Tuesday, Nov. 8
By Jonathan Larsen
Reliability of Pre-Election Polls and Post-Election Punditry Heads for Record Low
Well, today’s the day when we probably won’t learn what’s actually being decided today.
We’ll be live-blogging TYT's original reporting and curating reports from around the country at the TYT Reports liveblog all day and who-knows-how-long into the night/Wednesday. At 6:30pm eastern time tonight, just as the first polls start to close, we’ll kick off our Twitter Space monitoring election results without horserace bullshit, without pre-baked conclusions, and without over-determining of way-too preliminary data. So what will we have?
Me!
Wait, come back, there’s more, I promise...
My co-hosts will be TYT Washington Correspondent Candice Cole and TYT National Correspondent Matthew Sheffield. And we’ll be joined throughout the evening by special guests. Including you, if you wanna chime in. I’d name names, but I still can’t believe some of them agreed to join us and I'm half-expecting some to realize what they've done and bail on us...
Speaking of media-egg on media faces…it’s time for predictions!
What Will Happen Tonight?
Here are the scenarios we’re looking at:
Uncertainty – we might not know tonight who will control either congressional chamber in 2023 and 2024.
A red wave – scanning some granular state-by-state race assessments, I saw a lot more tight House races than I expected.
Not a red wave – the polling is so janky this year (compared to how FREAKING EXCELLENT it’s been before) that it doesn’t seem impossible that Democrats will hold on to one or possibly even two chambers.
A blue wave? – there’s nothing to indicate this is in the works, except for the widespread critical loathing for this year’s offering from right-wing dystopian non-fiction author Samuel Alito.
Campaign Watch
I know you don’t give a shit about any other stories today and I am here for you because I love you, so that long piece I’ve had simmering about inflation and health care will just have to wait another day. Here ya go, my precious darlings, and forgive me if I missed your favorite race (we’ll no doubt get to it on the live blog and/or Twitter Space tonight):
ARIZONA Two tight races here, and Data for Progress polling released last night puts Democrats behind in both but within the margin of error.
Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) is virtually tied with hedge-fund manager and Peter Thiel protege Blake Masters:
Kelly has run as a pox-on-both-your-houses, can’t-we-all-get-along moderate, which progressives will have to acknowledge if he wins and which we’ll learn was undermined by hordes of police-defunding Democrats if he loses.
Data for Progress has Donald Trump-loving, never-governed-anything GOP candidate Kari Lake four points ahead of her Democratic gubernatorial rival, Secy. of State Katie Hobbs:
Hobbs weeks ago was fielding – or not fielding – complaints about a low-key campaign, including refusing to debate Lake. A recent Hobbs campaign tactic of featuring Republicans who back her was almost instantly undone – assuming it would have done anything – by RINO accusations from Fox. Anyway, if Hobbs loses it’ll be because she’s a radical socialist.
CALIFORNIA Believe it or not, at some point in the next 24 hours, you’re going to hear about the Los Angeles mayoral race. Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA) has been the favorite, but billionaire Rick Caruso, a Republican until recently, has made it closer than expected by hammering crime as an issue. And by spending millions and millions of his dollars.
GEORGIA - GOVERNOR Last night’s Data for Progress polling paints a gloomy picture for former state House Min. Leader Stacey Abrams (D-GA), now a nationally known organizer and activist, in her challenge against Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA). Although Kemp has overseen voter-suppression efforts there, he also bucked Trump’s attempt to steal the state’s 2020 votes but has managed to retain enough Trump supporters in his coalition to go into today’s balloting with a strong lead.
GEORGIA - SENATE The race between Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-GA) and Trump-backed challenger Herschel Walker, once best known for playing a game where you have to get a ball across a line, is statistically neck and neck in Data for Progress's polling:
Walker’s recidivism – in terms of both crime and abortions – appears to have led Georgia Republicans to shed even the pretense that character -- let alone personal adherence to political principles -- matters. Instead, what Walker has done is to make shockingly clear just how powerful what I call the Frat Factor is this year.
The Frat Factor is pretty simple. To join a frat (sorry, frat boys, I say “frat”) – more precisely, to prove your worthiness to join a frat – you have to demonstrate your passion for putting the frat above all else. Especially above reason.
