2020 Governor

KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE — Like every post-World War II president, Donald Trump witnessed a fall-off in his party’s numbers of U.S. Senate, U.S. House, gubernatorial, and state legislative seats during his presidency. That said, compared to recent presidents, the erosion on Trump’s watch was more modest than it was for his immediate predecessors. — One obvious difference is that Trump had only one term in office and escaped a “six-year-itch” election. The only other postwar president to escape the down-ballot curse relatively unscathed was George H.W. Bush, who was the most recent president before Trump to be ousted after one term. — Another factor may be today’s heightened partisan polarization, which makes states and districts less “swingy” than they have been in the past. Trump’s down-ballot impact For a defeated president, Donald Trump still seems to wield a great deal of power within the Republican Party. GOP candidates are still angling for his backing, and his decision whether to run for another term looms over the emerging 2024 Republican presidential field. It may or may not be wise going forward, from a strictly electoral standpoint, for Trump to remain as central to the GOP as he is. On

A Return to Normalcy? The 2020 Election That (Almost) Broke America — the University of Virginia Center for Politics’ new look at the 2020 presidential election and its consequences — is now available through UVA Bookstores, Indiebound, and other online booksellers. Edited by Crystal Ball editors Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik, and J. Miles Coleman, A Return to Normalcy? brings together what Booklist calls a “stellar coterie of reporters, pundits, and scholars” to “parse the 2020 election via a data-driven set of analytics displayed in useful charts and graphs, drawing conclusions that will satisfy hard-core political junkies and provide a solid foundation for everyone looking ahead to 2022 and 2024.” Tonight (Thursday, April 8) at 6:30 p.m. eastern, four of the book contributors will participate in a free virtual forum: “Taking Stock: The Societal Impact of the 2020 Election.” Business Insider‘s Grace Panetta will moderate. She wrote a chapter on the massive expansion of early and mail-in voting necessitated by the pandemic. In it, she notes how President Trump’s criticism of mail-in voting “represented a stark reversal for the GOP because it upended decades of Republican get-out-the-vote strategy — in the process baffling and upsetting numerous Republican candidates and operatives.

Dear Readers: We just posted a new Crystal Ball webinar on Friday afternoon, which you can watch at this direct link on YouTube. We discussed presidential concession speeches, our successful Electoral College projection, ticket-splitting (or lack thereof), what remains to be counted, and the looming Georgia Senate runoffs in January. Next Thursday’s Crystal Ball webinar will feature our 22nd annual American Democracy Conference. We’ll be hearing from New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie; CNN commentator Tara Setmayer; Republican strategist Chris LaCivita; and Democratic strategist John Lapp. That program will be posted at 2 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 12 on our YouTube channel, UVACFP. — The Editors One has to go back to 1884 to find a newly-elected Democratic president, Grover Cleveland, who won without his party also winning both chambers of Congress. If Joe Biden pulls out the presidential race — which seems likelier than not as we write this Wednesday afternoon, although much is uncertain — it seems likely he will be the next Democratic president to face at least one hostile chamber of Congress. Amidst the highest turnout in modern history, both Biden and President Donald Trump turned out their bases and battled in an epic duel that

Dear Readers: Due to popular demand, we decided to release a final pre-election Sabato’s Crystal Ball: America Votes webinar. We will be going through our picks for the election. We’ll also hear from Rob Griffin, the research director of the Democracy Fund Voter Study Group, about the demographic changes we are likely to see in the electorate tomorrow and into the future, as well as how we should interpret the exit polls tomorrow evening. We will be releasing this edition on our YouTube channel by 2 p.m. eastern. Just visit our YouTube channel, UVACFP, then (or whenever you want), and look for Episode 12 of the Sabato’s Crystal Ball: America Votes webinar. The direct link will also be available on the Center for Politics’ Twitter account (@center4politics) as soon as it is posted later today. — The Editors KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE — Our final Electoral College ratings show Joe Biden at 321 electoral votes and Donald Trump at 217. — Democrats are narrow favorites to capture a Senate majority, 50-48 with two Toss-ups — the two Georgia races, both of which we think are likely to go to runoffs. — We have Democrats netting 10 seats in the

