{"id":24560,"date":"2017-09-27T09:12:47","date_gmt":"2017-09-27T14:12:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/gregladen\/?p=24560"},"modified":"2018-02-01T18:56:07","modified_gmt":"2018-02-02T00:56:07","slug":"reading-the-special-election-tea-leaves","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/2017\/09\/27\/reading-the-special-election-tea-leaves\/","title":{"rendered":"Reading the Special Election Tea Leaves"},"content":{"rendered":"

There are special elections all the time, mostly at the state level. The news is full of the Moore vs. Strange race, which isn’t just strange because Strange is in it. You all know about that. But what you may not know about is the interesting victory, also yesterday, of Kari Lerner<\/a> in New Hampshire.<\/p>\n

New Hampshire politics are above-average complex at the state level, so I won’t dwell on context. But this is a New Hampshire state house race in a district normally held by Republicans. Lerner is a centrist Democrat. She won 39 votes, and a third party candidate, a Libertarian, won by 41. So, one could say that the right wing won by one vote but split the ticket. Nonetheless, a Republican house seat flipped Democratic.<\/p>\n

The pattern has been similar in races at the state and national level across the country. There is some number, which I suspect is predicted by some other number, by which Democrats do better, even if they don’t win. So, for example, in a district where Republicans usually win 66-34, and where Trump got 65% of the vote, the special election will still have the Republican winning but in a close race, like 52-48. In the case of this New Hampshire district, Trump did get 65% of the vote, so it is pretty deep red, and the race came out virtually even (with the Democrat happening to win).<\/p>\n

At some point we will have to start to dissect this dynamic and predict the color of states and federal districts over the next two years. Yess, my precious spreadsheet, we wills do thisss…..<\/p>\n

But first I think we need more data.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are special elections all the time, mostly at the state level. The news is full of the Moore vs. Strange race, which isn’t just strange because Strange is in it. You all know about that. But what you may not know about is the interesting victory, also yesterday, of Kari Lerner in New Hampshire. … Continue reading Reading the Special Election Tea Leaves<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":24561,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5026],"tags":[5020],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5fhV1-6o8","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24560"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24560"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28797,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24560\/revisions\/28797"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gregladen.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}