srothstein wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 8:28 pm
clarionite wrote: ↑Wed Nov 11, 2020 5:56 pm
I'm at a loss to figure out how republican's picked up quite a few house seats, only lost one senate seat (with a very lopsided number of republican seats up for grabs) and the Democrats clinched the top spot with a very high number of ballots with no down ballot votes. My experience working in the polls was there was a very small number of voters who didn't vote for anything other than President. They usually voted at least for governor, and congressmen. Even if they didn't vote for all the local stuff.
I think the House difference in performance can be explained by the shape of many house districts. Last redistricting, many states like Texas broke up some districts to make them more favorable to one side or the other. If you look at the county maps, you will see how this meant that Trump could carry a lot more House districts that crossed county lines. If the part of the district in the big city county went heavily Biden, but the rest of the district went Trump, then Trump could win the district while Biden won the large population centers and carried the state.
I think (and it is just my opinion) that most of the Senate seats up for grabs were in relatively safe states for the parties involved. Some states had no open Senate seats being contested this time, most had one, and at least Georgia had two. I am convinced that honest analysts did not expect the Senate to change control, though the dishonest ones mixed their hoped for result with their analyst and forecast otherwise.
I did read one analysis that said the results of the election are a clear indication that Republican party ideals were preferred by voters in most places and Trump was rejected as an individual and not for real policy reasons. I tend to agree with this analysis, though some politicians like AOC certainly do not.
It took me a while to finally find the numbers, but GA looks like after the runoff's it'll be an R in both spots. One is so close that I'm not sure it'll go to a runoff once all the votes are counted. The other had 20 candidates running. Not sure how many were on the ballot, but 20 show up as getting 13K votes or more. If you count up all the Democrat votes, and all the Republican votes leaving out the independent, libertarian and green party votes (which really don't add up to enough to sway it at all) the Republican would walk away with it. My confusion is about the difference in Presidential votes. Several hundred thousand Republican voters voted for Biden? 50-100K voted for Biden but didn't vote in the other national races?