I am doing a four part series on the 2020 election, to keep each piece from being too unwieldy. The first section, the South, is made up of the 11 states of the Confederacy, plus Kentucky, and Oklahoma.
I will first take a brief moment to outline my toplines and logic. I am attempting, rather than project probabilities (and skirt any responsibility for not being super-accurate), to project an outcome based on a lot of information and sources, but not strictly on any magic sauce statistical formula. Though if I had to put my holistic approach into a formula I would say it is as follows: polling and demographics, (including the last 4 Presidential elections), and fundraising. Nationally, I am projecting a 9.5 point Biden win, which is about where I have been since July, and other than a bit of noise pushing the margin down a bit in polling, and now, pushing it up, the race has been quite stable around that point, regardless of the media’s barnburner narrative. This is roughly comparable to Carter’s 1980 loss. This series is about Biden’s projected performance and downballot performance in each state, but if I were to explain the national margin very simply, it would as follows: Biden is crushing Trump in nearly every substantial urban and suburban area, and he is going to perform ten or even twelve points better than Clinton in a lot of these marginal suburban areas. We are likely to see record turnout in the suburbs and urban centers as well, and Biden will get a record-setting margin across the board. Secondarily, rural areas, mid-sized secondary cities, heavily white areas with low education levels, will become slightly more Republican for the most part, with some exceptions, and also see big turnout, though whether they match Dems intensity remains to be seen. Biden’s improvements in working class white voters, white voters without a college degree, is almost solely going to come in blue suburbs near major urban centers, following the pattern of midwestern elections in 2018. Thus in Michigan, for example, Biden will do better in Wayne, Macomb, and Genesee counties, but not improve much at all in the rest of the state. Or in Ohio, where Biden will do better in Youngstown, Cleveland, Akron and Toledo, but not the rest of the state and not in the more suburban, rural and secondary cities near those centers.
Nationally, I am thinking the election looks about like Biden getting 53.5% to Trump’s 44%, with 2.5% going to various third party candidates. From here on out I will brief people on each state, pointing out some major counties to watch, trendlines, and so forth. In House races, there just really isn’t enough clear data to venture any very precise margins, so for the most part I will just say which party I expect to win. What is clear to me is that if push comes to shove, I there is only 1 or 2 seats I see Democrats losing from 2018, and there are a lot of Republican seats the party has put into play. The South, despite being mostly Trump territory, still has plenty of opportunities for the Democratic party and for anyone anti-Trump.
Now, to start: The South (Mostly Trump Territory)
Alabama
Alabama has a Senate race featuring Doug Jones versus ex-Auburn Coach Tommy Tuberville, and 7 House seats, which thanks to an effective Republican Gerrymander, are 6-1 Republican, with none of the other seats even competitive.
Senate: Doug Jones is an excellent guy, a pretty good, and principled Democrat on the right-end of the party. He’s an example of a reasonable, and decent person in politics: even though we have a lot of political disagreements, I feel like I could work with him and respect him as a colleague. Tommy Tuberville is...well, he was the most hated coach in the SEC football league for a reason. He is a slimeball, and his involvement in some investment scams, and the little fact that he has few personal ties to Alabama and has mostly lived out of state for the past 13 years, only changing his residence again to gear up for a Senate race. As an Ole Miss alumni, I can’t help but always point out to people that Tuberville declared to media and boosters, “They’ll have to carry me out of here in a pine box” one week before he ditched the program for Auburn. Tuberville’s schtick in this race has been basically to cling to Trump and the banner of Trumpism as close as possible, and to mimic Trump’s charged rhetoric and perhaps be even more staunchly conservative. Neither are liabilities in Alabama. Doug Jones’ has attempted to inspire Democratic base voters by sticking up for them on key, very high profile issues, and taking principled stands. It’s the Tom Perriello strategy, and he is basically arguing he is a principled, independent-minded Senator who can effectively represent the state’s interests, while pushing the argument that Tuberville is a carpetbagger and unsavory. Needless to say, Tuberville’s argument is basically that Jones is a socialist who wants to abolish the police and is tied to Soros (the anti-Semitic GOP strategy continues), and other shadowy leftist groups like Antifa.
Tuberville will underperform Trump, but Alabama is a rock-ribbed Republican state and an extraordinarily conservative one, and the Democratic party is also a corrupt mess and Jones is having to actively work against the state party to run a lot of the organizing activities for his campaign. It’s one of the most evangelical states in the country, and the most racially polarized. Jones only has his seat on a fluke, the implosion of Roy Moore, and even then Moore got 49% of the vote. There are some positive trendlines in the state though, and Jones should once again do quite well in Jefferson County (Birmingham) the state’s most populous county, possibly even winning by 20 points. In a 56-42 loss (I admit it could be a little closer, but Jones probably has an absolute ceiling of 44%), I suspect Jones also has decent odds of narrowly winning Tuscaloosa (University of Alabama) and Dem-trending Madison County in the north (which has both a large Black population in downtown Huntsville, and, because of NASA, a large college educated white, suburban population), while trimming margins in Shelby (Birmingham exurbs) and Mobile (Mobile is the third most populous city in the state), Mobile more so than blood red Shelby. Jones just released an internal poll showing the two nearly tied, while Tuberville responded with a poll showing him up 15, and Tuberville’s poll is the more accurate of the two (and corresponds with a recently released Auburn poll also showing Tuberville up by 12). The only real question is going to be if Jones’ is the incumbent Senator to lose by the largest margin this year, or if that will be Cory Gardener or even Martha McSally.
House: No competitive races.
President: Biden will improve on Hillary’s horrific 28 point loss here. Improving 7.5% nationally, I suspect he will cut the margin in Alabama somewhere around 21%, more or less returning to Obama 2008 numbers in the state, though the map will look different due to the floor falling out from under Democrats in ex-Dem rural white strongholds that Obama managed half-way decent numbers in in 2008, but which Biden can expect about 25% of the vote in now. Biden’s best change to flip a county in Alabama, other than Clark and Barbour counties in the rural Black Belt, is probably the aforementioned Madison county in the north, though I would say it probably remains red narrowly, as does Tuscaloosa, though Biden will clock in excellent numbers for a Dem in both because of demographic realignment. Similarly, Biden will be the first Democrat running for President since at least Adlai Stevenson to win Jefferson County by more than 10%. To really outline the way coalitions have shifted even in the Deep South, in 1996 Bill Clinton kept the state close, at a 50-43 win for Dole, and he did it while losing Jefferson county by 4, but narrowly winning Etowah county (the industrial city of Gadsden in the appalachian northeast of Alabama), a county that Hillary lost 73-23 in 2016, while winning Jefferson 51-44.
Arkansas
Arkansas has a non-competitive Senate race, where Democrats somehow left Tom Cotton, who is truly awful, one of the most awful conflagrations of Neocon ideology and America-First Trumpism, unopposed. Arkansas went from reelecting Mark Pryor unopposed in 2008, to reelecting an arch-conservative firebrand unopposed in 2020. There are also 4 House races, all currently held by Republicans (thanks to the Democratic-controlled legislature deciding, after 2010, to try and target all three of the seats they had previously held, instead of drawing 2 more Democratic districts, or just one Dem vote sink), but one is competitive. Nationally, the state is not competitive.
The problem in Arkansas is that nearly everyone who has moved into the state in the past 40 years is a conservative, evangelical White, business-oriented Republican, the older, loyal White legacy Democrats have mostly died, and both Boomer and Gen X White voters are staunchly conservative and have veered ever more to the right with each year, particularly in the deeply impoverished rural areas with their chronic high unemployment and massive drug issues. I haven’t lived in Arkansas in over a decade and a half, despite my teenage handle for DailyKos, but the state remains close to my heart. But politically, Arkansas is a true lost cause. The Black vote is much smaller than in other southern states, there is no true major urban center whose growth and dynamism is creating a source of Democratic voters, and the educational attainment levels and percentage of people identifying as evangelical, are both in complete reversal of what Democrats need to be competitive. To put in context, the national average percentage of people with college degrees is 29.7%, the highest rate in all of Arkansas is Pulaski County at 33.7%.
Senate: Nothing. Democratic vote share will be 0%, because no candidate.
House: 3 safe R, however one seat is breaking towards Democrats. Most prognosticators rank AR-02, currently held by 3-term incumbent French Hill, as Lean Republican, and I tend to concur, but it’s truly Tilt R. Former State Senator Joyce Elliot, a progressive Black woman with a highly successful career in the state legislature, who has, also, it must be mentioned, run for AR-02 once before, in 2010 Red Wave, when she lost to now Lieutenant Governor Tim Griffin 57-38, is the Democratic nominee this cycle. Her campaign, and her fundraising, have gained steam in the second half of the year. AR-02 is really only even a reach seat for Democrats because of Little Rock, the Capital and Pulaski County, which casts about half of the district’s votes and has a strong Democratic lean. Trump won the district 52.4 to 41.7% however, even with an 18 point margin Pulaski for Hillary. Joyce probably needs to win Pulaski nearly 2:1 to have any chance of an upset, and that’s a really heavy lift. The other major counties, Faulkner and Saline, are very Republican and very White with large evangelical populations, but slightly higher than average educational attainment levels. Faulkner County is one of the fastest growing areas of the state, and the County Seat, Conway, has 3 colleges in it, the University of Central Arkansas with its 12,000 plus students is the largest, and in addition to UCA, there are 2 small Liberal Arts colleges in the town, Hendrix College, and the Central Baptist College. Nearly 40% of Conway’s adult population has a Bachelor’s degree or more, making it one of the most college educated parts of the state, and one of the few that saw a swing, miniscule as it was, to Hillary in 2016. Elliot really needs to do well in Conway proper and cut the margins in Faulkner down to under 20%, and not lose quite as badly in Saline and White counties, ultra-conservative, exurban counties dominated by White Evangelicalism, but with slightly higher than average educational attainment. Both parties are acting like this is a close race, but I have to rate it Lean R. An upset could happen, and Hill is certainly going to have a closer election than his previous 3, but I don’t see it as very likely, not unless the political culture and gravity of Conway really has changed the last 4 years (and that of more conservative leaning North Little Rock in Pulaski).
President: Hillary lost by 27%. Biden is not going to move the needle much in the state. I think he may stem the bleeding a bit, and cut it down to 24%. Most of the rural areas are going to shift even harder to Trump. Biden will slide under 20% in most of the rural north and central parts of the state, and continue sliding in the rural southern end. Pulaski should see the strongest bounce to Biden, followed by Washington County (Fayetteville, the location of the University of Arkansas and a sort of liberal cultural haven in a blood red, culturally conservative ocean that is the Ozarks). What is interesting is that the demographic realignment faultline becoming college education, has meant that Benton County, home to Bentonville and the headquarters of Wal-Mart’s business empire, and long one of the fastest growing and most ultra-right leaning areas of the state, is moderating. Trump got 62.9% in a county Romney got 69% of the vote in. And when I say fast growing, I mean fast. It grew 55% in the 1980 census, 25% in 1990, 57%!! In the 2000, 44% in 2010, and an estimated 26% in the latest census. It’s population in 2020 may be nearly 6 times the population of the area in 1970. Biden may crack 33% of the vote there, and his best chance of flipping a county is the aforementioned Washington, which neighbors Benton and also has a heavy dose of rich, business Republicans, as there are a smorgasbord of large corporations with headquarters in the Bentonville-Fayetteville-Springdale metro.
Florida
I don’t have the energy to describe Florida, not without turning this into an even more unwieldy series of posts than it already is. Florida is basically 5 states wearing a trench coat and tophat pretending to be one state. There are a dozen different demographic trends, whose effect has mostly been to cancel each other out, meaning the state has remained swingish, but narrowly Republican leaning for essentially the last 28 years, even as the population has boomed, coalitions have changed drastically, and the state itself has changed. There is the internal migration of conservative, low-education white voters from the rural south to areas of North Florida like Pensacola or Panama City, Jacksonville, Tampa, etc. There is the flood of conservative, upper middle class boomers to the massive retirement communities in regions like The Villages, that have created vast, ultra-reliable vote pools for Republicans and turned previously rural undeveloped counties into giant suburban sprawl, yet there are other scattered retirement communities in Southeast Florida that are made up of well-educated, wealthy New Yorkers and New Englanders, including many Jewish people and religiously moderate non-Evangelical Protestants, and which vote heavily Democratic. The state remains diverse and increasingly so, but other than the Puerto Rican diaspora (one that is more elastic and more likely to cast votes for both parties than other Democratic groups), most Hispanic voters in the state are conservative. Older Cubans vote like Antebellum White planters and have pretty much the same social views and are little different than Trump in how they view dark-skinned Spanish speaking immigrants and refugees from Central America. Younger Cubans lean Dem, but also vote R sometimes. Because of the Cuban diaspora community, the state is a magnet for any upper class/right-wing person fleeing leftist governments in South America, meaning a lot of the international in-migration, to the extent they become citizens and gain voting rights, tends to lean Republican, save for Afro-Caribbean immigrants and immigrants from Asia.
