Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Why Did Republicans Lose The Election

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What Happened: Arizona Turned Blue In The 2020 Presidential Election But The Republicans Still Control The State

Reflecting broader democratic shifts, recent decades have seen big changes in politics in Arizona: moving from deep red Republican domination to a particular shade of purple over the last decade. Eldrid Herrington maps how these changes have played out in recent years, the 2020 general election, and what they might mean moving forward.

  • Following the 2020 US General Election, our mini-series,?‘What Happened?, explores aspects of elections at the presidential, Senate, House of Representative and state levels, and also reflects on what the election results will mean for US politics moving forward. If you are interested in contributing, please contact Rob Ledger or Peter Finn .

At 2.14pm on the 6th of January 2021, as Congress’ conducted its ceremonial Electoral Vote count, Paul Gosar of Arizona was addressing the US House of Representatives, challenging the electoral votes in his own state, when he and his colleagues had to be rushed out of the chamber and taken to safety elsewhere in the Capitol building. Hours later, when the legislature returned, almost all Republican representatives from Arizona persisted in repeating the lie that their party did not, in fact, lose the elections in the state .


Liz Cheney Reportedly Acts Like A Pig Not Just To Trump But To Other Republicans And May Lose Her Gop Post Soon

Monica Showalter

Liz Cheney is in trouble.

After winning handily as chair of the House Republican Conference in Congress in February shortly after her unpopular vote to impeach President Trump, House members are now looking to get rid of her.

Axios had the scoop on that:

Top Republicans are turning on Rep. Liz Cheney, the party’s highest-ranking woman in Congress, with one conservative leader suggesting she could be ousted from her GOP post within a month.

Why it matters: The comments by Reps. Steve Scalise, the minority whip, and Jim Banks, chairman of the Republican Study Committee, carry weight because of their close relationship with House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy — who is openly feuding with Cheney.

So it’s not because of the impeachment vote, it seems, but because she can’t get along with other people.  She’s the Queen of Mean, if the multiple incidents that Axios reported have it right.


That’s far from a perfect reason for getting rid of her, but it’s better than nothing, and obviously, it tells us a lot about her.

Liz, though, didn’t like it, and thus, she has been getting into fights with McCarthy over that and some other stuff.

She also did other nasty things, which Axios didn’t seem to notice were the kind of mean-spirited things that get people’s attention.

She fought with Rep. Steve Scalise of Louisiana for roughly the same stuff. 

And she got downright petty with Rep. Jim Banks, chair of the House Republican Study Committee, calling him a “neo-Marxist.”


Most Americans Don’t Want Voting To Be Harder; Democrats And Gop See Political Fortunes At Stake

July 19, 2021 / 5:00 PM / CBS News

CBS News poll on voting laws09:22

As a host of states try to change their voting rules, most Americans say they’d prefer the voting process to be left alone — or made easier. Relatively few want it to be harder after an election that saw record turnout.


With the fight over voting attracting national attention, partisans say it’s a high-stakes battle that affects their electoral fortunes. Republicans think Democrats will do better in elections if voting becomes easier. At the same time, Democrats think they’ll suffer if it becomes harder to vote, and they believe many of their constituent groups, including Hispanic and Black Americans, would lose political power.

‘the Beast Is Growing’: Republicans Follow A Winning At All Costs Strategy Into The Midterms

Much remains uncertain about the midterm elections more than a year away — including the congressional districts themselves, thanks to the delayed redistricting process. The Senate, meanwhile, looks like more of a toss-up.

House Democrats think voters will reward them for advancing President Joe Biden’s generally popular agenda, which involves showering infrastructure money on virtually every district in the country and sending checks directly to millions of parents. And they think voters will punish Republicans for their rhetoric about the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 election.


“Democrats are delivering results, bringing back the economy, getting people back to work, passing the largest middle-class tax cut in history, while Republicans are engaged in frankly violent conspiracy theory rhetoric around lies in service of Donald Trump,” said Tim Persico, executive director of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

But the challenges Democrats face are real and numerous.

They knew they would face a tough 2022 immediately after 2020, when massive, unexpected GOP gains whittled the Democratic majority to just a handful of seats.

“House Republicans are in a great position to retake the majority,” said Rep. Tom Emmer, R-Minn., who chairs the National Republican Congressional Committee, “but we are taking nothing for granted.”

