward the middle to help get the position he’s in now, according to Hans Noel, a professor of government at Georgetown University who has researched how Trump shifted the meaning of what it meant to be a conservative. 

“At first, [McCarthy] was the upstart person who was challenging things,” Noel told me. “But now he’s been around for a while, and he’s likely realized that, in order to have a career, you have to moderate your positions a bit.” The shift was cosmetic — his policy positions remained largely the same — but his stature within the party grew. 

You might be wondering, too, why I put Stefanik in this category, given that she has a fairly moderate voting record. That’s largely because, since entering the lower chamber ahead of the 114th Congress, Stefanik has gotten more conservative. According to ideology metrics based on her voting record, Stefanik went from a fairly moderate member of Congress between 2015 and 2021, to a more conservative one from 2021 to 2023. Plus, she’s explicitly embraced Trump as she’s climbed into leadership roles over the past few years — which means she arguably embodies elements of both this wing and the pro-Trump insurgent wings. 

One difficulty I ran into in writing about this group, though, was in pinpointing where its loyalties really lie. Are they loyal to Trump? Or to the GOP as a whole? Politicians often take their cues from leadership in their own party, and if Trump were no longer in the picture, it’s unclear where members of this faction would swing.

Far-right establishment 

• These are the conservatives who likely align with the Freedom Caucus ideologically but make fewer waves. They’re the preferred leaders of the Tea party conservatives and pro-Trump insurgent factions.
• Prominent members: Reps. Steve Scalise of Louisiana, Patrick McHenry of North Carolina.

Here, you have the members whom far-right members are comfortable with in leadership roles. In fact, I’d go one step further and argue that they’re the glue that holds Freedom Caucus and the conservative establishment together, as this wing won’t broker all that much with Democrats and/or the more moderate GOP House members. 

That dynamic was on full display during the House speaker fight, when Scalise was floated as a possible consensus speaker who could speak to the 20 anti-McCarthy Republicans. On average, these members’ voting records tend to be more conservative compared with Republicans in other top leadership positions. 

These members might not agree with everything the Freedom Caucus proposes, though. For example, Scalise, for his part, has sometimes quietly staked out neutral or mainstream positions when his colleagues have gone the other way. For example, he broke with most other top House leaders when he didn’t get involved in Cheney’s GOP primary. And, perhaps most notably, as Freedom Caucus members continued to promote the false claim that it was fraudulent, McHenry voted to certify the 2020 election’s results.

Tea party conservative 

• Here are the Freedom Caucus members who are driven by ideology. They’re often associated with conservative groups like the Club for Growth.
• Prominent members: Reps. Jim Jordan of Ohio, Byron Donalds of Florida, Chip Roy of Texas.

Members of this group are some of the most conservative in the House. In fact, I’d lump a good chunk of the Freedom Caucus into this wing. But what I think differentiates these members from, say, the pro-Trump insurgent (more on them below) is that Tea party conservatives are more clearly motivated by ideology — e.g., supporting less government spending — than by grievance.

Tea party conservatives can veer between fiery House floor speeches, wonky strategizing over procedural quirks and breezy talks with members of the various GOP factions. Their brand of conservatism, at times, might compel them to break form with Republican allies. For example, when Trump said in a tweet that four Democratic members of Congress — all women of color — should “go back” to “where they came from,” Roy denounced his actions. Jordan has had streaks of independence, too, including, in June when he broke from Freedom Caucus members and voted to honor Capitol police for their response to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Members of this group support Trump, too, but their loyalties aren’t tied to a specific leader. And they often strategically show their support for the former president (i.e., vociferously defending him during impeachment hearings), since they arguably also want to increase their power in the House. Yes, members of this group can be obstructionists at times, but their politics are often guided by a strong adherence to their ideas — regardless of whether it is politically expedient or in line with Trump’s wishes. 

Pro-Trump insurgent

• These are the rabble-rousers. They’re led by Trump but largely avoid criticizing him publicly, even if they don’t fully embrace his views. Most of them voted against certifying President Biden’s 2020 electoral victory. Their beliefs are malleable, and more motivated by grievance more than ideology. 
• Prominent members: Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia. 

This might not be the biggest wing, but it’s definitely the loudest — and wields a lot of power given the GOP’s narrow House majority. In fact, it’s the members in this camp who made it so difficult for McCarthy to attain the speakership in the first place. 

That’s in part because the politicians in this bloc are primarily motivated by grievance and, as such, are not afraid to take on the establishment even if it means being seen as unserious lawmakers by the rest of the caucus and GOP voters. Moreover, since this wing is defined by a fealty to Trump, these members are the most likely to defend anything the former president says or does. Of course, during the vote for House speaker, many in this camp — specifically Gaetz and Boebert — initially refused to vote for McCarthy, even though he was Trump’s chosen candidate. But many of these members had personal quibbles with McCarthy that led to them not wanting him to be speaker. And those intraparty arguments, I’d argue, stand separate from members’ support for Trump. Plus, reporting suggests that Trump helped encourage at least some defectors to come around to voting for McCarthy— or at least voting “present.” 

This group’s loyalty to the former president was arguably displayed most prominently during the Jan. 6 investigations. Its members not only diminished the events of that day but have been steadfast in promoting the debunked narrative that the 2020 election was stolen from the former president. 

But this bloc is more flexible than it appears. In fact, I’d argue that Greene, at least as of late, is trying to teeter between this category and the far-right establishment (or, at least, I think that’s where she wants to be). This tension was on full display during the House speaker vote, when she publicly chastised ideologically aligned members (like Boebert) for refusing to back McCarthy’s bid.

Azari told me that continued infighting among this group might be a good thing for the larger party. There’s also no incentive for the GOP, she said, to have this insurgent bloc grow in size. “It’s not to Republicans’ benefit for them to be at the forefront of the party,” she said. “They are really not super popular figures with the broader population.”

The speaker fight was just the beginning. I’d expect the fissures between these groups to become more noticeable as long as Republicans hold onto a narrow majority in the House. Up next, we’re likely to see debates over things like whether Democrats should be allowed to have committee seats, whether McCarthy should negotiate with Biden and Democrats over raising the debt ceiling and much more. 

But don’t get too cozy with these (albeit imperfect) categorizations. “Over time, conservatives have become more conservative on a number of more nativist, social and racial issues. And they’ve become slightly more moderate on at least some economic issues,” Noel said. “But there could be lots of new issues that come in, and those could become the cleavages that start to shake things up again.”

Transcript

Alex Samuels: The brutal body cam footage showing 29-year-old Tyre Nichols being beaten to death by Memphis, Tennessee, police officers was released late Friday. The videos prompted outrage from all corners of D.C. since its release. But whether it will spark action is another question.

The video has revived some bipartisan calls for police reform legislation.The chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus also said that he and his group requested to meet with President Biden this week to quote “push for negotiations on much-needed national reforms to our justice system – specifically, the actions and conduct of our law enforcement.”

But the negotiations aren’t necessarily starting from a hopeful place. After George Floyd’s murder in 2020, both Democrats and Republicans drafted police reform bills. The George Floyd Justice in Policing Act passed the House, but stalled out in the Senate in September 2021 after months of bipartisan negotiations. Essentially, the two sides couldn’t get past concerns about union involvement or qualified immunity — that’s the policy that often protects police officers from being held personally liable for their actions. And those sticking points haven’t necessarily been resolved.

And while there’s not a lot of recent polling gauging American’s views on policing, a spring 2022 study from the Gallup Center on Black Voices found overwhelming support for some level of change to how police officers do their jobs among Americans of multiple races and ethnicities.

But even if the public wants to see policing change, it’s not clear that lawmakers are on the same page. Let’s not forget, Republicans now control the U.S. House and reform legislation is likely not high on their to-do list. In fact, over the weekend, Republican representative Jim Jordan said the following:

Rep. Jim Jordan: I don’t know if there’s anything you can do to stop the kind of evil we saw in that video.

Samuels: In the meantime, reporting suggests that Sen. Cory Booker will re-introduce a version of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act as soon as this week — and negotiations should begin in earnest from there. So we’ll be keeping an eye on the police reform efforts and whether Congress makes any headway on this go-around.