Within the state, you have: The Florida Panhandle, the Jacksonville Metro, the I４ Corridor from Orlando to Tampa, The Space Coast, Central Florida, Southwest Florida, and the South Florida trio of heavily Democratic counties that is the backbone of the state party.
House: Florida has 27 house seats. 5 are competitive this cycle.
FL-13: Charlie Crist, is well, not very likeable, and the ex-Republican McCain VP shortlist politician at least has the sense to stay quiet and toe the party line on almost everything, speaking up mainly to bash Republicans. It’s helped him settle into his late-life career as a mid-level Democratic politician in the state he was once one of the dominant Republican leaders in. St. Petersburg has always been his political base, going back to the 1990s, so he is well known there and he attracts more crossover support there. FL-13 is 100% in Pinellas County, and the +3 Hillary district swung slightly to the right in 2016, with Trump flipping Pinellas county, but the country reverted to form in 2018, and Crist has had few issues winning his first 2 elections easily. With Trump doing substantially worse in many big urban areas this time around, and the district leaning against Trump to start with, Republicans need more than a combative Trump booster to beat Crist, who because of his deep roots in the area’s Republican circles, will outrun the Democratic ticket here. I would be surprised if Crist won by less than 10%, even though this is a historically moderate Republican dominated area, that sent Republicans to Congress for 62 years until Crist won the seat, though David Jolly, the Republican who preceded him has now left the party and become a never-Trumper.
FL-15: An interesting district, where the incumbent congressman, 1-term Ross Spano, already lost his primary to Scott Franklin after campaign finance scandals rocked most of his short tenure. Alan Cohn is the Democratic candidate. This a 53-43 Trump seat, covering mostly White, exurban turf. It shifted little downballot in 2018, and while Biden should do considerably better than Hillary, it would be shocking if he flipped the seat and even more surprising if Cohn outran the top of the ticket in this extremely-Republican-downballot area. Cohn hasn’t been a particularly impressive candidate or strong fundraiser either.
FL-16: Very similar to FL-15 demographically and in being a reliably Republican area of the state for the last 20-30 years. FL-16 has 7-term incumbent Vern Buchanan running against Sarasota State Representative Margaret Good, who decided to challenge Daddy Buchanan immediately after defeating his son in one of the most highly contested State House races of 2018. Good is a, well, good candidate running a spirited campaign, but Buchanan is a mostly quiet if ethically challenged, loyal Republican foot soldier with a long-record in the district, who hasn’t had a particularly close race since his first election by 369 votes in contested circumstances. I don’t see the district flipping, because like FL-15, it’s a very effective soft-gerrymander and the geographic sorting of Democrats in Florida is highly inefficient. That said, I suspect Good will give Buchanan his closest race since 2006 if polls are correct and Biden is winning Florida (in which case he is doing a lot better than Hillary in this district, and Buchanan could underperform the top of the ticket a little). Good is outspending the filthy rich Buchanan substantially in the final months of the race, which may point to some complacency on the incumbent’s part, and this is the district I think Democrats have the best chance to flip, on a congressional and Presidential level. It will come down to whether Good can hold the margins down in Manatee County, mostly blue collar, low education and very White, and zooming to the right in recent years, while winning Sarasota (similar profile, but a lot more diverse), by a decent margin, both tall orders, but not unthinkable.
FL-18: Pam Keith is back for another run against Rep. Brian Mast, who has been marred by some well-earned controversy over comments, including rape jokes and jokes about fucking underage girls, have come to media. Keith is no stranger to controversy herself, in a completely different manner, as her Leftist Twitter Warrior status has led her to repeatedly make or share incendiary and politically toxic rhetoric (particularly in a conservative leaning suburban districts like this). I mean it literally; she said on twitter that “Biden had lots of rape to do to catch up to Trump” among other things. Keith has been massively outspent, and Mast has in the past outrun the top of the ticket in this Republican leaning district. Neither party is acting like the district is very competitive either, so I say, likely Republican.
FL-26: This is a 56-40 Clinton district that is a toss-up yet again this year. It’s a bit of an outlier, but the Cuban vote is not all about that Biden, and there is less antipathy against Trump in a lot of the Cuban community, not least because of his hardline against Cuba and his strong push against Venezuela. 2016’s numbers represent a bit of a blip: they are where the district is heading, but a few cycles early so they disguise the competitive downballot nature for the district now. That in itself would not make the district competitive, but Republicans scored their best recruit anywhere in the country with Carlos Gimenez, former Miami City Fire Chief, Miami-Dade County Commissioner, and two time Miami-Dade County Mayor. Gimenez, who now has national Republican backing, including Trump, was, coincidentally, one of the most prominent Cuban Republicans to endorse Hillary Clinton in 2016, highlighting the kind of headwind Debbie Mucarsel-Powell faces in a district that is still almost monolithically Republican downballot, with an extraordinarily active and well-organized Cuban Republican political machine, and an underwhelming local Democratic organization. That said, I think Biden’s margin will only be slightly smaller than Clinton’s (12 points maybe), and that political environment, plus hardening against Trump, should help Mucarsel-Powell narrowly prevail in the end, in a marginal Cuban district the two parties have traded back in forth and which has been the site of a very expensive, nationally watched contest every cycle since 2012.
FL-27: This is an even more Dem county, that Hillary won 58-38 in 2016, and which Obama Obama won in both 2008 and 2012. It is the least heavily Cuban of the 3 Cuban seats in South Florida, and it is one of the most diverse areas in the country. The Democratc trends in this part of Miami-Dade have been continuing for the last 20 years or so and Trump has only accelerated them. I don’t see him improving that much here, even if he consolidates and gets better turnout from the Cuban conservative vote. I believe even Rubio narrowly lost this area for reelection in 2016. Even downballot, Democrats have cracked large portions of this district in the State Senate and State House, and both Nelson and Gillum won it in 2018, albeit by weaker margins than Hillary. But freshman Democratic Rep Donna Shalala is 79 (ran for Congress at 77, after an already long and accomplished career as Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin, Secretary of HHS 1993-2001, and President of the University of Miami 2001-2015), and it shows. She’s a very low energy campaigner and weak fundraiser, prone to gaffes and not great on the stump, and she won mainly because of a weak and crowded Democratic primary in 2018. There’s not a lot of love for her in the district, particularly its progressive elements, who preferred David Richardson to her. Shalala also doesn’t speak Spanish in a district where some 2/3rds of voters can speak Spanish to some degree, has no connection to the Latino community (she is from an Ohio family of Lebanese immigrants) and her ties to the area are pretty weak (she relocated to the area to run the University of Miami, a tenure where she was not very highly regarded by staff or students at the end of). She won by an underwhelming 6 points in 2018, and that candidate, a far-right Trumper, Maria Salazar, who is a terrible fit for this diverse, relatively well-educated urban district, is running again. That said, I think DailyKos Elections’ rating of Lean Dem is too bearish, and I agree that she will underperform again, but with Biden winning by 16 points, she can underperform and win. I think she will win by around eight to ten points, and hope she calls it quits next cycle and lets some talented individual not in their 80s represent the area and build up the state’s bench of Democratic politicians.
Senate: No race this cycle.
President: Well, I think it’s already been covered. The main pattern is Biden doing a little weaker in South Florida, but improving with blue collar white voters without a college degree in some of the more urban areas like St. Petersburg-Tampa, Sarasota, Jacksonville, etc, and he’s doing better among older voters, where there does seem to be a bit of COVID19 backlash. There are also prevailing political trends. The Jacksonville area (Duval county mainly) is trending steadily Dem, as is suburban Orlando in Seminole County, and Orlando proper. Florida is on face only about R+3 to the nation, but I have a hard time seeing Biden win the state by 6.5, as Republicans have had a very high floor in recent years, and Florida is an ultra-polarized microcosm of America writ-large. I suspect that Biden wins by 3-4 however, and also improves a lot in Palm Beach County, where Democrats have had their margins steadily decline in the past few election cycles, but where any systematic backlash from seniors would disproportionately hurt Republicans, for whom they are a critical constituency in the very senior heavy county (and many of the seniors in PBC are more politically elastic than their counterparts in the conservative firelands that is The Villages and similar communities up north). The big place to watch is the Duval-Seminole-Orange-Polk-Hillsborough-Pinellas strip of Florida running from the northeast to southwest. I would also recommend keeping an eye on: St. Lucie, Sarasota, and Pasco. If Biden is winning St. Lucie and doing substantially better in Sarasota and Pasco than Hillary, he’s in a good spot.
Georgia
Georgia is still a conservative leaning state, to the right of the nation as a whole. But this year is the question of whether it is moderating enough, and whether the national results are moving enough to the left, for a Democrat to win it for the first time since 1992. My answer is an increasingly certain yes, at least if polling trends nationally are relatively accurate and nothing disrupts the trajectory of the race in the last few days. The state has come a long way since Bush won it 58-41.5 in 2004, and it voted a bit over 14 points to the right of the nation. Even in 2008, it voted 13 points to the right of the nation, though Obama drastically improved on Kerry’s margin. Georgia though, was just seven points to the right of the nation in 2016, and that could fall to roughly 5 points to the right of the nation this year. I am predicting a 2-4 point win for Biden, which would put the state roughly in the same position as Florida nationally, in a sign of Florida’s gradual drift rightwards and Georgia’s zooming leftward trends and favorable demographics.
House: Georgia has 14 House seats, and a 5D 9R Republican gerrymander in place. However, in 2018 that gerrymander cracked in the Atlanta suburbs, and I suspect it cracks again this year.
GA-06: Last cycle Lucy McBath unseated Karen Handel in a bit of an upset. After Handel’s endless ambition and office swapping, and her far-right politics in full view, it was one of the night’s sweeter moments to see her lose to a pretty standard liberal, gun control activist turned Democratic candidate in a race that many had written off after losing an expensive special election in 2017, to replace David Price who had left to become Trump’s Secretary of Health and Human Services after 6 terms in the House. Handel, the former Chair of the Fulton County of Commissioners, spent 1 term as Secretary of State, before losing primaries for both Governor, in 2010, and Senate, in 2014. After her losses she landed up in a cushy and with any normal, sane human being, non-political gig as the Vice President of Public Policy at Susan G. Komen, where she almost instantly devoted her energies and passion to craft a partisan hack move, whereby for no logical reason the foundation suddenly cut funding to Planned Parenthood earmarked specifically for breast cancer prevention services (which PP provides for tens of thousands of low income women) and who then resigned when the move was massively criticized and furious donors forced Susan G. Komen to rescind the policy. Handel even had the gall to write a whiny, self-righteous victimized book about it with the stupid ass title of Planned Bullyhood. Karen Handel, luckily, looks set to lose again, in a district that has zoomed from a district Mitt Romney won 60.8 to 38.5, to one that Trump won just 48.3 to 46.8. In 2018, Stacey Abrams, running a staunchly progressive campaign, flipped the district, winning 51-47.5, in an area that gave Bush three quarters of the vote in 2004. The area has changed rapidly. It’s both becoming much more diverse, is very young (a huge portion of the vote are from people not old enough to vote in 2004, millennials and Gen Z), and the leftward drift of the highly college educated White suburban population that anchors north Fulton (with relatively low levels of Evangelical Christians compared to most of the South). I suspect Biden wins by closer to 10 points, and that McBath closely tacks to him in a race I rate as Likely Democrat.
