At The Cook Political Report, Amy Walter shares her insights about the role of “candidate quality” in next year’s midterm elections:

Then there’s candidate quality. As ticket-splitting has decreased, the quality of the individual candidate has become less important to the outcome of a contest than the partisan make-up of the state and how the presidential candidate of his/her party performed there in the previous election. It wasn’t that long ago when a great candidate could beat a mediocre one, even when the partisan lean of the state was not in that candidate’s favor. Today, that’s become an almost impossible feat, with Senators Joe Manchin and Susan Collins as rare examples.

Even so, with the Senate divided 50-50, all it takes is one really bad candidate — or one exceptional one — to decide control of that body in 2023.

As my colleague Jessica Taylor has written, Trump is going to have a big influence on the kind of candidates who make it through the GOP primary process. Given that his choice of a candidate to promote — or denounce — is driven not by political analysis but by how loyal Trump perceives that candidate to be to him, there’s a good chance that many GOP Senate candidates will come with liabilities both known and unknown, that will make them vulnerable to defeat. Already, some strong potential candidates who have angered Trump in the past, like Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey, have taken a pass on running for the Senate.

At the same time, Trump casts a smaller shadow than he did back in 2017-18 when potential candidates and incumbents decided not to run — or announced their retirement — because of how toxic they perceived the Trump brand to be in the midterm election. This year, it’s Biden, not Trump in the White House, and those candidates no longer have to answer for the unpredictable and unpopular decisions coming from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. For example, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu — a top-flight recruit for Senate Republicans — would probably have had to think twice about running in a year like 2018. If he runs in 2022, he’d instantly vault that race into one of the best pick-up opportunities for his party in the country.

At the same time, Biden’s solid — though not particularly impressive job approval ratings — also help to encourage Democratic candidates and incumbents to stick around. The fact that Democrats currently don’t have to defend any open Senate seats in 2022 is one of those small, but potentially decisive things that can make the difference between Democrats serving in the minority or the majority come 2023.

Certainly Dems would rather have more impressive candidates in 2022. Perhaps ‘candidate quality’ matters more when matched by good campaign staff quality, as was evident in the last Democratic presidential campaign.

In “The Jan. 6 Committee Is Politically Terrible For Republicans — And They Did It To Themselves,” Kate Riga writes at Talking Points Memo: “Pelosi chose Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY) as one of her eight selections. Cheney already lost her leadership position within the Republican caucus over her refusal to accept the big lie, and said she was “honored” to serve….Picking Cheney allows Pelosi to avoid the narrative that would have dominated the independent commission, where the Democratic and Republican appointees would have been evenly split. Instead of neat, party-line battles between Democratic and Republican appointees, Pelosi will likely be able to tout bipartisan decisions and findings, as Cheney has an actual interest in investigating what happened. The independent commission was much more likely to end in a partisan schism, perhaps even with dueling majority and minority reports….Ultimately, Republicans saved Democrats from themselves. Democrats right up to Pelosi made clear that they preferred the independent commission model, regardless of its built-in features that would have made it easier for Republicans to manipulate…..Expect months of GOP objection to every move the committee makes — “witch hunt!” — and dismissal of its fact-finding. But its discoveries will be covered and conclusions made known, with Republicans having very little say over the matter. For that, Republicans have no one to blame but themselves.”

NYT columnist Thomas B. Edsall explores the phenomenon of “political schadenfreude” in politics, and notes, “In their July 3 paper, “Partisan Schadenfreude and the Demand for Candidate Cruelty,” Steven W. Webster, Adam N. Glynn and Matthew P. Motta, political scientists at Indiana University, Emory and Oklahoma State, explore “the prevalence of partisan schadenfreude — that is, taking ‘joy in the suffering’ of partisan others.”….In it, they argue that a “sizable portion of the American mass public engages in partisan schadenfreude and these attitudes are most commonly expressed by the most ideologically extreme Americans.”….In addition, Webster, Glynn and Motta write, these voters create a “demand for candidate cruelty” since these voters are “more likely than not to vote for candidates who promise to pass policies that ‘disproportionately harm’ supporters of the opposing political party.”….In response to my emailed inquiries, Webster answered: Schadenfreude is a bipartisan attitude. In our study, the schadenfreude measure ranges from 0-6. For Republicans, the mean score on this measure is 2.81; for Democrats, it is 2.67. Notably, there is a considerable amount of variation in how much partisans express schadenfreude: some express very little schadenfreude, while others exhibit an extraordinary amount. Those who identify as a ‘strong Democrat’ or a ‘strong Republican’ tend to express greater levels of schadenfreude than those who do not strongly identify with their party.”….Democrats should consider that Schadenfreude is not a particularly good look for any political candidate, who hope to win over swing voters who are tired of all the bickering. And yet, there are studies which indicate that negative campaigning works.

