David Beard:
Hello and welcome. I'm David Beard, contributing editor for Daily Kos Elections.
David Nir:
And I'm David Nir, political director of Daily Kos. The Downballot is a weekly podcast dedicated to the many elections that take place below the presidency, from Senate to city council. Please subscribe to The Downballot wherever you listen to podcasts, and leave us a five-star rating and review.
David Beard:
What are we going to be covering on this week's show, Nir?
David Nir:
We are going to be starting off with a couple of very different Senate races, the likely open seat in California, and the definitely open seat in Indiana. We also want to recap the first poll that anyone has ever seen of the Kentucky governor's race, one of the top races on the ballot in 2023. We will wrap with another 2023 race that should not fly under the radar, and that is the contest for a vacant seat on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court.
We are then going to be joined by Kyle Kondik, the managing editor of Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball and one of the top election analysts in the country. We are going to be discussing race ratings, the Senate map, and much more. Great episode for you. Please stay with us.
We've had some developments in what is almost certain to be the most expensive Senate race of the 2024 cycle. I'm talking about California, of course. Beard, why don't you get us filled in on what's been going on out west?
David Beard:
Yeah, there's long been talk of a potential free-for-all in a Senate seat in California with just a million Democrats running and it looks like that might be starting to happen for 2024. Of course, as we've talked about, everyone expects incumbent Sen. Dianne Feinstein to retire and not run in 2024. We've already talked about one declared candidate, Rep. Katie Porter. Rep. Barbara Lee has also reportedly told folks that she's going to jump in, though she hasn't officially announced yet. Now just this week, we've got another representative from California who has officially announced—that's Adam Schiff. He's declared for this seat as well.
All three of them have strong favorabilities among national Democrats for different reasons. Schiff of course rose to providence on the intelligence committee. He also lead the first impeachment against Donald Trump. Porter, as we've talked about, is a protégé of Elizabeth Warren, has been prominent in a number of hearings against corporate executives. Lee is one of the most progressive members of Congress. She was the lone vote against authorizing the use of force in Afghanistan, which really gave her an enormous amount of credibility among the left for many years.
Of course, there're a number of other candidates who could run. This is still very early, so we don't know how long the list of prominent Democrats is going to be. The one benefit that Schiff has is that he has a ton of money because he didn't have a competitive race like Katie Porter has. He has over $20 million in the bank while Porter had to spend a lot of her money making sure that she won reelection in 2022.
The other notable factor that this creates is California 30, which is Schiff's seat, is now going to be open. Of course, it's a very safe blue seat in the Los Angeles area. There's going to be a bunch of Democratic candidates. There's one particularly notable candidate who has filed with the FEC but hasn't announced yet, which is Boy Meets World actor Ben Savage, who ran for West Hollywood City Council last year and lost. I don't know how competitive he's going to be, but it certainly gives a little celebrity gravitas to the race as that starts to develop.
David Nir:
Do “celebrity” and “gravitas” belong in the same sentence?
David Beard:
I think in Los Angeles they do. I think that's the exception.
David Nir:
Schiff said one thing: Everyone has still been kept wondering by Feinstein. It would be shocking if she ran again. It turned out that in the fourth quarter of 2022, we just got her fundraising reports. She only had $10,000 on hand. But Schiff said as part of his announcement that he wouldn't be moving forward unless he had Feinstein's blessing. That seems to be the clearest sign yet that, thank God, she isn't going to run again because really it's a very sad situation. She was a pioneer in so many ways, but obviously should have stepped aside some time ago. California and the nation will be lucky to get new representation come the next Congress. Are we going to be up to the 119th?
David Beard:
I think so. It's hard to keep track nowadays. We've been through so many.
David Nir:
Another Senate race that we need to dive into is the open seat in Indiana. For once, at least for the moment, it seems like Republicans are not in disarray regarding a GOP Senate primary. I know that seems hard to believe after what we saw for the last couple of years, but the current incumbent Mike Braun is running for governor and far-right Congressman Jim Banks currently has the field to himself. Because former Gov. Mitch Daniels, who was really an old line classical establishment Republican real D.C. creature, he had been looking at the race, but Daniels said that he wasn't going to run.
In response, the NRSC put out a statement that all but endorsed Banks that the committee said that it was looking forward to working with him as a top recruit. He also has the support of the Club for Growth and Donald Trump, and this trifecta is pretty unusual because the club and Trump are now back to hating one another. He recently called them the Club for No Growth. That is so, so clever, just vintage Donald Trump humor. But they've all lined up behind Banks in this case.
There are still however, some prominent Republicans who are still thinking about running, including Congresswoman Victoria Spartz. Maybe Banks will get some kind of a challenge—remains to be seen. No matter what though, Indiana has become such a red state. I think that even if there is unexpectedly yet another GOP shit show primary, it's almost impossible to imagine them somehow fumbling this seat in the general election.