GA-07: This is the epicenter of Republican suburban collapse in Georgia, being centered on Gwinnett County, the second most populous county in Georgia, and one of the fastest growing. The combination of a very diverse population (majority Non-white), and a large college educated population have really led to the floor falling out from under Republicans, as a county Bush won 2:1 in 2004 voted for a liberal Black woman 56-42 in 2018, and should give Biden over 60% of the vote. GA-07 was a 60-38 Romney district that initially saw less drop off for Republicans, with Trump winning 51-44 in 2016. But then, Abrams flipped it in 2018, winning 50-48.6. Part of South Forsyth is also in this district. South Forsyth is also one of the most rapidly changing and politically moderating areas of the Atlanta metro, but the problem is it started out 85-15 Republican, and with the population growth, even knocking that down to 63-37 Republican, means the margins are still increasing for Republican candidates. Abrams got 31.8% however, in South Forsyth, and I think Biden has a chance to get around 38 or 39% in the Forsyth area of this district if the numbers with college educated suburbanites we are seeing across the country are also true in south Forsyth County.. In 2018, the district was the site of one of the biggest near upsets of the cycle, as 4-term Republican Rob Woodward won 50.1-49.9, or a margin of 433 votes, against an under-funded Democrat in a race no national group had made substantial investment in. 2018’s candidate, Carolyn Bourdeaux, is back for a second try and Rob Woodward, a lazy campaigner, saw the writing on the wall and called Congress quits after 5-terms. If Biden is even keeping Georgia remotely close to flipping, he is winning this district, and Rick McCormick is not moderating even the tiniest bit, though he isn’t as much a lightning rod firebreather as many other members of the GA Republican party, he is also being massively outspent. This is one district, where, with Cook Political Report and Larry Sabato both placing it at Lead D, I think DailyKos Elections’ toss up rating is too bearish, (update, DKE moved it to Lean D) given the fundamental trends and demographics of the district, plus the fact that it is an open district with a better known Democratic candidate and which is likely to vote for Biden, though the race may be artificially close (in the 2-4 point range) in the end. Democrats made a lot of gains legislatively in Gwinnett in the 2018 elections, and they are targeting several other districts there this cycle, so the realignment is likely to get another boost.
Senate: Both tilt R. I am deeply pessimistic of Raphael Warnock’s ability to win a runoff election in Georgia, even though he looks increasingly set to make it to the top two by consolidating the Democratic vote. For the regularly scheduled Senate seat, I am a little more open to the idea an upset could occur. Unfortunately, Georgia has a law that requires a runoff if the candidate does not win a majority of the vote on election day. I think it is more likely that Ossoff edges Perdue with a plurality on election day, and then loses the runoff, than it is likely he gets 50% on Election Day. If Biden really breaks the door down in the state, maybe he could win outright, or if its a double runoff, and Trump does something outrageous to try and stay in power that fails but causes further backlash and inspires massive Democratic turnout, then all bets are off and the runoff could be a more favorable electorate than the general election. That said, Ossoff has been running a decent campaign and David Perdue’s inability to distinguish himself other than as a Trumpian blusterer and a foot soldier for every right-wing cause and conspiracy, is not helping him. Polling has tightened to a dead heat, and the odds of Ossoff being the top vote getter next week have risen. However, breaking 50% will be very hard. Similarly, the runoff for Warnock will be very challenging, though I admit Loeffler in particular would be an excellent candidate to run against, partially because she is so reviled among many of the poor rural White areas of the state and appalachia (she is a rich NYC connected mega-donor, with a private JET, and an insider trading scandal, while Doug Collins is the favorite of these voters), that do have weaker turnout for Republicans and it’s hard to imagine her inspiring the motivation to a lot of the firebreathing base in a December run-off, while she has also simultaneously alienated suburban moderates and non-White voters.
President: Holistic approaches are destroying my free time, as summarizing all the data I have read is just taking up a lot of time, and probably losing readers by the second. I am projecting a 1-4 point win for Biden, more or less within polling aggregates. The difference between the squeaker and a slightly more spacious win will be whether Trump seriously takes a shit in Cherokee and Forsyth counties, long some of the most Republican exurban areas in the entire nation, and Biden is able to hit 38-39 percent in both, and whether, corollary to that, Trump’s numbers in the rest of the Atlanta metro look even worse. On a county by county basis, things to look for are whether Biden can break 60% in Douglas, Gwinnett, and Henry counties. He needs at least 75%, but more likely, 80%, in Fulton (most of Atlanta proper), and I am looking to see if he can’t get close to 90% in DeKalb. He also needs around 70% in Rockdale, and to get pretty close to 60% in Newton and Cobb Counties. He also, like I said, needs to improve another 12-13% over Hillary in both Cherokee and Forsyth counties, mobilizing new transplants and young voters and getting some usually R, educated suburbanites to switch their votes. Equally key is insane turnout through the Atlanta metro, and weak turnout in rural North and South Georgia.
Outside of the Atlanta metro, Biden needs to approach Obama levels of turnout from rural Black Belt voters and Black voters in secondary cities like Columbus and Savannah, and likewise do substantially better than Abrams did with educated white voters in those areas. I would say Biden needs to hit at least 62% in Chatham (Savannah), and 2/3rds of the vote in places like Bibb (Macon) and Muskogee (Columbus). It also remains to be seen if Biden can really hit 75% of the vote in places like Clarke (Athens) and Richland (Augusta). Lastly, Biden just needs to do slightly better than Abrams in most of the rural areas of the state, just 1 or 2 percentage points better, but consistently across the board, or concentrated in larger 4-5 point gains in a few more populous rural areas of the state’s hinterlands.
Kentucky
Kentucky is one of the most strongly Trump states in the county, and demographically, the state, which is a mix of conservative, heavily white exurban/outer suburban counties with not particularly high education rates, Appalachian counties, extremely white, rural, evangelical Christian heavy rural counties, struggling mid-sized, mostly white rust-belt cities, and two Democratic urban centers that combined cast a small percent of the state’s vote total (and which until recently have not even leaned heavily Democratic), will remain one of Trump’s strongest states. The only warning sign for the GOP has to be Matt Bevin’s disastrous reelection campaign, where he lost by .25%, but more importantly lost despite dominating rural Kentucky and many of the Democrats’ former strongholds and the midsized cities, except for Bowling Green. Andy Beshear, the scion of former Governor Steve Beshear, did produce an outline for Democrats’ to be relevant in Kentucky again in the future; namely to absolutely dominate the state’s two largest counties by a long-shot, Jefferson (Louisville) and Fayette (Lexington), while doing well in Bowling Green (traditionally a Republican leaning, major college town), and do well in the trio of suburban Cincinnati counties in the north (Boone, Kenton, and Campbell, with Boone being the most populous and the most deeply conservative of the three). Beshear, in a squeaker election, actually won both Kenton and Campbell, which is astonishing. In addition, the Bourbon region around Lexington, including many of the extended suburbs and commuter towns, also swung hard towards Beshear, a potent combination, as if Democrats can come out of that region with a net positive vote total, it puts them in a stronger position statewide.
That side, Beshear’s map is a localized state election, and Matt Bevin is a hateable human dumpster fire despised on a visceral level by half of his own party’s establishment and activists, who makes Trump look like the nicest, most popular, and most competent politician in the whole world. This is especially true in how Beshear was able to distance himself from the national Democratic brand and win or keep close in a whole host of Eastern KY Appalachian counties that used to be Democratic strongholds but voted for Trump 70-30. Beshear, particularly because of support from educators and voters concerned about education and his own depoliticized campaign, did much better than any Democrat running for President has done in much of rural Kentucky since at least 2004, and those trends are only getting deeper and more complete. So even in 16 years of demographic shift, Kentucky should still be a lean R state, but Democrats may have a future in the state’s suburban and more educated counties, particularly if the entire Cincinnati metro flips blue in that period.
House: Kentucky has 6 House seats. The delegation is 5 R, 1D, with the lone Democrat, John Yarmuth, a popular congressman representing a strongly D-leaning seat covering all of Jefferson County. There is one competitive race, KY-06.
KY-06: This is the district that McGrath came up short in. Her loss here, (after Jim Gray had won the district against Rand Paul in 2016), combined with the terrible early numbers from Indiana (which ended up being much more respectably close once all the votes were counted), had me in something of a panic pretty early on election night 2018. It was the first sign too, that McGrath’s political instincts weren’t particularly good. Beshear winning the district by double digits in 2019, and even the Democrats losing Secretary of State candidate, based on a quick eying of the numbers, winning it as well, reinforced the impression I had of McGrath’s campaign as underwhelming. In 2018, Democrats passed up well-known Lexington Mayor Jim Gray, who had just run a respectable race against Rand Paul in 2016, as the first openly gay nominee for Senate of a major party in Kentucky, and turned instead to an outsider with a good bio and excellent fundraising ability. However after winning the primary on a fervor of activist support, McGrath stumbled repeatedly in the general election, and ran a campaign focused on winning socially conservative, rural Trump-supporting conservative ex-Dems, rather than on flipping gettable suburban voters, particularly well-educated suburban women. She ended up initially voicing support for Kavanaugh, then having to walk back that support, only to sound kind of like she supported him, then apologize again and say no, no, she really didn’t actually support him. Similarly, she kept playing a coy “I want to work with Trump, and I think he has some good ideas, but I don’t support him” line, and in the end, her strategy failed as the rural areas stuck hard R, and she underperformed in the Lexington area where the vast majority of the district’s population lives.
This is actually my sleeper race for the cycle. Andy Barr has never struck me as a super capable politician, nor has he really developed a grip on this locally swingish district. The recent trends in the Lexington area, with formerly hard-R suburbs swinging hard towards Democrats in local elections and not being very friendly to Trump, mean the district should swing considerably towards Biden, from Trump’s 54.7-39.4 win last time. I expect this district to go down to the 5-9 point margin Presidentially this time, and Barr could run below the top of the district. Josh Hicks is running a campaign more targeted at flipping suburban voters in the Lexington center, and the district is the one I offer up as the one that could shock people; i.e. a Republican leaning district with a fairly established incumbent not seen as being in the top tier of competitive districts by any aggregate. That said, this race is Lean R, and if I were forced to actually venture results, which there isn’t enough data to do reasonably, I would say Barr wins again by 4-6 points, but pressures the legislature for a safer seat next time, which likely ends up saving Louisville from a baconmander.
Senate: Not even going to do this. If anyone reading this expected a long write up, sorry. McGrath is not a good candidate. I think her instincts are usually wrong, and her attempts to court crossover support are awkward at best. Her campaign is one of the gimmicky, scammy campaigns full of professional, campaign operators grifting off easy money from the base, sort of like how Pelosi always has GOP candidates raising and spending like 2 million dollars a cycle to get 9-13% of the vote against her. It’s a waste of money. Is McConnell the smarmiest, most hypocritical, callous, and hateable member of the Senate, responsible for lowering the public’s trust in government, smashing the favorability rating of legislature even more, and violating every single norm, principle, and collegial privilege the body has traditionally operated under, why yes. Will McConnell underperform Trump? Quite certainly. There are a fair number of populist drain the swamp voters who love Trump, hate Biden, think Democrats are antifa supporting extremists and will vote against McConnell for being a corrupt, rich scumbag who has been in the Senate 36 years. Will he lose? Empathetically no. Nope. It would be a huge win to hold him to his 2014 double digit win against then Secretary of State Allison Lundergan-Grimes. The best chance to oust McConnell probably came in 2008, but Democratic activists let that chance slip through their fingers.
President: Mostly already covered. Hillary lost by 30%, a stunningly bad performance. She lost deeply Democratic areas like Franklin County, where the state capital of Frankfort is located, and won Fayette by only 10 points while getting the low 30s in all the populous suburban counties. Biden should improve a good bit by Hillary in the two largest counties, and also in the Cincinnati suburbs. I suspect KY moves in line with the nation, i.e. Biden turns a 30 point loss into a roughly 22 point loss is my best guess, with the gains disproportionately in the aforementioned counties, plus Bowling Green and perhaps a slight improvement in some of the legacy Dem counties.
Louisiana
I can feel the boredom of every reader who doesn’t eat political prognosticating every morning for breakfast with a side of Raisin Bran with whole milk. Well, I have finally reached my home state, dear to my heart in so many ways, and insanely frustrating. Louisiana isn’t competitive. It’s one of the states where Trumpism probably plays best, even with a lot of Black voters. Demographically, it’s an awful state for Democrats and is at, I believe, a net-negative for college voters, losing more than it gains. The only thing keeping it from being like, say, West Virginia, is that there is a large nonwhite population and two legitimately liberal big urban centers in the state capitol Baton Rouge and New Orleans. So I will keep it short.
