Downballot Counts

Regardless of the final outcomes of the still-uncalled House races or the two upcoming Senate runoffs in Georgia, it's clear both chambers of Congress will have razor-thin partisan margins next year. On the latest episode of Downballot Counts, hosts Kyle Trygstad and Greg Giroux talk about what this will mean for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and whoever it is that will become Senate Majority Leader in the new Congress.

It's Nov. 16, and there are still a handful of uncalled House races. But it's becoming more clear, now that a few weeks have passed since the elections, that partisan margins in both houses of Congress will be razor thin.

On this episode of Downballot Counts, hosts Kyle Trygstad and Greg Giroux discuss where there are still undecided races and why Democrats underperformed in this year's Congressional elections.

Contrary to popular belief, the results of last week's elections weren't as far off from final polling projections as they initially appeared. But the discrepancy was large enough that it indicates a fundamental flaw in the way polling is conducted, according to Democratic pollster Jefrey Pollock with the firm Global Strategy Group.

On this post-election episode of Downballot Counts, we speak with Pollock about his industry's painful soul-searching and about what this election says about where the country's two parties are at.

We're about 36 hours or so before polls close and election results start to come in. But it's not too soon to start analyzing what this historic election cycle has meant.

On this episode of Downballot Counts, Kyle Trygstad and Greg Giroux talk about the forces that shaped 2020's congressional races and about which races they'll be paying close attention to tomorrow night.

You can tell a lot about the shape of an election by tracking where candidates are spending their time in the race's final days. That's according to Nathan L. Gonzales, a political prognosticator and publisher of the Inside Elections newsletter. We speak with Nathan about how this election cycle has turned out and about what one can glean from watching the movements of the President, Vice President, and other senior administration officials in the coming days.

We're two weeks from election day and roughly a dozen GOP-held Senate seats are competitive, according to the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. Hosts Greg Giroux and Kyle Trygstad speak with the Report's Senate editor Jessica Taylor about how we got here and whether Republicans' hopes for holding on to the Senate really are as dim as they seem.

Recent fundraising disclosures confirmed what polling numbers have hinted at: South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham is in the fight of his life. On this week's episode of Downballot Counts, we talk about how Graham's Democratic opponent, Jamie Harrison, shattered fundraising records during the third quarter of this year.

Political handicappers long predicted that North Carolina's Senate race would be one of the closest of the 2020 election cycle. But almost no one could have foreseen that its neighbor, South Carolina, would also see a Senate race turn into a dead heat.

On today's Downballot Counts, hosts Kyle Trygstad and Greg Giroux examine the difficult reelection campaigns of Republicans Senators Thom Tillis and Lindsey Graham, and also breakdown a campaign ad playing right now in Colorado.

With five weeks to go before the election, polling data is looking pretty grim for Republicans up and down the ballot. Today we hear from Glen Bolger, a major Republican pollster and founder of the firm Public Opinion Strategies, on what his party needs to do to turn this trend around or at least mitigate it heading into Election Day.

On this episode of Downballot Counts, we speak with Joe Biden's top pollster. He says comparisons between current polls and those from four years ago indicate there are fewer undecided voters now than there were back then.