2024 Election

Adam Schiff's Unlikely To Be The Last Major Democrat To Join California's U.S. Senate Race

By Geoffrey Skelley

Jan. 31, 2023, at 6:00 AM

During Donald Trump’s presidency, few U.S. House members grabbed more headlines than Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff of California. Schiff’s lead role in Trump’s first impeachment trial and work as the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee made him a hero to many liberals and a villain to many conservatives. Now Schiff is looking to parlay his notoriety and accomplishments into a promotion: On Thursday, he announced a bid for California’s safe Democratic Senate seat, held by Sen. Dianne Feinstein since 1992. 

While Feinstein hasn’t announced her own plans, the possibility that the 89-year-old might retire has all but guaranteed that Schiff won’t be the only Democrat looking to win the solidly blue seat. Rep. Katie Porter announced her own bid earlier this month, and the field of contenders may only grow: Rep. Barbara Lee reportedly plans to run and Rep. Ro Khanna has publicly expressed interest, too. We wouldn’t normally be this interested in a federal race in a strongly blue state with an undeclared incumbent and a small field (for now), but the developing Senate race in California has a number of wrinkles that will make it pretty interesting, from the primary structure and how expensive the race will be to the state’s geographical and ideological divides.

First, California primaries are set up such that the Senate race could come down to two Democrats. Dating back to 2012, all candidates in California, regardless of party, run on the same ballot and the leading two vote-getters advance to the general election. We don’t yet know how many credible candidates will run from either party, but that could affect who advances to the November election in 2024. Historically, the most likely outcome is that one of these Democrats will meet a Republican in the general election, but that’s not a given: Over the past decade, California’s statewide primaries have sent a pair of Democrats to the general election three times. Of those, two were Senate races: In 2016, now-Vice President Kamala Harris (then California’s attorney general) and Rep. Loretta Sanchez advanced (Harris won the general), and in 2018, Feinstein and then-state Sen. Kevin de León advanced (Feinstein won).

A number of strong Democratic candidates in 2024 could possibly split up the Democratic-leaning vote and the same could fragment the GOP-leaning vote. Over the past decade, Democratic candidates have won an average of 57 percent of the top-two vote across all statewide primaries, compared with the GOP’s 36 percent,¹ so you could have a couple of Democratic candidates win the vast majority of the Democratic primary vote and finish above a splintered field of Republican contenders. In an indication of what’s possible, de León won a spot in the 2018 general election with only 12 percent of the vote, the lowest percentage for a second-place candidate in a statewide top-two primary.

Another factor that will undoubtedly be important is campaign fundraising. Buying television ads isn’t the end-all, be-all in our digital age, but it’s costly in California, which has the second-largest (Los Angeles), 10th-largest (Bay Area)² and 20th-largest (Sacramento)³ television markets in the country, according to Nielsen. Not to mention, California is a huge state in terms of population and geography, so building a statewide campaign won’t be cheap. 

This is an area where Schiff has an early edge: He had more than $20 million in his federal campaign account at the end of the 2022 election, thanks to his star power and an easy reelection campaign in his deep-blue seat that didn’t require him to spend most of his campaign war chest.

This isn’t to say that Schiff’s opponents — declared or potential — can’t raise beaucoup money. Porter brought in more than $25 million for her reelection campaign, second only to now-Speaker Kevin McCarthy among House candidates in the 2022 cycle. But unlike Schiff, Porter had to spend $28 million to narrowly win her competitive district last November. For his part, Khanna hasn’t raised that kind of money, but he represents much of Silicon Valley, America’s technology epicenter and home to a great deal of wealth. Lee may struggle to compete in fundraising terms, but she’s well-known in progressive circles and might be the only prominent Black candidate in the race.

Naturally, ideological divisions could play a role in this race, too. Porter, Khanna and Lee are members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, while Schiff is part of the more centrist New Democratic Coalition. This is mostly reflected in voting records: Schiff falls largely in the middle of the House Democratic caucus, while Khanna and Lee both sit clearly on the left side. Porter, though, is harder to pin down. She’s drawn many eyeballs (and donations) with her withering questioning of corporate honchos in congressional hearings, and she’s campaigning as a progressive. But that profile overshadows a pretty moderate voting record, which probably speaks to the realities of representing a highly competitive district — a challenge faced by none of the other three House members. In theory, the three progressives could split the more left-leaning vote in the primary, improving Schiff’s chances of advancing to the general election. What’s more, California Democrats may be dominant, but they aren’t necessarily that progressive, which means Schiff may be playing to a larger part of the electorate to begin with.

Another wrinkle is California’s northern-southern split in Democratic circles, with the northern region’s population centered around the Bay Area and the southern’s around Los Angeles. In recent years, California’s statewide political offices have been dominated by northern Democrats, including Feinstein, longtime former Sen. Barbara Boxer, Gov. Gavin Newsom, former Gov. Jerry Brown and former Sen. Harris.⁴ Within this north-south dichotomy, Schiff and Porter both represent parts of Greater Los Angeles while Lee and Khanna represent the Bay Area, so whether both northerners run could matter for how the primary vote shakes out. After all, the tendency for candidates to win votes from their regionally aligned “friends and neighbors” remains a factor in primaries.

But Northern California Democrats’ edge may be diminishing, which could redound to the benefit of Schiff or Porter. After Harris became vice president, Newsom appointed Sen. Alex Padilla — the former California secretary of state and Los Angeles native — who won a full term in 2022. And if you look at the trajectory of primary votes in California, Southern California has recently cast a larger share of Democratic votes in top-two primaries. That hasn’t yet paid huge dividends for statewide candidates from the south, but it could affect the 2024 primary.

At this point, there are a lot more questions than answers about the state of play in California’s much-anticipated 2024 Senate race. But in the months to come, we will be closely monitoring key aspects of the contest.

In Part 3 of this week’s FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast, the crew look ahead to the gubernatorial, legislative, mayoral and judicial races they are watching for in 2023.

In Part 2 of this week’s FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast, the crew looks at how the Democratic Party’s effort to rearrange its presidential primary calendar is going and discusses the impact this resorting could have on candidate selection.

In Part 1 of this week’s FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast, it’s another GUOP/BUOP where the crew ask whether a survey of Republican National Committee members was a good or bad use of polling.

Although much of our elections-related attention is already trained on 2024, there are consequential elections happening this very calendar year. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, the crew discusses the gubernatorial, legislative, mayoral and judicial races to watch in 2023. They also look at how the Democratic Party’s effort to rearrange its presidential primary calendar is going, and ask whether a survey of Republican National Committee members was a good or bad use of polling.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

2024 Democratic Primary

Would Putting South Carolina First Give Black Democrats A Stronger Voice?

By Alex Samuels

Jan. 30, 2023, at 6:00 AM

Despite objections from leaders and state party officials in Georgia and New Hampshire, a Democratic National Committee panel voted on Wednesday to move forward with President Biden’s plan to drastically revamp the party’s 2024 presidential primary process. Biden wants to remove Iowa’s caucus as the leadoff in the nominating calendar — a position it has held since 1972 — and give the first-in-the-nation honor to South Carolina instead, followed by New Hampshire and Nevada on the same day, then Georgia and finally Michigan.

The reason for the changes seem straightforward — and practical: Biden and other Democrats say they want a calendar that accurately reflects the party’s diverse slate of voters. Iowa is a smallish state whose demographic makeup is far less analogous to the larger Democratic Party than South Carolina, which is more racially diverse. (In 2020, Black voters made up a whopping 60 percent of the Democratic electorate.) Throwing the primary calendar into disarray, Biden wrote in a letter to the DNC committee that it was “unacceptable” that Black voters, who have been the backbone of the Democratic electorate for decades, “have been pushed to the back of the early primary process” and that it was “time to give them a louder and earlier voice in the process.”

But does earlier necessarily mean louder? And would Biden’s move really give all Black voters more of a voice — or is it more of a reward for the state that saved his bacon in 2020? At least in the last few contested cycles, South Carolina was arguably the decisive state. So moving it first could streamline the nomination process. But there’s another scenario that’s equally as likely: that South Carolina’s role changes from picking presidential candidates to winnowing large fields. And while the reshuffling would allow more diverse states to weigh in first, it wouldn’t necessarily give Black voters more power.

