Regarding GA and NC being conservative. . . speaking as an NC resident, it could be that we don't have things like legal weed because we're conservative. Or it could be because our state legislature is heavily gerrymandered and there's no easy way (as in some other states) to do a citizen-led ballot initiative. I think it's hard under the circumstance to draw a straight line between a policy's popularity and its likelihood of being enacted. For example, Arizona probably has legal weed because it has ballot initiatives, not because it's more liberal than North Carolina.
I live in a South Carolina in a Trump 2-1 county in anecdotally is pretty pro weed around me. I think around me weed has been effectively weed for several years there isn’t a huge need to legalize weed around me. People I’m sure people would rather see weed legalized but the changes wouldn’t really matter.
This is a little misleading though because no matter how walkable it is to the nearest Bojangle’s, about half of CLT residents will still elect to drive there anyway.
Settle down. No doubt Texas does short beef rib the best. But don't be cocky. Tennessee is tops. I say this as a non-biased eater from New Jersey who's visited most of the top spots in each state.
Have you ever been west of the Mississippi in your life?
Though I’ll not talk down TN BBQ, as I’ve never been in it long enough to try it.
I would like to here from locals there recommendations for the best example to try, as no doubt I’ll pas through again in the future.
Actually I need that for NC, too. As the one time I stopped for some there I was left scratching my head. “That’s it? Well sheeeeet, I’ve had far better bbq pig in the Canadian prairies”.
I ate my way through the South once, and I had the best bbq chicken ever somewhere in the Research Triangle. Oh, the moist tenderness... and that was white meat! The sauce there was actually sweet; it wasn't until I moved to the West Coast that I learned that NC BBQ was supposed to be sour. Go figure.
My fave is, though, gasp, brisket... I have not had bad brisket ANYWHERE... although there is a place in Oregon that gives you very little of it, booooo.
Whether you’ve named a sample of brisket “bad” or not, there’s definitely degrees of good.
It’s actually really tricky to hit pinnacle brisket. The distance between that & brisket I wouldn’t bother with if you were giving it away (and I can name a place here in Houston like that) is huge. So much so that I’m not sure you’ve had pinnacle brisket if you haven’t had bad brisket (or maybe you got very lucky)
Hmmm... Well, I don't know what I don't know, do I...
I have certainly had inferior brisket, but I still enjoy it a great deal: underdone, overdone, dry, steamed inside, cooked at high temp, cooked at low temp, short, long, grass fed (which I usually consider to be inferior), corn fed... no matter how you try to ruin it, brisket turns out great, to me. The only brisket I avoid are the hipster-fancy-pricey kind; they are still good, but not worth paying for.
Still, I would love to try this "pinnacle brisket". Name a place, and I will do my best to go there! Also, please name the place in Houston, so I can see if brisket can truly be ruined...
Texas acts like all of its food is not originally from other regions, brought to it by migrants. Then proceeds to butcher the food by using extremely fatty brisket or super heavy flour tortillas. Settle down Texas, we don’t care about your arrogant views on food.
My first reaction was indeed that they've stumbled on to a huge minefield here...
To be fair, I think of Georgia as having a rather wide range of BBQ sauce preferences. I'll try to remember about mustard, though. Let the flame war begin!
Nate, is polling accurately reflecting the groundswell of support Harris is generating - from rally sizes, to volunteers, to new voter registrations, to cash donations. Or are these activities concentrated in "solid-blue" states where it wouldn't make a difference? Thanks.
My understanding is that Nate's model "trusts" that these efforts will result in polling shifts detected via state polls. It doesn't take into account rally size, volunteer numbers, registration, or donations directly but indirectly. That means there could be a significant delay between seeing this increased activity/enthusiasm and the model taking it into account. So if part of the goal of this model is to quickly react to new information it may be worth adding such factors in future versions.
The other thing is, unless a needed change is obvious due to an election being particularly unique (like the pandemic adjustments Nate made last time) I don’t think he’s just going to throw it into his model unless he has enough historical data to effectively test for how strongly those variables correlate with outcomes. He doesn’t want to overfit to just one or two recent elections either. I think fundraising dollars may already be factored in to the “fundamentals”, but beyond that I’m not sure what sort of other variables highlighting this concept could be available consistently across prior elections.