His rural district had been trending Republican for years. Kind won re-election last year by just about 10,000 votes.


Renewable Energy And Health Care Among The Sectors That Could Get Shakeup Due To Midterms

Nunes: If Russia Favors Republicans, Why Did They Let ...

The 2022 midterm elections are already affecting Washington, and the results could shake up sectors such as renewable energy, health care and finance.

As Democrats in Washington work to deliver on infrastructure spending and other priorities, they’re trying to make progress in large part because of a key event that’s still more than a year away.

That event is the midterm elections on Nov. 8, 2022, when Republicans will aim to take back control of the House and Senate and become a more powerful check on the priorities of President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats.

“What leaders are thinking about, particularly since we have unified party control, is that these midterm elections are inevitably a referendum on the governing party,” said Sarah Binder, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution and a professor of political science at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.


“In that sense, shrinking time coupled with ‘What is it that Democrats want to run on?’ — it adds pressure on Democrats to get their priorities through the door.”

Time is growing short, Binder said, because party leaders often avoid making their members vote on tough issues in the same calendar year as an election, since that can hurt incumbents in tight races. “Party leaders often think primarily about what they can get done in the first year of a Congress, as opposed to counting on the second year,” she said.

Sectors that could win or lose
Year
Races worth watching

List Of United States Presidential Elections In Which The Winner Lost The Popular Vote

United States presidential elections in which the winner lost the popular vote
Year
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Comparison of the presidential elections of 1824, 1876, 1888, 2000, and 2016, in which the Electoral College winners lost the popular vote.

There have been five United States presidential elections in which the successful presidential candidate did not receive a plurality of the popular vote, including the 1824 election, which was the first U.S. presidential election where the popular vote was recorded. In these cases, the successful candidate secured less of the national popular vote than another candidate who received more votes, either a majority, more than half the vote, or a plurality of the vote.


In the U.S. presidential election system, instead of the nationwide popular vote determining the outcome of the election, the president of the United States is determined by votes cast by electors of the Electoral College. Alternatively, if no candidate receives an absolute majority of electoral votes, the election is determined by the House of Representatives. These procedures are governed by the Twelfth Amendment to the United States Constitution. It is important to note that the U.S. Constitution does not require states to hold a popular vote, however, since 1880, electors in every state have been chosen based on a popular election held on Election Day.

Why Republicans Lost: Analysis And Lessons From The 2012 Presidential Election

It is hard to make the argument for one glaring reason that caused Republicans to lose the White House in 2012. It appears to be a more complex combination of circumstances that came together to produce a victory for President Obama. Here is one man’s perspective on what went wrong for conservatives and what the left did correctly.


  • Moderate Republicans are losing Republicans. Governor Romney is a decent and honorable family man with great business and leadership experience. But the reality is Mitt Romney was a very flawed candidate from the outset. He was a Northeastern liberal and arguably the most liberal republican ever nominated for President by the Republican Party. The history of Presidential elections demonstrates a pattern of moderate Republicans losing: Goldwater, Bush I, Dole, McCain, and Romney. In my opinion Romney was the GOP candidate most vulnerable to defeat by Obama; who he was and what he stood for on his voting record is the single most significant factor in the Republican defeat.  As was commonly stated in the 2008 McCain/Obama election, conservatives did not lose the election.  Conservatives were just not on the ballot.
  • How Did The Gop Gain In The House While Trump Lost Its Actually Pretty Simple

    One of the increasingly prevalent arguments spun by President Trump and his allies when it comes to supposed voter fraud in the 2020 election is this: Republicans had, by and large, a pretty good election below the presidential level. They gained significant ground in the House and probably held the Senate — as long as they don’t lose both Georgia runoffs. So how on earth did Trump lose?

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    The answer is actually pretty simple: Our elections increasingly look more like parliamentary ones, and given that, the results make a ton of sense.

    New data from the election-reform group FairVote sheds some light on how the battle for the House played out. The big takeaway: Our politics are increasingly less about people and incumbents and more about party. We’ve been talking about increased polarization for many years, but the 2020 election really drove it home. The results for Congress affirm the fact that Republicans writ large lost the election, even though it might have been closer than many expected.

