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Moneyball for Congressional and State Legislative Races - 2022 - Diary 1 [1]

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Date: 2022-08-19

North Carolina State Assembly, Raleigh (from Wikipedia)

In 2020 I tried to help fundraise for small-dollar donations by making a one-click donation button for various state legislative seats around the country, those which were deemed (by me and others, based on non-partisan analyses) as having the best chance of being competitive.

The DailyKos community (and others) raised $41,249.73 for this effort. I have since disabled the links. The largest link was a mistake, it turned out, because of the way credit card companies process transactions, some wouldn’t charge everything as a lump sum, and tried to process 350 charges at the same time. So instead, I’ll be doing the links on a state-by-state basis. Before we get to the links, please read up on some of my reasoning.

Due to the way politics seems to work in the US, many folks often donate to races in states where the registration advantage in the district for Republicans is almost insurmountable or donate to races where the Democratic candidate is sure to win.

I don’t think this is a good use of resources, and for the last few years, it’s become increasingly clear that there needs to be a substantial effort towards taking advantage of new and upcoming coalitions to re-take as many state legislatures as possible. With the looming Independent State Legislature supreme court case in 2023, which could cause a dramatic change in the amount of power the legislatures have to decide federal/all elections, they are proving to be even more important. On top of that, for every legislature we flip, we reduce the risk of a state “trifecta” of the republicans (also giving us a chance to make our own...) which prevents them from passing laws to further restrict abortion or change election laws to enact things which are/were legally unconstitutional but permissible under the current SCOTUS regime. See here for more info about the ISL theory.

Under the most extreme version of the ISL pushed by the GOP, electoral votes would be completely assigned by the state legislature, without taking into account the votes in the election. The consequence for 2024 (assuming an identical election as 2020) would as follows:

Electoral Votes and the Impact of the ISL Party EVs gained 2024 assuming 2020 states EVS earned under ISL assuming 2020 States D 303 228 R 235 310

This means that in 2024 even if the Democrats beat the Republicans exactly the same way as they did in 2020, by the exact same margin, if the most extreme ISL theory is adopted by SCOTUS, the Republican party will win, 310 EVs to 228. The Republican-led state legislatures could legally override the voters of those states and assign the EVs to their preferred candidate. Unfortunately, the ISL theory also means that this possibly becomes true forever, because the ISL also holds that these state legislatures can set their own election laws without any oversight (except those that are prohibited in the constitution or federal law) and make their own districts. This means that at the time of the result, any legislature entirely controlled by the GOP could always be controlled by the GOP, forever, due to the ability to gerrymander and discriminate against people (legally) on a partisan basis (SCOTUS does not seemingly identify political party as a protected class under the first amendment, for example). The result — in the most extreme case, it’s possible that for all intents and purposes, the entirety of the US federal government could become single-party, legally, forever, starting in January of 2024.

What can be done? If you’ve got the money, here’s what I would do:

1) Target those most-competitive legislatures where both houses are held by the Rs, to split as many as possible so they cannot auto-assign EVs (NC, AZ, PA, MI, NH)

2) Target the “reach” legislatures that are not competitive due to gerrymandering (TX, FL, GA, WI)

3) Protect other legislatures where any chamber is at risk of flipping to Rs (ME, NV, NM)

4) Bring the two existing split legislatures (MN and VA) to D control by targeting swing districts in the currently R-held legislatures (Senate in MN and House in VA)

I have made a master list of the most competitive districts, looking at non-partisan analysis from cnalysis.com (please donate to them if you have a chance — they have their own “bang for your buck” feature which I am a subscriber to, as well), to identify districts which the Democrats have the best chance at winning. In addition, I have worked fervently to try to identify the PVI of every single house and senate district in every state that I can, to identify those “solid R” seats which are close-ish to the median PVI and those which swung most from 2016 to 2020. PVI is not a perfect metric for SLD races, but with ticket-splitting declining it is becoming more reliable and it shows that the people in the district are at least open to voting for a Democrat. For many chambers, these “solid R” seats need to be contested to have any chance of a majority x x Embedded Content

2022 Cook PVI vs. District Population Density

Feel free to take a look at my Google sheet above for more information. You can download it and mess with the numbers, or look for seats that seem competitive on your own. All of my reach seats should have a PVI of about R+10 or less, have a notable positive swing towards D from 2016-2020, and should have a higher density than the median for the chamber within state — see the chart to the right. Some regions have a smaller correlation, so this could be discarded in some cases.

This post is for all the category 1) chambers noted above — so AZ, MI, NC, NH, and PA, as follows.

Note in my counts of “Solid D” and “Solid R” also contain uncontested seats and seats that are not up this year. Also note (and check my sheet) that many candidates do not have accounts with ActBlue. I’ll give website links to the donation page for those applicants (all are seemingly through NGPVAN instead) but if someone has time, please ask the candidate to make an ActBlue recipient account.

Here’s PA first:

Pennsylvania District Summary Chamber Solid D Competitive Solid R Total Solid R Required for Majority House 80 26 95 201 0 Senate 16 9 25 50 1

Every seat in the house is a 106/201 seat majority. Every seat in the senate leads to a 25/50 split chamber, which is enough to prevent the ISL, but one extra seat would be good for obvious reasons.