Some key points from “Where Both Parties Overperform in the House” by Louis Jacobsen at Sabato’s Crystal Ball: “— As we head into a once-a-decade redistricting cycle, we analyzed which states have one party that is currently overperforming in its House delegation compared to that party’s share of the 2020 presidential vote.— Overall, the GOP has notched notable overperformances in 19 medium-to-large-sized states, compared to 11 for the Democrats. However, the total number of excess seats for each party from these states is roughly in balance, though Republicans have a slight edge: 32 for the GOP, 28 for the Democrats.— The three biggest sources of excess seats for the GOP today — Texas, Ohio, and Florida — could provide additional excess seats in the coming redistricting round, given the fact that each state has unified Republican control of state government. The Democrats’ options for squeezing out additional seats are more limited because many of their biggest sources of excess seats have a commission system for redistricting.”

Table 1: States where Republicans overperform in House

Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas was caught spilling the beans. As Jake Johnson reports at Common Dreams: “Newly leaked video footage of a recent event hosted by the right-wing group Patriot Voices shows Republican Rep. Chip Roy of Texas openly admitting that his party wants “18 more months of chaos and the inability to get stuff done” as President Joe Biden, a bipartisan group of senators, and congressional Democrats work to pass climate and infrastructure legislation….”Honestly, right now, for the next 18 months, our job is to do everything we can to slow all of that down to get to December of 2022,” Roy says in the clip, referring to the month after that year’s midterm elections. Republicans need to flip just a handful of seats to take back the House and Senate….”I don’t vote for anything in the House of Representatives right now,” Roy says in response to an audience member’s question about the sweeping infrastructure and safety-net package that Democrats are planning to pass unilaterally alongside a White House-backed bipartisan deal….As the clip of Roy circulated online Tuesday, McConnell (R-Ky.) told a Kentucky audience that Republicans intend to give Democrats a “hell of a fight” over their plans to pass a multitrillion-dollar infrastructure bill using the budget reconciliation process, which is exempt from the Senate’s 60-vote legislative filibuster—an archaic tool that McConnell has repeatedly used to obstruct Democratic legislation….Rep. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, noted Monday that “not a single Republican voted for the American Rescue Plan,” a popular $1.9 trillion reconciliation package that included direct relief payments, an extension of emergency unemployment programs, and funding for vaccine distribution.” With Roy, McConnell and other Republicans bragging about their obstruction intentions, Democratic ad-makers have the resources to do a hell of a mash-up ad illustrating the GOP = Gridlock, Obstruction and Paralysis equation for the midterm elections.

There’s an idea floating around that Trump has liberated his party from the conservative strictures that made it hard for Republicans to build a majority coalition. I pushed back on that notion at New York:

Heading toward the 2022 midterm elections, Republican-watchers are fascinated by the aggressive role Donald Trump intends to play in GOP primaries. Aside from his plans of vengeance toward those who egregiously crossed him at some point over the past half-century, he is selectively backing candidates whom he can claim as his very own. Indeed, the former president has already endorsed ten Senate candidates, two House candidates, and five candidates for state offices (one for a 2021 election). More important, his potential endorsements have Republican candidates and proto-candidates scrambling to prove their MAGA credentials so as to head off, or at least partially neutralize, the possibility that the Boss will give the magic nod to an opponent. The most obvious example of this phenomenon is in the Ohio U.S. Senate race, during which candidates had an Apprentice-style audition with Trump at Mar-a-Lago in March, with one aspirant, J.D. Vance, subsequently launching his candidacy by apologizing for criticisms of the 45th president back in 2016.

But loyalty to Trump isn’t the only essential trait for Republican candidates in a party that (in this century, at least) seems haunted by fears of heresy more than it is tempted by dreams of diversity and outreach. Trumpism has simply been added to previous conservative litmus tests. Revealingly, Herschel Walker — one high-profile potential candidate for the U.S. Senate whom Trump has strongly encouraged to enter the race — is alarming some conservatives in Georgia because he hasn’t been ideologically vetted, as the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports:

“’Herschel Walker will need to come back to Georgia and campaign. He will need to show that he is a conservative,’ Doug Collins, a former Republican congressman and 2020 Senate candidate, said on his radio show.

“’I have never heard Herschel Walker’s position on pro-life. I haven’t,’ Collins said. ‘I’ve never heard his position on gun control. I’ve never heard his position on a lot of these issues that are conservative issues.’”

Collins himself is a MAGA stalwart, having served as Trump’s chief defender on the House Judiciary Committee during the former president’s first impeachment. But he won’t take Trump’s word for it that Walker is ideologically kosher: The current Republican front-runner for the 2022 Senate nomination needs to publicly pledge his allegiance to culture-war causes like banning abortion and outlawing any outlawing of a single gun.