At the very least, Republicans will be glad not to have yet another mess on their hands. But the reality is it doesn't really help them take back the Senate in any particularly direct way because they need to beat some Democrats to do that, and this is an open seat that by all rights they should hold without breaking a sweat.
David Beard:
Absolutely, and of course the fact that Jim Banks is now probably going to become a U.S. senator—he's extremely conservative—is certainly important information.
But I think the important thing about the Republican Party here is just how far it's traveled away from a Mitch Daniels-esque figure. Richard Lugar, of course, was a very prominent Republican senator from Indiana for many, many years who was on the more moderate side of the Republican Party. Lost his primary in 2012, which of course led to the Republicans briefly losing the seat for one term until they won it back in 2018.
I think Mitch Daniels is sort of a Lugar-esque figure, and the fact that he couldn't have even run a competitive race, I don't think, against a more conservative candidate like Banks. He would've gotten smashed in this primary. It's no surprise to me that he ultimately decided to forego a race because he saw the writing on the wall that this is not the party of Richard Lugar or Mitch Daniels anymore.
David Nir:
Banks, just to give you a sense of how extreme he is, he had been tapped by Kevin McCarthy to serve on the original version of the Jan. 6 committee, and Pelosi refused to seat him on that committee because he's a total insurrectionist and election denier. What you just talked about, Beard, what played out here, which is the more moderate establishment-type Republican deferring to the far right. Okay, they can get away with that in dark red Indiana, but if that happens in other states, even a state like Ohio, as it very probably will, that's going to cause a redux of the exact same problems we saw in '22.
David Beard:
We saw that in states like New Hampshire and even Maryland where they really need Mitch Daniels as candidate and they potentially had them and Gov. Larry Hogan in Maryland and Gov. Chris Sununu in New Hampshire, who knows if they could have gotten through a primary. Of course, they won their governor's races, but federal primaries are different. But those are the types of candidates Republicans need in purple and blue states to make those seats competitive, and they're very reluctant to nominate them. They want the crazies. In Indiana it's fine, but we'll see how that turns out more nationwide.
David Nir:
I think we need to swivel back to 2023 because we have a couple of big races that we have not talked about a ton so far on The Downballot, but what's going on down in Kentucky?
David Beard:
Yes, the Kentucky governor's race is potentially I think the marquee race of the year and has not gotten a ton of national coverage yet. It's sort of still bubbling under a little bit, but we did just get a poll from Mason-Dixon, which is a pretty reputable pollster, and it showed that Democratic incumbent Gov. Andy Beshear is leading the GOP frontrunner Attorney General Daniel Cameron 49 to 40. Pretty healthy lead from this one poll and actually does even better against the rest of the field that they polled, leading by double-digits comfortably.
Now, this is of course just one poll of a very tough red state, so I don't think people should go all in on the fact that Beshear has a nearly 10-point lead here. Four years ago, the same pollster found Andy Beshear starting with a similar lead against then-incumbent GOP Gov. Matt Bevin, only for them to come up with a tied poll in October. I think it's very clear that this race is going to be very close and very competitive, regardless of where it might be now before the campaign has really engaged fully.
But polls do show that the Attorney General Daniel Cameron, who also has the backing of Trump, does have a clear primary lead, so I think you have to start him as the favorite. He would be the first black governor of Kentucky.
Another candidate, former U.S. Ambassador Kelly Craft for the Republicans, has spent to get her name out there. But she attracted a lot of undesired attention after running an ad about fentanyl where she said her kitchen table has an empty chair. Of course, everyone saw this ad and thought that this was a very moving discussion about someone who had died, a loved one that she knew that had died from a fentanyl overdose.
Then eventually she came out and was like, oh no, that person's not dead. The person is still alive. The empty chair is just an incredibly strange and inappropriate metaphor because the person is still in the chair. That obviously did not help her campaign despite sending some money. It's really hard for me to see an establishment-esque attorney general who already has Trump's endorsement losing the primary at this point.
David Nir:
Yeah, that Kelly Craft ad, it was almost like the opioid crisis version of Stolen Valor. That was just deeply, deeply strange.
That Mason-Dixon poll, it did seem really positive for Beshear and it also had him at a job approval rating in the 60s. But interestingly, there was a poll from Morning Consult recently, sometime last month, that also put Beshear's approval rating in the 60s. That's extraordinarily high for any governor, but certainly for a Democratic governor in a red state.
I'm definitely eager to see more polling data. I have a very strong feeling that this one will be a lot closer, but it does seem like Beshear has a very legit chance at winning a second term.
David Beard:
We did see John Bel Edwards four years ago able to win reelection being a strong Democratic candidate in a very red state. It's certainly doable, and I do think Beshear is popular in Kentucky, but of course a lot of those folks who may say they approve of Beshear may just go and vote for the Republican anyway. We've seen that before too.
David Nir:
There's one last race on the ballot in 2023 that we want to touch on, and that is the fight for an open seat on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. Democrats currently have a 4-2 majority on the court. That's because the chief judge, Max Baer, very unexpectedly died last year and his seat currently remains vacant. The State Democratic Party just endorsed an appellate judge, Daniel McCaffery, over colleague Deborah Kunselman for this race.