This is the ActBlue link to the competitive PA seats: x Not Included: Chris Sainato — Tilt D— HD-9 — No Campaign Page/Donation Page Deborah Turici — Very Likely R— HD 44 — No Campaign Page/Donation Page Christina Sappey — Likely D — HD 158 — No ActBlue Account — Donate here. Lindsey Williams — Tilt D — SD 38 — No ActBlue Account — Donate here. x This is the ActBlue link to the reach PA seats, the 13 most “competitive” solid R state house districts, as well as the most competitive state senate seat (there’s only 1 with any chance of swinging D this cycle— SD 16 — but note that one solid R seat is required for a majority in the state senate): HD: 7, 28, 88, 119, 120, 131, 142, 147, 176, and 178 SD: 16 I would have included Chamir James in HD 13, but he was disqualified or withdrew from the race. HD 40 — Sharon Guidi does not appear to have any campaign information. North Carolina District Summary Chamber Solid D Competitive Solid R Total Solid R Required for Majority House 36 27 57 120 0 Senate 16 8 26 50 2 Every seat in the house is a 63/120 seat majority. Every seat in the senate leads to a 24/50 D minority chamber, which is not enough to prevent the ISL, so we have to identify the two most competitive state senate races. This is the ActBlue link to the competitive NC seats: x Not Included: Terry Garrison — Lean D— HD-32 — No ActBlue Account — Donate here. Sherrie Young — Lean R — HD 59 — No campaign presence, may not be a real candidate. Katherine Jeanes — Very Likely R — HD 82 — No campaign presence, per her Twitter account she is likely a candidate by mistake. Mary Willis Bode — SD 18 — No ActBlue Account — Donate here. Val Applewhite — SD 19 — No ActBlue Account — Donate here. x This is the ActBlue link to the reach NC seats, the two most “competitive” Solid R state house districts, as well as the three most competitive state senate seats. As a reminder, at least two “Solid R” seats have to flip to get a Democratic majority in the state senate: HD: 12 and 47 SD: 4, 24, and 34 Arizona District Summary Chamber Solid D Competitive Solid R Total Solid R Required for Majority House ?? ?? ?? 60 ?? Senate 11 4 15 30 1 Arizona’s lower house is a multi-member district chamber, so is impossible to rate. As a result, we’re only doing a donation page for the Arizona state senate + the Arizona Democratic Party. Winning all four state senate seats means that it’s a tied chamber, so it’s obviously good to win one more to get a majority. x This is the ActBlue link to the competitive AZ state senate districts + state party : x This is the ActBlue link to the reach AZ seats, the three most “competitive” Solid R state senate districts: SD: 2, 16, and 27 Also, Mike Nickerson is running in SD 17 and his campaign website is: www.mikenickersonforaz.com but he notes that he cannot accept any more donations. I don’t understand why. Michigan District Summary Chamber Solid D Competitive Solid R Total Solid R Required for Majority House 30 30 50 110 0 Senate 12 11 15 38 0 Every seat in the house is a 60/110 seat majority. Every seat in the senate leads to a 23/38 D majority x This is the ActBlue link to the competitive MI seats: Michigan is seen as the most competitive of the competitive state legislatures, largely because the independent redistricting commission made a number of maps with extremely low “efficiency gaps.” Of all the states, it’s largely considered the one most likely to break the current R Trifecta. x This is the ActBlue link to the reach MI seats, the three most “competitive” Solid R state house districts, though these are kind of a stretch, given their geography and 2016-2020 swing HD: 42, 92, and 96 New Hampshire District Summary Chamber Solid D Competitive Solid R Total Solid R Required for Majority House ?? ?? ?? 400 ?? Senate 11 4 15 30 1 New Hampshire’s lower house is a multi-member district chamber, so is impossible to rate. As a result, we’re only doing a donation page for the New Hampshire state senate + the NH Democratic party. x This is the ActBlue link to the competitive NH senate seats + state party: x This is the ActBlue link to the reach NH seats, the six most “competitive” Solid R state senate districts: SD: 1, 3, 8, 14, and 17 SD: 2 Kate Miller does not appear to have any web presence or donation pages. As a reminder, per the count above, at least one of these seats must be flipped to have a chance at an NH senate majority. In 2018 I also did something similar with house districts, and here’s a mostly up-to-date competitiveness spreadsheet: x x Embedded Content x For this, I took the district rating from Decision Desk, Cook Political Report, Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Split Ticket, and 538’s model and averaged them together. This is like what 538 does for its “Deluxe” model, but since I don’t know what secret sauce/models/ratings go into it, and I like the four sites I linked above, I combined them together for my own “deluxe” ranking. Then I made a donation sheet, and it’s got the 41 most competitive seats that have had primaries, but is missing Don Davis — because I can’t add him as a recipient in ActBlue! Here’s his contribution page.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/8/19/2113553/-Moneyball-for-Congressional-and-State-Legislative-Races-2022-Diary-1

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