Certainly, abortion and guns represent two major issues on which any sort of heterodoxy is disqualifying for nearly all Republican candidates. The once-robust pro-choice Republican caucus in Congress is now down to two veteran senators: Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski. A good indication of how obligatory anti-abortion views have become was provided by recent party-switcher Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey. He had a strongly pro-choice voting record as a Democrat, but one of his first House votes as a Republican was on behalf of a failed effort to force a bill banning all abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy onto the floor. Similarly, one of the vanishingly few congressional Republicans open to any kind of gun regulation, Senator Pat Toomey, is retiring next year. On both of these cultural issues, Republican opinion seems to be hardening. The ascendant conservative view on reproductive rights is now fetal personhood as a matter of federal constitutional law, rather than simply a reversal of Roe v. Wade, and a return of abortion regulation to the states. And on guns, the big conservative trend is “constitutional carry,” a rejection of any firearms licensing provisions, which is closely associated with the even more dangerous idea that the Second Amendment was designed to give teeth to a “right to revolution” against a “tyrannical” government.

But these are hardly the only litmus tests of “true conservatism” that survived or even flourished in the Trump era. Tax increases remain verboten, as evidenced by their absence from the recent bipartisan infrastructure package in the Senate. Anti-government rhetoric, an inheritance from the Goldwater-to-Reagan conservative movement that was intensified by the tea-party phenomenon of the Obama era, now has even greater power thanks to the Trumpian doctrines of a traitorous deep state and a corrupt Swamp dominating Washington. Hostility to organized labor is now universal in a party that used to more than occasionally secure union endorsements for its candidates (unless you take seriously the eccentric endorsement by Marco Rubio of an effort to organize Amazon workers or the more general revolt against “woke” corporations).

There are obviously some tenets of traditional conservatism that Trump has called into doubt as orthodoxy. Several are really restorations of Old Right thinking: the abandonment of free-trade principles for a return to the protectionist creed that animated Republicans from the Civil War to World War II, an America First repudiation of neoconservative commitments to alliances and interventionism, and a return to the nativism that has always been just under the surface in Republican politics. While Trump’s sometimes incoherent views on these topics haven’t become totally obligatory for Republicans just yet, gestures in his direction probably are required. It’s hard to imagine, for example, more than a smattering of Republicans vocally opposing a border wall, or calling for closer trade relations with China, or saying something nice about NATO, much less the United Nations. In international relations, Trump’s determination to throw money at the Pentagon and his unremitting bellicosity have made his isolationist tendencies more acceptable to the Cold War set.

There’s one very loud new habit of Republicans that Trump has elevated from a fringe extremist preoccupation into a near-universal habit in the GOP: the attacks on “political correctness,” “wokeness,” “cancel culture,” and now “critical race theory” that present a violent antipathy to cultural changes deemed threatening to white patriarchal hegemony (or, stated more neutrally, to the “Great” America Trump has promised to bring back). All these phantom menaces are nicely designed to make old-school racism and sexism respectable.

All in all, it’s a complicated landscape that ambitious Republicans must navigate to safely rise within the Trumpified GOP. The safest are hard-core conservatives of the old school who downplay Reaganite views that are now out of fashion — and who add in conspicuous personal loyalty to Trump and whatever he wants at any given moment. Examples of this formula are Ted Cruz, the members of the House Freedom Caucus, and, above all, Alabama U.S. Senate candidate Mo Brooks, who is still doing penance for endorsing Cruz in 2016, in part by personally participating in Trump’s January 6 insurrectionary rally. Trump is close to the once-unlikely accomplishment of making “true conservatism” and Trumpism identical. The big question is whether his personal presence as a presidential candidate or a hurricane-force disrupter is necessary to seal the deal.

There are lots of reasons to be pessimistic about Democratic prospects in the 2022 midterm elections, including precedent, gerrymandering and the Democratic proclivity for forming circular firing squads. But, if Dems are to buck the odds and the pundits, a little creative visualization can’t hurt. For starters, check out Jame’s Pindell’s “3 emerging reasons why the midterms might not be a disaster for Democrats” at The Boston Globe, in which he writes:

But while all signs historically and structurally point to a good night for Republicans, there are several reasons why Democrats might actually buck the trend lines in the contests, which are suddenly less than 500 days away….Here are three reasons why:

1. Biden is relatively popular

Political pundits will throw out all kinds of numbers and suggest they hold some hidden secret to predicting election results. But in midterm elections, there is only one rather obvious number that makes all the difference: the presidential approval rating.

In the modern polling era, there have been six presidents who have lost seats in midterm elections. Only one — Dwight D. Eisenhower, a war hero — had an approval rating of about 50 percent. When Republicans picked up seats in the 2002 elections, Republican incumbent president George W. Bush had a 68 percent approval rating.

Today, Biden’s average approval rating stands at 52 percent, according to a FiveThirtyEight average of polls.