House: 5 R, 1D, the lone Democrat Cedric Richmond, represents an ultra-Dem, unnecessarily gerrymandered seat that stretches from New Orleans to Baton Rouge taking in most of the black population centers of South Louisiana, so that a nearly 40% nonwhite state has only 1 of 6 House seats majority nonwhite. None of the other seats are remotely competitive, though Ralph Abram’s LA-05, mostly based in NE Louisiana (and one of my hometowns, Monroe), is open. My other hometown is represented by Clay Higgins (Lafayette), and Higgins is pretty much an open psychopath with anger management issues, and also someone with the intelligence of the average Fox News online commenter and about the same political views, and his only fucking claim to fame is being a melodramatic, attention-seeking, conservative humorist when he worked in Sheriff’s department of St. Landry Parish and got shuttled to doing media relations about crimes that occurred where he was supposed to just be asking people to cooperate and giving announcements about crimes. He’s also safe for reelection.
Senate: Safe R. I bet the safe assumption most had was that I would go into great detail about my home state while also being nostalgic and deliriously hopeful. Haha. No. Shreveport Mayor Adrian Perkins is a fantastic candidate, and in any other state he would have a bright political future. He chose to come home to the wrong state if he wanted a successful national-level political career. He will hit the Dem baseline against Cassidy at least.
President: Well...Biden will improve on Hillary’s atrocious bed-shitting result from 2016 (a 20 point loss). Does that mean he loses by 18 or 10? I project a result in the ballpark of a 12 point loss, thus Biden will plug in the most respectable national showing since John Kerry in 2004. Losing by 12 is the most wishful thinking of good results mind you. Look to John Bel Edwards’ 2019 reelection for a guide for where Biden will, no scratch that, has the possibility to grow the Dem vote total. My prediction is that he gets East Baton Rouge Parish and Caddo Parish (Shreveport) closer to 60%, with EBR parish being 3-4% to the left of Caddo, and that he improves a bit in Orleans (hard blue) and in St. Tammany (still hard right). The big place I am watching with excitement is Jefferson parish, the state’s second largest. Edwards won it by double digits in 2019, and it veered to the left compared to his 2015 race. It’s a highly diverse, somewhat well-educated suburban county, and if Biden can actually flip this 55-40 Trump county, he will probably manage to trim the statewide loss to around 12, as the rest of the state won’t budge an inch, and he’s going to do worse in a lot of the rural areas, as we see Democrats hit single digits or drop from lows 20 to low 10s in most of the state. I will be kind of interested to see what happens in Ascension parish (Baton Rouge suburbs, but the less radically David Duke flavored right-wing evangelical white nationalist variety), Lafayette Parish (my childhood home, and a parish with a growing nonwhite population, several colleges, a relatively high-education level, but also a big petrochemical industry that is a few degrees to the right of Attila the Hun politically), and Ouachita Parish (Monroe, my other hometown, again several universities, and some educated white, white-collar suburban areas, particularly with CenturyLink and some security firms, that used to be ultra-right wing and monolithically so, but where Trump has caused some cracks around the margins).
Mississippi
Fun facts, the only state with a smaller percentage of foreign-born residents and a smaller percentage of college education residents is West Virginia. The only reason Mississippi isn’t to the right of Idaho and Wyoming is that while only 2.3% of residents were born outside the U.S. (low immigration and almost no international diversity or the correlating forms of growth and industry associated with areas with lots of foreign-born immigrants), and while only 21.3% have a college diploma (with a high school graduation rate of under 84% ranked for 49th among U.S. states ahead of only Texas), the state is also 37% Black. Even the Black population in Mississippi is very rural, tends to be anti-gay marriage and pro-life, in the past voted roughly 50-50 in favor of keeping the state’s neo-confederate flag (back in the early 2000s), and has tended to be the most conservative Black vote in the country, broken down by state. Republicans can frequently crack 10% in Mississippi among Black voters, and sometimes 20%, and there is some degree of Trump-curiousness, particularly among a lot of socially conservative rural Black men in the state, but his open white-nationalism is preventing him from really capitalizing on that. I went to college and grad school at Ole Miss, so I am quite familiar with Oxford and North Mississippi (my father previously worked in Memphis and lived in DeSoto County, while my younger brother grew up in and around Panola and Tate Counties). I am pretty familiar with Vicksburg too (my grandfather has done work as a radio news broadcaster there), and also my family (mother, stepfather, siblings) lived in Madison County for over 2 years, and I had a Great-Aunt who lived in the Jackson area as well. I am more immediately familiar with the state than my DailyKos Moniker would suggest I am familiar with Arkansas.
That said, Mississippi is not worth spending a lot more time on here, in this case. The state Democratic party is in the doldrums, but it’s also run by a small, entrenched, unaccountable collection of idiots. Politics, especially in tough areas with hard to GOTV voters, requires a lot of local engagement and a well-organized state-based vehicle for handling data, recruitment, coordination and the like. In 2019 Jim Hood had to actively fight the party to get access to data, and couldn’t get any real help coordinating his campaign and others, as you had an absentee Chairman, an empty headquarters (pre-COVID19, the party was just leasing an empty office that people sent mail to that was never being collected or responded to), just 2-3 part-time staffers working remotely, who didn’t know what their coworkers or Chairman were doing, phone lines that went to automated messages, emails never returned to State House candidates asking for access to data files on past voters and outreach. The list goes on. And it is hard to see it not continue to get worse. Demographically, only West Virginia is worse for Democrats, but at least West Virginia still has an active and functional Democratic party.
I will give people a few places to look at on election night, especially as they try to get a feel for how the election is going to go. In Mississippi, Biden should improve on Hillary a bit, particularly if Black turnout is high this year and the focus of MS Black voters is COVID19 and police brutality, both of which Biden has crafted a much better response to than Trump. I think the state is likely to lag national trends though, and get redder, if only slightly. Hillary lost by 17, and I would say Biden loses by about 12, even though he improves over Hillary by 7 nationally. As for trendlines, much of rural MS will get even redder, but I will be watching my beloved Lafayette County (home of Faulker, model of his Yoknapatawpa county, and also the location of the beautiful University of Mississippi, and the booming college and research town of Oxford). Lafayette County has been the fastest growing area of MS for about the past 20 years, driven not just by the explosive growth of the state’s flagship university (one of the top academic schools in the SEC), but also a host of research labs, business groups, and start ups associated with the college. It’s one of the most dynamic areas of the state, and also has a decent Black population. The county has been historically Republican and stubbornly stuck at 15-18 point margins for Republicans, not least because not a lot of the student population is registered in Oxford, and the student body is not as liberal as most colleges, and historically even been a Republican-leaning group disproportionately made up of the white, upper middle class WASP families that dominated the state historically. But Jim Hood easily flipped the county in 2019 while losing by 6, and I suspect Trump’s collapse in very educated and college-oriented towns, as well as the rapid growth of this area and the new residents being less Republican than the town’s old crust white voters, could make Biden the first Democrat to win the county since Carter in 1980. In 2015 Democrats unseated the sitting State Rep for most of the county, Brad Mayo, who was basically the next in line to be Speaker of the State House, so it was a huge win on a night when Democrats were decimated down the ballot in legislative races across the state, because of a landslide loss at the top of the ticket (a some dude trucker who hadn’t raised a penny or campaigned at all won the primary after the Democratic nominee spent the entire year prior to the primary solely working high dollar fundraisers, hiring general election staff, and spending no money on the primary) but then, the Mississippi Democrats being the cesspool of incompetence that they are, the incumbent didn’t run for reelection and Clay DeWeese narrowly picked the seat back up for Republicans in 2019, despite Jim Hood winning it at the top of the ticket easily. Again, Fuck the MS Democratic party.
The other easy county flips are Warren County (Vicksburg), Panola (only low Black turnout allowed Trump to narrowly flip it), and possibly Chickasaw. Madison County, the richer, more educated white collar suburban county north of Jackson (Canton, home to one of the largest car manufacturing plants in the South and a substantial Black population while the neighboring white flight communities are renown for their stifling, Homeowner Association planned, sterile, rich WASP suburban communities, to the point where gas stations are zoned into having fake stucco columns and the McDonalds has a fancy brick facade). Jim Hood also narrowly flipped Madison while losing by 6, an almost unthinkable result in a state where Madison was long one of the bedrocks of Republicanism and the home turf of most of the state’s Republican elite. Similarly, within Hinds County (where Jackson is), Northeast Jackson has traditionally been a filthy rich, 99.9% white country club Republican community; in recent decades the only strongly Republican area of Hinds county. But in 2019 Hood flipped it, and the trends among wealthier educated white voters means Biden should flip it too. Similarly, it will be key to see if Biden can improve a little in Harrison (Gulfport and Ocean Springs), and in DeSoto (Memphis suburbs). These are both areas with decent nonwhite populations and higher educational attainment levels, and where Hood plugged decent performances, but which have traditionally been the bedrock of Republicanism in the state. Simply put, Mississippi is an extremely rural state with no real economic engine (even Jackson is an incredibly impoverished, mid-sized city with little growth or dynamism), and which is also one of the most heavily Protestant Evangelical White states in the country, to say nothing of the harsh, polarized racial dynamics that mark society there. Despite it slowly growing less white, and young white voters being not quite as religious and quite as Orthodox Republicans as their parents, it is a very harsh state for Democrats.
House: 3R, 1D. No competitive races.
Senate: Mike Espy is running against against Senator Hyde-Smith, who is most famous for joking about lynching and suppressing Democratic voters in her 2018 campaign, where she won by the smallest margin of any Republican in a generation. She’s not a good politician, replete with her peak Karen-haircut and disapproving scowl in nearly all her official pictures. Cindy Hyde-Smith, an ex-state Senator and Agriculture Commissioner, was appointed by Phil Bryant to her current seat. She is a product of segregationist private academies and Protestant Evangelicalism and it shows. She will underperform Trump, not least because Epsy, who in 1986 was the first Black person to be elected to Congress since reconstruction and later served as Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Agriculture until ethics scandals and an indictment forced him resign, is running a very conservative campaign focused intensely on avoiding scandals or hot button issues, emphasizing his own cultural conservatism, and playing populist notes on health care, social security, and the economy. I have a hard time seeing the race become much closer than 2018’s under 8 point margin, and even less room for Espy to actually outpoll Hyde-Smith.
President: Basically already ran through it.
North Carolina
I really can’t write this much about all 50 states. So, straight to the races.
House: 12 Seats, 9R, 3D. It took years of lawsuits, including one freebie where Republicans basically redrew the same map 9-3 map they had drawn before, but made one entirely Mecklenburg-based majority-minority district instead of stretching the same district to Greensboro, then made feeble claims that they hadn’t taken race or partisanship into account. But because the court naively allowed Republicans to fix the map themselves without requiring preclearance, that map was used in 2018, where, surprise, surprise, despite a strong slate of well-funded candidates and a good national environment in a roughly 50-50 swing state, Democrats once again won just 25% of the state’s congressional seats, coming up short in 3 different Republican seats, one marred by fraud that eventually led to an election redo. Republicans' main change in the 2018 map was to simply get rid of a trick they used to put the most heavily Black areas of Charlotte and Greensboro into one ultra Democratic district (pushing a configuration originally put in by Democrats in the 1990s even further). They still magically found ways to split the strongly Democratic leaning Winston Salem-Greensboro metro between 3 districts that each magically managed to meet what their previous data experts had tapped as the safe-from-flipping range of 57-59% of the vote going to Republican presidential candidates. Cue another lawsuit, and now the maps were redrawn by the courts themselves, and the result is an automatic 2 pickups in NC. Republicans aren’t even really contesting the new 6th and 2nd, or the much more competitive 1st district. The Republicans who represented the 6th and 2nd have retired or jumped to other districts. The New 2nd is entirely based in Wake county (Durham), and voted for Clinton 60-35. The new 6th district is entirely in Guilford (Greensboro) and Forsyth (Winston Salem) counties, though not all of Forsyth fits in the new district. The new district voted for Clinton 59-38, showing just how carefully and extensively you have to gerrymander the whole region (and split up those two major urban counties) to make 3 57-40 Trump districts.
Other than 2 safe dem pickups, there are two modestly competitive races.