Typically, we have seen in judicial races in Pennsylvania that when the state party issues an endorsement, it is quite common to see the other candidates drop out, at least on the Democratic side. That seems to have been somewhat less the case these days for Republicans. Not so surprising given the GOP's general disarray when it comes to primaries. We don't know yet who the Republican standard bearer will be. The primary is in May and the general election is in November, even though control of the court is not necessarily at stake. Even if Republicans win, Democrats would still have a 4-3 majority. There have been some recent cases where, on some major issues including voting rights, that one or another democratic justice has cited with Republicans. Again, it didn't affect the outcome, but if you have a 4-3 court instead of a 5-2 court, then if a Democrat switches sides like that, then you could see the outcome affected. And that could be particularly devastating in voting rights matters. So this race might not be quite as high profile as the April battle to flip the Wisconsin Supreme Court, but this is definitely the second-most important state Supreme Court race of the year that's going to be on the ballot this fall.
David Beard:
And one of the things we've seen with these staggered Supreme Court elections, like a number of these states have, is that you really can't afford to take a cycle off. Of course, in this case, the control of the court, in terms of the number of progressives versus the number of conservatives, is not up for grabs. But what we saw in 2020 was Democrats had a poor night in say, the North Carolina Supreme Court races, which set up the loss of the control of the court in 2022 and up in Wisconsin, some past victories for Democrats and Supreme Court races have set up the opportunity now to flip the court in April. So we don't want to be like, oh, the control of the court is fine. We've got four Democrats on there and let that go. We want to make sure and hold that fifth Democratic seat in Pennsylvania.
David Nir:
We always have to play the long game. That does it for our weekly hits. Coming up, we are going to be chatting with one of our favorite fellow election analysts. Kyle Kondik is the managing editor of a site you are very probably familiar with, Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia. We are going to talk about how their shop goes about doing their race readings and what he sees happening on the Senate map for 2024. Please stay with us.
Welcome back everyone. We are joined today by Kyle Kondik, who is the managing editor at Sabato's Crystal Ball, which is the University of Virginia's Center for Politics nonpartisan newsletter on American campaigns and elections. He is also one of the top observers of elections in the country, a very common presence on Twitter. Kyle, thank you so much for joining us. We have been fans of yours for years.
Kyle Kondik:
Right back at you. I was just saying before we started that I read the Daily Kos Elections morning email basically every day and have every day basically since I started this job a dozen years ago, as long as you guys have been doing it. So the information you guys provide is extremely valuable, both at that morning email and keeping tabs on campaigns and whatnot. And also a lot of the numbers you all produce about presidential results in congressional districts and that sort of thing. So I'm a big fan of the work you all do.
David Nir:
We certainly love hearing that and the feeling is mutual. But we would love to talk to you about how you got into the line of work that you're currently in. You've been at the Crystal Ball, which is really one of the top election sites in the country, for more than a decade now. How did you get started there, and what brought you there? Where were you before Crystal Ball?
Kyle Kondik:
Yeah, so I'm from northeast Ohio and I was not really into politics that much when I was a kid or even as a teenager. I was very much into history. I was a big World War II buff. And so I read a lot of that stuff and followed that. And I think through that I sort of got to know Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, and that kind of got me a little bit more interested in politics, sort of following those figures. But I didn't really get into it until I was in college at Ohio University, I was at the campus newspaper there. And when I was in college, the 2004 election was my junior year, and I think for a lot of people my age anyway, the 2004 election was sort of an important moment in our lives is sort of following American politics. And that got me into it. And then my first job out of college, I worked at a small newspaper in New Philadelphia, Dover, Ohio area. And that was right at the time where Zach Space, who you'll probably remember or remember covering.
David Nir:
Yes.
Kyle Kondik:
Zach Space had ended up winning the winning election to the U.S. House district there that Bob Ney had held, former preprominent Republican in both Ohio and national circles who had a fall from grace and scandals and whatnot. But anyway, Ney left office, Zach Space replaced him as part of the sort of 2006 kind of Blue Dog wave, and I covered that. I got to go to the Capitol to see Space get sworn in, and I was in the chamber for when Pelosi became speaker, which is just kind of a cool moment for someone from a small newspaper in northeast Ohio to get to do.
So I did that job for a year. I was the editorial page editor at another newspaper, the Chronicle Telegram up in Elyria, Ohio. And through that I got to meet Richard Cordray, who at that time was running in a special election for state attorney general for the Democrats and some of the folks affiliated with his campaign and out of the blue after the election, they said, "Hey, would you want to work for us?" And so I said ... I interviewed for a job and got it. So I was Cordray's kind of speechwriter. I did all the communications stuff in Columbus for him for two years. Cordray lost to Mike DeWine for the attorney general election in 2010.