That’s, in part, because there’s a difference between removing overwhelmingly white states from the front of the queue and giving Black voters more power. And moving just one state cannot change the whole process. You’d have to diversify the order significantly for both of those things to be true — and that’s proving easier said than done. Already, two of the affected states, New Hampshire and Georgia, which would hold their primaries second and fourth, respectively, under Biden’s proposed lineup — are in defiance, though national Democrats are giving both states until June to comply with the party’s goal of a new early-state order. Iowa Democrats, for their part, aren’t thrilled by the news, either, and are reportedly debating bucking national Democrats’ wishes.

In putting this proposal forth, Biden offered an implicit rebuke of Iowa and New Hampshire, the two overwhelmingly white states that rejected him in 2020. But the odd thing about Biden’s proposal is that South Carolina — because of its geographic and demographic diversity — already has a lot of power. Typically, Iowa and New Hampshire’s role has been to narrow the candidate field. That’s an important function and one that officials from both states are vociferously trying to cling to. (New Hampshire is reportedly determined to maintain its first-in-the-nation primary status, which they say is solidified under state law.) But, over time, South Carolina has served an arguably more worthy function: rebuffing or embracing the earlier decisions made by the overwhelmingly white — and more liberal — Democrats in New England and the Midwest. Since 1992, the winner of the South Carolina Democratic primary has gone on to win the nomination — with one exception. In 2004, South Carolina native John Edwards won the state’s primary, but didn’t get the presidential nod.¹ So, at least in recent years, if a Democratic candidate couldn’t appeal to South Carolina’s Democratic voters, he or she was unlikely to win the nomination or the presidency.

“The road to heaven and the White House runs through South Carolina,” said Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist based out of South Carolina. “I don’t care how red or blue any district is, and I don’t care how good of a candidate someone may be in any other scenario: No one can be the Democratic nominee for president without having strong support among Black voters.”

So how would putting South Carolina first change things? Putting the state in the position to winnow could have a big impact on which candidates are considered viable in the first place. Given that the state’s Democratic electorate skews older and more moderate, it’s possible that a certain type of candidate would stand to benefit most from the switch-up: one more like Biden himself. 

Would Black candidates benefit, though? Maybe not, because there’s both “a supply and demand issue,” said Andra Gillespie, a political science professor at Emory University. “I don’t assume that moving South Carolina first immediately privileges candidates of color — or candidates who bring other types of diversity,” she said, noting that it’s unlikely that a change to the order would have helped the Black candidates in the Democratic primary in 2020. “[Kamala] Harris dropped out of the race before we even got to the primaries, as did [Cory] Booker, so there were other factors that weeded them out beyond the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary.”

It’s also not clear that moving South Carolina to the front of the queue would disenfranchise candidates without significant Black support, either, said Jennifer Chudy, a professor of political science at Wellesley College. That’s because there’s evidence that the party establishment favors certain presidential candidates, and, because of that, Chudy said she could envision a scenario in which the results of South Carolina’s primary are dismissed if they don’t line up with what the larger party wants. “I can see a narrative being created that dismisses winners and losers out of that system and does so on the basis of the state’s heavily Black vote,” she said.

All that’s to say that going first could lead to mixed results — both for South Carolina and Black voters. South Carolina could get more attention and advertising dollars and its local issues are likely to become national ones — but that doesn’t automatically translate into a more decisive role.

“Maybe, in a best-case scenario, candidates invest a lot of time in South Carolina and Black voters there whereas they used to go to corn fairs in Iowa,” Chudy said. “But even if there is some real effort in the ground game there, it doesn’t necessarily matter because there are many primaries that follow almost immediately after.” So even if there is a definitive result in South Carolina, she said, it’s not clear that it would carry to the states that follow.

There’s an argument, too, that choosing the nominee after the field has narrowed is actually a more powerful position. “There’s power and leverage in being the first place that candidates have to pass through,” Gillespie said. “But there’s also a case to be made for Black voters to want to hold their cards close to their chest until South Carolina to see whether certain candidates are viable.” In 2008, for example, Gillespie said that former President Barack Obama’s first-place win in Iowa was an important signal to South Carolinians that he could win non-Black votes, too. “And so you can see an argument, perhaps, for maintaining the status quo, especially when the leading candidates are non-white.” 

But the aspects of Biden’s plan that seem likeliest to empower Black voters actually have less to do with South Carolina and more to do with what happens to Michigan and Georgia since they also have large Black populations. And, at least right now, it’s unlikely that Georgia, which has the highest Black population share of the newly-proposed early states, plays ball given that the Republican secretary of state is steadfast on holding both the Republican and Democratic primary on the same day. (Republican officials in the state claim that holding two separate primaries would put an unnecessary strain on counties and poll workers.) 

So while it’s more clear how the state itself would benefit from going first, it’s far from obvious that the changes Biden is proposing would give the voters there — particularly Black ones — more power over the process. We also can’t say for certain that Black candidates would have a better chance of winning the nomination as a result. And even if Biden’s proposed order is used in 2024, the vote could lead to a convoluted scramble over what happens in 2028, and beyond. That’s primarily because the calendar approved in the coming months may not necessarily hold beyond for long. According to Politico, DNC members have privately noted that the review process is already in place to reconsider the 2028 lineup.

Ultimately, the impact of Biden’s proposal for Black voters only depends in part on what happens with South Carolina — the real question is whether additional diverse states get added to the initial round. If that doesn’t happen, then Biden is rewarding a subset of Black voters who support candidates like him, and it’s not even clear how much of a reward that will be.

Abortion

Are Blue States Ready To Relax Their Bans On Later Abortions?

By Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux

Graphics by Paroma Soni

Jan. 30, 2023, at 6:00 AM

You hear people say the term “third rail” all the time in politics, usually in reference to an issue that is too volatile — too charged — to touch. For decades, abortion later in pregnancy has been one of those issues. As recently as four years ago, a proposal to loosen restrictions on third-trimester abortions went down in flames in Virginia after Republicans accused Democratic lawmakers of advocating for infanticide — an attack that was misleading but effective.

But the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned Roe v. Wade, has changed the current running through the abortion debate. And now Democratic legislators may have new opportunities to try and expand abortion rights — including abortions in the late second and early third trimester of pregnancy. Last week, Maine’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills, announced a new package of legislation designed to make it easier to get an abortion, including a measure that would expand women’s ability to get abortions after a fetus can live outside the womb. The proposed bill doesn’t remove the ban, but it would loosen the restriction by giving doctors more discretion to recommend a post-viability abortion. In Minnesota, some lawmakers are working to repeal a similar ban, which many abortion providers still follow even though it was paused by a court more than 40 years ago. There is also a debate in California about whether the state’s newly passed constitutional protection for reproductive rights overrides the state’s ban on abortion after viability.

But has the abortion debate changed enough for Democratic legislators to loosen or remove bans on third-trimester abortions without getting burned? Abortion in the late second or early third trimester is still unpopular, but in a limited form, it’s less unpopular than a full ban — which may remove some risk for Democratic lawmakers who want to ease access to abortion after viability. And a rising share of Democrats want abortion to be legal in all cases, which could give blue-state lawmakers even more of a reason to relax restrictions. 

Abortions after the point of fetal viability — which generally happens around 24 weeks of pregnancy — are often restricted no matter which party runs a state. Eleven states that are fully controlled by Democrats still ban abortion after 24 weeks of pregnancy, with some exceptions.² Often, it’s the scope of the exceptions that are key: Only four clinics in the country will perform abortions in all three trimesters of pregnancy, and two operate in Maryland, which bans abortion after viability but allows exceptions for fetal abnormalities and risks to mental and physical health. Abortion-rights advocates and legal experts argue that some states’ exceptions are too limited and give too little deference to medical opinion. In fact, lawmakers said that the proposed Maine bill will broaden the state’s exception to explicitly give doctors more leeway, citing the case of a woman who had to leave the state for an abortion because of a rare and deadly fetal abnormality.

