Surprisingly, the NY Times doesn’t seem to connect the dots on all these Republican losses in what should have been easily winnable races
Turnout by Republicans Was Great. It’s Just That Many of Them Didn’t Vote for Republicans.
After yet another disappointing showing for Republicans in Georgia’s Senate runoff on Tuesday, some conservatives — like Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich and Kevin McCarthy — have begun to point to a surprising culprit: a failure to take advantage of early voting.
The theory seems to be that Republicans are losing because early voting is giving Democrats a turnout edge. It follows a similar conversation after the midterm elections, when a chorus of conservatives said Republicans needed to start encouraging mail voting.
But as more data becomes available on turnout in this year’s election, it is quite clear that turnout was not the main problem facing Republicans.
In state after state, the final turnout data shows that registered Republicans turned out at a higher rate — and in some places a much higher rate — than registered Democrats, including in many of the states where Republicans were dealt some of their most embarrassing losses.
Instead, high-profile Republicans like Herschel Walker in Georgia or Blake Masters in Arizona lost because Republican-leaning voters decided to cast ballots for Democrats, even as they voted for Republican candidates for U.S. House or other down-ballot races in their states.
Kemp won the Governor’s race by 8 points over Abrams, while Walker lost the runoff by 2.8. So, so, so many polls showed Republicans with comfortable leads in certain races, yet, still lost. It can’t all be blamed on cheating by Democrats, can it?
Take Maricopa County in Arizona. It’s home to Phoenix and around 70% of the state’s voters. Some Republicans say — without any clear evidence — they faltered in Arizona because some Maricopa voters were unable to cast ballots at the polls on Election Day, but the final turnout data shows that 75% of registered Republicans turned out, compared with 69% of Democrats. That was enough to yield an electorate in which registered Republicans outnumbered Democrats by 9 percentage points. Yet Republicans like Masters and Kari Lake lost their races for Senate and governor.
Or consider Clark County in Nevada. There, 67% of Republicans voted, compared with 57% of Democrats, implying that Republicans probably outnumbered Democrats statewide. Yet the Democrat — Catherine Cortez Masto — prevailed in the Senate while Republicans won the governorship and also won the most votes for the House.
In the key Senate states mentioned in this article, Republican House candidates received more votes than Democratic ones. The final Times/Siena polls showed that voters in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada preferred Republican control of the Senate.
It’s fair to say voters in these key states probably preferred Republican control of government, in no small part because more Republicans showed up to vote. They just didn’t find Republican candidates they wanted to support at the top of the ticket.
In other words, most of these are ones that Trump was pushing hard, making those candidates toxic, even if those candidates supported positions which those squishy Republicans, and #NeverTrump Republicans, supported, because these people are investing too much emotion into their choices, rather than thought. They’re forgetting that most politicians are really not the best of people. You wouldn’t trust them around your favorite stuff. Some of the candidates were not great, like Walker and Ozz. Some where. But, some Republican voters either flipped to vote Democrat, voted for someone else, or just left that part of the ballot blank. This will not end well if Trump wins the primaries. Again, this is not me being #NeverTrump, not Trump Derangement Syndrome, it’s about electability.
Read: Election Data Shows Lots Of Republicans Flipped For Certain Races »