This is one reason why Democrats haven’t lost some recent special elections, as they’d be expected to do ahead of a midterm election under a Democratic president. In fact, Democrats are actually doing better by an average of two to three percent in these contests than they did in the 2020 elections.

2. Donald Trump remains a driving force in American politics

Midterm elections are typically a referendum on the current president, but it is increasingly clear that former president Donald Trump wants to make them also about him. We haven’t seen a former president play this type of role in modern politics and it is unclear how this will all play out….The Washington Post found that a third of the 700 Republican candidates who have already signed up to run in the midterms are publicly adhering to the Trump-fueled lie that the 2020 elections were stolen. Independents and Democrats — along with a good number of Republicans — do not agree.

Instead of going on the offensive and discussing, say, inflation or Biden’s tax proposals, many of these Republican candidates will find themselves in a general election defending something deeply out of step with the electorate, only because Trump demands they do so.

3. The Senate map is actually good for Democrats

The good news for Republicans is that they only need to gain one Senate seat to win the majority. The bad news for them is that they will have to defend 20 of the 34 Senate seats up in 2022. Of those 20, five are seats held by Republicans who have announced their retirement, putting them further on defense….while the smart money is on Republicans gaining the majority in the House, it’s also on Democrats keeping control of the Senate. If Democrats can do that it means they will still be able to confirm presidential nominations and Supreme Court judges. In other words, these midterms could be a lot worse for Democrats.

None of this is to deny that Democrats have very little wiggle room on loaded issues like police reform and immigration. But these three factors, along with a booming economy and the GOP’s failure to get real about Covid, the 2020 elections and Trump’s growing legal problems, should help Dems a bit with swing voters – if they drive Democratic strategy and messaging in the 500 days ahead.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

I argued over and over before the election that high turnout was not the key to beating Trump in the 2020 election. The key instead was doing better among persuadable voters who were not the usual suspects. Turns out I was right, as the new Pew validated voter data (and much previous data) confirm.

Nate Cohn covers the new Pew data:

“Married men and veteran households were probably not the demographic groups that Democrats assumed would carry the party to victory over Donald Trump in the 2020 election.

But Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s apparent strength among traditionally moderate or even conservative constituencies, and especially men, is emerging as one of the hallmarks of his victory, according to new data from Pew Research.

Mr. Trump won married men by just a 54 to 44 percent margin — a net 20 point decline from his 62 to 32 percent victory in 2016. He won veteran households by a similar 55 to 43 percent margin, down a net 14 points from his 61 to 35 percent victory.

In both cases, the size of Mr. Biden’s gains among these relatively conservative groups rivals Mr. Trump’s far more publicized surge among Latino voters. Each group represents a larger share of the electorate than Latinos, as well….

Higher turnout did not reshape the electorate to the favor of Democrats, either. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, many Democrats blamed Mrs. Clinton’s defeat on low turnout and support from young and nonwhite voters. Many progressives even believed that mobilizing Democratic constituencies alone could oust the president, based in part on the assumption that Mr. Trump had all but maxed-out his support among white, rural voters without a degree.

At the same time, Democrats supposed that higher turnout would draw more young and nonwhite voters to the polls, bolstering the party.

Overall, 73 percent of Mr. Trump’s supporters voted in the 2020 election compared with 68 percent of Mr. Biden’s supporters. In comparison, Mr. Trump’s supporters were only 2 percentage points more likely to vote than Mrs. Clinton’s in 2016, according to the Pew data….

In the end, there was a far deeper well of support and enthusiasm for Mr. Trump than many progressives had imagined. An additional 13 million people voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 than in 2016. Voter records in states with party registration — like Pennsylvania, Florida, North Carolina, Nevada and Arizona — suggest that registered Republicans continued to turn out at a higher rate than registered Democrats, and in some cases even expanded their turnout advantage over the 2016 cycle….

Perhaps another Democrat would have mobilized voters more decisively. But the strong turnout for Mr. Trump implies that it would have been very challenging for any Democrat to win simply by outmuscling the other side.

Instead, Mr. Biden prevailed by making significant inroads among moderate or conservative constituencies.

Mr. Biden’s strength among these groups was not obvious on election night. His gains were largest in suburban areas, which are so heterogenous that it’s often hard to say exactly what kinds of voters might explain his inroads….

[A]ccording to Pew Research, Mr. Biden made larger gains among married men than any other demographic group analyzed in the survey. He won 44 percent of married men, up from 32 percent for Mrs. Clinton in 2016. It’s an even larger surge for Mr. Biden than Pew showed Mr. Trump making among Latino voters, even though they do not stand out on the electoral map.

In a similar analysis, Catalist also showed that Mr. Biden made his largest inroads among married white men, though they showed smaller gains for Mr. Biden than Pew Research.