If he did have sufficient data, then it wouldn’t be hard to test and see, he could just add it in and retroactively compare over the timeline of each test data election if the model results at any given point in the race were closer on average with the eventual outcome either with or without those variables added in. If they are, then it might be worth adding to the model, but if they aren’t then he’s better off just sticking with what he has.
Hmm. I'd say Ohio invented flight but used NC as a testbed. Anyway, being an NC resident now, I'm rooting for the state to gain in electoral importance.
As someone that lived in Ohio for over 20 years, you don’t want to be a swing state if you watch anything that has commercials after May on an election year.
I went to Nevada (from L.A.) in 2012 to knock doors. I was horrified watching TV in the hotel at the amount and viciousness of the commercials. I had never experienced that and it was awful, and I was only there for 2 days. I get it.
I have a grammar question. I read "being an NC resident..." as "being an North Carolina resident..." and it seemed like the "an" was incorrect and should've been "a". Did I read it as North Carolina instead of NC because I'm not from there? Just nerdy grammar stuff.
Lol, you ARE being picky. I don't know what grammarians might say, but if I say "encee", I tend to automatically put "an" before it. But if say "North Carolina", I'll obviously use "a". But I can't say that I'm all that careful in casual speech/writing.
I'm not from NC and I read it as "an NC resident" - but my work has tons of acronyms so I'm used to just saying out the letters and then whining about unnecessary alphabet soupitization.
My guess is if part of your mind was trying to assure itself of what NC was standing in for in this case, then you started the "an", your brain realized this is an uncertain acronym, corrected course to "North" so you didn't lose comprehension rather than "N," and once it finished realized "an North" sounded wrong.
Probably more common with unfamiliar abbreviations, is my guess. Like "an MRI exam" will probably always sound right, because the non-doctors like me have to google that the M stands for "Magnetic," but even without knowing the original, the acronym flows without issue and comprehension is not lost.
Saying “Ohio” invented (not discovered sheesh) is like saying the telephone was invented by Scotland. We’re first in flight because flight took place here. Wright brothers were first to sustain flight. As part of NC history we all learn the Wright brothers discovered sustained flight and were from Ohio.
Telephone was invented in Canada. Ohioans are always so sensitive about the flight thing.
Another thing to consider is that both Georgia and North Carolina have seen an influx of college-educated white people in the past few years. This demographic is more likely to vote for Kamala Harris, especially since many of them are transplants from more Democratic-leaning areas of the country. This is probably a factor in making Georgia and North Carolina more competitive than they’d otherwise be.
Also, the massive “get out the vote” initiative organized by Stacy Abrams was a major factor in turning Georgia blue in 2020. If the “get out the vote” initiative is also strong this year, then Harris might outperform polls in Georgia (but she might underperform the polls if GOTV isn’t as strong this year).
Impossible to judge against the counterfactual no-pandemic scenario but FWIW, ballotpedia tracks incumbent win rates going back at least to 2019, and 2020 doesn't appear to be out of line with the normal rates:
2019: 90%
2020: 93%
2021: 85.5%
2022: 94%
No idea what to make of the 2021 dip (maybe nothing, maybe an off-cycle effect, best guess is people mad about ongoing school closures?) but 2020 looks pretty normal, at least at a very zoomed-out level.
Even in so-called "change" elections voters overwhelmingly return Congressional incumbents to power. Since most districts are completely safe in one direction or the other change has to happen at the margins.
Elections at the state level used to be more contested but the big sort is increasingly locking in states at the party level as well--Florida and Ohio used to be considered as reliable swing states, for example. (When Bush and Gore contested for the presidency conventional wisdom was that whoever won two out of the three states of FL, PA and OH) would win the presidency.) In Covid that was reflected in the radically different approaches individual states took in response to the pandemic--CA vs FL for example continues to be a flash point, as in the recent DeSantis-Newsom debate.
Right - where the anti-incumbency stuff really seems to have played out re Covid is in some of those 2021 elections (VA governor being a prominent example) but, at least in raw results, less so in 2020.
Some individual candidates may have gotten dinged for particularly bad pandemic responses in 2020, but it doesn't appear -- at least in terms of literally winning elections -- that incumbency alone had a significant negative correlation in 2020.