NC-08: Former NC Supreme Court Justice (a statewide elected position) Patricia Timmons-Goodson is running against 4-term incumbent Republican Richard Hudson. Hudson may be the incumbent, but the new district lines mean a substantial portion of this district is new to him. His district also went from 56-41 Trump, to 53-44 Trump. Hudson is a competent campaigner, and both candidates are well-funded, with Hudson having an edge of 3.4 million to 2.9 million for the cycle. This is a district with a mix of very Republican Charlotte suburbs, and formerly heavily Democratic rural counties plus all of Cumberland county (Fayetteville). The result really hinges on Cumberland, and Cabarrus (suburban Charlotte), since over 70% of votes are cast in these two counties and the other counties have a mix of rural Black areas and increasingly Republican white rural communities that produce a small and growing margin for Rs. Timmons-Goodson wins if she does very well in Cumberland and Cumberland swings back to the left, and at the same time, Cabarrus continues its trend towards the center, as like many other formerly rock-ribbed Republican suburban bastions, the well-educated, wealthier county it also swings hard against the current iteration of Republican politics. Both parties are spending here, and most prognosticators list it as Lean R. All polls we have are Democratic internal polls, so they must be taken with a bit of salt, but all have shown a tight race, with both candidates exchanging leads and being in the mid 40s. I suspect the tough trends against Democrats in parts of Fayetteville and the rural areas, with the loss of support from White, blue collar Democrats, and the slowness of the political shifts of the Charlotte suburbs beyond Mecklenburg county (where the Republican party collapsed in a space of 12 years), mean this district doesn’t flip. Hudson will probably run a little over Trump, and I’m thinking he escapes with a 2-3 point win, even as his margin in Cabarrus is surprisingly weak.
NC-11: Less interesting is this western NC district. Once, this turf used to be moderately competitive for Democrats. While Buncombe County (Asheville) is steadily growing and rapidly veering further to the left, Democrats have lost half their vote total in the rest of the district over the course of 12 years, and that trend won’t reverse, and Democrats have a little room to fall yet. That said, Madison Cawthorn has made a lot of headlines for the wrong reasons. He is basically a millennial conservative motivational speaker/influencer, who has never really left the Very Online and very insular click of the far-right social bubbles and it shows. He is one of my least favorite candidates running this year, not least for some of his dishonesty on basic parts of his resume and his fanboying over Hitler’s vacation home (including referring to it as the Fuhrer’s vacation home, when pretty much no one refers to Hitler as the Fuhrer outside of neo-nazis), but for more details, I advise readers to look into the investigations into his campaign. The Democratic candidate is a retired Air Force Colonel and law professor, Moe Davis, and Davis is, how to describe it...very salty. Basically, as someone who came from modest upbringings and spent a career in the highly competitive Air Force officer core and worked as a legal administrator and law professor, Moe Davis has absolutely 0 patience for Cawtorn’s entitled anti-education, do-nothing for a living (he advertises himself as a realtor, based on one or two small investments he made recently, both using money from the multi-million dollar settlement he got from the accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down, similarly he spent one semester at a tiny far-right Evangelical Christian college before dropping out and making all kinds of disgusting comments about the whole idea of education, and now does nothing but move money around in stocks mostly and collect the odd speaking fee, as well as his aforementioned, tiny, recent investment into real estate, that has yet to produce any actual business). This district will be closer than it should be probably, but Davis isn’t a very good fit for the district, and Cawthorn, barring it actually coming out that he’s like an active member in some neo-Nazi group or something, hasn’t done enough that’s blatant enough to actually lose a very conservative, 57-40 Trump district like this. It should end up being a single-digit race though, and Cawthorn will do much worse than a Republican should in this area.
Senate: I find this a very boring race, to be honest. Thom Tillis has never been popular; he only barely won by 1.5% with 48.8% in 2014 in a Republican wave cycle, and he’s done nothing to fix his images and his low name recognition. Aside from not being at all liked by the Republican base, Tillis consistently manages to both look like a sleazeball, a tea party reactionary, and a political coward all at the same time. It’s a rare political talent to frequently infuriate Trump partisans, moderate centrists, and casual low-info voters. This is one of the barnburner races that will determine control of the Senate. Tillis has been up in just a handful of polls (one very questionable) in the past month, and tied in another one, the DKE average is Cunningham up by 48-42, and the trendlines of the past few months have been downward for Tillis. There has been a flurry of attacks based on Cunningham having an affair, but at this point in American politics, with a President who fucked a porn star right after his 3rd wife gave birth and then used campaign money to pay her hush money, a politician sexting and having an affair doesn’t sink in the way it did in the past. Tillis too, has had allegations of physical and emotional abuse in his past divorce proceedings, so it’s strange to me he wants to play this game of who is the better husband/more respectable man, other than desperation.
I think Cunningham will run a little above Biden and Tillis a little below Trump, if the current polling aggregate holds the last few weeks and there isn’t any substantial methodological sampling error in the state. It will be a close race though, decided by around 3 points.
Governor: North Carolina is the only state in this section with a gubernatorial election coinciding with Presidential elections. That’s saying something, considering 4 states in this series have oddly scheduled off-year elections. The gubernatorial election follows one of the most competitive, expensive and contentious campaigns in American history in 2016, when 4-term Attorney General Roy Cooper defeated incumbent Republican Governor (and former Charlotte Mayor), Pat McCrory by just 10,000 votes out of more than 4.5 million cast. This year’s race is a lot less competitive, as Lieutenant Governor Dan Forest has a reputation as a hot-button social conservative, and he’s run a very weak, if nasty campaign. Roy Cooper has been mostly competent, and if anything benefits from getting to look like a moderating influence on an extremely conservative legislature. Cooper’s average polling lead is 51-42 in the DailyKos Elections Tracker, and that’s been right about where I’ve been predicting him to land on election day for some months now. It will be a big gain from 2016, and one of the things I will be watching most closely is if he can actually flip Cabarrus County and cut into the Republican margins significantly in Union, the more conservative major suburban Charlotte county. If he is winning by 9, I also expect he will flip normally Republican suburban counties like Alamance and Franklin in the Research Triangle, and get truly unimaginable numbers in both Mecklenburg and Wake (the state’s most populous county). Improving his margin by 8.9% also means he has to be winning over a few more voters in some of the D-leaning rural counties that voted narrowly for McCrory in 2016. Will be particularly interesting to see if Robeson county, where the unrecognized Lumbee tribe, are a major political force that swung hard to the Right in 2016, swing back to Democrats up and down the ballot.
President: After Trump won by an unexpectedly comfortable 3.7 point margin in 2016, it marked the second Presidential race in a row that North Carolina had burned me for being optimistic about Democrats’ chances there. The issue is that the coalition that Obama could put together in 2008 no longer exists. Democrats have made huge gains in the state’s largest urban counties and smaller gains in several major suburban counties, but it has been largely offset by the floor falling out from under the party everywhere else in the state, where unlike the rest of the South, Democrats were still competitive or even dominant in rural areas and many secondary cities in competitive Gubernatorial, Presidential, and Senatorial elections as late as 2008, when Kay Hagan won nearly all of Eastern NC in route to her 8 point win against incumbent Republican Elizabeth Dole. Hagan won Colombus and Bladen counties by 20 points each, and even narrowly won Pender and Brunswick counties. She also won about half of the Appalachian counties in the far western tip of the state, somehow winning Swain by double digits. Flash forward to 2016, and Hillary Clinton and Cooper were in the low 30s or low 40s at best in these areas. The increasing polarization of NC has allowed Republicans to make up the votes they lose in the urban centers each cycle by doing much better in rural NC and in many of the secondary cities and far-flung suburbs. That said, my prediction this cycle basically amounts to “this is the cycle where Republicans finally overdraft on their strategy, as they can’t make up enough in the rest of the state to outdo the big cities and suburban-urban counties.” I don’t expect much if any improvement for Biden in the rural and smaller counties. Strong Black turnout may flip one or two rural counties back to blue and make a few a little closer than they were in 2016. His entreaties to the Lumbee may send Robeson county back into the D-fold, as will, likely, an election very far removed from hot button social issues like Trans Rights and Religious freedom, where the conservative bend of the county really comes to the fore. But I think he will win NC by a little over 3 points, and the 7 point swing statewide will mostly be from some really gaudy margins and insane turnout in Wake, Mecklenburg, Buncombe, Forsyth, Guilford, Durham, and flipping some major areas like New Hanover county (Wilmington).
Oklahoma
House: 4R, 1D
OK-05: Oklahoma produced one of the biggest shocks of 2018, when a little known Democratic campaign operative and non-profit worker, Kendra Horn, upset two term Steve Russell in a race that no one was talking about. No one. No outside political group had spent any money on either side, despite both having mountains of cash to spend, and both sides getting involved in dozens of fringe peripheral races, most of which did not flip. Russell himself ended the campaign with hundreds of thousands of dollars of money left over in his campaign account and only started running ads in October. It was the first time since John Jarman (a conservative 12-term incumbent who switched parties afterwards), narrowly won reelection in the Watergate wave cycle that a Democrat had won the Oklahoma City based district. The last time a Democrat had won any of Oklahoma’s 5 house seats was when the extremely conservative legacy Dem Dan Boren had won OK-02 56-43 in 2010, for what was his fourth and last term. Oklahoma’s Fifth district is a soft gerrymander, containing none of more swingish Cleveland County (centered around Norman and the University of Oklahoma, but increasingly tied into the OKC metro), and excluding part of Dem-trending Oklahoma County to instead include Pottawatomie and Seminole counties, two very conservative rural counties. I would guess Republicans try to nuke the district even more aggressively in the next round of redistricting, but Kendra Horn is running a strong campaign against Stephanie Bice in this 53-40 Trump district. Bice is equally hampered by the long, extended, and quite nasty primary campaign and then runoff that she had to deal with, and her close ties to various GOP establishment figures quite unpopular in this district. Particularly its former Congresswoman, Mary Fallin. In 2018, Oklahoma County gave Drew Edmonson a 12 point margin against now Governor Kevin Stitt, in part because of anger at chronic cuts to education, teacher walkouts, and government dysfunction most of the past half decade of universal Republican control of the state. Horn used many of those issues against Russell, and she is tying Bice even more closely to Fallin and cuts to education. I can’t see Biden winning this district, but I think it will be very close this cycle for President, and Horn will run ahead of Biden in the district. There’s been a dearth of polling, but I give Horn the very narrow edge because of the district's trends and the national environment.
Senate: James Inhofe will easily win 5th term, at age 86. Democrats have a hard time breaking 30% of the vote in Presidential elections in Oklahoma. It’s one of the toughest states in the nation for them, and their freefall in rural white communities, and the traditionally Republican nature of Oklahoma’s Ag and petrochemical dominated cities of OKC and Tulsa, make the state a lost cause for Democrats. That said, I think Democrats easily get a third, and maybe 36 or 37% against Inhofe, who has always underperformed the top of the ticket and whose reputation for being a sputtering, crotchety asshole costs him some votes from soft partisans.
President: Hillary got 29%. Biden should crack 30, and probably crack a third of the vote again. The big thing to watch is whether he flips Oklahoma County, the most populous in the state.
South Carolina
House: 5R, 2D. South Carolina also has a strong gerrymander, as until Joe Cunningham’s squeaker upset win in SC-01 in 2018 (1.4% margin), they’d held 6/7 of the 55-45 state’s seats for the entire decade, and only had competitive races for any of them twice.
