What Democrats Need to Know About Moderate Republicans
What Democrats Need to Know About Moderate Republicans
There aren’t enough of them to provide the margin of victory this November.
But that’s not how the House was lost in 2010. It wasn’t that the huge hordes of swing voters recoiled against the legislative overreach of our nation’s first black president. It was that too many of the hordes of voters who’d propelled a black man into the White House in 2008 sat out the 2010 elections.
Doing a deep data dive on the districts reveals that the number of swing voters is far smaller than many people realize, especially when you factor in the drop-off in voter turnout in midterm elections. In the most competitive Republican-held congressional districts, Clinton won by an average of 17,000 votes, but the incumbent GOP congressperson beat his or her Democratic foe by an average of 34,000 votes.
If, on average, just seven Republicans are moderates, and Democrats need 15 additional votes, Democrats will obviously fall short. Where else then could and should Democrats look? The more promising pools of people are actually Democratic voters—many of whom face greater economic obstacles in finding the time and transportation to get to the polls.
In the quest for those necessary 15 votes, the number-one place Democrats should look is among the 19 percent of Democrats who voted in 2016, but are unlikely to cast ballots this year.
In races that may well be decided by a few thousand votes (for example, Pennsylvania Democrat Conor Lamb won his special US House election earlier this year by a mere 627 votes), it makes sense to also target the 20,000 young people in each congressional district who were not old enough to vote in 2016, but are now eligible.
In fact, the largest pool of people Democrats should be trying to tap is actually nonvoters—the 200,000 people per district who were eligible but didn’t cast ballots in 2016.
What Democrats Need to Know About Moderate Republicans
There aren’t enough of them to provide the margin of victory this November.
But that’s not how the House was lost in 2010. It wasn’t that the huge hordes of swing voters recoiled against the legislative overreach of our nation’s first black president. It was that too many of the hordes of voters who’d propelled a black man into the White House in 2008 sat out the 2010 elections.
Doing a deep data dive on the districts reveals that the number of swing voters is far smaller than many people realize, especially when you factor in the drop-off in voter turnout in midterm elections. In the most competitive Republican-held congressional districts, Clinton won by an average of 17,000 votes, but the incumbent GOP congressperson beat his or her Democratic foe by an average of 34,000 votes.
If, on average, just seven Republicans are moderates, and Democrats need 15 additional votes, Democrats will obviously fall short. Where else then could and should Democrats look? The more promising pools of people are actually Democratic voters—many of whom face greater economic obstacles in finding the time and transportation to get to the polls.
In the quest for those necessary 15 votes, the number-one place Democrats should look is among the 19 percent of Democrats who voted in 2016, but are unlikely to cast ballots this year.
In races that may well be decided by a few thousand votes (for example, Pennsylvania Democrat Conor Lamb won his special US House election earlier this year by a mere 627 votes), it makes sense to also target the 20,000 young people in each congressional district who were not old enough to vote in 2016, but are now eligible.
In fact, the largest pool of people Democrats should be trying to tap is actually nonvoters—the 200,000 people per district who were eligible but didn’t cast ballots in 2016.
ugh clearly you don't know how the Senate works
Do y'all not realize we lost West Virginia because they didn't like Obama 
maybe I need to make a thread about this, but in 2014 everybody was running AWAY from Obama