I had to find something else to do. I applied for the job down at Center for Politics and ended up getting it. I didn't really have any connection down there. I just happened to see the job and thought it looked interesting. And I've been there ever since. I mean, I telecommuted from Washington for much of my time at Center for Politics, I currently live in Washington, but I've been working for the Center for Politics for many years and it's been a very cool job.
David Nir:
I think it's awesome that you mentioned that original Cordray-DeWine race because of course the two faced off in a rematch in 2018, which was another close very competitive race, but for a different office, for governor. And I remember wondering, I don't remember what the answer is, but whether the same two candidates have faced off in a rematch for different state offices in different years, but obviously the result was the same both times.
Kyle Kondik:
Yeah, I'd imagined it happened, and actually it was a little bit closer in 2010, although both races were pretty competitive. But as this just sort of electoral geek, you could see just the differences in the electoral coalitions, the two parties just between those two elections because Cordray did much better in eastern Ohio, specifically Appalachian Ohio and Youngstown and Warren, than he had done ... Or he did a lot better in 2010 than he did in 2018. Ted Strickland was also on the ballot that year. He was losing his gubernatorial reelection bid, but Strickland used to represent the 6th Congressional District, which is sort of a kind of Ohio River district.
And you look at, I think under the old lines of the last decade, I don't think any district in the entire country moved more strongly toward the Republicans from 2012 to 2020 than Ohio’s 6th did. So that was sort of the epicenter of the kind of Trump or the Democrats sort of losing ground to Trump in rural and small town America. But yeah, it was just interesting to follow along with all that. And Cordray is now working in the Biden administration. He was a great guy to work for, but I've been doing this for a dozen years and have been very happy about that.
David Beard:
Something really interesting that you got to do just this last year was be a part of CBS's election night decision desk. Now this is something that people hear a lot about, right around election time, but otherwise not too much and you don't get a lot of looks inside that actual room where people are going through taking in this data and making these decisions. So tell us how that worked, what you were doing as a part of that election night coverage, what the sort of hour by hour work was.
David Nir:
I am so interested to hear your answer about this, Kyle, because like Beard said, it's something we don't get great insight into, so I really want to hear what you have to say.
Kyle Kondik:
Yeah, I tweeted about it that I was going to do it, I don't know, a month or two before the election. And Natalie Jackson, Public Religion Research Institute writes a column for National Journal. I can't remember exactly what she said, but she tweeted back to me and said it was almost like Fight Club. It's like you don't talk about it or whatever. I'm sorry, I just can't... I don't have the specific quote off the tip of my tongue. But yeah, I guess it is something that there is kind of a little bit of mystery around it. I don't know if there's any particular reason for it, but what it sort of evolved out of, I helped on the Ohio primary night with CBS on their decision desk, and that was just via Zoom, but I do know Ohio pretty well. And so we were tracking the J.D. Vance Senate primary, but most notably that evening, although Governor DeWine also had something of a challenge. I think he ended up getting slightly under 50%, but really won fairly easily.
So that was sort of my first experience doing it. And I did another night with them and after that they asked me to if I could actually come to New York and be part of the team on election night, which was very flattering. I mean, that's something I've kind of always wanted to do and CBS is first rate operation. And so Anthony Salvanto, who you'll see on Face the Nation and also on election night, he's sort of the head of the decision desk. And then he works very closely with Kabir Khanna, who's sort of my more kind of direct contact over there. But you may see Kabir also working on some of the polling that CBS does. And then there are a few other folks who are, I guess, consultants the way that I was for the 2022 election.
And we just gathered in New York a few days before the election, we went through, there's this whole backend system of information. I think Edison Research provides the data that goes into that. There are a few other... I think a few other different organizations use some different data sources or what have you. But for me, just having access to basically a better sort of backend system that I could get just sitting at my desk at home was really kind of nice. And we tried to... I work specifically on trying to call the house races and I work specifically with Kabir Khanna on that on election night. And the way it works is if you're watching CBS, you'd see the big set out there and then behind where the cameras are, there's like a glass wall and then they're a bunch of computers set up and that's where the decision desk team is.
And so the folks who are on camera, they can sometimes come back and ask questions, look for stuff that they want to get on air because what we're really trying to do is to support the broadcast and give them things that they can use and to talk about and also for things that CBS can share through social media and whatnot. But yeah, I mean it was a cool experience. I was very flattered to be asked to do it. And there is some kind of modeling and statistical stuff going on in the backend system. But ultimately, just like anything else, you're trying to call the races, you're just looking at all of the data that you have, where the votes are coming from, whether it is early voting or absentee voting or election day, which sort of tells you, given the sort of polarization by voting method, that's become increasingly important and then you end up making a judgment.
And I was happy that there... And we actually didn't get to do it on election night because the house ended up being so close, but in the system there's like a button that says, call the house. And first of all, if I tried to touch that button, it wouldn't do anything. My system didn't have access to that, which I was very happy about. But we were thinking, given my own expectations and other expectations that the Republicans would win sort of a clear victory in the house, we thought that there would be a point where we would hit that button. And so part of the prep work was trying to think about the races that we thought were the most important and doing some sort of back of the envelope math about how we expected the West Coast races to break so that you could sort of assume like a floor for the parties.