SC-01: I initially thought this would be a loan seat, as it’s a well-gerrymandered seat, containing mostly conservative white suburbs and mid-sized cities in Beauford, Dorchester, and Berkeley (I know the spelling annoys me too, because I keep thinking I’ve spelled it wrong) counties, paired off with all but some of the most heavily black neighborhoods of Charleston. The above three are largely white, have a fairly high percentage of self-identified evangelicals. The one Democratic trending area, Berkeley, is also the one area higher than average percentages of residents with a college degree. However, 40% of Beauford residents have at least a Bachelor's degree, compared to 27% statewide (Berkeley is 24%, and Dorchester is 28%) and 31% nationally. The district was designed so that the Charleston portion would be swingish, and perhaps vote Democratic by a small margin from time to time, but be completely overwhelmed by 20 percent margins of the Republican party in the rest of the district. Beauford however, is one of the fastest growing counties in the state, and it’s both attracting more younger people and more educated people, as well as growing slightly more diverse over time. Cunningham, with a message focused against offshore oil drilling and aimed at the various resort communities that make up one of the pillars of Beauford’s economy, kept the county 54-46, and actually did even better in Berkeley and Dorchester counties (perhaps because of the growing Black populations in both areas). Where he really won though was his 57-43 margin in the Charleston portion of the district. When Republicans nominated more mainstream, rising star State Rep. Nancy Mace, over the incendiary small town City Councillor Kathy Landing, I became further worried about Cunningham’s chances, in what was still a district that had regularly voted for Republicans for decades. But to the contrary, national Republicans have been openly pessimistic about Mace’s chances, and though she released a poll showing her up narrowly, Cunningham’s own polling showed him up 55-42, and the national Republican party is not making much of an investment in this must-flip district for them, despite Mace being heavily outspent by Cunningham’s well-oiled campaign machine. What to look for in this district’s results is whether Cunningham breaks 60% in the Charleston portion of the district, and whether he can keep Beauford 50-50 and win either of the other two major suburban counties in the district. A strong performance up and down the ballot in this district may discourage Republicans from trying to gerrymander it even further, especially if Joe Wilson also has an unusually close race in the neighboring 2nd district.
Senate: Jamie Harrison did things to Lindsey Graham in their television debate that almost violate the Geneva Conventions. I’ve never seen a major politician look like they were about to puke while listening to their opponents' criticism. Graham was practically shivering at times, and at others he was absolutely stone-faced still, seemingly in shock at the hits he was receiving. And in a first for me in 14 years of watching Senate races, a Senate race debate response actually filtered throughout twitter and YouTube and the rest of social media; Harrison’s delivery was political ad, social media soundbite pitch perfect, as were the visuals of a terrified looking pale-faced Lindsey Graham. That debate finally forced me to start taking the South Carolina Senate race seriously, in a state where the late Ernest Fritz Hollings (running for a 6th full term in 1998, as an institution in the state), was the last Democrat to win a Senate race, and only 50-48 at that. The last time a Federal race in SC was even competitive was 2004, and that turned into a 9.5% loss for the highly touted Democrat (who had been twice elected statewide). Lindsey Graham in particular has never had a competitive general election race in his career...and it’s showing. Then came the news that Harrison had set, by a huge margin, the record for the most money ever raised by a U.S. Senate candidate in one quarter, raising over 50 million dollars, nearly all of it from small donations and fueled by ActBlue and progressive anger. Then came the spending reports where I could look at how massively Graham and his allies have been outspent on the airwaves, and news that McConnell’s dark money group, the Senate Leadership Committee had to drop a total of 16 million dollars on the final stretch of the race in this very-red leaning state have also excited me. Polling has been very close, with Graham up just 46-45 in the aggregate polling (as of 10/22), and Harrison has been running a picture perfect campaign. His strategy has been to paint Graham as ineffective D.C. Swamp insider who has no real accomplishments for his decades in Congress, and to use his own speeches and flipflopping to make him look like the ultimate politician, wormy, untrustworthy, self-serving, and opportunistic (aided by the fact that all those things are more embodied in Graham than in any other member of the Senate). Meanwhile he is portraying himself as a fresh outsider, willing to be independent, proud of his faith and personal integrity, and wanting to bring new solutions to pressing problems for South Carolinnians, while Graham’s entire opposition strategy is hugging Trump and running a very low-energy, weak Trump-wannabe campaign. His attacks seem dutiful at best, and mostly involve ranting about national Democrats and Biden, calling them socialist nuts and talking about defunding the police. Graham is running under Trump, and Harrison is also cleverly propping up third party candidate Bill Bledsoe, who actually already withdrew and endorsed Graham, playing to drive dissatisfied conservatives to a 3rd party, enabling him to win with a plurality, (this is something Republicans have done, without much success, with Green Party candidates in other states).
South Carolina is still a lower-ranked state by educational attainment, and much of the in-state migration has tended to be either White, evangelical Southerners, or conservative, upper middle class, evangelical White Midwestern retirees. But it has a substantial nonwhite population, the college educated population is growing as are its core urban and suburban areas, and even Republican operatives are admitting that not just SC-01, but large swaths of the state have had substantial political evolution over the last 4 years and just during the course of just this Senate race. I still predict that, unfortunately, Graham will scrape by a narrow win, but I am eagerly hoping for the upset and eager to see if Democrats finally make major inroads into the Greenville-Spartanburg corridor, the suburban Charlotte, NC commuter suburbs in York County, and manage to turnout black voters better in many of the rural counties. Places to watch in elections return are: Charleston (obviously), Greensville, Spartanburg, and York. If Harrison is winning, he also needs to flip some mid-sized to small but locally swingish counties with large-black populations, namely Darlington, Florence, Colleton, Barnwell, Chester, and McCormick, which all also serve as bellwethers for the turnout of rural Black voters and the margins they are voting Dem, and Biden is basically in the same boat.
Tennessee
House: 9R, 2D. No competitive seats.
Senate: Non-competitive. Not interested in talking about it, other to mention Bill Hagerty was Trump’s Ambassador to Japan and as an American national living in Japan, I did not hear good things about him. He also issued an initial recommendation that all American citizens living in Japan (not just tourists, the wording said all Americans in Japan), should make immediate preparations to return home in the face of the pandemic, making no distinctions for those with long-term jobs, in education programs etc. Hilarious and laughable to encourage Americans to flee a low-infection rate country with a fairly good response, to the clusterfuck of America.
President: Look, in 2018 Democrats recruited Phil Bredesen to run. Bredesen was a very conservative (in a state like Maryland, he would be a Larry Hogan style Republican), but also fairly successful and extremely popular governor. In 2006, he won every county in the state in a record-breaking reelection campaign. Republicans had an expensive and divisive primary that ended up being won by Marsha Blackburn, a firebreather known for her abrasive style and hard-right conservatism, who managed to out-Trump and out-Conservative all the other Republicans in the primary. In a state that had for decades elected mainstream, quiet, middle of the road Conservative Republicans, this was a huge departure. Bredesen was a huge get, and unlike Ted Strickland in Ohio, circa 2016, Bredesen ran an excellent campaign. He raised money, he attracted murmurs in the Beltway grape vine of political campaign reporting. Even Republicans were a little nervous towards the end stretch. He got huge endorsements, including becoming the first political candidate ever, ever, endorsed by Dolly Parton, a philanthropic living legend in Tennessee, widely loved and admired. Then on election day he lost to the firebreather by 11 points. Even more bizarrely, incomprehensibly to me, is that Hillary lost the state by 26 points, Bredesen lost by 11, he more than trimmed the margin in half, yet he won the exact same fucking 3 counties as Hillary did; he improved 15 percent on the overall margin and could not flip a single fucking county. I guess he came extremely close to flipping Knox (Knoxville, home to the University of Tennessee and the economic center of the region), and Hamilton county (Chattanooga, another industrial Appalachian city, and one with a large Black minority), which counts for something. Tennessee has a small non-White population compared to other Southern states, and a strongly conservative Protestant Evangelical bend. Nashville and some of its suburbs are steadily trending Democratic (though whether that saves the Nashville Dem seat from a baconmander this time around remains to be seen, though parochial interests and selfishness from well-connected Congresspersons who don’t want their districts changed radically, could also preserve it). I would say the state probably shifts in line with the nation, but I don’t have a good read on it and would not be surprised if it shifted less than the rest of the nation, or actually shifted a bit more than the nation as a whole if Biden did unexpectedly well in some of the more well-educated areas of the state. Looking at a 20-23 point loss in my modeling however.
Texas
I’ve been dreading reaching Texas, because everything is indeed bigger in Texas.
House: 22R, 13D. Texas is an R gerrymander, but it really shows how an effective gerrymander can become impotent by the ten year mark. Texas Republicans are further hit by the fact the state has a sort of reverse geographic sorting problem; Democrats aren’t just concentrated in the ultra-blue city cores (though they are) but rather they are spreading out over huge swaths of suburban turf as entire, extremely populous metros like the Houston and the Dallas-Fort Worth, as well as Austin, make a mad dash to the left, what with their massive growth, younger than average populations, relatively high levels of college education, and booming diversity, all proving a demographic bomb for Republicans, who still seem a half in a condescending denial at how much Texas has changed since 2014 and how much harm Trump has done to the party’s brand there. The Republican vote is increasingly clustered in far flung mid-sized cities and rural territory, none of which offer many good options for gerrymandering; as Austin has shown even an extremely aggressive 5-way baconmander can become a huge headache with demographic growth and political trends. If Democrats flip all the competitive seats in Texas, they will actually have a majority of the delegation, even with Republicans’ aggressive gerrymander, and even though Republicans will probably gerrymander the state again (unless Democrats flip the state house and force a court-drawn, neutral map), they will have to cede at least 16 seats to Democrats, a far cry from the 11 they initially packed Democrats into in 2012.
TX-02: Likely Republican. Something about Dan Crenshaw rubs me the wrong way, though that is probably intentional. Like, straight-ticket, far-right conservative millennials are just the worst, as a general experience, because they without fail combine the worst tendencies of millennials and modern conservatism into a uniquely smug form of asshole. That said, Crenshaw has serious political skills and is a rising star in the state GOP who manages to come off as likeable and funny when he is not firebreathing on some political or social issue, where he’s never managed to display even the smallest whiff of moderation. He’s a monster fundraiser, and while this suburban Houston district has been veering left at a speed shocking even the local GOP, I have a hard time seeing Crenshaw losing, even if there is an outside chance Trump could fuck up and narrowly lose this reliably Republican district. Crenshaw will get a safer district after redistricting, and I imagine he will be running for higher office at some point. Cruz won the district just 50-49 in 2018, but Greg Abbot won reelection for Governor 55-42 here, and Crenshaw also did quite well. It would probably take a comfortable Biden win in this district to pull a weak Democratic campaign over the finish line.
TX-03: This district is only on this list because Collin county (think Plano and its suburbs), is zooming away from Republicans like Appalachia zoomed away from Democrats. It is, I believe, the single most highly educated district still held by a Republican and by a long-shot, and it is also fairly diverse, with a decent Hispanic population, a number of South Asian immigrants who are now American citizens, and a substantial Muslim population. This district went from 63-34 Romney to Trump 55-41, and Beto lost it just 48-51. The current Rep, Van Taylor, is not much of a politician. In 2006 he lost 59-40 against Chet Edwards in a Waco based district hundreds of miles south of this one, and I don’t care what you say, even in a big Dem wave election, it takes special talent to lose by 19 points in a gerrymandered Republican district that voted 69-30 for Bush and was, prior to 2004, mostly entirely new to Edwards. That said, I don’t think this district flips just yet, but if Democrats can force a neutral court drawn map, it’s impossible to think the district won’t remain entirely in Collin county and center around Plano, so I do think the trends in 2 years or 4 years, could make it flip if there are no big changes to it current composition.
TX-07: Lizzie Fletcher flipped this seat in 2018. This area was literally George H. W. Bush’s old district, both in number and territory (Western Harris county, though it naturally contracted over the decades as the county’s population exploded). After Bush the area was represented by Bill Archer, who switched parties after his first term and never won with less than 79% of the vote in 34 years. After Archer, then State Rep John Culberson won the seat in 2000, and by 2018 he had represented much of the district in politics for nearly 30 years, even as he remained a largely anonymous congressman, without a particularly prominent post in leadership, a good committee chairmanship, or a national presence. But only 3 Democrats had broken 40% of the vote in the entire history of it’s post 1966 redistricting configuration, so Fletcher’s 5 point win was a huge win, in a district that went from 60-39 Romney, to 49-47 Clinton. It says something about this district that the political trends are such that, despite being one of their most highly touted challengers in the nation, Wesley Hunt, has been triaged by all national Republican outside groups, having to redirect their resources elsewhere. Hunt remains very well-funded, but he’s running against the tide in a fast-growing, and changing district, where even the Republican bedrock communities are starting to moderate and are quickly abandoning Republicans because of Trump, and where much of the rest of the district is fast growing, and diverse, liberal communities. Fletcher is extremely likely to win again, and I’m predicting she expands her margin a bit, and wins by around ten percent, as Hunt only manages to keep it close (if he was capable of saying a single moderate or not harshly pro-Trump thing ever, he might keep it closer, but Republicans as a rule of thumb, do not run even remotely moderate candidates).