Viability became a legally important dividing line after the Supreme Court’s 1992 decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, when the justices ruled that because of changes in medical care, states were now permitted to ban abortion after viability. In the lead-up to the decision and in its aftermath, some Democratic-controlled states passed laws that essentially codified the terms of that decision. It was an attempt to ensure that if the Supreme Court eventually reversed course, abortion would still remain legal in those states — but it also possibly contributed to the stigmatization of abortions later in pregnancy.

In general, Americans do not know much about abortion, but the gap between belief and reality is particularly large when it comes to later abortion. Kaiser Family Foundation data from 2020 found that only a small share of Americans correctly identified that less than 5 percent of abortions happen after 20 weeks of pregnancy — in fact, that year, the share was about 1 percent of abortions, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Unlike earlier abortions, which happen for a wide range of reasons, many abortions in the late second or early third trimester are prompted by medical issues like fetal abnormalities or risks to a pregnant person’s health. Medical organizations have been clear that abortions very late in pregnancy simply do not happen, for legal and ethical reasons, and a study conducted in 2021 by Ipsos found that Americans who are more knowledgeable about fetal development and pregnancy are also more likely than less knowledgeable people to support legal abortion. But anti-abortion advocates and Republican politicians — including former President Donald Trump — have used the existence of post-viability abortion to claim that the abortion-rights movement is dangerously extreme.

When most abortions were constitutionally protected, it may have been easier to argue that it was abortion-rights advocates — not their opponents — who were trying to push abortion laws out of the mainstream. Support for legal abortion generally declines as a pregnancy goes on, although as is usually the case with public opinion on abortion, perspectives are more nuanced than they appear. A 2022 poll from the Pew Research Center found that 44 percent of Americans who said abortion should be illegal after 24 weeks of pregnancy agreed that abortion should be available if a woman’s life was threatened or the baby would be born with severe disabilities, and 48 percent said “it depends.” This is perhaps why some states — including New Hampshire last year — have added fetal abnormalities to their post-viability exceptions.

Mary Ziegler, a law professor at the University of California-Davis who studies abortion, said that anti-abortion advocates were able to use later abortion as an effective political tool because while Roe was in place, Americans were generally unaware of how far in the other direction those advocates wanted to go. “The argument was, ‘Abortion-rights proponents are extreme because they’re not content with the protections we already have,’” Ziegler said. “Now it’s a lot harder to argue that the people who are opposed to abortion are the ones in the middle.” Moreover, Democrats have grown more supportive of legal abortion over the past few years. According to tracking polling by Civiqs,³ a solid majority (58 percent) of Democrats think abortion should be legal in all cases, up from 50 percent only two years ago.

Simply loosening restrictions on later abortion might not make the procedure easier to get, though. There are only four clinics in the country that will currently perform an abortion in the third trimester, and hospitals’ policies on later abortion are opaque. Three of those clinics are in the Washington, D.C., area and the fourth is in Colorado, which means that to reach one, most women will have to travel a long distance. And later abortions are often extremely expensive. They’re only sometimes covered by insurance, and the bill for a third-trimester procedure — which can take up to three days — can easily run to thousands of dollars.

Changes in state law could allow more abortion providers to offer later abortions. Whether they actually would, though, is a separate question. As Dr. Diane Horvath and Morgan Nuzzo, a doctor and nurse-midwife team, discovered when they set out to open an all-trimester abortion clinic in Maryland just over a year ago, finding a space for a new clinic and securing the funding to open is not an easy task. Clinics in states like Illinois, Kansas and North Carolina, which are closer to the region of the country where abortion is largely banned, have struggled with long wait times since the Dobbs decision, due to a flood of out-of-state patients. Adding later abortion procedures could be a significant burden on clinics that are already strained. Changing the law could also affect hospitals’ willingness to perform later abortions, but those shifts is hard to track.

More people might end up seeking later abortions as the effects of Dobbs add up. A few months after the Supreme Court’s ruling, some abortion providers were already reporting an uptick in second-trimester abortion patients — people who might have gotten an earlier abortion if not for the difficulty in getting an appointment, or the time and money involved in leaving the state to get an abortion legally. “If we see people facing longer delays, there will be more people who need this care that really has been quite rare and hard to obtain until now,” said Elizabeth Nash, a principal policy associate at the Guttmacher Institute, a research organization that supports abortion rights. “And that can’t happen without more providers who are willing to offer abortion later in pregnancy.”

So the political fate of the bills in Maine and Minnesota is important not just because it would be a significant legal change in regions where abortion is mostly banned after viability, but also because it’s an early signal of whether the politics of later abortion are changing. It may not be an easy process. For instance, in the aftermath of Dobbs, Massachusetts Democrats were split over whether to expand an exception in the state’s later-abortion ban, and the proposed change was watered down because of fears that the state’s Republican governor would veto it. But the outcome of the 2022 midterms — which gave Democrats control of additional state legislatures — could end up emboldening left-leaning state legislators.

“Progressive states generally are recognizing that there are gaps in [abortion] access in their states, and they’re looking for ways to fill those gaps,” Nash said. “We may be hearing more from other states on this soon.”

Pollapalooza

Which Parents Are The Most Tired?

By Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux

Jan. 27, 2023, at 6:00 AM

Welcome to Pollapalooza, our weekly polling roundup.

At some point last year — maybe around when my child woke up wailing at 4 a.m. for the thousandth time — I gave up wondering when I would stop being so tired. For parents of young children, “tired” isn’t a state of being that can be sloughed off with a few good nights’ sleep. It’s an innate condition — the thing I say reflexively when people ask me how I am, the excuse I use for days when everything I touch feels mediocre. Burnout, exhaustion — call it what you want, but I’m not the only one who can’t stop talking about how tired I am. Stories about parental exhaustion are ubiquitous.

Except that burden of fatigue isn’t evenly distributed, and parents are feeling a lot of other things, too. In a newly released survey of 3,757 parents of children under the age of 18 conducted last fall, the Pew Research Center dug into the drama of raising kids in the United States today, asking about parents’ worries and dreams for their children, how caring for kids is divvied up at home and — yes — how tired parents really are. 

The survey found that the stress and worry of parenting are disproportionately affecting mothers and parents of color.¹ But that doesn’t mean the stress is getting to them — the groups that reported higher levels of stress, fatigue and worry were among the most likely to say that having children is rewarding and enjoyable all of the time. Perhaps it’s a kind of parental Stockholm syndrome, where the parents in the most arduous conditions grow to love their misery.

Fathers took on more caregiving responsibilities during the COVID-19 pandemic, but the Pew survey indicates that in most households, the emotional weight of parenting still falls on mothers. According to the survey, mothers are more likely than fathers to say that being a parent is tiring (47 percent vs. 34 percent) or stressful (33 percent vs. 24 percent) all or most of the time. Mothers are also more worried than fathers about whether their children will face hardships, like being bullied or struggling with anxiety and depression, and they’re more likely to say that they experience judgment about their parenting from friends, other parents in their community and other parents online.

Mothers in heterosexual relationships also reported that they do more child care tasks and their perceptions of the division of labor did not always line up with the way fathers saw things.² For example, a majority (58 percent) of mothers say they do more work providing comfort or emotional support to their children, while the same share (58 percent) of fathers said that this task was shared equally. The only area asked about in which mothers and fathers generally agreed that the work was shared equally was on disciplining their children — and even there, 31 percent of fathers said that they did more of the work, compared to 36 percent of mothers. 

So who’s right? Data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics also supports the idea that women are spending more of their time on most forms of childcare. According to the latest American Time Use Survey, which measures the amount of time people spend on various activities throughout their day, mothers of children under the age of 18 report spending 1.76 hours per day with childcare as their main activity, while men only spent 1.02 hours. When the survey researchers broke it down, women reported spending more time than men on physical care for kids and activities related to their education — but men and women were spending about the same amount of time playing with their kids. (The BLS definition specifically excludes sports from “playing with children.”)

