This is a part of a series of posts analyzing the 2010 midterm elections. This post will focus on the Illinois Senate election, in which Republican candidate Mark Kirk pulled out a close Republican victory in a strongly Democratic state.
The state of Texas is one of the Republican Party's most valuable strongholds. It adds a good 38 electoral votes to the Republican candidate's electoral vote; Democrats have not been competitive in the state for at least a decade.
One of the only Democratic regions in Texas lies along the Rio Grande River:
This is a part of a series of posts analyzing the 2010 midterm elections. This post will discuss the 2010 Florida gubernatorial election, which Republican candidate Rick Scott won in an extremely close contest.
Florida's Gubernatorial Election
On November 2010, Democrat Alex Sink faced an extremely flawed Republican opponent: multimillionaire Rick Scott, a businessman accused of heading the biggest fraud in Medicare history.
Ms. Sink still lost, running in a Republican leaning state in a very Republican environment. Here is what happened:
Asians are one of the most ignored constituencies in American politics. When most politicians think about the Asian vote, they don't.
Yet the Asian-American population is increasing, both in absolute terms and relative ones. By 2050, the Census estimates that Asians will compose 7.8% of the American population. Although their voting rates will still fall far short of this, the population is becoming more influential. Predicting their future voting path therefore has some utility.
In previous posts, this blogger has argued that the Latino vote will likely trend Republican, as Latinos follow the path of previous immigrants and become more assimilated.
To follow up the series of posts on Colorado, I've posted a few recent presidential elections in the state (courtesy of the New York Times). Each map comes with some brief analysis.
Boosted by a Democratic National Convention held in Denver, Senator Barack Obama wins a thorough victory in the ultimate swing state of 2008. The Democratic candidate does especially well in the Republican-leaning suburbs of Denver - winning several outright and dampening margins in Douglas County and Colorado Springs.
The recent mid-terms were, by all accounts, very bad for Democrats. They lost 63 seats in the House of Representatives and 6 seats in the Senate. In many ways things were worse than in 1994, when Republicans won landslide victory.
There is another analogy to 1994, however, which will probably make Democrats happier. President Bill Clinton, after devastating mid-term losses, went on to win a comfortable re-election campaign. Can Mr. Obama do the same?
The book "The Keys to the White House," by Professor Allan J. Lichtman provides a fascinating answer. Mr. Lichtman argues that the results of a presidential election can be predicted months or years beforehand by a series of thirteen "keys." According to this theory, if the incumbent party or current president captures a certain number of "keys", it will win the election. Otherwise it will lose.
A long time ago, I posted a series of posts analyzing the swing state Pennsylvania. One section of this series focused specifically on the city of Philadelphia. This section analyzed Philadelphia's vote by precinct results and mapped out the results of several previous elections.
Of particular interest was the difference between the results of the 2008 presidential election and the 2008 Democratic primary, which illustrated a political divide not seen in presidential elections: between Democratic-leaning white Catholics in the northeast and Democratic-voting blacks in the west.
Here is Philadelphia in the 2008 Democratic primary. Take a note at the region the question mark points to, which this post will discuss:
In little more than a year several months, the great city of Chicago will select its next mayor. Following the retirement of Mayor Richard Daley, the field is wide open.
Enter Rahm Emanuel. A powerful Democrat and President Barack Obama's former chief-of-staff, Mr. Emanuel currently looks like the front-runner for the office. With many strong candidates declining to run and his potential opposition divided, things look good for Mr. Emanuel.
And yet one shouldn't overestimate Mr. Emanuel's chances as media-anointed front-runner. Mr. Emanuel has a number of hidden weaknesses that may combine to badly damage his campaign.
In 1928 the Democratic Party nominated Governor Al Smith of New York. Mr. Smith was nominated as a Catholic Irish-American New Yorker who directly represented Democratic-voting white ethnics. Mr. Smith's Catholicism, however, constituted an affront to Democratic-voting white Southerners, who at the time were the most important part of the party's base.
The 1928 presidential election thus saw a mass movement of white Southerners away from the Democrats, corresponding with a mass movement of white ethnics towards the Democrats. This was the beginning of the great realignment of the South to the Republican Party and the Northeast to the Democratic Party.
This change can be illustrated with a map detailing the state-by-state shift from the 1924 presidential election to the 1928 presidential election:
There are a number of things that stand out with this map.