TX-10: Married into the Clear Channel Communications family, Mike McCaul is one of the most obscenely rich members of Congress, #5 to be exact. Though, to be clear, it’s not his money and he has never self-funded to much extent. Mike McCaul is now in his 8th term, originally elected when Republicans created a new Frankenstein district between Austin and Houston in their 2004, DeLay-backed mid-term redistricting scheme (midterm redistricting is still almost unheard of, especially for nakedly partisan reasons). That year, Democrats didn’t manage to field a candidate against McCaul, who nonetheless turned in two underwhelming wins of less than 16% in 2006 and 2008 as the district trended against him. The number 1 household water user in all of Austin, then had Republicans in the legislature shore the district up for him more, which worked for a while, until 2018 when the bottom fell out from under Republicans in the suburban reaches of the district and only the dark red rural counties and exurban, McMansion bedroom communities saved McCaul in what was the closest General Election of his nearly 20 year tenure. After beating Mike Siegel by 4.3% of the vote in 2018, in a race rated Likely R and which saw no real investment from any party outlet, being viewed as a heavily R (Romney 59-39 district), Siegel is back again and this year his fundraising is much better and he is seeing some investments from national groups. It is still a district tailor made for McCaul and gerrymandered to make it very hard to win for Democrats, even if Beto won it by .2% in 2018. If Biden even just performs where 538 currently projects him to (a 2.2% loss), he will slightly improve on Beto’s loss, while doing a good bit worse in rural Texas than Beto, and better in suburban districts like this. This is a lot to say I think it’s quite likely Biden wins the district by 1 or 2%, but McCaul is also taking the race a lot more seriously this time, and this a district with a lot of habitual Republicans who also don’t like Trump and may vote Biden this time out of frustration with Trump, while still voting Cornyn-McCaul. An upset is not out of the question; after it all the district was shockingly close in 2018, and the areas near Austin and Houston that make up the bulk of the district's population are steadily trending Democratic and growing quite quickly. If McCaul is winning very narrowly, that would still be a sign of a very bad night for Republicans.
TX-21: Yet another reliably Republican seat that has veered Left. This seat is another case of how land doesn’t vote, as when you look at a map, the district is very large, but 2/3rds of votes are cast in Hayes, Travis, and Bexar, the tiny little strip on the far east of the district, and the rest is almost a majority in Comal in some exurban bedroom communities of San Antonio. The cluster of rural Hill country, along with Comal, do though provide massive margins for Republicans and are solid Republican bastions. Republicans actually have nothing but themselves to blame for the current issues with this seat, as in their intense desire to deny Democrats a seat 100% Travis county district centered around Austin, they baconmandered the county 5 ways, and they made this district considerably less R by moving a chunk of Travis into it that now votes more than 70-30 D and has been casting more and more votes while the rurals remain stagnant in terms of growth. In addition, Hayes county, particularly San Marcos in the south and adjacent-to-Austin suburbs in the north, have seen explosive growth and trended rapidly to the Left. The suburban, whiter but highly educated chunk of north-central Bexar county is the make or break for this district. Wendy Davis (former State Senator, 2014 gubernatorial nominee) is a great get, and she’s been running a better funded, more energetic campaign than her disappointing gubernatorial run. It also helps she is up against an acerbic former Ted Cruz staffer and close ally, Chip Roy, who shares many of his bosses unlikeable ticks and isn’t on great terms with the local Republican establishment after winning a narrow and divisive primary in 2018. Chip Roy is a bit of a libertarian-flavored purist, and the general evaluation I’ve seen is that he hasn’t run the best campaign. Roy won by just 3 points in 2018, a shocking result in a Safe R rated seat where Democrats put up a C-list candidate who raised little money and had no national attention. This year, Davis is one of the best-funded challengers in the nation, and she is holding Roy’s feet to the fire, as are the ongoing demographic and political trends of the district. After Ted Cruz won it by just 500 votes in 2018, (compared to Romney’s 60-38 win 2012) Biden is likely to flip this district, and Republicans will rue their Austin baconmander. I am predicting a narrow Davis win, and am looking forward to seeing her in Congress and back in the political spotlight.
TX-22: Those of us who have been following politics remember this is Tom DeLay’s old Sugar Land based district. Nick Lampson managed to win it for one term in a very memorable 2006 race that ended with his original opponent indicted, and Republicans stuck running a write-in campaign with a candidate with an incredibly long and hard to spell name. After beating Lampson in a bruising 2008 campaign (despite the national Dem wave) Pete Olson never had further issues until 2018. The seat was redrawn in 2012 to be even more Republican leaning, and Romney won it that year 62-36.7. But Hillary cut the margin down to 44-52, and Beto cut it further in 2018, losing by just .6%, while Pete Olson ran an incredibly offensive campaign against Sri Preston Kulkarni, a biracial Indian-American former Foreign Service Officer (whose mother is a descendant of Sam Houston). Olson made a point of calling Kulkarni, an American-born career diplomat who grew up in Houston and who speaks 5 languages, a “liberal liberal Indo-American carpetbagger”. Kulkarni is back again after losing by just 5 points, and this time Olson is retiring, leaving the seat open. Republicans nominated Fort Bend county Sheriff Troy Nehls, but he has been one of the most anemic fundraisers in the country. National Republican groups are spending millions to make up the difference (and triaging the neighboring TX-07 to do so), but even privately Republicans have griped in Politico and elsewhere that Nehls, despite his prominent local profile and long track record, has run a bad campaign across the board and Republicans are worried about losing this seat. My prediction is that both Biden and Sri Preston Kulkarni narrowly win this seat. The only polls we have are Dem internals showing Kulkarni up, but tellingly Republicans haven’t countered.
TX-23: If it feels like nearly every seat in Texas is competitive this year, that’s because we haven’t seen this many seats in play in the state in decades. National Democrats triaged this seat in the Fall of 2018, and it proved to be a short-sighted decision, as Gina Ortiz Jones lost to 2-term incumbent Will Hurd by less than 1000 voters and .5% of the vote in a race most prognosticators had at lean R. Will Hurd saw the writing on the wall, in this swing district that voted for Hillary by 3.4% after voting for Romney by 2% and has been slowly trending D in the Trump era. This is a very polarized district however, and well gerrymandered to provide a solid base for Republicans. Even Beto only moved the needle to 52-47, a small improvement on Hillary compared to his big improvement statewide. Gina Ortiz Jones is a great, staunch progressive voice running an unabashedly progressive campaign. And fittingly, she is running against a 100% pro-Trump, conservative Republican firebreather, in comparison to Will Hurd, who was quiet, not very fond of Trump, and sometimes bucked the party line.I suspect that just given how inelastically conservative the Republican areas of the district are, that the race will be artificially close, but Ortiz Jones will win by a similar margin to Beto in a district that all prognosticators I know of list as Lean D.
TX-24: The consecutive barnburners just keep coming. In this case, 8-term incumbent Kenny Marchant is retiring, after he won in 2018 by just 3% against a candidate who to my knowledge did not even make an FEC filing (meaning they raised less than 2600 dollars). Marchant’s last 3 reelections went like this, 2014: 65%, 2016: 56%, 2018: 50.6%. Marchant was just an unimaginative party hack and he’d never had to run a competitive reelection campaign, and decided to retire rather than run one at 69 years old. This district went from 60-38 Romney, to 51-48 Beto and Biden should outrun Beto in this area. Republicans are putting up a good fight with Irving Mayor Beth Van Duyne, but Dallas County school board member Candace Valenzuela appears to have the edge. The race has actually been on the quiet side, which is not a good sign for Republicans. TX-24 is 40% North Dallas, 40% northeast Tarrant, and the remainder is in Denton County. The Dallas portion has flipped D and after this cycle will be completely represented by Democrats in the State House. The Denton portion is roughly 50-50, while the Tarrant portion is much less dark red that it was originally. Every area of this district is zooming away from Trumpism in a way Republican mapmakers never imagined in 2012 when they tried their damndest to cram every Democrat in the Dallas-Fort Worth metro into just 2 house seats (better than before, when there was only one Dem Rep in the metro).
After that, there are just some likely seats that I don’t see as flipping but worth keeping an eye on. For Republicans those are: TX-06, where Ron Wright won the open seat last cycle. The Tarrant county portion of this district, which casts 75% of the votes here, actually flipped blue narrowly for Hillary in 2016 and Beto won it with a lot more leeway. The blood red portions in Ellis and Navarro counties have essentially remained the same and not been part of the trends, and the 75-25 Republican margin from these two counties will keep Wright and Trump afloat. TX-25, another one of the Austin Baconmanders. This district has been more effective as a gerrymander, but even it zoomed from 59-39 Romney to 52-46 Cruz, and 4-term Rep Roger Williams has a tougher race this cycle than he is accustomed to. TX-31, based on Williamson County (directly north of Austin, and also a rapidly growing and Dem trending county), and part of Bell county, has another tough race for 78-year old 9-term incumbent John Carter, who won against now Senate-nominee M.J. Hegar just 50.6-47.6 in a tough 2018 race. This 59-39 Romney district dropped to just 50-48 for Cruz, and the trends in Williamson are tough for Republicans. If Trump manages to lose this district, it is bad news for the low-energy and anonymous John Carter (even his name is anonymous). Lastly, TX-32 for Democrats, where Colin Allred comfortably defeated long-term incumbent and former NRCC Chair Pete Sessions in a 57-41 Romney district that flipped to a Hillary +2 district. Genevieve Collins is a decided underdog and national groups in both parties are passing up this district down the stretch. Beto won 54-44 in 2018 and Biden will likely outrun that given the demographic trends and the collapse of Republicans even in their north Central Dallas strongholds.
Senate: Money is flooding into this race late. For much of the cycle former TX-31 candidate and military veteran M.J. Hegar failed to really take off. While her high-energy campaign for TX-31 got great reviews from national party campaign advisers, and she had a big volunteer network among Texas activists, her fundraising was weak and when Dallas State Senator Royce West jumped in, and also wrapped up some key endorsements in the Black political community, she really struggled. In the end the primary was quite divisive and heated, and she ultimately won 52-48, losing most of the Dallas Fort Worth metro overwhelmingly, and also losing in most of the Houston metro. Current polling averages have her down 47-41 to veteran GOP Senator and Majority Whip John Cornyn, but that seems to be mainly a function of her polling under Biden. In the end, I can’t see Cornyn losing even in a wave. If Biden flips Texas, he will be doing it on the backs of a lot of typical suburban GOP voters who will probably vote GOP downballot. Cornyn can probably eke out a win even if Biden edges Trump, but if Biden wins by 2 or 3%, all bets are off in the Senate race, particular if current turnout trends, with massive urban and suburban turnout, strong youth and non-White turnout, and huge engagement from voters who didn’t vote in 2016 or even 2018 continue.
President: The Texas Republican party is a mess right now. Their party Chairman is nut-job war criminal Allen West, best known for his bat-shit crazy antics during his 1-term in the house, in what is now Brian Mast’s district. West is a fucking nutjob, and completely incompetent at everything he puts his hand to. And by nutjob, I mean when neo-Confederate activist Dylan Roof murdered 9 Black parishioners in their Church and Nikki Haley decided to officially removed the Confederate Flag from the State Capital, West, a Black man, went full David Duke, slamming the move as a fake crisis designed purely by liberal agitators to distract from Black-on-Black violence and that’s not even the most fucked up thing he’s said. He is running the state party off a cliff after taking over this year, upsetting the competent, well-liked insider on the back of festering QAnon conspiracy theory sniffing activists, and no shockers, one of his first moves was to make the party’s slogan “We are the storm” and angrily denounced “white, liberal, progressive socialists” for suggesting the meaning was anything other than a reference to some obscure poem he had never used before in a political speech but which was apparently one of his personal favorites long before QAnon. The State Attorney General is under indictment, after years of ethics troubles, and Dan Patrick has faced national backlash, even from many Seniors groups and Republican older voters for literally saying old people need to be willing to die for the economy. The Texas Republican party is a mess and they are going way off the deep end, led mostly by blatantly corrupt leaders or frothing at the mouth conspiracy theorists and off-the-wall far-right conservatives. Even Governor Greg Abbot is little better, as he felt it appropriate to take potshots at California and New York’s tax rates and Democratic governors early in the summer in connection with the large COVID19 death toll in both states, because there’s nothing like a major political leader literally mocking the pain and suffering of tens of thousands of families losing loved ones to make arrogant, assholish conservative talking points.