But mothers and fathers weren’t the only groups with different outlooks on parenting. There were also substantial divides by race and ethnicity. In the Pew survey, Black and Hispanic parents expressed more concern than white or Asian parents about their children facing challenges like being bullied, struggling with anxiety and depression, or being beaten up. Other groups suffered from different forms of anxiety: Asian parents were more likely than parents from other racial and ethnic groups to say they feel judged by their own parents at least sometimes, and white parents were more likely to say they feel judged by other parents in their community. 

One of the biggest racial and ethnic divides wasn’t about the downsides of parenting, though — it was about the benefits. Black (39 percent) and Hispanic (39 percent) parents were more likely than white (18 percent) and Asian (13 percent) parents to say that they find being a parent to be enjoyable all the time. There’s a similar — although slightly less dramatic divide — when parents were asked whether they find parenting rewarding.

There’s a tension in those findings. Black and Hispanic parents were more likely to fear for their children’s safety — but they’re also the most likely to find consistent joy in being a parent. There was a similar pattern for lower-income parents, who were much more worried about a wide range of concerns — their children being bullied, kidnapped, beaten up, getting shot, or getting trouble with the police — than middle or higher-income parents, but also were substantially more likely to say they enjoy being a parent all the time. And all of the most worried groups — mothers, Black and Hispanic parents, and lower-income parents — were more likely than other parents to say that being a parent is the most important part of their identity.

Why are the most anxious parents in Pew’s survey also the most likely to find daily joy in raising children? Shouldn’t all that worry make parenting less fun? There could be a lot going on here, including differences in which respondents felt more comfortable reporting an emotion like worry (probably women), or more pressure to say they enjoy being a parent (again, probably women). But maybe it’s simply that the joys of parenting are inextricably linked with its frustrations and anxieties — and the more you have of one, the more you have of another. At least, that’s what I’ll tell myself the next time my daughter keeps me up all night.

Other polling bites

• The American public has judged embattled Rep. George Santos, and the results are not pretty. A Data for Progress poll conducted from Jan. 20-23 found that only 11 percent of likely voters have a favorable view of Santos, who turns out to have lied about basically everything in his background. Half (50 percent) of respondents have an unfavorable view of Santos — including 38 percent who have a very unfavorable view — and 39 percent say they don’t know enough to say. For context: the poll found Santos well behind some of his Republican colleagues. Twenty-nine percent of Americans have a favorable view of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, 20 percent have a favorable view of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell and 17 percent have a favorable view of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
• Speaking of the House GOP, a CNN poll conducted by SSRS from Jan. 19-22 found that nearly three-quarters (73 percent) of Americans think Republican leaders in the House haven’t paid enough attention to the nation’s most important problems, while 27 percent say they have paid enough attention. Of course, not all respondents likely agree on what the nation’s most important problems are.
• Americans aren’t happy with the fact that classified documents were found in President Biden’s home in Delaware and a Washington, D.C. office, according to another CNN poll conducted by SSRS from Jan. 19-22 — and they think appointing a special counsel to investigate was the right call. About two-thirds (67 percent) of Americans think it’s a very or somewhat serious problem that documents were found in Biden’s home and office, and 84 percent approve of the Justice Department’s decision to appoint a special counsel to investigate.
• Younger Americans are holding corporations to a high ethical standard, according to a newly released Gallup poll conducted in June 2022. The poll found that 77 percent of Americans ages 18-29 think it’s “extremely important” for businesses to operate in a way that is sustainable for the environment and a similar share (72 percent) say it’s extremely important for businesses to focus on long-term benefits to society instead of short-term profits. Both of those shares are substantially larger than any other age group.

Biden approval

According to FiveThirtyEight’s presidential approval tracker,³ 42 percent of Americans approve of the job Biden is doing as president, while 52.4 percent disapprove (a net approval rating of -10.4 points). At this time last week, 43.4 percent approved and 51.3 percent disapproved (a net approval rating of -7.9 points). One month ago, Biden had an approval rating of 43.4 percent and a disapproval rating of 51.5 percent, for a net approval rating of -8.1 points.

In his new book “Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America,” Washington Post national columnist Philip Bump argues that many of the fissures that the country is facing today — politically, economically, culturally — have to do with the Baby Boomers getting old. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast, Galen Druke speaks with Bump about what he found.

In his new book “Aftermath: The Last Days of the Baby Boom and the Future of Power in America,” Washington Post national columnist Philip Bump argues that many of the fissures that the country is facing today — politically, economically, culturally — have to do with the Baby Boomers getting old. In this installment of the FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast, Galen Druke speaks with Bump about what he found.

You can listen to the episode by clicking the “play” button in the audio player above or by downloading it in iTunes, the ESPN App or your favorite podcast platform. If you are new to podcasts, learn how to listen.

The FiveThirtyEight Politics podcast is recorded Mondays and Thursdays. Help new listeners discover the show by leaving us a rating and review on iTunes. Have a comment, question or suggestion for “good polling vs. bad polling”? Get in touch by email, on Twitter or in the comments.

Congress

Republicans Didn’t Get Less Popular After All That Speaker Drama — They Were Already Unpopular

By Nathaniel Rakich

Jan. 26, 2023, at 6:00 AM

The election for speaker of the House may have gripped Washington, D.C., for almost a week earlier this month, but the rest of the country apparently reacted with a big fat shrug.

According to polls, Americans are indifferent about both Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s election and the chaotic process that led to it. Despite what some suggestive surveys might lead you to believe, the GOP revolt against McCarthy doesn’t seem to have turned more Americans off from the Republican Party. But the nation does have low expectations for the next two years of federal governance.

Let’s start with some sexy toplines. (We’ll get to what’s wrong with them in a moment.) Two polls found that a plurality of Americans thought that the drama surrounding the speaker election hurt the GOP. According to a HarrisX/Deseret News poll conducted right after McCarthy’s election, 41 percent of registered voters felt that the Republican Party was weaker after the speaker election, and only 23 percent thought it was stronger. In addition, 43 percent of registered voters told HarrisX/the Deseret News that the ordeal made them trust the Republican Party less. Meanwhile, 34 percent of respondents told Ipsos that the drama weakened the Republican Party, and only 19 percent said it strengthened the party. 

In reality, these poll questions don’t tell us that much. We’ve written previously about the dangers of pollsters asking whether a given event makes people more or less likely to vote for a candidate or party. Asking whether the speaker election made people trust the GOP less falls into the same trap. The question allows people to express dissatisfaction with the election without considering where their feelings started on the issue. (For example, quite a few of those people — i.e., Democrats — probably had little or no trust for the GOP to begin with.)

And asking Americans to be pundits and assess whether the GOP is weaker in the wake of the speaker vote is less informative than just looking at the GOP’s actual standing. Several polls have shown that the Republican Party’s brand hasn’t changed since the disharmony. It was damaged before the speaker vote, and it’s still damaged after it:

• Twenty-one percent of respondents said Republicans exhibited stronger leadership than Democrats in Washington in a November 2022 Ipsos poll. And the same pollster showed no significant change after the speaker vote: Nineteen percent said the GOP showed stronger leadership in January 2023.
• Civiqs maintains a running tracker of whether registered voters have a favorable or unfavorable opinion of the Republican Party, and it has remained steady at 64 percent unfavorable, 26 percent favorable since Dec. 22, 2022.
• Similarly, every week, YouGov/The Economist asks Americans whether they have a favorable or unfavorable view of Republicans in Congress. Between Jan. 2 and Jan. 9, their favorable rating barely changed (from 37 percent to 36.5 percent), and their unfavorable rating slightly ticked up (from 56.7 percent to 58.9 percent).
• Finally, Republicans in Congress remained a net of 15 percentage points underwater with registered voters before and after the speaker vote, according to Morning Consult. Interestingly, though, opinions of McCarthy got worse after the vote. His net favorability rating was -20 points on Dec. 29 and -26 points on Jan. 8, even as his name recognition improved slightly between the midterm elections and the speaker election.

Ultimately, Americans didn’t seem to care whether McCarthy won the speakership election. The Ipsos poll found that 33 percent of Americans approved of McCarthy’s selection, but only 35 percent disapproved; 33 percent weren’t sure. And YouGov/The Economist found that 27 percent thought McCarthy should have been elected speaker, while only 13 percent preferred another Republican; the remaining 60 percent weren’t sure or didn’t care.