The same thing holds true for MAGA Republicans. Here’s what I mean:
If you’re being hazed for a frat, and your pledge leader – or Recruit Colonel or whatever stupid made-up name your frat uses – tells you to prove your loyalty by eating a delicious, salted-caramel chocolate-chip cookie…well, hell, yeah! Salted caramel, bruh!
The problem with that is it’s easy. And yummy. So, to really prove your frat-love, you’re gonna have to eat a Triscuit. One that’s also salted…but not with caramel. This is a family publication, so I’m not gonna tell you what it's salted with.
The point is that the more your hazing offends reason, the more powerful it is as evidence of your passion for the cause. How MAGA Republican am I? I’m so nuts I’ll vote for Herschel FREAKING Walker!
NEW YORK - ATTORNEY GENERAL What, you say? How have I not heard that this is a close race? Well, it might not be. Incumbent state Atty. Gen. Letitia “Tish” James (D-NY) is widely expected to win, despite some polling suggesting her little-known rival, Republican Michael Henry, might have a shot.
James has a national profile after publicly taking on both then-Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) and Trump. But she reportedly has kept a low profile when it comes to campaigning. For some reason apparently she’s not a superfan of standing up in front of big crowds of strangers and saying political shit. Weird, right?
The James-Henry race, however, is a primo example of what I call (starting now) the one-way litmus test. If James loses, it will be seen as an early indicator of a red wave backing the blue: Voters so juked by sensationalized crime coverage and politics crime that they go for candidates whose party wants to make it much easier to flood our cities and backwaters with guns... and whose economic policies will likely fuel crime, as well (not to mention further decriminalize white-collar crime).
If James wins, on the other hand, you likely won’t hear “boo” about it. You certainly won’t hear that New York voters rejected GOP crime rhetoric, and if you do hear anything about it, it’ll probably be some sage solon declaring that James won because she wavered somewhat on bail reform. In other words: The folks who brought you crime hysteria will see its vindication in tonight’s results…no matter what.
NEW YORK - GOVERNOR Speaking of crime, Rep. Lee Zeldin (R-NY) ran a fear-mongering ad firehosing viewers with images of guns and violent crime. The star of the ad, of course, was Black people. Zeldin has refused to remove one clip from the ad which shows a Black man, Shaheed Vassell, aiming a gun at someone in what the ad refers to as “Gov. Kathy Hochul’s (D-NY) New York.”
ONLY FROM TYT Washington Correspondent Candice Cole asked Alliance for Safety and Justice (ASJ) co-founder Lenore Anderson about Zeldin’s ad, in light of a new ASJ report on the damage that media sensationalism of crime has on victims (retraumatizing them) and communities of color (demonizing/othering them). Anderson told Candice, “the kind of case you're describing sounds just so similar to what so many victims have experienced.”
Here’s the kicker. The clip of Vassell doesn’t show what the ad says it shows. It’s not Hochul’s New York…it’s three years old. Vassell isn’t holding a gun, he’s holding a pipe. And Vassell wasn’t committing a crime, he was a victim – shot dead by police during a mental-health episode. Vassell’s family has asked Zeldin to remove the clip from his ad. Zeldin’s refused.
Today, Zeldin apparently has a chance of unseating Hochul, even in this overwhelmingly blue state. Like the James-Henry race, count on this being a one-way litmus test in tonight’s corporate-media coverage.
PENNSYLVANIA - GOVERNOR State Atty. Gen. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) helped pick his Republican rival for governor. State Sen. Doug Mastriano (R) is a far-right Trump loyalist, and Shapiro ran ads elevating Mastriano’s profile during the GOP primary.
Mastriano beat the GOP establishment favorite, Lou Barletta, who likely would have given Shapiro a tougher race, and has since run a crappy campaign.
Shapiro is widely expected to win today. If he does, you likely won’t hear that it was because he engineered himself an extremist rival, you’ll hear (falsely) that it was because Shapiro ran an “explicitly moderate” campaign (aside from calling himself progressive).
Axios’s Josh Kraushaar claimed hilariously that “Analysts are going to be studying” Shapiro’s messaging, for the hints of (Bill) Clinton’s winning rhetoric” in the ‘90s. If that’s true, lemme help. Clinton won with less of the popular vote than (any? almost any?) any other Democratic winner in history.