Unfavorable domestic conditions are typically a drag on the incumbent. Conventional wisdom holds that something like a recession will be the kiss of death for whoever is currently in charge. Yet who exactly voters blame is highly variable. Bad economic times seem to get pinned to the federal government as compared to, for example, the governor or local state legislatures.
Given that I am very skeptical that Covid wouldn't have played the same role in 2020 that a potential recession is playing in the current day. When times are bad voters need to blame somebody--but that doesn't mean that they blame everybody.
I understand that the point of this article is to just look at the model's fundamentals, but how can any article with this title be wriiten without even a footnote mentioning the very "unusual" governor's race taking place. Mark Robison is very clearly a disaster of a candidate who could affect turnout on both sides (invigorating Ds, supressing Rs). I get it that cotails from governor to president are not the norm, but if ever possible, this would seem to be the scenario.
You should remove the pictures from the table for the “Steph Curry vs. Magic Johnson-style tale of the tape”. They are confusing, since they don’t match up with the text. Or at least say somewhere that you’re using photos of Anthony Edwards and Michael Jordan to represent their home states.
Ohio invited flight. The only reason the first flight happened in North Carolina is because Kitty Hawk is closer to Dayton than California. Silver's Michigan propaganda, surely.
Ohio didn’t invent flight! The Wright brothers discovered flight and a way to sustain it for humans. We never say we invented flight, we’re first in flight.
The telephone wasn’t invented by Scotland but that’s the equivalent of what you’re saying.
I won't stand for your mealy mouthed license plates. Ohio is the birthplace of Aviation. Ohioan was the first American to orbit the Earth. Ohioan was the first to step foot on the moon. Home of the National Air Force Museum and Aviation Hall of Fame. Ohio is first in flight and no state is even a close second. Ohio Against the World.
A small, but statistically significant amount is my guess. Mark Robinson is as galvanizing to NC democrats as Project 2025 is to the national electorate. It will be difficult to parse from other factors driving a high turnout, but anecdotally people are energized to vote against him.
Another factor that could make NC more likely than Georgia is the governors race.
Robinson is down double digits in many polls and while you will have split ticket voting you probably just get more stay at home from the soft lean Trump voters.
Not sure if there are any historically correlations on the impact of poor down ballot candidates
Strange that no one mentions a key difference we saw between North Carolina and Georgia in 2020 and 2016. The polls in Georgia were very accurate, but in North Carolina, they were not.
Without any Senate races on the ballot this year in Georgia, I worry that turnout will be a lot smaller on the Democratic side (on top of all the voter roll purging that’s already happening). I imagine there’s not enough data to say for sure, but I wonder how much of an impact having a competitive Senate race has on voter turnout.
NC also has been purging voter rolls. And they just added a photo ID requirement to vote, this will be the first presidential election that’s in effect. Although, ironically, our gerrymandered state legislature keeps holding back public transit improvements in the big cities in favor of keeping us all car-dependent, so maybe that’ll have less of an impact than they’d hoped because more of our poorer urban residents already had to have a driver’s license compared to most cities.
Regarding GA and NC being conservative. . . speaking as an NC resident, it could be that we don't have things like legal weed because we're conservative. Or it could be because our state legislature is heavily gerrymandered and there's no easy way (as in some other states) to do a citizen-led ballot initiative. I think it's hard under the circumstance to draw a straight line between a policy's popularity and its likelihood of being enacted. For example, Arizona probably has legal weed because it has ballot initiatives, not because it's more liberal than North Carolina.
I live in a South Carolina in a Trump 2-1 county in anecdotally is pretty pro weed around me. I think around me weed has been effectively weed for several years there isn’t a huge need to legalize weed around me. People I’m sure people would rather see weed legalized but the changes wouldn’t really matter.
The entirety of CLT is accessible by foot to Bojangle's. At ATL, you're probably getting on a train.
Survey says: CLT
This is a little misleading though because no matter how walkable it is to the nearest Bojangle’s, about half of CLT residents will still elect to drive there anyway.
I snortlaughed.
Oh wait were you just talking about the airports? Glad you still liked it either way.
Glad we here in NC win the proximity to Bo Jangles contest. Much better chicken than KFC or Popeyes.