That could be key to understanding why the speaker election didn’t seem to budge public opinion: Americans weren’t tuning in. According to Ipsos, almost half of adults (49 percent) did not follow the speaker election news at all or followed it “not so closely.” A similar 42 percent felt that the fight over the speakership had very little to do with their daily lives. 

Another reason could be that Americans were already so cynical about Congress that the chaos of early January made them nod and say, “Yup, sounds about right.” In the HarrisX/Deseret News survey, 56 percent of registered voters thought that the dispute was just “politics as usual.”

And that cynicism apparently means Americans are just expecting more of the same from this Congress. According to YouGov/The Economist, they don’t believe McCarthy will be able to serve effectively as speaker (33 percent to 25 percent). And according to Ipsos, 61 percent of Americans think the speaker fight made it less likely that Republicans and President Biden will get anything done together in the next two years. So further gridlock in Congress may not affect how Americans feel about it, either; their expectations are already on the floor.

2023 Election

Yes, 2023 Is An Election Year. Here Are The Races To Watch.

By Geoffrey Skelley

Jan. 25, 2023, at 6:00 AM

President this, Senate that. FiveThirtyEight has already expended ample digital ink looking ahead to the elections that will take place in 2024, including the nascent presidential nomination race and the fate of the Democrats’ slim majority in the U.S. Senate. We’re not going to apologize for this — and don’t pretend you’re not interested, too.

But there are also a bevy of fascinating contests on the ballot this calendar year that will affect the lives of millions of Americans. Three states will hold gubernatorial elections, four will decide the makeup of their state legislatures and two will vote for potentially critical seats on their supreme courts. Additionally, a host of large cities will cast ballots for mayor. With so much on the docket in 2023, we decided to take a look at the high-profile races you should be watching.

Governor

Three southern, Republican-leaning places are voting for governor this year. However, Democrats currently control the governorships in Kentucky and Louisiana, while the GOP holds Mississippi via Gov. Tate Reeves. Republicans are hoping to flip the other two, as Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana is term-limited and Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear of Kentucky is likely to face a formidable Republican opponent. Victories in these gubernatorial races would give the GOP full control of state government — a “trifecta” — in Kentucky and Louisiana (and maintain it in Mississippi).

Now, Beshear does have a decent chance of bucking Kentucky’s red lean to win a second term. In the last quarter of 2022, Beshear’s 60 percent approval rating made him the most popular Democratic governor in the country, according to Morning Consult. And while Kentucky Republicans added more seats to their supermajorities in the state legislature in the 2022 election, voters didn’t back conservative positions at every turn: They rejected a constitutional amendment that would’ve denied the possibility of constitutional protection for abortion rights, 52 percent to 48 percent. The referendum result mirrored in part some of Beshear’s success in 2019, when he defeated unpopular Republican Gov. Matt Bevin by less than 0.4 percentage points.

But Beshear is far from a shoo-in considering Kentucky ranks as the reddest state in the country with a Democratic governor, based on the 2020 presidential vote. And an array of Republican candidates are champing at the bit to take him on. Of those, the leading contenders are probably state Attorney General Daniel Cameron and former U.N. ambassador Kelly Craft, a high-profile GOP donor who served under former President Donald Trump. Cameron, a former aide to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, has Trump’s endorsement and would be Kentucky’s first Black governor, while Craft has led the way in fundraising. The only primary polling we’ve seen comes from Cameron’s campaign, which found him ahead of Craft and other notable contenders.

By comparison, Republicans have a clearer shot of capturing a Democratic-held governorship in Louisiana, where Edwards is leaving office after two terms. The candidate field remains in flux — the filing deadline isn’t until August — but the early GOP front-runners appear to be state Attorney General Jeff Landry, state Senate Majority Leader Sharon Hewitt and Treasurer John Schroder. Landry has a conservative reputation and, controversially, received the state party’s early endorsement, so he should attract ample GOP support. In many red states, that might be enough in a primary — but not necessarily in Louisiana, which uses a “jungle primary” system in which all candidates regardless of party run together and, if no candidate wins a majority in the first round, ends in a runoff between the two leading vote-getters. One of Landry’s political rivals, Republican Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser, had signaled he would challenge Landry, likely by running to the center. But then Nungesser surprisingly chose to seek reelection, which created an opening that Hewitt and Schroder have jumped into. They may have more company: Republican Rep. Garrett Graves is also considering a bid.

While Republicans have many high-profile names, no major Democrat has yet entered. But that could soon change: Earlier this week, state Democratic Party chair Katie Bernhardt grabbed headlines with an ad run by an allied political action committee that featured her wielding a shotgun. Another Democrat who might run is Louisiana Secretary of Transportation Shawn Wilson, who serves under Edwards. But given Louisiana’s Republican lean, Democrats will need some things to go their way if they want to replicate Edwards’s success.

Lastly, Reeves is somewhat favored in Mississippi, although he’s received mixed ratings for his performance as governor. Only 49 percent of the state’s registered voters approved of Reeves in the last quarter of 2022, according to Morning Consult, while an early January survey from Siena College/Mississippi Today found his approval rating at 48 percent. The state has faced a growing scandal over the misuse of federal welfare funds during the previous governorship, which could damage Reeves, who served as lieutenant governor at the time.

In fact, Reeves could face both a serious primary challenge and just about the strongest potential candidate the Democrats could have in the general election. Back in 2019, Reeves won a competitive primary runoff against former state Supreme Court Chief Justice Bill Waller Jr., who ran as a more moderate option and may decide to take on Reeves again. If Reeves gets past his primary, he’ll face Public Commissioner Brandon Presley, a longtime state official and distant relative of Elvis Presley who declared his candidacy earlier this month. The Siena College/Mississippi Today poll found Reeves ahead of Presley by 4 points, 43 percent to 39 percent. But considering Reeves fended off a popular statewide-elected Democrat in 2019, it will still be a tall order for Democrats to win this race.

State legislature

Four states have elections for their state legislatures this year, with Louisiana and Mississippi holding them in tandem with their gubernatorial elections, and New Jersey and Virginia holding legislative midterms. The dominant party in three of those states — Republicans in Louisiana and Mississippi, Democrats in New Jersey — are likely to retain full control, though there’s a question of whether the GOP can hold onto or win veto-proof majorities in Louisiana and Mississippi, in case a Democrat manages to win either governorship.

As a result, only Virginia looks set to see much drama on this front. That’s because it’s one of the only states where each party controls one legislative chamber. And with Republican Gov. Glenn Youngkin in office, the results will determine whether Republicans can capture full control of state government.

Thanks to redistricting, Virginia’s elections will take place on new maps, which should produce a number of highly competitive races — although each party may have a slim edge in the chamber it already controls.¹ The November environment is difficult to know, but Democrats did claim a pivotal 2-point victory in a Jan. 10 special election for a Senate district that Youngkin had carried by 4 points, in a race that centered largely on the future of abortion rights in Virginia.

State supreme court

We’ve covered the executive and legislative branches, but two states — Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — also have elections for state supreme court in 2023. Wisconsin hosts what is undoubtedly the key judicial election this year. Retiring Justice Patience Roggensack is part of the court’s 4-3 conservative majority, so a liberal victory would flip control of the court. The state’s high court has made many major rulings in recent years, including on redistricting and election-related matters, and could soon hear a case challenging the state’s 1849 ban on abortion. This election will determine which side has control until at least 2025.

Four candidates are running, two from each side of the ideological divide: on the right, Waukesha County Judge Jennifer Dorow and former Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Daniel Kelly, and on the left, Dane County Judge Everett Mitchell and Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz. The top-two finishers in next month’s primary will advance to the April general election; because the race is technically nonpartisan, two conservatives or two liberals could advance out of the primary, although one of each is most likely to move on. But other issues could help drive voters to the polls, including two ballot measures added by the GOP-controlled state legislature: a constitutional amendment that would require judges to consider a defendant’s risk to public safety when setting bail, and an advisory referendum asking voters if they believe that able-bodied, childless welfare recipients should be required to seek work.