In 1992, Clinton’s genius rhetoric powered him to win 43% of the popular vote. That’s right, barely more than two out of five voters in a very low-turnout election were inspired to vote for him. Four years later, with the power of incumbency, and the GOP having turned hard right under House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA), Clinton won…49% of the vote. Yep, his “winning rhetoric” still won him less than half of every vote in an election where turnout was even lower: Just 49% of people were moved by that year’s political rhetoric to cast a ballot.
Maybejustmaybe Clinton won both times because a Republican candidate split the GOP vote. Businessman Ross Perot’s votes would have put then-Pres. George H.W. Bush over the top in 1992. And in 1996, Sen. Bob Dole (R-KS) would have just about tied Clinton without Perot again on the ticket. But, sure, “winning rhetoric.”
PENNSYLVANIA - SENATE You really don’t need to hear any more about the race between Lt. Gov. John Fetterman (D-PA) and Dr. Mehmet Oz, do you?
It’s close. Fetterman suffered a stroke; if he loses it’ll likely be in part due to media obsession (and hypocrisy, as I reported) over whether Fetterman’s health issues render him unable to serve in the Senate (they don’t) and media disinterest in whether health issues will be redefined for most of the country (reproduction, contraception, LGBTQ, etc.) if Oz helps the GOP seize control of the Senate.
WISCONSIN - SENATE Recent polling consistently shows Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes (D-WI) lagging Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), which means a lot less this year than it did in the past, but likely means something. If Barnes loses, you’ll likely hear that it means he was too far left for Wisconsin, or some such bullshit.
What you’re not likely to hear is that Johnson ads darkened Barnes’s face. And that Johnson himself leaned on racism in his campaign, assuring White voters there’s nothing to see here when it comes to systemic racism.
Recommended Reading
TYT REPORTS LIVE BLOG Starting…well, by now, I hope, since I’m linking to it…and going late into the wee hours, TYT Reports will be live-blogging news and results from around the country, including exclusive comments and news from progressive leaders.
We’ll be hunting down reports of voter suppression, elevating important policy implications of election results, and providing context to help make sense of why nothing makes sense. I hope you’ll bookmark us to stay on top of progressive news throughout the night (and come chat with us in our Twitter Space).
CRIME TIME TYT’s Ana Kasparian argues in a Newsweek op-ed that Democrats not only blew their response to voter concerns about crime, but that some progressives are “gaslighting” us on crime stats. Her bottom-line point: Increases in crime are real, voters are scared, and Democrats have failed to connect with them. All true.
I have a different take on causes/remedies. And as someone who used to cover crime in Brooklyn (never ask me about the Colombo family war) I take issue with some of the stat readings. But none of that blinds me to how essential it is that we hear the lived experiences of people in cities that are struggling.
We can provide appropriate and effective policing and still man the barricades against militarized policing of our own people – especially people of color and other disenfranchised communities. And we can do that and still get more discerning in how we respond to crises. Differentiating crises that require a gun from those that require care is not only effective, it’s wildly popular.
And we can also recognize that rising crime isn’t a clear-cut urban/rural dichotomy like it used to be (or used to be seen as). Cities have gotten safer. Rural America – awash in guns and drugs – has gotten less safe. We can also recognize that crime is less of an issue in societies where the highest cause is something other than liberating capitalists to extract wealth from the rest of us.
BOLTS If you’re the type who whiteboards Election Night, I hope you’re sitting down when you get a look at the massive, exhaustive, high-info PSI, Black Hole-density cheat sheet prepared by the election wizards at Bolts magazine. I’ve already printed out my copy.
FROM HELL’S HEART Jaw-droppingly enough, the most profound legacy of former Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) might today turn out to be handing the House of Representatives over to the Republican Party. I feel like at this point I should say, “Get comfortable, because this is quite the tale,” but it’s really effing simple.
Until he was forced to stop, Cuomo governed New York State to the right. That included appointing conservative judges. Earlier this year, those judges tossed out the state’s congressional maps – and had them rewritten in a way that jammed up Democrats and opened the door for Republicans around the state.
Obviously, those new lines don’t techhnically affect statewide races – like those of Gov. Kathy Hochul (D-NY) and Atty. Gen. Letitia James (D-NY) - but they did and might still affect House races. And if the House turns red because Cuomo turned New York’s courts red, his casualty count could explode today. Alexander Sammon pieced it all together for Slate last week and I can’t recommend it highly enough.
Your Report
Talk to us via email at Newsletters@TYTNetwork.com or tag @JTLarsen on Twitter using #ProgRep.