But it ended up not being something that was callable on election night, as we all know now, and the Republican majority ended up being relatively small, but ultimately you've got all of the backend technology stuff and all of the models and whatnot, but ultimately the people working on the desk have to work collaboratively together to ultimately render the judgments. And so there's a lot of quantitative information, but it's ultimately this sort of qualitative judgment. And actually in some ways it's kind of like what we do at the Crystal Ball, in that we're not a model. It's ultimately judgments about what we think the rating should be. Now we take a lot of things into account to do that, but ultimately we have, I guess, we have agency to decide what we want to do. It's not just the model sort of spitting out what the projection is. It's ultimately a judgment call that we make. Sometimes we make the right judgment, sometimes we don't, but that's how it ends up working out.
David Nir:
So, to dial back a little bit earlier in the night, 2022 was obviously a very strange and unusual election in so many ways. Was there any particular point, any particular race or state that you saw the data coming in? Maybe you made a call, maybe you didn't want to make a call and you thought, "Huh, this night might actually not be so terrible for Democrats after all."
Kyle Kondik:
Yeah, there were two races, in particular, that I was really tracking, both of which the Democrats ended up winning. One of them was Rhode Island Two, which, of course, I actually kind of thought would flip, but Republicans are trying to make these inroads into New England, and there was the open seat in Rhode Island Two. Republicans had a pretty strong candidate in Alan Fung, but ultimately it became relatively clear that Seth Magaziner was going to win. I think he ended up winning by four or five points, the Democrat.
And so, that was one that was sort of on the wave watch. It's like if that one flips, it probably means Republicans are sort of winning the House going away. And then, more specifically, and the one that I really was tracking very closely, was Abigail Spanberger of Virginia Seven. And that was one where we're starting to get... I remember working through it with other people on the desk about talking about, like, "Oh, well, in these particular places"... Yesli Vega's running ahead, but it's all election day, so we have to be careful about that. And here's a locality where we have everything, at least, that's what the system says. And Spanberger is running decently well, or just a little bit behind Biden. Of course, Biden won that district by 6.5 points. So, there was a little bit of slack there for Spanberger.
And that's one that I really ended up spending a lot of time on that evening... at least, early in the evening. We were able to make a call there for Spanberger, and that was also another one that was sort of in the Wave Watch category. So, I think those are the two that I think of in terms of early in the evening... And I remember doing the prep work for election night. What were the states were watching was Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida. Of course, Florida looked like a mega wave, but as we now know, there was a red wave in certain places. It just was sort of unevenly applied across the country. And you could even argue that there was... I wouldn't say there was a blue wave necessarily anywhere, maybe Michigan, but that there was not a uniform swing clearly in a lot of these states. But yeah, those were the two races. And once the Democrats had won those two, it sort of seemed like, okay, this thing is going a little bit different way than maybe we thought.
David Beard:
Yeah, I remember tweeting on election night somewhere in the middle, it was really outside of Florida, things are fine. Florida is terrible, otherwise things are actually going pretty well, which is sort of the weird dichotomy of that night.
Kyle Kondik:
Yeah. And, of course, the Democrats ended up almost like some of the "safe democratic seats" left behind after the Ron DeSantis gerrymander. Some of those ended up being kind of close, like the seat that Jerry Moskowitz won, for instance, and I think maybe one or two others. And it was also kind of reminiscent of election night 2020 when I still think the sort of the big flash ball moment of that whole night for me. And I was not working on the desk at that time. I was just following along was when Miami-Dade reported and Clinton won it by 30 and then Biden won it by seven. And that was like, "Whoa, something's going on here." But again, it was sort of unevenly applied because really Biden was doing fine in other places.
Now, you also had in 2020, we knew there was going to be a big lag in Pennsylvania. And I was sort of ready for there to be a big lag in Pennsylvania this time. But first of all, even Fetterman's race ended up being not that close. We won by five points or something. But also, it did seem that the counting process just seemed to work a lot better there. And that was something I didn't really quite know exactly what to expect beforehand, but that was another thing that made 2020 more dramatic, I guess, than 2022 was.
David Beard:
So turning now to 2024, it's just under two years away. So, of course, we got to start talking about it.
Kyle Kondik:
Of course.
David Beard:
Crystal Ball released its initial 2024 Senate map and its ratings. And one of the race that's, of course, gotten the most early coverage is Arizona. We've talked about it a fair amount already on the podcast, but what's your take on it and how hard is it to project a race with the potential for three major candidates to be going to the general election?