Mr. Biden also made significant, double-digit gains among white, non-Hispanic Catholics, a persuadable but somewhat conservative voting bloc. He won 16 percent of moderate to liberal Republicans, up from 9 percent for Mrs. Clinton in 2016. And Mr. Biden gained among men, even while making no ground or, according to Pew, losing ground, among women. As a result, the gender gap was cut in half over the last four years, to 13 points from 26 points in 2016.”

You want more Democratic votes? Persuade people to vote for you.

The Data for Progress Newsletter reports that “Our latest polling with Invest in America on Biden’s Build Back Better infrastructure initiatives finds that bipartisan negotiations haven’t caused voters to lose their enthusiasm for the bold structural changes contained in the American Jobs Plan and the American Families Plan — in fact, they are strongly supportive of the clean energy, long-term care, and education investments contained in the American Jobs Plan, by +60-points, +53-points, and +41-points, respectively….In the same survey, we found that voters want to pass the AJP and AFP together via reconciliation by +31-points — news the White House seems glad to hear.

Commenting on the New York City Mayoral election in his column, “‘New York City Is a World Unto Itself.’ But It May Tell Us Where Democrats Are Headed,” Thomas B. Edsall writes that “In census tracts with a majority or plurality of whites without college degrees, Adams — who repeatedly declared on the campaign trail that “the prerequisite for prosperity is public safety” — led after stage one of the New York City Democratic primary last week, according to data provided to The Times by John Mollenkopf, director of the Graduate Center for Urban Research at C.U.N.Y….Adams took 28.5 percent of the first-choice ballots among these white voters, compared with the 17.1 percent that went to Garcia, who is white and has served as both sanitation commissioner and interim chairman of the New York City Housing Authority, and the 15.4 percent that went to Wiley ….Adams’s strength in non-college white tracts shows that his campaign made substantially larger inroads than either Garcia or Wiley among white working-class voters, a constituency in which the national Democratic Party has suffered sustained losses….Adams’s biggest margins were in Black majority non-college tracts, where he won with 59.2 percent to Wiley’s 24.4 percent and Garcia’s 4.7 percent. In Black majority college-educated tracts, Adams won a plurality, 37.5 percent, to Wiley’s 32.5 percent and Garcia’s 13.0 percent….Counting all the census tracts with a majority or plurality of adult voters who do not have college degrees, Adams won decisively with 42.1 percent — compared with Wiley’s 19.7 percent and Garcia’s 10.3 percent.”

Edsall quotes Jonathan Rieder, author of “Canarsie: The Jews and Italians of Brooklyn Against Liberalism,” who notes, “For all the gradual shrinkage of white non-college voters, the Democrats still require a multicultural middle to include non-affluent and lesser-educated whites in their majority coalition. And that will be hard to secure if the party is identified with ceding the border, lawlessness, ignoring less privileged whites, exclusionary versions of anti-racist diversity that smack of thought reform, phrasing like Latinx that large numbers of Latinos find off-putting, esoteric or perplexing, and so much more.” Edsall adds, “Margaret O’Brien Steinfels, who founded the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture with her husband Peter Steinfels, argues that Adams’s lead rests on four factors: (A) the “crime wave” that became the hot issue in the campaign; (B) on Adams’s story of experiencing police abuse and then being in the police; (C) on the emerging sense that Black voters are “moderates” — pace the views of progressives and young B.L.M. advocates (Black and white) — that N.Y.C. is a union city and that Adams had important endorsements; (D) Adams was pretty clearly the “working class” candidate and he campaigned in relevant districts. Defunding the police, which Adams opposes, is not a winning policy as Biden’s announcements on crime this past week underlined.”

At The Daily Beast, Matt Lewis shares some insights derived from the recent Pew Research poill: “To be clear, Biden did not win the married white male vote or “veteran households.” But the data suggests that Biden won the election by making inroads with these traditionally center-right constituencies by broadening his base of support—as opposed to winning by juicing traditionally Demographic constituencies. In other words, Biden won the presidency by losing groups of Americans like non-college whites by a smaller percentage than Hillary Clinton—and that made all the difference in the world….It’s possible a different Democratic candidate might have turned out higher numbers of voters traditionally assumed to represent progressive constituencies. However, Cohn (whose expertise is covering polling and demographics) is appropriately skeptical of this alternative electorate. And I agree with him. Trump drove progressive turnout. And even if minority turnout were higher in, say, California, it wouldn’t matter because of the electoral college. And any turnout gains made by a different Democrat (like Bernie Sanders—who won the New Hampshire primary) may have been offset by votes that were only gettable by Biden….Why does this matter? People in the Democratic Party (especially progressives) don’t fully appreciate or understand the coalition that got Biden elected in the first place. Indeed, I’m not sure Biden even fully appreciates this (if he did, he would more forcefully stand up to the left in his party), though he certainly has a better sense of it than most of his fellow Democrats.”