    FairVote has for years studied an issue called “incumbency bump” — i.e., how much an incumbent benefits relative to other members of their party thanks to already being in office. The conventional wisdom on incumbency is that it’s a big advantage — that people might not like a politician’s party or Congress as a whole, but if they know that politician well or have any doubts, they’ll revert to supporting the person in the seat.

    Georgia District Attorney Is Investigating Trump’s Call To Overturn Election

    The bill would also put new limits on weekend early voting, which would complicate efforts to allow voting on the Sunday just before an election. “Sunday voting,” says Fowler, “is when Black churches in Georgia typically host a ‘Souls to the Polls’ event and where we statistically see the highest Black turnout during early voting.”

    Another bill, SB 67, would strengthen ID requirements when requesting an absentee ballot. The sponsor, state Sen. Larry Walker, argues that 97% of voters have the necessary identification; he told NPR it’s a basic reform as mail voting expands.

    But Democratic Sen. David Lucas said some voters would be disenfranchised, and in a tearful speech on the Senate floor, he told his Republican colleagues: “Every one of these election bills is the election didn’t turn out the way you wanted, and you want to perpetuate the lie that Trump told.”

    A promised follow-up to 2020

    Even as Trump was attempting to overturn the election last year, his allies said they would use his false claims to shape future elections.

    Mail-in balloting is a nightmare for us,” Sen. Lindsey Graham told Fox News on Nov. 8, referring to a form of voting that had been used securely with little controversy for years but was used more often by Democrats in 2020. Graham said that without changes, “we’re never going to win again presidentially.”

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    A divide among Republicans

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    On Republicans and democracy

    Arizona Election Official Reacts To ‘check Your Six’ Threat From Republican

    There was an exchange Thursday between Fox News’ John Roberts and Texas Rep. Kevin Brady that is remarkably telling about just how lost the Republican Party is at the moment.

    Roberts: “President Donald Trump says the ‘Big Lie’ was the results of the 2020 election. Liz Cheney says, no, the ‘Big Lie’ was suggesting that the 2020 election was stolen. Between the two of them, who is right?”Brady: “I’ll leave that dispute to them.”alreadyhe is retiring

    In each episode of his weekly YouTube show, Chris Cillizza will delve a little deeper into the surreal world of politics. Click to subscribe!

    The Point: Political courage is in short supply among Republican elected officials these days. Very short supply.

    Why Did The Republicans Perform So Well In The Us Congressional Elections

    Three factors played a part: preconceptions, policy and polls.

     

    One of the many ironies of Republican support for President Donald Trump’s efforts to challenge the outcome of the 2020 election is that the Republican Party, save the president himself, actually did very well in it. Unless the Democrats manage to win both runoffs in the special election early in January, Republicans will keep the Senate. While Democrats held on to their majority in the House, the margin of that majority has shrunk, leaving the party to worry about 2022 already.

    This was unexpected: Joe Biden was polling ahead, yes, but so were Democrats in many congressional races. Yet relative Republican success followed. The Republican Senator Susan Collins, who was expected to lose her Maine seat, not only won, but won quite comfortably. In Iowa, almost all polls besides the state’s own Des Moines Register showed a tight presidential race. In fact, not only did Trump win the state, but the Republican Senator Joni Ernst kept her seat and the Democratic Representative Abby Finkenauer lost hers.

    All of which raises the question: what went right for Republicans and wrong for Democrats?

     

    There are three possible answers: preconceptions, policy and polls.

    There’s a third possibility, which is that polls were wide off the mark about support for Trump, and for the Republicans more generally.

    The Next 2020 Election Fight Convincing Trump’s Supporters That He Lost

    In Alaska, incumbent Republican Dan Sullivan’s double-digit margin could tighten with mail-in votes still out and only 74% of the votes in as of Wednesday, so put an asterisk next to that one, but that was supposed to be a 3-point race.

    There is going to be a reckoning — again — within the polling industry. Survey researchers are already combing their numbers for patterns of what went wrong.

    Some theories at this point include:

    Early voting: Surveys having too many people in their samples saying they would vote early. The pollsters had a tough time adjusting for that, because there’s no historical trend to go by.

    Democratic overresponse: Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents seem to have been more willing to talk to pollsters, and pro-Trump Republicans just didn’t want to participate as much because of their deep distrust of and disdain for the polls and the media.