In Pennsylvania, Democrats had a 5-2 edge on the state’s high court prior to last fall, when Chief Justice Max Baer died. Baer, a Democrat, was set to retire, so the election this year is for his old seat, which, while important, won’t alter partisan control of the court.

Mayor

Last but definitely not least, 12 of the nation’s 25 largest cities by population have mayoral elections this year. Most of these cities employ a “strong mayor” form of government — where the mayor is the city’s chief executive and can veto actions by the city council — so these elections could have major repercussions for millions of Americans. Democrats or left-leaning politicians tend to run most of these cities,² so municipal elections can also reveal divisions on the left on matters such as crime, police reform and housing.

There are too many contests to cover in depth here, but Chicago’s race is probably the headliner. There, Mayor Lori Lightfoot faces a difficult reelection battle amid high crime rates, and she has also faced potentially sexist criticism over her combative personal style. Democratic Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia decided to challenge her, and Lightfoot’s list of opponents has grown to also include Cook County Commissioner Brandon Johnson and former city budget director Paul Vallas. Recent surveys suggest Lightfoot might not just struggle to win the officially nonpartisan race; she might not even make it to the April runoff, assuming no candidate wins a majority in the initial election.

Outside of Chicago, big candidate fields have emerged in cities where incumbents won’t be on the ballot. In Philadelphia, at least 10 candidates (mostly Democrats) look set to run in the race to succeed outgoing Democratic Mayor Jim Kenney, while in Houston, eight candidates have filed so far in the hopes of taking the place of term-limited Mayor Sylvester Turner. And in Denver, at least 14 candidates have qualified in the officially nonpartisan race to succeed term-limited Mayor Michael Hancock. Meanwhile, Jacksonville Mayor Lenny Curry is one of the only Republicans leading a big city, but he’s leaving office, and seven candidates have entered the race to succeed him.

We know 2024 election activities will pick up steam as 2023 progresses, but as you can see, there’s plenty going on in 2023 itself! We’ll be keeping a close eye on all of it in the weeks and months to come.

2024 Election

Is It Fair To Compare Biden's And Trump’s Classified Documents Scandals?

A FiveThirtyEight Chat

Jan. 24, 2023, at 3:19 PM

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

nrakich (Nathaniel Rakich, senior elections analyst): President Biden is in hot water over the discovery of classified documents from the Obama administration in his possession. In November, attorneys for the president discovered a handful of documents with classified markings on them at the Penn Biden Center in Washington, D.C., and immediately contacted the National Archives, who took back possession of the documents the next day. However, we didn’t learn this until a couple weeks ago, and since then, Biden aides have found more pages of classified material at Biden’s home in Delaware, and Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to look into the matter impartially. And this past week, at Biden’s invitation, the Justice Department searched Biden’s Delaware home and took away six additional items, some with classified markings. 

The story has drawn comparisons to former President Donald Trump’s possession of classified documents, which led to an FBI search of Mar-a-Lago last summer. (Editor’s note: This chat was conducted before Tuesday’s revelation that classified documents were also found at former Vice President Mike Pence’s home.) But given the important differences between the two cases, is that a fair comparison to make? Or is this just a trumped-up (pun intended) story driven by a slow news cycle? 

kaleigh (Kaleigh Rogers, technology and politics reporter): I think it’s a fair comparison. The differences in how each president responded to the revelation are certainly noteworthy, but I feel like they’ve been overemphasized a bit. At the end of the day, they both did the same wrong thing, which is keeping documents that they weren’t supposed to keep. Now, you can argue about whether the current system for determining how documents are classified even makes sense, but that argument doesn’t favor one president’s situation over the other’s.

ameliatd (Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux, senior writer): It’s a comparison that people will inevitably make because both of the cases involve special counsels, and both involve classified documents. From a legal perspective, there are a lot of important differences, including — crucially — how the documents were discovered and how Trump and Biden responded. But once the special counsel has been appointed it’s harder for people to understand that nuance.

This is generally the issue presidents run into with special counsel investigations — it’s all well and good to say you want the role to exist, but they’ve nettled most modern presidents regardless of how the investigations actually turned out. In this case, Garland really had no option but to appoint a special counsel to investigate Biden because he had just appointed one to investigate Trump. And the mere act of appointing the special counsel sends the signal that these are equally serious cases.

nrakich: I think of it this way: These are fundamentally the same genre of scandal, but the degree of seriousness is different. As Amelia alluded to, Biden and Trump have responded very differently: Biden contacted the National Archives right away and invited the Justice Department to search his home. For Trump, it was actually the National Archives that contacted him, and a grand jury had to issue a subpoena to get the documents back. And even after Trump’s team said he complied with the subpoena, it turned out he still hadn’t handed over everything, prompting the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago — which Trump very much did not consent to.

kaleigh: But don’t you think Biden’s reaction was, in part, an attempt to create some daylight between him and Trump since, essentially, they both did the same thing? Biden had to kind of be over-the-top with transparency and invite investigators into his home because otherwise it just looks like Biden did the same thing as Trump, which Democrats and left-wing media had just spent months saying was Really Bad. 

nrakich: Yeah, Kaleigh, I think that’s right. But I also think there are questions of intentionality that, unfortunately, we may never get a definitive answer to. There have been allegations that Trump wanted to hold onto these classified documents after he left office, as mementos almost. By contrast, I don’t think there’s much reason to think Biden’s possession of these documents was anything other than carelessness (which, to be clear, is still really bad when you’re talking about state secrets!).

Interestingly, though, Americans may not distinguish much between Biden and Trump on the intentionality point. According to a recent survey from YouGov/The Economist, Americans said that Biden took the classified documents intentionally 39 percent to 28 percent. They said the same thing about Trump 50 percent to 24 percent. Of course, a lot of respondents were (rightfully, IMO) not sure about both questions.

kaleigh: Surely the special counsel investigation will reveal all the answers, Nathaniel!

nrakich: Amelia, you said earlier that Garland’s appointment of special counsels to investigate both Trump and Biden implies that they’re parallel cases even though the legal facts are different. So do you think Garland shouldn’t have appointed a special counsel in Biden’s case?

ameliatd: I don’t mean that he should or shouldn’t have — without knowing the details, it’s hard to say. As Kaleigh said, keeping classified documents in your home (or garage) after leaving the White House is bad. My concern is that the politics of the situation will overshadow the legal outcomes because the mechanism for figuring out what happened is so similar.

kaleigh: My own point is, the parallelism was already there, and that’s why Garland had to appoint the second special counsel. It’s a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

ameliatd: There’s an argument that the role of special counsels is overblown anyway. They’re empowered to investigate with a measure of independence from the Department of Justice. Now, as we saw during Robert Mueller’s investigation of Russian interference into the 2016 election, many of the rules surrounding special counsels are open to interpretation, and the attorney general can end up playing a significant role — as when former Attorney General Bill Barr wrote a misleading summary of Mueller’s report that ended up shaping the initial narrative. 

There’s also a history of special counsels overreaching and having their power curbed. In the 1980s and 1990s, independent counsels were much more independent than they are now (yes, “independent counsels” are different from special counsels — welcome to the word-soup nightmare that I lived in for several years), and Congress ended up clawing back their power. In fact, that’s how we ended up with the much more pared-down role that we have now.

Now, instead of being appointed by a court, special counsels’ credibility with the public is derived from the fact that they’re perceived as being independent from the executive branch, so their findings can be trusted. And my concern is that the more special counsel investigations happen, the less power they’ll have to do the thing they’re actually supposed to do — and the less trust there will be in the outcome — because the process has become so enmeshed with politics.

nrakich: Interesting. If you had to guess, Amelia, how do you think these special counsel investigations will end? It almost sounds like they will just release their reports and nothing will happen, no one’s minds will change — except maybe to think that the special counsel investigations were toothless from the start.

ameliatd: I’m not sure how they’ll end. It’s possible that they’ll result in charges. But from a public opinion perspective, I’m not sure it matters because people generally perceive that the two counsels are dealing with the same types of issues (the mishandling of classified documents), even though, from a legal perspective, how Trump and Biden responded actually matters a lot. 

nrakich: Well, we are a public opinion website, so let’s talk about that public opinion. Do we have any polls yet showing how Americans are thinking about Biden’s classified documents scandal vs. Trump’s?

kaleigh: Yeah, there was a YouGov/Yahoo News survey earlier this month that captured a striking dynamic, in my (non-public) opinion. When asked whether they thought Biden keeping classified documents was more serious than Trump or vice versa, 31 percent of Americans said Biden’s situation was less serious than Trump’s, 21 percent said it was more serious than Trump’s and 32 percent said the situations were equally serious. 