Kyle Kondik:
Well, in some ways, it's easy because you can just throw it in the tossup column because... I think it actually would be a harder call if Sinema had not switched parties and she still had her baggage, but was still sort of in line to maybe be the Democratic nominee. Then you could maybe think about, "Well, should this be like Lean's Democratic race? Although Sinema's numbers were bad before she switched parties, too... I don't know. Again, it would've maybe been a little bit more complicated from a rating perspective, but I didn't really see any reason with the likelihood of it being a three-way race. I think you just have to sort of toss it in the tossup column.
You've got a credible Democrat running, Ruben Gallego, who, I think it's fair to say, doesn't start... maybe starts as a more like clearly kind of liberal/progressive candidate compared to where Sinema was in the 2018 cycle. And also, Mark Kelly when he first started out. And then you've got Sinema maybe not running again, and then the Republican side, who knows who it's going to be. It could end up being one of their fairly weak candidates from 2022. Kari Lake or Blake Masters could be someone stronger than that, could be someone weaker than that. So I think you just set it aside and put it in tossup for now.
David Beard:
I would love for them to find somebody weaker than Blake Masters to run. That would be a really impressive piece.
Kyle Kondik:
Well, that would be a heck of a challenge. I mean, I remember, and I've tweeted this, so whatever, I stand by it, but there were a lot of bad Republican candidates last time. I really thought Masters was the worst. And I think it kind of shows up in the performance because... and I think a lot of people would say Herschel Walker. But I think that Walker, at least, had some built-up goodwill that I don't think Masters ever had because, at least, Walker had been around for a long time. And again, he had all sorts of problems, that Walker, I think basically, had kind of a sunnier disposition, for lack of a better way of putting it. Masters was just... I think he's kind of a strange candidate. And I'm sure Republicans... I'm sorry Democrats would just love for him to be the nominee again.
Although in a three-way race, maybe he could actually win if, in fact, Sinema is hurting the Democratic nominee more than the Republican nominee. Although the polling has been kind of mixed on that. I think there was just one today that... although I think that one showed Gallego getting hurt borne by Sinema than Kari Lake, who was just the tested candidate, but I think Gallego was leading by a small amount, but then it was basically a tie in the three-way race.
So, long way to go here, but we'll see if the Republicans could sort of find somebody stronger because that seat and several others are hypothetically right there for the taking.
David Nir:
One thing you guys do when it comes to race ratings that I both admire and fills me with trepidation is right before election day, you take everything out of the tossup column and you make your fearless predictions on is it going to be Lean R or Lean D? That feels so difficult to me, and no one else does that. I think, like you were saying, the tough ones, just throw them on the tossup column. How do you go about doing that?
Kyle Kondik:
I mean, we just try to collect as much information as we can. We do get a sense of things throughout the season. And then, usually, the weekend before, we're all just asking around various sources and whatnot. And a lot of them... People just say, "Hey, it's tossup or whatever." I mean, the thing about the House in 2022, and there were some of this in 2020 as well, but it seemed like a lot of the internal stuff that I heard about... I get little dribs and drabs here and there of what the parties have or whatever. But it seemed like everything was... a lot of it was legitimately very close when they sort of stopped tracking. And then it was just you had to make a judgment as to which way you thought things would sort of fall.
And I personally thought, just based on the history, and sort of how I interpreted the trajectory of things near the end, that the Republicans would just do better in the House than they did. And it was a second straight cycle where the House projections... just mine were not very, very good. But I don't necessarily think that others who do this sort of thing did much differently than we did. But there was just a lot of legitimate uncertainty at the end. But we sort of feel like, "Hey, we're a publication that does election handicapping and that's the only thing we do, but that's what a lot of people are looking for." And so we feel like, "Hey, we've got to handicap all these things and offer our best judgment."
Sometimes we make late switches that work out. Like right before the Virginia governor's race, we switched from McAuliffe to Youngkin. That ended up being right. When we switched... and this time, we had Fetterman favored the whole time in Pennsylvania, and then we switched it right at the end. I basically thought that Oz had sort of caught up by the end, and that it would be super close. It ended up being not being very close, and Fetterman ended up winning, of course.
But we did okay in the Senate. I mean, that was the only race we've missed outright. We had Georgia, Lean R at the end, but then we... because of the runoff, we got a do-over and we did end up picking Warnock. So, if you want to be a harsh critic, you could say we missed two Senate races. If you want to be soft or honest, you could say we missed one. I think that's not bad. Now, in the Senate's 50/50, anything you do will upset who you think the overall favorite is. But I was pretty pessimistic about Catherine Cortez Masto, but Jon Ralston picked Cortez Masto and people were critical of us for being like, "Oh, you're just going with Ralston."
On one hand, yeah. I mean, we do trust his judgment on things and also, frankly, his assessment of what's going on. I almost look at it as it's as good of as a poll. You know what I mean? He's as good at it now, or he's so good at it that it's sort of one of the indicators you have to look at in that particular state. We also, frankly, had heard some sort of sunnier democratic polling information about Nevada over the weekend that also kind of reinforced what Ralston had said. And it ended up being a less than one point race. So it wasn't like there was some sort of huge indication.