    This is not the idea of a “shy” Trump voter. While survey researchers — Democratic, Republican and nonpartisan — all found people, especially women, less willing to say they are Trump supporters to their friends and families, there is little evidence they aren’t telling pollsters they support the president.

    The bigger problem may be Trump supporters simply not wanting to participate at all. That would seem to make sense, considering the consistent underestimation of Republican vote, especially in Republican-leaning states.

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    Number Of Electoral Votes Changed As The Result Of Trump’s Effort: 0

    GOP Official Blames Trump (via MSNBC) For Republicans Who ...

    Despite all the lawsuits, recounts and false voter fraud allegations, the Electoral College on Dec. 14 elected Biden the next president by a margin of 306 to 232 – marking no change in the electoral outcome. 

    Biden finished with a record 81,281,502 votes nationally, defeating Trump in the popular vote by a sizable 7 million votes.

    With 51.3% of the national popular vote, Biden won with the highest share of the vote for a challenger of an incumbent president since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932. Trump won 46.8% of the vote nationally.

    Ron Faucheux: Can Republicans Escape The Trap Being Set By Democrats

    President Joe Biden addresses a joint session of Congress as Vice President Kamala Harris, left, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., look on. That all three positions are held by Democrats is a GOP legacy from Donald Trump.

    Here’s the stark reality: If Republicans want to win back Congress in 2022 and the White House in 2024, they must begin now disconnecting their party from Donald Trump’s domination.

    This doesn’t mean they must denounce the former president — that won’t happen in any case, he’s too popular with Republican voters. But it does mean quietly removing the party from under his thumb.

    If the midterm election next year is about litigating Trump’s grievances, Republicans lose. If it is about policy contrasts that work to their advantage, Republicans win. This conclusion is based on simple math, the kind where one plus one equals two.

    Republicans have felt an obligation to Donald Trump for beating Hillary Clinton, attacking Democrats and appointing hundreds of conservative judges. In return, GOP officials and rank-and-file voters stuck with Trump throughout his four tumultuous years in office and his bumpy reelection campaign.

    Here’s the bottom line: The Republican Party has paid its debt to Trump and must now move beyond the 2020 election — which it lost — and concentrate on 2022 and 2024, elections it can win.

    Message distractions can be deadly, and Donald Trump is a message distraction.

    Here’s Why The Democrats Got Crushedand Why 2016 Won’t Be A Cakewalk

    Barack Obama has been elected president twice, but his party has now gotten drubbed in the two midterm elections held during his presidency. He will face a Republican Senate and House. Because the Democrats will be able to block Republican initiatives in the Senate with forty votes, and because, if necessary, Obama can exercise a veto, he can prevent the evisceration of the Affordable Care Act and the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill, but he and the Democrats won’t be able to pass any initiatives of their own; and he will have a very difficult time getting his nominations and appointments confirmed. Gridlock? That’s probably too mild a description of what America has in store over the next two years.

    Did it have to happen—particularly given that in repudiating the president and the Democrats, voters were reacting to the palsied state of Washington politics? A president’s party rarely does well in midterm elections, and that’s been particularly true in a president’s second term. And the country has still not fully recovered from the Great Recession. Employment is up, but not wages, and that may have hurt the Democrats. But midterm losses don’t have to be as severe as those that the Democrats have suffered under Obama. In 1998, resident Clinton and the Democrats actually added five seats in the House, broke even in the Senate, and won a governorship. Obama himself has to take some blame and his Republican opponents some credit for what happened yesterday.

    The Midterm Factor

    Surprise Trump Lost Arizona Because So Many Gop Voters Shunned Him

    Gage Skidmore

    This article was produced by Voting Booth, a project of the Independent Media Institute.

    About 75,000 Republican-leaning voters in Arizona’s two most populous counties did not vote to re-elect President Donald Trump in the 2020 election, according to an analysis of every vote cast by a longtime Arizona Republican Party election observer and election technologists familiar with vote-counting data.

    The analysis from Maricopa and Pima Counties underscored that the Arizona state Senate’s ongoing audit of 2.1 million ballots from Maricopa County’s November 2020 election was based on a false premise—that Democrats stole Arizona’s election when Trump lost statewide to Joe Biden by 10,457 votes.