Washington Post columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. comments on Thursday’s “twin rulings” from the U.S. Supreme Court, which allow states to “make it harder for people to vote” “made it easier for big donors to sway elections in secrecy.” Dionne argues that “These decisions send three important messages”:

So many words have been spilled about the 2020 presidential election that it’s easy to put it in the rear-view mirror. But only now are we getting the kind of reliable data that makes understanding it easier, as I noted at New York:

One of the many weird things about the 2020 presidential election is that there was never a moment of big-picture clarity immediately after the count came in. Trump and his Team of Disrupters jumped into wild conspiracy theories based on insanely detailed (if largely made-up) claims involving the closest states. Meanwhile, the usual source for a quick understanding of national elections, the network-sponsored exit polls, were generally ignored. In part that was because of greater awareness of their documented shortcomings in the recent past, and in part because the very high level of voting by mail subverted the basic function of exit polls as a scientific after-the-fact tabulation of how people had already voted (“exit poll” data for by-mail voters was actually derived from a standard phone poll, in a relatively bad year for pollsters).

Since politics abhors a vacuum, particularly in close elections, the absence of authoritative data slicing and dicing the electorate along the usual demographic categories led to the development — via various studies of county-level data and some sheer hunches — of various takes on what happened, and even a bit of a conventional wisdom. As information is released from voter files and census reports, we are now getting a better picture of the actual 2020 election results, and an important new analysis of them has just been released by Pew. It’s of voters validated by voter files, and it provides a fresh and more accurate look at the 2020 fault lines.

Things we knew (but now know more precisely)

One of the big narratives of the election was that Biden won by making gains among suburban voters, and in the overlapping category of white voters with college degrees. The Pew numbers show that even more strongly, with Biden winning suburbanites 54-43 (the exits showed a narrower 50-48 margin), as compared to a Trump advantage of 47-45 in 2016; and white college-educated voters 57-42 (again, the exits show a narrower 51-48 Biden win). Notably, Pew had Biden improving on his party’s 2018 midterm congressional performance in the suburbs, which was the dominant story of that election.

It was widely reported that Trump repeated his boffo 2016 performance among white non-college voters in 2020. But Pew confirms Biden reduced the Republican margin in that demographic from 36 to 32 points.

Perhaps the biggest storyline from 2020 among Republican spinmeisters was that Trump cut into expected Democratic margins among Latinos, despite his long and recently intensified nativist rhetoric and occasional anti-Latino racism. The exits showed him winning a third of Latinos. But Pew showed Biden winning them 59-38, a margin of only 21 points, as compared with Clinton’s 38-point margin in 2016, and the Democratic congressional margin of 47 points in 2018.

Things we didn’t know but now know

The initial analysis of the results suggested the kind of gender gap we have seen in so many recent elections. The exits showed a 23-point gap (Trump winning men 53-45 and Biden winning women 57-42) close to the 26 point gap in 2016. But Pew’s numbers show the gender gap being cut in half since 2016, with Trump winning men 50-48 and Biden winning women 55-44.

There was at least one under-discussed surprise on the age front as well, though the exits did capture this one: Biden’s margin among under-30 voters (59-35) was six points lower than Clinton’s in 2016 (58-28), and a shocking 25 points lower than the margins won by congressional Democrats in 2018 (72-23). Similarly, both Pew and the exits showed a modest Trump win among seniors (down from his nine-point margin among them in 2016), but it was impressive when you consider Biden’s regular leads among over-65 voters in nearly all the polls for months.

There were two small surprises in terms of religious affiliation. Joe Biden cut Trump’s margin among white Catholics (57-42) by more than half from 2016 (64-31), and nearly tied Trump among Catholics generally. Yes, Joe Biden is a white Catholic, but in today’s polarized ideological and partisan climate, that might not have made much difference. Meanwhile, there was a lot of speculation during the campaign that Trump was losing altitude with white Evangelicals, his strongest large constituency. In the end he won them 84-15, an improvement over his 77-16 margin in 2016.

Things we thought we knew but didn’t

One apparent “surprise” that was hyped to high heaven by Team Trump was his alleged “breakthrough” among Black voters. The exits showed him doubling his support in this demographic, albeit from an anemic 6 percent in 2016 to 12 percent in 2020. That was still an impressive improvement for the candidate of neo-Confederates everywhere, running on the thinly veiled racism of attacks on “rioters” and other threats to suburban neighborhoods. The 19 percent the exits gave to Trump among Black men was even more eyebrow-raising.

Pew’s validated numbers show Trump getting 8 percent of the Black vote, a much smaller boost, with Biden actually increasing Clinton’s share of that vote. Biden’s 60-point margin among Black men in the exits grew to 75 points in the Pew data. Not quite a Republican breakthrough.

Just as you can’t take the politics out of politics, you can’t take the spin out of post-election analysis, particularly if informative breakdowns of the results are slow to arrive. But we now know enough to have an educated guess at the trends we are likely to see in 2022 and 2024, particularly if Biden and Trump are the candidates.