This is Brunswick stew erasure, and I will not have it
As a Georgian, I was coming here to say EXACTLY this. I won't have my state's barbecue besmirched by a NEW YORKER.
Nate, next time you're in Atlanta, ping me so I can Doordash you some Brunswick stew.
?
Why would we start talking about Virginia here?
I have a couple of questions: the first is, how dare you?
😂
Brunswick stew is from VA and should not have pork in it. You barbarians!
But GA does have distinct cue tho
HUGE miss here by the Silver Bulletin team. Georgia is very well known for mustard based BBQ sauce. C'mon guys.
*chuckles about the whole discussion* - Texas
Settle down. No doubt Texas does short beef rib the best. But don't be cocky. Tennessee is tops. I say this as a non-biased eater from New Jersey who's visited most of the top spots in each state.
“Short beef rib”?
Have you ever been west of the Mississippi in your life?
Though I’ll not talk down TN BBQ, as I’ve never been in it long enough to try it.
I would like to here from locals there recommendations for the best example to try, as no doubt I’ll pas through again in the future.
Actually I need that for NC, too. As the one time I stopped for some there I was left scratching my head. “That’s it? Well sheeeeet, I’ve had far better bbq pig in the Canadian prairies”.
I ate my way through the South once, and I had the best bbq chicken ever somewhere in the Research Triangle. Oh, the moist tenderness... and that was white meat! The sauce there was actually sweet; it wasn't until I moved to the West Coast that I learned that NC BBQ was supposed to be sour. Go figure.
My fave is, though, gasp, brisket... I have not had bad brisket ANYWHERE... although there is a place in Oregon that gives you very little of it, booooo.
Brisket is what makes TX BBQ singular.
Whether you’ve named a sample of brisket “bad” or not, there’s definitely degrees of good.
It’s actually really tricky to hit pinnacle brisket. The distance between that & brisket I wouldn’t bother with if you were giving it away (and I can name a place here in Houston like that) is huge. So much so that I’m not sure you’ve had pinnacle brisket if you haven’t had bad brisket (or maybe you got very lucky)
Hmmm... Well, I don't know what I don't know, do I...
I have certainly had inferior brisket, but I still enjoy it a great deal: underdone, overdone, dry, steamed inside, cooked at high temp, cooked at low temp, short, long, grass fed (which I usually consider to be inferior), corn fed... no matter how you try to ruin it, brisket turns out great, to me. The only brisket I avoid are the hipster-fancy-pricey kind; they are still good, but not worth paying for.
Still, I would love to try this "pinnacle brisket". Name a place, and I will do my best to go there! Also, please name the place in Houston, so I can see if brisket can truly be ruined...
Check out Redneck BBQ Lab at McGee’s Crossroads
Texas acts like all of its food is not originally from other regions, brought to it by migrants. Then proceeds to butcher the food by using extremely fatty brisket or super heavy flour tortillas. Settle down Texas, we don’t care about your arrogant views on food.
😂
Montreal/corned is a much different dish, if that’s what you’re imagining.
And corn tortillas with brisket? WTAF???
My first reaction was indeed that they've stumbled on to a huge minefield here...
To be fair, I think of Georgia as having a rather wide range of BBQ sauce preferences. I'll try to remember about mustard, though. Let the flame war begin!
Nate, is polling accurately reflecting the groundswell of support Harris is generating - from rally sizes, to volunteers, to new voter registrations, to cash donations. Or are these activities concentrated in "solid-blue" states where it wouldn't make a difference? Thanks.
My understanding is that Nate's model "trusts" that these efforts will result in polling shifts detected via state polls. It doesn't take into account rally size, volunteer numbers, registration, or donations directly but indirectly. That means there could be a significant delay between seeing this increased activity/enthusiasm and the model taking it into account. So if part of the goal of this model is to quickly react to new information it may be worth adding such factors in future versions.
The other thing is, unless a needed change is obvious due to an election being particularly unique (like the pandemic adjustments Nate made last time) I don’t think he’s just going to throw it into his model unless he has enough historical data to effectively test for how strongly those variables correlate with outcomes. He doesn’t want to overfit to just one or two recent elections either. I think fundraising dollars may already be factored in to the “fundamentals”, but beyond that I’m not sure what sort of other variables highlighting this concept could be available consistently across prior elections.
