Ok, I've spent the morning looking at voting data after the whole “people split their votes for President and congress, that’s a call that we need to be more moderate” discussion. Anyone interested in a thread with maps and numbers?

Let's get started then. All voting data is from the CNN website, caveats, blah, blah, not all votes tallies are final, not all races have been called. I've included all the data where I can, and will include links at the end.

The argument is: there's a significant number of people who "split" votes, going Biden for President and staying Republican for their congressional races. First, I wanted to see if that was true, and if so, to what degree. Second, does it give us a path to follow to *win votes*?

Let's look at the "key" Senate races, just as a barometer. There were 10 states with 11 races, but Georgia is still undecided, so we'll focus on the remaining 9: AL, AZ, CO, IA, MT, NC, SC, MA & MI.

Alabama: Trump carried the state by 25.6% and Republicans won the Senate seat by 20.4%.

Arizona: Biden carried the state by 0.6% and Democrats won the Senate seat by 2.5%.

Colorado: Biden carried the state by 13.2%. and Democrats won the Senate seat by 8.9%.

Iowa: Trump won the state by 8.2% and Republicans won the Senate seat by 6.6%.

Montana: Trump won the state by 16.3% and the Republicans won the Senate seat by 10.4%.

North Carolina: Trump carried the state by 1.4% and Republicans won the Senate seat by 1.7%.

South Carolina: Trump won the state by 11.7% and Republicans won the Senate seat by 10.3%.

Maine: Biden won the state by 10.1% and Democrats lost the Senate seat by 7.9%.

Michigan: Biden won the state by 2.6% and Democrats won the Senate seat by 1.5%.

With the exception of Maine (a state with a real independent bent) every single Senate race tracked along side the Presidential race….so where’s this enormous “split ticket” phenomena that’s supposed to drive the Democratic policy direction for the next four years?

If we look at the total number of votes that were split, acknowledging there could be lots of reasons for it including Republicans who couldn’t stand Trump either, what do we see?

Overall, in the 9 races documented above, 125,453 MORE people voted for Trump in those states than voted for the Republican Senator on the ballot. In fact, in only two of those states were there more R votes cast for the Senate seat than the Presidency, and Dems LOST one.

Overall, 106,976 people could be said to have split their vote in the direction of Democrats, while 232,069 more votes were cast for Trump than the Republican Senate. And Republicans won twice as much as they lost these key races.

Leaving aside that it’s nonsense to make ANY national policy decision based on 106,976 people spread across 9 states, this idea that there’s a driving force of moderate voters who were splitting their votes as a signal that they are open to moving to the left is baffling.

I couldn’t find any evidence in these 9 “key races” to show that such a block of voters exists at all. In fact, we have data that shows once the Presidental race became clearer, the early Republican support for Democrats plummeted: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/how-democrats-senate-dreams-crumbled_n_5fa8914fc5b623bfac5164a9?d6f

ON THE OTHER HAND: We know that the left, especially Black, urban voters and ESPECIALLY Black women won this election. When more than 90% of a voting block goes for a single candidate, as Black women did, it’s a good place to look for new voters.

There are policies that are very much more progressive than ones in place now that are widely popular in all/most states. Expanding Medicaid, raising the minimum wage, governmental corruption reforms, employee governance of publicly traded companies, paid family leave, --->

automatic voter registration, allowing the government to fund drug research and making the results patent-free, credit card interest rate caps and banking reform in general, red flag laws, environmental protection, and marijuana/drug legalization, all enjoy broad support.

Curiously, these seem to be some of the same policies that moderates who lost in red states either refused to run on at all, or blame for their losses. We can't have it both ways.

So, what’s a better bet for Democrats to make: moving towards the unidentifiable center and hoping that something new happens despite no recent historical proof it will or even that it CAN, while letting the Republicans gear up for the mid-terms, or....

....going left to the growing number of young, progressive voters, especially POC and women, who want to see real changes and encouraging them to get involved by championing policies that speak to their experience as Americans?

Resources:

I like how transparent they are with their polling questions and methodologies.

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/08/poll-marijuana-legalization-data-for-progress-radical-ideas-popular-aoc.html https://www.dataforprogress.org/the-new-progressive-agenda#corruption