Alan Abramowitz

Political participation now has an emotional energy that is essentially hostility, especially towards anyone who opposes our political positions.

Political scientists Alan Abramowitz and Steven Webster examined that development in their research on negative partisanship and they demonstrated how antagonism towards opposing parties has become an increasingly influential component I mean, in that kind of a framework, political campaigns frequently succeed through the cultivation of resentment, antagonism, outrage, because persuading citizens to despise political opponents actually requires less effort than demonstrating the moral standing and coherence of one's own political platform.

It's easier to villainize the other than to prove that my position is worthy of moral consideration.

And that's the transformation of American political media.

You should.

But what is very impressive about the polling that has occurred is that every reputable congressional analyst, I'm talking about Charlie Cook and Amy Walter and Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia and Alan Abramowitz in Atlanta, They have shifted dozens of Republican seats from safe to Democratic takeover.

And so there is just no question that the Democrats will take control of the House of Representatives.

The margin is only three right now, and so they need to win a net of four.

What do you know?

So going back to 2016, my colleague Alan Abramowitz did a study where he looked at vote share in places where Donald Trump held rallies.

And he doesn't see a difference between the vote share for Trump in the places where those rallies were held versus comparable places where there wasn't a rally nearby.

And so rallies have a really important purpose.

I think they happen over a long period of time.

And it's going to take years for us to figure out sort of whether or not the shifts that we saw in 2020 and 2024 amongst Blacks and Latinos are going to be permanent.

What we know about Latino partisanship is that my colleague Derek Wakefield sort of found that Latino partisans act like partisans.

So the Democrats are going to vote Democrat.

So voters remain fundamentally moderate or a bulk of the population.

Alan Abramowitz offered the counterpoint, which I think is actually more persuasive, that what Fiorina is doing is looking at the country at large rather than just the electorate.

And so the electorate, the actual voting public, is more polarized.

And there's a third view, sort of a more recent view of what you would call and what's often called negative partisanship.

I've picked one, and I think we picked correctly, but we also have model.

The quantitative side is all about producing a model, and our dear friend Alan Abramowitz was a pioneer in that area of political science and still runs a model for my crystal ball site.

And the quantitative does not tell you which candidates are going to win for the House, but it predicts the number of seats that will be turned over from the majority party to the minority party.

And you can see here the three leading models that are published daily.

There is some nuance.

I think Americans can walk and chew gum and see that.

Yeah, some things like China is not a friend.

And in many ways, Donald Trump is unique for standing outside of the bipartisan consensus on China.

So.

Alan Abramowitz did an interesting analysis where he tried.

Abramowitz mentioned where he tried to look at what the generic congressional ballot would translate into in terms of Senate seats, because the GCB is, you know, it's interesting that the way that question gets asked, you think it's about House races.

But a lot of times it says, like, who would you vote for for Congress? And Congress does include the Senate.