| Dear Readers: Last night, the Center for Politics hosted a wide-ranging discussion on polling with Glen Bolger of Public Opinion Strategies, Henry Fernandez of the African American Research Collaborative, Courtney Kennedy of the Pew Research Center, and Kyle Kondik of Sabato’s Crystal Ball. If you missed it, we just posted the video here on our YouTube channel, UVACFP.
We have a few rating changes to discuss today. One of these changes, shifting North Carolina’s gubernatorial race from Leans Democratic to Likely Democratic, we announced last Thursday on Twitter/X following the release of a bombshell report about Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R), the embattled Republican nominee in that race. But first, let’s talk about the single electoral vote in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District and the unusual Senate race unfolding in that state. — The Editors |
Table 1: Crystal Ball Electoral College rating change
Table 2: Crystal Ball Senate rating change
Table 3: Crystal Ball Gubernatorial rating change
NE-2 and Nebraska Senate
In most iterations of Electoral College math, a single electoral vote does not really mean anything. But it’s not hard to come up with scenarios in which a single electoral vote could mean… everything. Hence the intense recent focus on the electoral vote in Nebraska’s 2nd Congressional District, which under its current lines voted for Joe Biden by about 6 points in 2020.
When Biden was still seeking reelection, his polling numbers were generally weak in a trio of key states he carried in 2020: Arizona and Nevada out west, and Georgia in the southeast. Biden still had a path to victory, but it involved him retaining every other state and district he won in 2020 in order to get to exactly 270 electoral votes. That included, crucially, the single electoral vote in NE-2. This scenario is still in play for Kamala Harris—consider it the “Northern Route,” with Harris retaining the Blue Wall states of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin while losing those southern/western battlegrounds (that would also involve Donald Trump holding North Carolina, his closest win in 2020). It is also still the case that Harris, like Biden, is polling a bit better in the Industrial North states than in the Sun Belt ones, although all of the 7 presidential Toss-ups are close in polling. Harris has small leads in the northern states and Nevada, while Trump has small leads in Arizona, Georgia, and North Carolina, per Nate Silver’s Silver Bulletin polling averages.
National Republicans have been trying to close this Northern route by prevailing upon the state’s technically nonpartisan but effectively Republican-controlled unicameral state legislature to change the way Nebraska allocates electoral votes, moving to the winner-take-all system employed by every other state but Maine. The effort seemed to pick up late last week, but Republicans remained shy of the filibuster-proof two-thirds majority they needed to change the system in a potential special session. On Monday, state Sen. Mike McDonnell, a former Democrat who switched to the Republicans recently, seemed to end this effort by saying he would not support changing the Nebraska system. Gov. Jim Pillen (R-NE), who had been pushing for the change, released a statement Tuesday saying that he will not call a special session before the election to make this change.
McDonnell, who is term-limited in the legislature, is sometimes mentioned as a possible candidate in the Omaha mayoral race next year and does not appear to want to disempower a municipality he may eventually seek to lead (this despite Democrats pushing McDonnell into the arms of the Republicans by censuring him following McDonnell’s support of some socially conservative legislation). The Omaha mayoralty is a technically nonpartisan office that uses a first-round all-party primary with the top-two finishers advancing to a general election. Jean Stothert, a Republican, is the current mayor and is planning to seek a fourth term. We have heard that leaders in Omaha, predictably, were furious about the talk of a switch to winner-take-all, given the money and attention that comes with being seen as a presidential battleground.
There may have been more smoke than fire regarding this late effort. Ryan Horn, an Omaha-based GOP consultant, told us that he didn’t think this change was particularly close to happening despite the late drama, noting that efforts earlier in the year to make this change fizzled (including a special legislative session over the summer that could hypothetically have dealt with winner-take-all but did not). This may be something to watch in the future—McDonnell himself supports a future statewide vote on winner-take-all—but the effort seems dead for 2024.