If he did have sufficient data, then it wouldn’t be hard to test and see, he could just add it in and retroactively compare over the timeline of each test data election if the model results at any given point in the race were closer on average with the eventual outcome either with or without those variables added in. If they are, then it might be worth adding to the model, but if they aren’t then he’s better off just sticking with what he has.
Hmm. I'd say Ohio invented flight but used NC as a testbed. Anyway, being an NC resident now, I'm rooting for the state to gain in electoral importance.
As someone that lived in Ohio for over 20 years, you don’t want to be a swing state if you watch anything that has commercials after May on an election year.
I went to Nevada (from L.A.) in 2012 to knock doors. I was horrified watching TV in the hotel at the amount and viciousness of the commercials. I had never experienced that and it was awful, and I was only there for 2 days. I get it.
I have a grammar question. I read "being an NC resident..." as "being an North Carolina resident..." and it seemed like the "an" was incorrect and should've been "a". Did I read it as North Carolina instead of NC because I'm not from there? Just nerdy grammar stuff.
Lol, you ARE being picky. I don't know what grammarians might say, but if I say "encee", I tend to automatically put "an" before it. But if say "North Carolina", I'll obviously use "a". But I can't say that I'm all that careful in casual speech/writing.
I'm not from NC and I read it as "an NC resident" - but my work has tons of acronyms so I'm used to just saying out the letters and then whining about unnecessary alphabet soupitization.
My guess is if part of your mind was trying to assure itself of what NC was standing in for in this case, then you started the "an", your brain realized this is an uncertain acronym, corrected course to "North" so you didn't lose comprehension rather than "N," and once it finished realized "an North" sounded wrong.
Probably more common with unfamiliar abbreviations, is my guess. Like "an MRI exam" will probably always sound right, because the non-doctors like me have to google that the M stands for "Magnetic," but even without knowing the original, the acronym flows without issue and comprehension is not lost.
Yeah, saying North Carolina invented flight is a bit like saying the Curiosity rover was invented by Mars.
Which is why we don’t claim to have invented it, just done it first.
Saying “Ohio” invented (not discovered sheesh) is like saying the telephone was invented by Scotland. We’re first in flight because flight took place here. Wright brothers were first to sustain flight. As part of NC history we all learn the Wright brothers discovered sustained flight and were from Ohio.
Telephone was invented in Canada. Ohioans are always so sensitive about the flight thing.
Another thing to consider is that both Georgia and North Carolina have seen an influx of college-educated white people in the past few years. This demographic is more likely to vote for Kamala Harris, especially since many of them are transplants from more Democratic-leaning areas of the country. This is probably a factor in making Georgia and North Carolina more competitive than they’d otherwise be.
Also, the massive “get out the vote” initiative organized by Stacy Abrams was a major factor in turning Georgia blue in 2020. If the “get out the vote” initiative is also strong this year, then Harris might outperform polls in Georgia (but she might underperform the polls if GOTV isn’t as strong this year).
I think Covid probably generated a lot of anti-incumbent sentiment across the country as a whole.
Impossible to judge against the counterfactual no-pandemic scenario but FWIW, ballotpedia tracks incumbent win rates going back at least to 2019, and 2020 doesn't appear to be out of line with the normal rates:
2019: 90%
2020: 93%
2021: 85.5%
2022: 94%
No idea what to make of the 2021 dip (maybe nothing, maybe an off-cycle effect, best guess is people mad about ongoing school closures?) but 2020 looks pretty normal, at least at a very zoomed-out level.
Even in so-called "change" elections voters overwhelmingly return Congressional incumbents to power. Since most districts are completely safe in one direction or the other change has to happen at the margins.
Elections at the state level used to be more contested but the big sort is increasingly locking in states at the party level as well--Florida and Ohio used to be considered as reliable swing states, for example. (When Bush and Gore contested for the presidency conventional wisdom was that whoever won two out of the three states of FL, PA and OH) would win the presidency.) In Covid that was reflected in the radically different approaches individual states took in response to the pandemic--CA vs FL for example continues to be a flash point, as in the recent DeSantis-Newsom debate.