But, yeah, we sort of ended up in a place in the Senate that I didn't necessarily expect us to. And it wasn't perfect, but it wasn't Republicans winning 53 or 54 seats, that we didn't really go there. I mean, I really thought in our... Again, our final projections ended up being kind of rosy for Republicans, but they could have also been rosier. You could have read the data that way. And in our final update before the election, I remember writing, "We're sort of suggesting here that the Republicans are going to pay a penalty for this and that then, and then depending on what happens, we'll see how big the penalty is." And it turns out the penalty was even bigger than we thought.
David Nir:
So, we've bounced back and forth a bit between last cycle and this cycle. But I want to ask you another question about 2024. So, I think there's universal agreement that the most difficult Senate seats that Democrats have to defend are in the three states that Trump won, where Democrats currently hold Senate seats: West Virginia, Ohio, and Montana. But now, you rated Ohio and Montana as tossups, but West Virginia as lean Republican. So, I'm really curious to know why the split among that trio.
Kyle Kondik:
It's basically just because West Virginia is so much more Republican at the presidential level, which you see. And we actually, we've got something coming out in the Crystal Ball real soon about this. The kind of overperformance that Manchin would need, basically, you probably would think he'd need to run something like 40 points ahead of the presidential margin in his state. That overperformance used to be a lot more common than it is today. Manchin himself was able to do it in 2012. But if you look at the 2016 and 2020 results, you don't see those kinds of overperformances, particularly in 2020, where the Senate and presidential races tracked closer together than they had in some of the more recent... or in some of the other presidential/Senate cycles this century.
So, I just think that West Virginia is even redder now than it was in 2018 when Manchin won by three points. It's very well possible that Manchin could face a stronger opponent. It's a presidential year. I just think there's a big pile of evidence suggesting that Manchin should start as an underdog. I wouldn't write off any incumbent to start it off with. We also don't know if he's even running again, but I think it was just sort of an unusual situation.
In some ways it reminds me a little bit of Collin Peterson who was a real outlier by the end of his time in Congress in that he held a 30 point Trump district and essentially no one else in either party held a district where the other side's presidential candidate had done better than 15 points. And so Manchin is in that situation too, in that he's a real outlier and what has generally happened to outliers in the House and the Senate is that eventually they've ended up losing or retiring or whatnot, and Peterson ended up losing in the 2020 cycle in a race that actually didn't end up being that close, although he, like some other Minnesota Democrats, was hurt by some of these marijuana party candidates on the ballot, but there was just too much of a drag at the top of the ticket. And I think that's ultimately the case for Manchin in 2024. So that's why I see him in a different category than Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown who still need to generate crossover support, but not nearly as much as Manchin would need.
David Beard:
Now with all of these target seats for Republicans who potentially pick up in 2024, obviously one way for Democrats to keep their majority, which is currently at 51 seats, would be to maybe lose a couple seats, but then maybe pick up a seat or two. But as you look at the 2024 map, it is extremely slim pickings in terms of targets for Democrats to try to pick up a seat. There are basically two that are in the realm of possibility, neither of which I would consider to be good targets. That's Texas and Florida. I think you started both of those in the likely Republican category. So just talk a little bit about what you think. What is more likely to happen there in terms of which state might be possible for Democrats?
Kyle Kondik:
I don't see a huge difference between the two states. Texas historically is more Republican, but I think Texas is getting a little more competitive and Florida maybe getting a little less competitive. And it wouldn't stun me actually, if at some point Texas passed Florida in terms of competitiveness. I think that the presidential vote in Texas, it was Trump by about five and a half there and Trump won Florida by a little more than three. So they've gotten a lot closer in recent years. I wrote something last year just about some of the places in the country that are growing the fastest and Florida and Texas are both really fast growing states. And so it's no surprise that there are a lot of counties in both states that are growing quite quickly.
A lot of those fast growing places are very Republican, particularly in Texas, but some of the fast growing places in Texas are Republican but getting a little more democratic and a lot of the fast growing places in Florida, which I think a lot of them are pretty retiree heavy, a lot of those places are actually getting more Republican in Trump era and so I just wonder about those demographic trends, the fact that the Democrats seem to be losing ground in Miami-Dade and some other places. And I just wonder if Texas may eventually become more competitive. But in the context of 2024, I think both states are pretty similarly positioned and unfortunately for Democrats, similarly positioned right of center.
I would say that particularly, if there's a prominent Democrat who runs against Ted Cruz, my guess is that raising money will not be that much of a problem. That is an advantage that Democrats have taken from Republicans in recent years, that Democrats have all this small dollar fundraising might. And I suspect that an email marketing campaign from Ted Cruz's opponent would probably lead to a lot of money, particularly if it's someone credible like Colin Allred, the house member from Dallas area, former football player. He's sometimes mentioned. I don't know if he's actually going to do it or not, but he's the sort of person who probably would be able to launch a credible campaign and raise money. But to what end? I think that Democrats are going to want to play offense somewhere. It's just bleak options. And Democrats did have, I think a pretty credible candidate in Florida in 2022, in Val Demings, and she just got swamped like basically the Democrats did in everything else and in Florida. And so where do they go in that state?