    “I am continuing my analysis of why Trump lost in Arizona,” Benny White, a former military and commercial pilot who has been a Republican election observer for years in Pima County and was part of the research team, said in a May 10 Facebook post. “Bottom line: Republicans and non-partisans who voted for other Republicans on the ballot did not vote for Trump, some voted for Biden and some simply did not cast an effective vote for President.”

    Maricopa County and Pima County accounted for 76 percent of Arizona’s 2020 presidential election ballots.

    Trump Election Lawsuits Have Mostly Failed Here’s What They Tried

    In the Senate, Democrats have so far gained one seat, but they need three with a Biden win to take over the chamber. Democrats still have a chance of doing that with two runoff elections in Georgia. That’s seen as possible, but not likely.

    It wasn’t expected to be this way. Democrats had put lots of Senate races in play, ones not expected to go their way at the beginning of the 2020 cycle, places like Kansas and Montana.

    To be sure, many of the Senate races were expected to be close, perhaps with razor-thin margins, and a Democrat-controlled Senate was never an assured outcome. But when you look at the average of the polls in the last week of the election versus the ultimate result, it’s clear that Republicans were underrepresented all across the country.

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    All of these races, except Colorado and Alabama, were within single digits in the polls. Colorado, a state Biden won handily, wound up pretty close to the average. Alabama, a state Trump won by a lot, was an even bigger blowout than expected.

    Many of the supposedly tightest races didn’t wind up tight at all. Maine is perhaps the most stunning one. Biden won the state by 9 percentage points, but Republican incumbent Susan Collins won reelection by 9 points.

    Not only was Collins down by 4 points heading into Election Day in an average of the polls in the week before the election, but she led in just one poll in all of 2020. And that was back in July. That’s one poll out of almost three dozen.

    Gop Warns Hr 1 Could Be ‘absolutely Devastating For Republicans’

    Some openly fret that broader access to voting will harm the party’s chances.

    DNC Chair Jaime Harrison: ‘Democrats are unified’

    In the aftermath of the GOP’s assault on the integrity of the 2020 presidential election and amid a torrent of Republican measures aimed at restricting voting rights in the name of security, Democrats are pushing for a far-reaching solution to counter attempts at narrowing access to the ballot box.

    H.R. 1, known as the For the People Act, seeks to abolish hurdles to voting, reform the role of money in politics and tighten federal ethics rules. Among the key tenets of the bill to overhaul the nation’s election system: allowing for no-excuse mail voting, at least 15 days of early voting, automatic voter registration and restoring voting rights to felons who have completed their prison sentences.

    Democrats’ comprehensive bill passed the House — for the second time — nearly along party lines earlier this month and was introduced in the Senate this week. But it faces steep opposition from the GOP over its potential implications for future elections, including the 2022 midterms, with some Republicans openly fretting that broader access to voting will harm the party’s chances.

    MORE: House Democrats pass election reforms as GOP moves to change voting laws

    And some Republican lawmakers, officials and strategists go even further, signaling the GOP’s opposition to such extensive electoral reforms is based on the fear it will cause them to lose elections.

    Why Republicans Are Moving To Fix Elections That Weren’t Broken

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    People wait in line on the first day of early voting for the 2020 general election on Oct. 12 in Atlanta.

    Republican-led legislatures in dozens of states are moving to change election laws in ways that could make it harder to vote.

    Many proposals explicitly respond to the 2020 election: Lawmakers cite public concerns about election security — concerns generated by disinformation that then-President Donald Trump spread while trying to overturn the election.

    The Brennan Center, a nonprofit that tracks voting laws, says that 43 states — including key swing states — are considering 253 bills that would raise barriers to voting, for example by reducing early voting days or limiting access to voting by mail. Lawmakers in a different set of 43 states have proposed expanding voter access, but Republicans have prioritized new security requirements and shorter voting periods.

    In Georgia, which President Biden won by nearly 12,000 votes, legislators are considering multiple bills to restrict voting. The most significant, House Bill 531, is before a committee chaired by Republican Rep. Barry Fleming. He said Democrat Stacey Abrams campaigned to expand voter access after losing a governor’s race in 2018, and now Republicans want their own changes. The bill is “an attempt to restore the confidence of our public,” he said, because “there has been controversy regarding our election system.”