At The Washington Monthly, Bill Scher outlines “The Voting Rights Package That Can Pass the Senate: A plan that can get past Joe Manchin, the Republicans, and still help voters.” As Scher writes, “The 72-year-old West Virginian made a big mistake when he drafted his compromise bill by himself, then sprung it on the rest of Congress, without any Republicans buying in ahead of time. So when Stacey Abrams announced she supported Manchin’s proposal, Republicans unfairly—perhaps blinkered by racism—presumed it was a raw deal. Missouri Republican Senator Roy Blunt was, well, blunt: “When Stacey Abrams immediately endorsed Senator Manchin’s proposal, it became the Stacey Abrams substitute, not the Joe Manchin substitute.”….A compact bill, prioritizing a few measures with distinct appeal to both parties, would be more likely to produce a bipartisan breakthrough. I would suggest a three-pronged bill.” Scher goes on to flesh out the three elements he thinks could get traction: Require voter i.d.; “enfranchise non-incarcerated felons and ex-felons; and tougher penalties and measures to insure a “fair and impartially conducted election process.” Read Scher’s article for more details.

In her article, “We Just Got Our Clearest Picture Yet Of How Biden Won In 2020,” Danielle Kurtzleben writes at npr.org: “We know that President Biden won the 2020 election (regardless of what former President Donald Trump and his allies say). We just haven’t had a great picture of howBiden won….That is until Wednesday, when we got the clearest data yet on how different groups voted, and crucially, how those votes shifted from 2016. The Pew Research Center just released its validated voters’ report, considered a more accurate measure of the electorate than exit polls, which have the potential for significant inaccuracies….The new Pew data shows that shifts among suburban voters, white men and independents helped Biden win in November, even while white women and Hispanics swung toward Trump from 2016 to 2020….To compile the data, Pew matches up survey respondents with state voter records. Those voter files do not say how a person voted, but they do allow researchers to be sure that a person voted, period. That helps with accuracy, eliminating the possibility of survey respondents overreporting their voting activity. In addition, the Pew study uses large samples of Americans — more than 11,000 people in 2020.

Among “the big takeaways” Kurtzleben cites: “While Pew found Trump winning the suburbs by 2 points in 2016, Biden won them by 11 points in 2020, a 13-point overall swing. Considering that the suburbs accounted for just over half of all voters, it was a big demographic win for Biden….That said, Trump gained in both rural and urban areas. He won 65% of rural voters, a 6-point jump from 2016. And while cities were still majority-Democratic, his support there jumped by 9 points, to 33%….In 2020, men were nearly evenly split, with 48% choosing Biden to Trump’s 50%. That gap shrank considerably from 2016, when Trump won men by 11 points. In addition, this group that swung away from Trump grew as a share of the electorate from 2016 — signaling that in a year with high turnout, men’s turnout grew more. White men were a big part of the swing toward Biden. In 2016, Trump won white men by 30 points. In 2020, he won them again, but by a substantially slimmer 17 points….in 2016, white women were split 47% to 45%, slightly in Trump’s favor but not a majority….This year, however, it appears that Trump did win a majority of white women. Pew found that 53% of white women chose Trump this year, up by 6 points from 2016….Black voters didn’t shift significantly from 2016. They remained Democratic stalwarts, with 92% choosing Biden — barely changed from four years earlier. Nearly three-quarters of Asian voters also voted for Biden, along with 6 in 10 Hispanic voters….”

Charlie Cook explains why “Biden Is on a Political Ledge With Transportation, Crime” at The Cook Political Report: “As this column pointed out earlier this week, with the economy firing on all eight cylinders, the purpose of this legislation has changed from shoring up and stimulating growth to the substance of the measure itself—the long-ignored and deteriorating transportation systems, as well as water and sewer lines and expanding broadband….The danger for House Democrats and the left is that if the party is seen as holding hostage much needed deferred maintenance on our infrastructure in order to advance their green climate change and social welfare agenda items, that could be a sticky problem in competitive districts and states, especially those with large suburban populations. Of course those pushing hardest for the green and social programs are those from the safest of districts and states, so they tend to be less cognizant or appreciative of the political danger….The other political move by Biden this week was his Wednesday speech on the uptick in violent crime and what can be done about it. The address was a tacit acknowledgement that law and order did pop up as a reason for some swing voters to take an unexpected detour away from the Democratic ticket in the closing weeks of the campaign. Since the 1960s, in fact, Democrats have often been perceived as “soft on crime.”….Last fall’s challenge for Democrats was less the straightforward issue of crime on the streets but of lawlessness in the streets, when in quite a few cities peaceful and lawful protests spun out of control. Republicans were able to raise enough questions in swing voters minds that Democrats could not be trusted to preserve order.”