Right - where the anti-incumbency stuff really seems to have played out re Covid is in some of those 2021 elections (VA governor being a prominent example) but, at least in raw results, less so in 2020.
Some individual candidates may have gotten dinged for particularly bad pandemic responses in 2020, but it doesn't appear -- at least in terms of literally winning elections -- that incumbency alone had a significant negative correlation in 2020.
Unfavorable domestic conditions are typically a drag on the incumbent. Conventional wisdom holds that something like a recession will be the kiss of death for whoever is currently in charge. Yet who exactly voters blame is highly variable. Bad economic times seem to get pinned to the federal government as compared to, for example, the governor or local state legislatures.
Given that I am very skeptical that Covid wouldn't have played the same role in 2020 that a potential recession is playing in the current day. When times are bad voters need to blame somebody--but that doesn't mean that they blame everybody.
I understand that the point of this article is to just look at the model's fundamentals, but how can any article with this title be wriiten without even a footnote mentioning the very "unusual" governor's race taking place. Mark Robison is very clearly a disaster of a candidate who could affect turnout on both sides (invigorating Ds, supressing Rs). I get it that cotails from governor to president are not the norm, but if ever possible, this would seem to be the scenario.
You should remove the pictures from the table for the “Steph Curry vs. Magic Johnson-style tale of the tape”. They are confusing, since they don’t match up with the text. Or at least say somewhere that you’re using photos of Anthony Edwards and Michael Jordan to represent their home states.
This is like when movie posters have the stars' names above the wrong star due to the contractual billing order conflicting with the photography.
Ohio invited flight. The only reason the first flight happened in North Carolina is because Kitty Hawk is closer to Dayton than California. Silver's Michigan propaganda, surely.
Ohio didn’t invent flight! The Wright brothers discovered flight and a way to sustain it for humans. We never say we invented flight, we’re first in flight.
The telephone wasn’t invented by Scotland but that’s the equivalent of what you’re saying.
I won't stand for your mealy mouthed license plates. Ohio is the birthplace of Aviation. Ohioan was the first American to orbit the Earth. Ohioan was the first to step foot on the moon. Home of the National Air Force Museum and Aviation Hall of Fame. Ohio is first in flight and no state is even a close second. Ohio Against the World.
How much does the impact of the NC gubernatorial race matter?
A small, but statistically significant amount is my guess. Mark Robinson is as galvanizing to NC democrats as Project 2025 is to the national electorate. It will be difficult to parse from other factors driving a high turnout, but anecdotally people are energized to vote against him.
My thoughts exactly!
Not much, I think. In GA we have a Republican Gov and two Democrat Senators.
Another factor that could make NC more likely than Georgia is the governors race.
Robinson is down double digits in many polls and while you will have split ticket voting you probably just get more stay at home from the soft lean Trump voters.
Not sure if there are any historically correlations on the impact of poor down ballot candidates
Could speculate that 2020 is a similar correlation when Cal Cunningham was involved in a scandal.
I sense down ballot candidates aren’t a huge impact, but with as similar as Georgia and NC are I’ll speculate it explains when they diverge
Strange that no one mentions a key difference we saw between North Carolina and Georgia in 2020 and 2016. The polls in Georgia were very accurate, but in North Carolina, they were not.
You confused me for a minute by saying curry/johnson and then picturing Edwards/MJ.
Without any Senate races on the ballot this year in Georgia, I worry that turnout will be a lot smaller on the Democratic side (on top of all the voter roll purging that’s already happening). I imagine there’s not enough data to say for sure, but I wonder how much of an impact having a competitive Senate race has on voter turnout.
NC also has been purging voter rolls. And they just added a photo ID requirement to vote, this will be the first presidential election that’s in effect. Although, ironically, our gerrymandered state legislature keeps holding back public transit improvements in the big cities in favor of keeping us all car-dependent, so maybe that’ll have less of an impact than they’d hoped because more of our poorer urban residents already had to have a driver’s license compared to most cities.
Haven't finished the article yet, but love the inclusion of SEC titles in the tale of the tape. Real Three Year Letterman energy
ACC.
I thought Nate liked basketball now?!
Yes, and Georgia Tech is in the ACC