One thing that stood out to me was the fact that Republicans were more likely than Democrats to say Biden’s and Trump’s transgressions were equally serious. Forty-two percent of Republicans said both cases were equally serious, while 41 percent said Biden’s was more serious, but a majority of Democrats (57 percent) said Biden’s incident was less serious than Trump’s and only 24 percent said they were equivalent.

You might expect the results to be more baldly partisan with a majority of Republicans saying Biden’s case is more serious and a majority of Democrats saying Biden’s is less serious. So the fact that a plurality of Republicans said they’re equal, I think, gets to the inescapable reality here, which is that it’s really hard to say what Biden did was awful and then turn around and claim Trump did nothing wrong. 

nrakich: Yeah, the official Republican Party line on this — among elites as well as voters — seems to be, “See, Biden did it too! They are just as bad!” Whereas the Democratic position is, “What Biden did is bad, but what Trump did is worse.”

ameliatd: That’s interesting, Kaleigh. So you think it does matter how it unfolds? And if the outcome is more serious in the Trump investigation, that won’t be seen as a political outcome?

kaleigh: I wouldn’t go that far. I think the reactions to both these cases are still going to break down along partisan lines, but I think they suggest that Republicans didn’t love how Trump handled things here, and Biden’s actions after the documents were discovered were a little more palatable even if, at the root, they both started off doing the same wrong thing.

ameliatd: My cynical view is that special counsel investigations are rarely going to move the needle anyway, but now they really won’t because Biden no longer has the ability to claim the moral high ground.

The lesson: Never criticize a past president’s behavior until you are absolutely sure there are no classified documents in your garage.

nrakich: I might go that far. Maybe this isn’t cynical enough of me, but I feel like the fact that the cases are initially being handled the same way will create more credibility if their findings diverge.

As we’ve already discussed, Garland appointing a special counsel in both cases does create this initial impression that they are equivalent, which is how a plurality of Americans feel, according to both Kaleigh’s YouGov/Yahoo News poll and the YouGov/The Economist poll I cited earlier. (That said, a poll from Ipsos/ABC News found that only 30 percent of Americans viewed the two scandals equivalently, while 43 percent believed Trump’s was worse.) But after counsels finish their work, Americans may feel differently.

ameliatd: But fundamentally they’re both happening under Garland’s watch. And that’s why I think the role is flawed — it’s kind of independent, but still enmeshed enough in the executive branch that it’s pretty easy for people to mistrust or misread. 

nrakich: Yes, true.

ameliatd: And if you make the investigation truly independent, then you run into the situation we had in the 1980s and 1990s, where members of the executive branch (and the president) were constantly being investigated, and one investigation on a completely unrelated topic led to former President Bill Clinton’s impeachment.

kaleigh: I wondered how long it would take us to get to Ken Starr!

ameliatd: To be clear, I don’t think there’s an easy answer here! There are certainly situations where independence from the Department of Justice is valuable and necessary, and maybe this is one of them. But the special counsel-upon-special counsel domino effect doesn’t seem great to me. 

nrakich: We’ve been putting a lot on poor Merrick Garland (hasn’t he been through enough???) and the special counsels, but I want to make sure we acknowledge our own role here — and by “we,” I mean the media. How would you guys grade media coverage of this story for Biden, especially in comparison to media coverage of Trump? How much responsibility does the media bear for many Americans thinking Biden and Trump are equally guilty?

ameliatd: I do think Kaleigh is right that Garland had no choice but to appoint a special counsel in part because of the media coverage. 

It’s hard, though. As journalists, we want to hold powerful figures accountable, and that certainly includes the president. And Biden did spend months talking about how bad it was that Trump kept classified documents — only to have it turn out that he did (sort of) the same thing.

kaleigh: To be honest, and maybe this is indicative of the media I consume, I’ve seen an effort from the media to try to differentiate the two. You can’t listen to an NPR hit or read a New York Times story about it without getting an obligatory mention of how Biden responded differently, alerted the National Archives right away, cooperated with investigators, etc., etc.

nrakich: Yep. CBS News, which broke the original story, had a whole section in its article about that:

The Penn Biden Center case has parallels to the Justice Department’s pursuit of Donald Trump’s presidential records — but the scope and scale are materially different. In August, the FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago that yielded hundreds of documents marked classified.

That unprecedented search followed more than a year of tussling between Trump’s representatives, the National Archives, and the Justice Department. The search warrant was sought and executed in August after multiple failed attempts by the federal government to retrieve what it considered to be sensitive documents at the former president’s personal residence that should have been turned over to Archives under law.

And the Associated Press, CNN and Washington Post have all done articles specifically comparing the two cases side by side.

kaleigh: I mean, look. That is part of the story, so this is partly due diligence. It would be negligent to not even mention that aspect. But at some point, it feels like a RIGBY situation, where there’s this obligation to caveat any coverage lest it comes across as equating the two in any way. 

nrakich: When you look at volume, though, cable news at least has been covering Biden’s story more. According to closed-captioning data from the Internet Archive’s Television News Archive, the three major cable news networks (CNN, Fox News and MSNBC) mentioned the word “classified” in an average of 357 15-second clips per day in the two weeks following the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago (Aug. 8-21, 2022). Meanwhile, the networks mentioned the same word in an average of 478 15-second clips per day in the two weeks after Biden’s own classified documents story broke (Jan. 9-22, 2023).

But the coverage gap is due to one channel in particular. CNN has covered the stories the most equally, with an average of 136 mentions per day over the August 2022 time period (Trump) and 154 this month (Biden). MSNBC covered Trump’s case a little more than it has covered Biden’s, with an average 153 mentions of “classified” per day in the August timeframe and 125 in the January one. But Fox News has covered Biden’s scandal way more than it covered Trump’s, mentioning “classified” an average of 199 times per day during the January time period but only 68 times per day during the August one.

kaleigh: Right, and it’s not shocking that MSNBC covered Trump’s documents more than it’s covering Biden’s documents and Fox covered Biden’s documents more than it covered Trump’s documents. What’s interesting to me is that in both cases there was kind of a frenzy right away, but it has tapered off at about the same rate.

ameliatd: I also wonder how much coverage the Biden story would be getting if we weren't in a slow news cycle...

kaleigh: And if Trump hadn’t just done the same thing, basically. The Democrats could wave this off as a nothingburger a lot more easily if they hadn’t just been dragging Trump for doing the same thing.

nrakich: Yeah, I think the slow news cycle is a big part of it. I'll get a little meta here and talk about how we’ve covered these scandals here at FiveThirtyEight: This is the third piece of content we have published about Biden's classified documents, but we only published two about Trump's. But it's not because we think Biden's case is more serious than Trump's; it's because last August was a much busier time for political news. If we had had unlimited resources, I think we would have written more about Trump’s predicament, but that was the thick of midterm-election season, and we had so much else to cover that we just didn't get to it.

Biden’s story has also come out in dribs and drabs — the first documents were found at the Penn Biden Center, and then a few more were found at Biden's home, and then a few more were found there, etc. I think that has given it a little more life than it otherwise would have. But I’m curious to see if it has staying power in the media’s and public’s minds even after new revelations stop coming to light.

kaleigh: That will partly depend on whether anything more newsworthy happens … or if the most exciting debate is still about kitchen appliances.

In Part 1 of this week’s FiveThirtyEight Politics Podcast, the crew discusses why raising the debt ceiling this congress may prove more challenging than during past episodes of debt limit brinkmanship.