Statistic shows Democrats' strength in Texas battlegrounds
ANALYSIS — After all the hype and money surrounding Beto O’Rourke last cycle, Democrats came away from Texas with just two more House seats than usual. Two years later, Democrats are seriously competing in a handful of House seats due to the strength of their candidates and the weakness of President Donald Trump at the top of the ticket.
It’s true that many of the Democratic nominees in the most competitive Texas races lost in 2018. But not only is that not an insurmountable résumé item, but it’s a metric that quantifies each candidate’s value. And Democrats have some valuable candidates in Texas, including Mike Siegel (10th District), Sri Preston Kulkarni (22nd), Gina Ortiz Jones (23rd), and Julie Oliver (25th).
Vote Above Replacement, or VAR, measures the strength of a political candidate relative to a typical candidate from the same party by comparing the percentage of the candidate’s vote to the party’s Baseline. Baseline is the trimmed mean of each party’s performance in partisan, contested statewide elections over the four most recent general election cycles.
After the 2018 elections, Kulkarni had a 7.4 VAR, followed by Siegel (6.1), Oliver (5.8) and Ortiz Jones (2.6), which means they did that many points better than a typical Democratic candidate, accounting for the 2012, 2014, 2016 and 2018 elections.
For some perspective, this current class of U.S. senators includes a number of Republican rising stars with lower VAR scores, including Cory Gardner of Colorado (2.02), Joni Ernst of Iowa (1.41), Thom Tillis of North Carolina (-1.3), and Tom Cotton of Arkansas (-2.87). Those scores were tabulated compared to a Baseline that calculated results from the 2008, 2010, 2012 and 2014 elections.
https://rollcall.com/2020/09/28/statistic-shows-democrats-strength-in-texas-battlegrounds/
= new reply since forum marked as read