The demographic changes in the state are finally sinking into the electorate in a big way, first in 2016, then more in 2018, and even more this year. What’s more, Republican behavior and doubly embracing a hard core Trumpist mentality, is not helping the party in a state where wealthy, college-educated suburbanites living in diverse regions are a core constituency and because of how State House districts have to be drawn, a constituency that wields outside influence in statewide politics. I am increasingly optimistic that Democrats will narrowly flip the State House of Representatives this year, and pick up 4 more House seats in Texas and come just as close to beating Cornyn as they did beating Cruz. At the Presidential level, Biden is making a bit of a late play here, as are some other Democratic national groups. There are two groups of counties to watch:
Really big urban counties that cast a lot of votes. Dallas, Tarrant (Fort Worth-Arlington), Harris (Houston), Fort Bend, Travis (Austin) , Bexar (San Antonio), and El Paso. There are two dimensions in these counties as well: is turnout and raw vote totals way up from 2016, and is Biden doing even better than Beto in these areas. The above six counties cast over 4 million ballots and nearly half of all statewide ballots in 2016, so they do matter big time. If Biden is at 60% in Harris and Bexar, 70% in Dallas, 75% in Travis and El Paso, 57-43 in Fort Bend, and narrowly winning Tarrant, he’s building a massive vote edge.
The counties that determine whether Biden can keep the rest of the state close enough to still win. Big, mostly well-educated suburban counties that used to be dark red: Williamson, Denton, Collin, Brazoria, and Galveston. Then there are swingish mid-sized counties like Jefferson (Beaumont), Nueces (Corpus Christi) and Hayes. Lastly, there are two heavily Hispanic, populous counties with weak turnout, Cameron County and Hidalgo County. Biden can’t win the state without winning Williamson and if he is also not also winning all three of the mid-sized swingish counties (and Hayes 60-40), he’s not winning the state. Brazoria and Galveston are still very red, but Biden needs to keep both around 60-40 at the bare minimum; if Trump is over 60 in those areas it is not a good sign for winning statewide. Denton needs to be around 52-48 Trump if Biden is winning, and Collin nearly 50-50. If Biden is winning Collin with most of the vote in...well you can stop watching TV if you like, pop open a bottle of champagne, and celebrate a big win for Democrats up and down the ballot.
Texas is indeed as huge as it presents itself. It’s a slog to go through, because of the numerous metros, major suburban counties, and the diverse coalition of different interest groups that influence its politics. The state is far more interesting to watch this year than it has been in a long time, longer than I have been following electoral politics (since 2004). Post-election there will be a mountain of data and trends to analyze in the state. It is really difficult to get a feel, especially with the state having hit nearly 10 million votes in just the early vote, and having passed its entire 2016 vote total, meaning that with E-Day, Texas could see over 12 million votes. These 3 million new voters, if they have a decided Dem bent, could flip the state up and down the ballot even without getting a lot of soft-partisans in the educated suburbanite demographic to flip their votes.
Virginia
I come now to my last state. Finally. For the remainder of the series, due to time constraints, I will just make a few general comments and then list my predictions, rather than write out background, as it takes too long and I have doubts over whether most people have any interest.
House: 7D, 4R. In 2018, Democrats finally crushed the Republican gerrymander in the state, and reversed the state’s delegations with three pickups.
VA-02: Elaine Luria is in for a rematch against the man she beat in 2018 by just six thousand votes. This district has been a tough nut for Democrats to crack. Thelma Drake was widely disliked for her abrasive style and was considered a weak campaigner, enabling Democrats to win the district for one term in 2008, but after that they consistently fell short, and Republicans made the district more Republican after 2012 by removing Norfolk, and it has seen minimal partisan changes in the subsequent shuffling of the state’s districts. In 2016, it was one of the biggest recruitment failures for the national party, as despite it being a 50-48 Obama open seat, Democrats nominated a some dude who lost handily to Taylor in a campaign that attracted little attention from activists or the national party. Taylor was a telegenic, talented Republican rising star in Virginia, and Luria had a very tough job to beat him in an area that was one of the historical bedrocks of Virginia Republicanism, which has only moderated in the mid-2000s, and has basically been swingish since then. Trump managed to win the district by 3%, but did not essentially improve Romney’s showing, while Northam and Kaine both won it in their respective campaigns, Kaine by 10% against Trump clown Corey Stewart. Right now polling suggests an 11-12 point Biden win in Virginia, improving substantially on Hillary. That would mean he is flipping Virginia Beach and Chesapeake, and this district as well. Taylor is plagued by a voter signature fraud his campaign blatantly and incompetently orchestrated in 2018 to try and get a third party spoiler candidate on the ballot, and for which, despite his angry protests to the contrary, he is still very much under investigation for and which two staffers have already been indicted for. Luria should pad her margin a bit, and become the first Democrat in decades to be reelected in this area, as she is a pretty good fit for the more moderate district with its large military presence (her background, coming from a Jewish family in north Alabama and serving 20 years in the Navy as a nuclear reactor engineer, raising to the rank of Commander, is pretty impressive too).
VA-05: Current Representative Denver Riggleman lost renomination this year under highly contested circumstances. Basically, Riggleman was not the first choice of the old-boy Republican establishment in 2018, but ended up beating well-connected insider Cynthia Dunbar by 1 vote in an emergency meeting to replace the sack-of-shit unstable Tom Garrett who had suddenly announced he was an alcoholic and retiring (after facing ethics probes and censure for abuse of staff and misuse of public resources by both him and his wife). Cue this cycle and Republican officials allied with Riggleman’s primary challenger, Campbell County Supervisor Bob Good, pushed the primary to a small convention, the locale literally being in Bob Good’s home turf. Riggleman vigorously attacked the unusual decision to hold a convention and the lack of transparency in the decision-making process, but to no avail. Running a convention meant that voters' votes were weighted according to the number of Republican votes their county produced for Republicans in prior elections. To even vote required applying to local Republican officials, getting registered for the election, and then driving to Campbell county for the drive-thru voting process. After losing 58-42, despite Trump’s endorsement and the endorsement of Jerry Falwell, Riggleman slammed the entire process as a sham and illegitimate, and as far as I know, he hasn’t lifted a finger to help Good in the competitive general election. It seems to me it was an obvious inside job from Cynthia Dunbar and the hard-core Christian Dominonist social conservative network in the district, that hated Riggleman, a craft whiskey distiller and former Air Force Officer with a more libertarian worldview. He was literally primaried for officiating a gay wedding for two former staffers and friends of his, something Good and the SoCons had a fucking coniption fit about. Riggleman is perhaps best known for his self-claimed satirical book about the search for Bigfoot and made headlines for an Instagram post of a picture of a book of Bigfoot erotica, (which was apparently intended as a joke, but didn’t help his image with social conservatives.) Riggleman was undoubtedly the stronger candidate though, and Bob Good is a firebreathing social conservative in the mold of Rick Santorum or Pat Buchanan, and his base is a small, heavily Republican county. Riggleman’s occasional independence and libertarian flavored small-government conservatism resonated better with what constitutes this district’s swing voters. Democrats are running Cameron Webb, a Black MD and health policy expert from Charlottesville who has been an incredible fundraiser and who has made healthcare and getting the pandemic under control the basis of his campaign. Webb has a few things going for him, despite the heavy R lean of the district, the biggest being the weak campaign Good has run in comparison to Webb. Webb has from all accounts outhustled Good on the ground substantially, and outspent him 4:1, while many Riggleman supporters are still disgruntled by the convention set-up, meaning Good’s base is not all excited about him. Webb is also a better candidate to reach out to Black voters, particularly in the Danville, VA area, where the Black vote often has low turnout, but has in the past turned out in heavier numbers for prominent Black candidates who focus on community outreach in their campaigns. This is a very Republican district however, not least because outside of Albemarle County and Charlottesville city, the rest of the district’s rural areas are veering right. Trump won by 11 last time, and he is likely to win by at least 5 this time around. Tim Kaine won reelection by 17% in 2018 and still narrowly lost this district, which is gerrymandered to be very tough for Democrats to win. Even in 2018 Democrats came up 8 points short with another well-funded candidate. Webb is still a better fit than Leslie Cockburn (the 2018 candidate) and running the most impressive campaign for this district since Tom Perriello won it in 2008, while Bob Good is a terrible candidate. Polling is close, but I suspect, barring a real wave election result, Republicans still hold onto this district.
VA-07: I actually didn’t really think Democrats would pick this district up in 2018 until the very end, and even then I thought it would be a fraction of a percent and only the fact that Dave Brat was a terrible politician and just a general asshole as a human being who wasn’t even really liked by his own party’s establishment in the district, that Spanberger would win. She won by a little more than I expected, a still narrow 2% margin, and Kaine won it 52-46. It was a huge win for a district that had elected Republicans continuously for the prior 50 years and the former House Seat of Eric Cantor (who would have become Speaker of the House rather than Paul Ryan, had he not lost to Dave Brat). VA-07 is still a tough district for Democrats; even Ralph Northam lost it by 3 while winning the Virginia gubernatorial election by a comfortable 9 point margin in 2017. Nearly 2/3rds of the district’s votes are cast in just two counties, Chesterfield and Henrico, both made up of diversifying and educated suburbs of Richmond. Henrico has been veering to the left for a while now, but under Trump that trend has gone on crack, and the portion in VA-07, even being whiter and traditionally R-leaning, will likely give Spanberger 60% in this election. Chesterfield was long a Republican bastion, but diversification, a young population, and the trends of educated suburbanites under Trump, mean that first Northam became the first Democrat in living memory to flip the county in a non-landslide race, and then Tim Kaine won it 54-44 in 2018 against Corey Stewart. The rest of the district is hardcore Republican, though Spotsylvania and Goochland are moderating a bit. However, if Spanberger and Biden are winning Henrico-Chesterfield 59-41, it’s virtually impossible for Republicans to make up enough ground in the remaining 1/3rd of the district, which is very inflexibly R, but not even close to 80-20 (the rest of the district isn’t the Texas panhandle). My prediction is a close win, around 6 points most likely, but demographically, this district has just shifted too far away from Republicans, and Abigail Spanberger is actually a good, centrist fit for the district’s politics and a great politician, while Nick Freitas’s continual fuck ups on the most basic levels of politics (two cycles in a row he’s had to win an election as a write-in because he fucked up his signatures) and so-so fundraising haven’t convinced me he can outrun the ticket (nor has his strident conservative Tea Party rhetoric shown he understands the changes in the district).
Senate: Mark Warner is safe. He’s not really a very good Democrat, and personally I would rather someone less conservative/cautious. But after an unexpectedly razor-thin reelection amid horrific Democratic turnout in 2014, Warner is going to crush unnecessarily well-funded Republican war veteran Daniel Glade by a bigger margin than Kaine’s 2018 win. Warner is at least extremely intelligent and works in a thoughtful and fact-based manner, and generally has principles. But he is also sort of the penultimate Beltway insider in his worldview, but probably is a fairly good fit for Virginia’s electorate. In anycase, the only real question is whether Warner breaks 60% of the vote.
President: Biden is winning Virginia a lot more handily than Hillary Clinton’s unexpectedly weak 5% win in 2016, (despite having native son Tim Kaine as VP). Polling hasn’t been too common, but 538 has Biden up 11.7 and that’s around in line with the 10-12 point margin I am projecting. Biden should easily flip some major, populous counties. Chesterfield, Chesapeake City, Virginia Beach, these three should all flip blue, no trifling matter seeing as nearly 25% of the state’s votes are cast in those three counties. Chesterfield should see the largest swing and the biggest blue margin. I will be interested in whether Biden can get Kaine margins in Henrico, and pass 2/3rds of the vote there, but he should, and he should get 2/3rds of the vote in Albemarle, if not 70%. Also keeping an eye out on Stafford, and of course the margins in NoVa should be disgusting. After long-dominating them locally, the Republican party will be completely dead in Loudoun and Prince William county in the next few years, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Biden got close to 2/3rds of the vote in both. This cycle Virginia should finally veer into reliably blue state territory and cement the two decades long political trends in the state.