In “Redistricting Holds Key to House Majority” at The Cook Political Report, Amy Walter writes: “Since the end of the Civil War, the party holding the White House has lost House seats in 36 out of the 39 midterm elections. Then there’s the fact that midterm elections are almost always referenda on the incumbent president, even more so when a party bears full responsibility for governing….President Biden’s job approval rating at this point sits at 52 percent. The good news for Democrats: he’s above water. The bad news for Democrats: this may be his high watermark. Even as Biden has presided over a successful roll-out of the COVID vaccine and a re-opening of the economy, support among independent voters is tepid. At the same time, approval among Republicans is pretty much non-existent. In other words, if this is where Biden’s job approval sits when things are going relatively well, and his administration hasn’t made obvious fumbles, it’s hard to see how his job approval ratings can go much higher in these next few months. Plus, it’s easy to see how a mediocre or troublesome next year can easily drag those approval ratings down….

Walter notes, further, that “we have no idea if the surge of voters we saw flood into polling places in 2018 and 2020 will remain engaged in politics now that Donald Trump is no longer on the ballot or in the White House. Moreover, writes demographic guru Ron Brownstein, more Democrats than Republicans turned out to vote in the Trump era, giving Democrats a bigger pool of potential voters to turnout in 2022.” However, “In 2021, the GOP will control the remapping process in 20 states with 187 districts, while Democrats will be able to draw the map in 8 states with 75 districts. Independent commissions will draw maps in 10 states with 121 districts. Just six states with 46 districts have split control….Republicans control line drawing in twice as many districts as Democrats. There’s also the fact that maps drawn by “independent commissions” like those in Ohio, New York, Utah and Iowa can be overturned by a vote of the state legislature. Only New York has a Democratic-controlled legislature and governor.” Walter concludes, “Traditionally, a midterm election is driven by two major factors — the political environment and opinions about the sitting president. This year, however, it is redistricting that is likely to be the most significant. In fact, until we know what the new lines are going to look like, discussions about Biden’s approval ratings, the political climate, or the makeup of the electorate are pointless.”

“A Gallup poll earlier this year also found that only 27 percent of Americans were satisfied with the nation’s policies to reduce or control crime, and that 65 percent were dissatisfied,” Nathaniel Rakich writes at FiveThirtyEight. “That’s a big change from 2020, when 47 percent were satisfied and 49 percent were dissatisfied….Altogether, this has sparked a narrative that the rise in violent crime poses a political problem for Democrats, who are the ruling party and also traditionally perceived as softer on crime. But at this point, it’s not really clear that the crime issue will hurt Democrats and anti-police progressives politically. For starters, Americans are actually pretty divided on what the best solution to stopping crime is. In a YouGov/Yahoo News poll from May 24-26, 32 percent of adults said that law enforcement is not tough enough on most offenders — but about the same amount, 27 percent, said law enforcement is too tough on most offenders. (Eighteen percent thought law enforcement’s level of toughness was about right, while 22 percent weren’t sure.)….The public is also pretty sharply divided on whether Democrats or Republicans are better on the issue of crime. When asked whether Biden or former President Donald Trump has done a better job handling crime, 34 percent of respondents to the YouGov/Yahoo poll said Trump, while 32 percent said Biden….Similarly, in elections so far in 2021, it also doesn’t look like crime is driving voters toward more conservative candidates. True, this week’s Democratic primary for mayor of New York City focused heavily on crime, and the winner was most likely Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, arguably the race’s most pro-police candidate. But there are plenty of counterexamples: In the Democratic primary for Philadelphia district attorney, incumbent Larry Krasner — the George Washington of the progressive criminal-justice movement — handily defeated a moderate who attempted to tie Krasner’s policies to Philadelphia’s rising crime rate. And in this month’s special election for New Mexico’s 1st Congressional District, the Republican candidate ran what was virtually a single-issue campaign on crime and policing issues; Democrat Melanie Stansbury ended up winning by 25 percentage points, exceeding the district’s D+18 partisan lean.”

At Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Kyle Kondik shares the latest map depicting “Party control of statewide elected executive offices” and writes: “Currently, one party controls all of the statewide elected executive offices in 36 of the 50 states….Candidate decisions by down-ballot executive officeholders in Florida and Missouri could make Republican statewide sweeps easier in those states, and Democrats may have opportunities to sweep more states on their side….Democrats could sweep Maryland and maybe Massachusetts. Popular Gov. Phil Scott (R-VT), the lone Republican elected in Vermont, has to run every two years. If he were to not run again, Democrats could sweep there….Arizona, Iowa, Kansas, and Nevada are split states that all should feature competitive races next year. Sweeps can’t be ruled out in any of them….The bottom line is that we may have even more one-party statewide executive states after 2022 than we have now, which would fit in with a larger trend toward one-party dominance in many of the states.”