Dear Readers: Join us today at 2 p.m. eastern for our latest episode of Sabato’s Crystal Ball: America Votes. Vice presidential expert Joel K. Goldstein will be joining us to react to the VP debate. If you have questions you would like us to answer about the debate, specific races, or other developments in the campaign, just email us at [email protected]. Additionally, an audio-only podcast version of the webinar is now available at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and other podcast providers. Just search “Sabato’s Crystal Ball” to find it. You can watch live at our YouTube channel (UVACFP), as well as at this direct YouTube link. — The Editors KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE — Recent rosy polling for Joe Biden in the presidential race may represent an artificial sugar high for the challenger. — But at this point, Donald Trump needs to be making up ground — not treading water or falling further behind. — 11 rating changes across four categories of races (president, Senate, House, and governor) almost exclusively benefit Democrats. Table 1: Crystal Ball Electoral College rating changes State Old Rating New Rating Arizona Toss-up Leans Democratic Georgia Leans Republican Toss-up New Hampshire Leans Democratic Likely Democratic Table

KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE — Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (D) seems to be rising in the Biden veepstakes. — Late Wednesday, Jon Ossoff (D) apparently captured the Democratic nomination to face Sen. David Perdue (R-GA), thus avoiding a runoff. — Primaries in South Carolina and West Virginia saw protest voting in some key races. Veepstakes and primaries — Thanks to everyone who reacted to last week’s breakdown of Joe Biden’s vice presidential options. After seeing your comments and following subsequent veepstakes developments over the weekend and earlier this week, it seems clear we did not include at least one prime contender: Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms (D). It is pretty obvious that she is emerging as a prime candidate to be selected, even though she lacks the formal, high-level elected experience that vice presidential nominees almost always possess (she’s never served in Congress or as a state governor). That said, she has earned a much higher profile in the midst of the ongoing national protests over police brutality, and some plugged-in people view her as a top contender for the VP slot. She will almost certainly be included in our next list of contenders, along with former national

KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE — Rep. Steve King’s (R, IA-4) primary loss makes his Republican-leaning seat easier for the GOP to defend. — There weren’t many other surprises from Tuesday night. Table 1: Crystal Ball House rating change Member/District Old Rating New Rating IA-4 Open (King, R) Likely Republican Safe Republican Notes from Tuesday’s primaries The first Tuesday in June of a presidential year is often a major political event — but for a lot of obvious reasons, this year’s early June primaries did not feature much drama or excitement. — The headline result, and the only one that is prompting us to make a rating change, is Rep. Steve King’s (R, IA-4) primary loss to state Sen. Randy Feenstra (R) in a Republican-leaning northwest Iowa district. King’s litany of racist comments had become impossible to ignore, and Republican leadership had stripped him of his committee assignments. This district voted for Donald Trump by a 60%-33% margin, and King’s narrow, three-point victory in 2018 had a lot to do with his abhorrent comments. With King out of the picture, Feenstra should be fine against 2018 nominee J.D. Scholten (D). We moved IA-4 from Likely Republican to Safe Republican on

Dear Readers: Please join Crystal Ball Editor in Chief Larry J. Sabato, Managing Editor Kyle Kondik, and Associate Editor J. Miles Coleman for a livestreamed assessment of the 2020 landscape from noon to 1 p.m. eastern today. The livestream will be available at: https://livestream.com/tavco/sabatoscrystalball and is free. We previously were asking those interested to sign up through Eventbrite, but in order to accommodate a larger audience we decided to provide a direct livestream link. During the livestream, we will spend a significant portion of the time answering reader questions. To submit a question, tweet using the hashtag #UVACB2020 or email us at [email protected]. Concise questions will have a better chance of getting answered. Today’s two-part Crystal Ball offers a wide-ranging assessment of the political state of play in the midst of the ongoing public health crisis. Part one describes a series of rating changes we’re making in the Electoral College and Senate. Part two makes some bigger-picture observations and describes parallels between the 1980 election and this one. — The Editors KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE — We are not dramatically revising our outlook for the presidential election, at least not yet. — That said, several rating changes in the Electoral

KEY POINTS FROM THIS ARTICLE — After just three years in the White House, Donald Trump is seeing a significant erosion of down-ballot seats held by his party. — This erosion puts Trump in good company — at least since World War II, presidents typically experience at least some erosion across his party’s numbers of U.S. Senate, U.S. House, gubernatorial, and state legislative seats. — The best news for Trump and Republicans is that they have held their own in the category of races that is arguably most politically important: the Senate. The down-ballot White House blues On Monday, President Donald Trump began his fourth year in office. His presidency has been unique in many ways, but he’s been like other presidents in at least one respect: His party has generally lost ground down the ballot since he took office. In recent decades, presidents have typically seen an erosion of their party’s seats in the U.S. Senate, U.S. House, the governorships, and the state legislatures. In fact, to one degree or another, every post-World War II two-term president has bled seats in these categories, and so have the two-term, same-party combinations of John F. Kennedy-Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon-Gerald