So it's just a bad map. The Democrats are just defending so many more seats than Republicans are. One of these days the Democrats are going to have a bad election on this map. They really haven't since 1994, was the last time that the Republicans really picked up a lot of seats on this map, and then Democrats gained a fair number in 2000, a fair number in 2006, and then held their own in 2012 and 2018 when you look at them together. But it's just a big imbalance. And it's also the Democrats only have three members left in Trump states. Well, they're all in the ballot this time. So it's just structurally pretty difficult.
David Beard:
I do think a good candidate for Texas would've been Beto O'Rourke had we just put him in some sort of stasis chamber for six years and he hadn't gone and run for president and then come back and run for governor and done a bunch of stuff.
Kyle Kondik:
And said that he wanted to ban everyone's guns or whatever it was.
David Beard:
Yeah, but if we just put him in a coma or something for six years, pulled him back out to let him run against Ted Cruz again. That's what we really needed.
Kyle Kondik:
Yeah, they needed to put him in the cryo chamber or something, like Austin Powers or something. Again, I think that the Democrats, they need to try to find someone, which I'm sure they're doing. And also if you're the Democrats and you could push Texas along a little bit toward being more of a swing state, it would open up a lot of opportunities. Part of the overall Senate problem for Democrats is that they do control a lot of the states or seats in the most competitive states. I'm stealing this from someone and I apologize to whoever I'm stealing it from because it's a really good point, but if you look at basically some of the closest states in the 2020 presidential race, Arizona, Nevada and Georgia and then Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, I think the Democrats hold all but one of the Senate seats in those states.
So they're really doing quite well in some of the really competitive states, but it stands to reason that probably over time the Democrats are going to lose some ground in some of those states, or at least in the Midwestern portion of that. And so where do they make up for that? Well, the Republicans have both seats in North Carolina. They have both seats in Florida, they have both seats in Texas. Those are what Democrats over the next generation are probably going to have to compete for. And they have competed, they just haven't really won them recently, but I think they're going to need more of a breakthrough in that region to win future Senate majorities, particularly if the Republicans do well this time, if they actually pick up three, four Senate seats or even more than that, which is possible if they win the presidency at the same time, that would give the Republicans a little bit of an advantage that it's going to be hard for Democrats to make up for in the short-term. But again, we can't make any assumptions.
The Republicans have this problem with kicking away Senate races at the start of when I started doing this work, 2010 and 2012 in particular, then that problem went away for a little bit and then it reared its ugly head in 2022. Although, you also have to look at it and say, "Given how big the margin was for Mark Kelly in Arizona and for Maggie Hassan in New Hampshire, I guess then the question is, would there have been alternative candidates who actually would've won? Would Doug Ducey have beat Mark Kelly?" Maybe, but I don't necessarily know if that's definitively the case. Would Sununu have beaten Maggie Hassen? Quite possibly, but maybe not. So that that's also something we need to think about.
David Beard:
We have been talking with Kyle Kondik of UVA's Crystal Ball, one of our favorite fellow election analysts. Kyle, please let our listeners know where they can find all your work.
Kyle Kondik:
Centerforpolitics.org\crystalball is our Crystal Ball website. We publish generally twice a week or at least once a week, and you could sign up for our email newsletter there. It's free to sign up. We also have a podcast that is relatively new called Politics is Everything that my colleague Carah Ong Whaley has taken the lead on, but I appear on that relatively often. My colleague, J. Miles Coleman also does. And so that comes out pretty often and is available on all podcasting platforms and still active on Twitter, @kkondik. Maybe not as active as I used to be. Part of it is the longer I do this, the less I feel like I truly have really provocative things to say or that I want to say.
So maybe I don't tweet as much as I used to, but I'm still pretty active there, particularly when it comes to sort of big events like the McCarthy House speaker vote and other things. I try to chime in on those sorts of things, but maybe at some point there'll be some alternative to Twitter for election folks, but don't seen a good one yet. And Twitter still seems to basically be functional even whatever you may think of Mr. Musk and his politics, but still trying to go strong there. And I will say also that with the McCarthy speaker vote, to me that reasserted why Twitter is so awesome and important because that was the place to follow it and until something supplants that as the place to follow events like that, I think it's still going to stay relevant for us in the politics space.
David Beard:
I think we are stuck with Twitter. Love it or hate it. Kyle, thank you so much for joining us today.
Kyle Kondik:
Thanks for having me.
David Beard:
That's all from us this week. Thanks to Kyle Kondik for joining us. The Downballot comes out every Thursday, everywhere you listen to podcasts. You can reach out to us by emailing the downballot@dailykos.com. If you haven't already, please subscribe to the Downballot on Apple Podcasts and leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks to our producer, Cara Zelaya and editor Trever Jones. We'll be back next week with a new episode.