So we are now comfortable pushing this single electoral vote from Leans Democratic to Likely Democratic. The district, which has a higher-than-average four-year college attainment rate, seems unlikely to swing strongly toward Republicans in an election where the demographic fault lines appear to be fairly similar to 2016 and 2020. Polling has consistently shown Harris leading by a margin commensurate with Biden’s 2020 margin (perhaps slightly less), and the Harris campaign has been making much more of an effort to compete for the district than Republicans have. The district is the kind of place where Republicans have been having trouble in recent years, and it’s really driven primarily by Omaha.
Back in 2008, Barack Obama carried NE-2’s single electoral vote, and under the current lines his margin there would have been about 2 points. Back then, Obama won the city of Omaha by 7 points. Meanwhile, the rest of the district backed John McCain by about 20 points. But in 2020, Biden carried the district by a little over 6 points, and by 17 points in Omaha, The rest of the district backed Trump by roughly the same margin it had backed McCain, although there has been change throughout it. Map 1 compares the 2008 presidential results in NE-2 to the 2020 results—places in blue got more Democratic between the two elections, while places in red got more Republican. It’s a familiar story, with the more rural components getting redder and the more urban/suburban places getting bluer; in this particular district, the changes net out to a Democratic gain.
Map 1: 2008 vs. 2020 in NE-2
This rating change in NE-2 also means that we currently have zero electoral votes rated in the Leans category on either side—there are 7 Toss-ups, and then everything else is either Likely or Safe.
Meanwhile, and as we noted in our House update last week, NE-2’s House member, Rep. Don Bacon (R), is still in a Toss-up race, but he may very well be behind in his rematch with state Sen. Tony Vargas (D). One wonders if the seeming death of the winner-take-all plan is helpful to Bacon—had it gone forward, voters in Omaha may have been outraged, and with their ability to truly impact the presidential race removed, perhaps they would have been even more inclined to vote out their Republican House member.
Staying in Nebraska, another change we are making today is in the state’s “regular” Senate election, where two-term Sen. Deb Fischer (R) has drawn a credible independent opponent in steamfitter and former labor union leader Dan Osborn. Before the May primary, Osborn seemed to imply that he’d be the de facto Democrat in the race, so the state Democratic party did not run their own candidate. After the primary, though, he announced that he would not seek their formal support. Despite some feelings of being strung along, Democrats seem to have buried the hatchet to some degree—state Democratic chairwoman Jane Kleeb openly supports him, for instance. Alex Roarty of NOTUS reported earlier this week that “behind the scenes, Democrats and their allies are doing plenty to try to get him elected in the unexpectedly competitive Senate race.”
Osborn has generally polled competitively with Fischer, one of the most anonymous sitting senators, although both candidates have struggled to break out of the low-40s. Our thinking has been that, in a red state, Fischer probably just has more room to grow as undecideds “come home.” That said, a fresh SurveyUSA internal poll from the Osborn campaign gives him a 45%-44% lead over Fischer—a close result, but it suggests the possibility that Osborn’s ceiling may be higher than what previous polls indicated, even as Fischer should ultimately have a much better chance of gobbling up remaining undecideds (and there’s also the caveat that this poll was sponsored by the Osborn campaign despite it being produced by a pollster that polls for many nonpartisan outlets).
In that poll, Sen. Pete Ricketts (R) leads his Democratic opponent 53%-35% in the special Senate election. This delta matches nicely with a poll from late August, sponsored by the election analysis site Split Ticket and done by the same pollster, that showed Fischer running markedly behind Ricketts: in their poll, the former led 39%-38% while the latter was up 50%-33%. Ricketts, who served 8 years as governor before his appointment to the Senate last year, is probably just better established with the electorate but we found the persistent gap in the Republicans’ vote shares notable. This may also have something to do with the novelty of Fischer facing an independent as opposed to an actual Democrat (even though Republicans of course assert that Osborn is basically just a Democrat disguised as an independent). Independents running effectively in place of a Democrat in red states recently, such as Greg Orman in neighboring Kansas in 2014, can make a race more interesting although they still came up well short of winning.