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    Republicans Fear Trump Will Lead To A Lost Generation Of Talent

    The 45th president has brought new voices and voters to the party, but he’s driven them out too. Insiders fear the repercussions.

    06/01/2021 04:30 AM EDT

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    As Donald Trump ponders another presidential bid, top Republicans have grown fearful about what they’re calling the party’s “lost generation.”

    In conversations with more than 20 lawmakers, ex-lawmakers, top advisers and aides, a common concern has emerged — that a host of national and statewide Republicans are either leaving office or may not choose to pursue it for fear that they can’t survive politically in the current GOP. The worry, these Republicans say, is that the party is embracing personality over policy, and that it is short sighted to align with Trump, who lost the general election and continues to alienate a large swath of the voting public with his grievances and false claims that the 2020 election was stolen.

    Trump has driven sitting GOP lawmakers and political aspirants into early retirements ever since he burst onto the scene. But there was hope that things would change after his election loss. Instead, his influence on the GOP appears to be as solid as ever and the impact of those early shockwaves remain visible. When asked, for instance, if he feared the 45th president was causing a talent drain from the GOP ranks, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — perhaps inadvertently — offered a personal demonstration of the case.

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    Number Of Elections Trump Has Claimed Were Rigged: At Least 6

    If voters are still unhappy, why did GOP lose the election ...

    This is not the first time Trump has declared an election had been “rigged” or “stolen.” 

    On Election Day in 2012, when President Barack Obama defeated his Republican challenger Mitt Romney, Trump tweeted that there were “reports of voting machines switching Romney votes to Obama.”

    “Pay close attention to the machines, don’t let your vote be stolen,” he said. 

    Four years later, when Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, defeated Trump in the Iowa caucuses, Trump tweeted, “Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it. That is why all of the polls were so wrong and why he got far more votes than anticipated. Bad!”

    Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it. That is why all of the polls were so wrong and why he got far more votes than anticipated. Bad!

    — Donald J. Trump February 3, 2016

    Trump also said the 2016 Democratic primary was “rigged” against Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and, as in 2020, he declared the 2016 general election race was “rigged” against him before it even took place. Even after winning the election and being sworn in as president, Trump baselessly insisted more than 3 million illegal votes were cast against him. A White House commission Trump created to investigate election fraud disbanded without finding any evidence to support the president’s claims. 

    Just out — in Arizona, SIGNATURES DON’T MATCH. Electoral corruption – Call for a new Election? We must protect our Democracy!

    — Donald J. Trump November 9, 2018

    Number Of Times The Us Supreme Court Sided Against Trump: 2

    The U.S. Supreme Court twice refused to take up Trump-endorsed lawsuits that sought to overturn the results of the Nov. 3 election.

    In a one-sentence denial, the Supreme Court on Dec. 8 rejected a request from Pennsylvania Republicans that sought to overturn Biden’s win in the state. The challenge, led Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., claimed that the Republican-led state legislature’s expansion of absentee voting violated the state’s constitution.

    Three days later, the Supreme Court refused to let Texas challenge the election results in four battleground states critical to Trump’s defeat. The court said Texas did not demonstrate “a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections.”

    Why Did House Democrats Underperform Compared To Joe Biden

    The results of the 2020 elections pose several puzzles, one of which is the gap between Joe Biden’s handsome victory in the presidential race and the Democrats’ disappointing performance in the House of Representatives. Biden enjoyed an edge of 7.1 million votes over President Trump, while the Democrats suffered a loss of 13 seats in the House, reducing their margin from 36 to just 10.

    BillGalston

    Turnout in the 2018 mid-term election reached its highest level in more than a century. Democrats were fervently opposed to the Trump administration and turned out in droves. Compared to its performance in 2016, the party’s total House vote fell by only 2%. Without Donald Trump at the head of the ticket, Republican voters were much less enthusiastic, and the total House vote for Republican candidates fell by nearly 20% from 2016. Democratic candidates received almost 10 million more votes than Republican candidates, a margin of 8.6%, the highest ever for a party that was previously in the minority. It was, in short, a spectacular year for House Democrats.

    To understand the difference this Democratic disadvantage can make, compare the 2020 presidential and House results in five critical swing states.

    Table 1: Presidential versus House results

    Arizona


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