There are signs of the race heating up: Heartland Resurgence, a Republican Super PAC, recently took to the air with a $480,000 buy hitting Osborn. While Osborn himself has raised $1.6 million as of last quarter—and outside groups have spent about that same amount supporting him—Heartland Resurgence has become the first outside group to hit Osborn. Still, neither of the two major Democratic outside spenders—the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Senate Majority PAC—have spent in Nebraska, and with their prospects in Montana seeming increasingly shaky, it seems they are looking more towards Florida or Texas as their potential majority-saving seats. But this also might be the type of situation where more outside play could work against Osborn by turning the race into something more nationalized.
As with former Gov. Larry Hogan’s (R) Senate campaign in Maryland, we feel like we’ve “seen this movie before.” The last several cycles of Senate races have shown that, while well-funded independents and popular governors of the non-dominant party usually come closer to winning in lopsidedly partisan races than generic candidates of the minority party, partisan gravity is still tough to overcome. But while we still view Fischer as a clear favorite, we don’t think she’s as well-positioned as Ricketts, or even Trump, in the state. We are acknowledging that by moving her race from Safe Republican to Likely Republican—Fischer’s chances of winning are still very good, but this change is our way of flagging that this is not a typical, sleepy “Safe” race.
Following up on North Carolina
As we noted earlier, last week we made one of those “emergency” rating changes that we sometimes find ourselves making as breaking campaign developments warrant. Though it has already become a huge national story by this point, Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson, the Republican nominee in North Carolina’s open-seat gubernatorial race, has been the “main character” in state politics since late last week—and not in a positive way.
Last Thursday, for much of the day, social media—or at least its political sphere—seemed captivated with rumors of a forthcoming story that would supposedly be damaging to Robinson’s campaign. By this point, Robinson was already falling behind against state Attorney General Josh Stein (D) and had given Stein’s campaign no shortage of oppo research to work with—so our thinking was that, given Robinson’s background, whatever came out against him would have to be pretty damning to move the needle much further to Democrats.
The article that eventually materialized was a thoroughly detailed report from CNN that linked outrageous comments on an X-rated forum to Robinson. Surely you’ve heard them by now—and we’re going to refrain from going further so as not to set off your email’s spam filter. Shortly after the CNN story published, another story, from Politico, found that Robinson’s email address was registered on Ashley Madison, a site for those looking to have affairs. Publicly, Robinson has questioned the credibility of those recent reports, although, curiously, the comments that CNN attributed to his account on the X-rated forum have since been deleted.
Not surprisingly, at the national level, Democrats have not wasted much time in trying to link Robinson to Trump. Democrats would probably like Robinson’s name to become a stand-in for the MAGA brand much in the same way then-Senate candidate Rep. Todd Akin (R, MO-2), with his “legitimate rape” comment, put Republicans on the defensive in states outside of Missouri in 2012. Though Trump did endorse Robinson, and has spoken favorably of him on multiple occasions, one of the, perhaps, overlooked details from the recent Robinson news deluge was that he was reportedly no longer welcome at Trump’s rallies. This race represents a great test case for the suggestion that a down-ballot race could have implications on the top of the ticket, but we want to see it before we believe it. More broadly, North Carolina has a long history of splitting its concurrent gubernatorial and presidential preferences—since 1992, Democrats have won 7 of 8 gubernatorial races even as Democrats have carried the state for president only once over that same timeframe.
In terms of the gubernatorial race itself, the most telling signal in all of the recent fallout was that the Republican Governors Association said that it would no longer be spending in North Carolina. According to AdImpact Politics, Stein, who was already dominating the airwaves, will continue, essentially, unchallenged.
Before last week, we had the race as Leans Democratic. While we don’t see an obvious path to victory for Robinson, given the fundamentally marginal nature of North Carolina, we were hesitant to shift the race all the way to Safe Democratic, although the spending discrepancy alone probably makes a legitimate case for that rating. So we see this race in much the same light as we see Washington’s state’s contest—on the “safer” end of Likely Democratic. But North Carolina’s persistent competitiveness holds us back from going all the way to Safe.