Nate Silver blog: It looks like African-Americans really did help Thad Cochran win

Nate Silver’s new blog, FiveThirtyEight, has an article this morning by Harry Enten, analyzing last night’s election between McDaniel and Cochran. Nate Silver, if you remember, was one of the only pollsters to get the 2012 election right. His success led him to creating this new blog.

Harry Enten first shows how turnout was much higher in the runoff than it was in the primary 3 weeks ago:

We know turnout was higher in the runoff than it was in the initial primary. About 375,000 voters showed up Tuesday compared with 318,904 on June 3, an increase of more than 17 percent. Cochran raised his vote total by more than 38,000 votes, while McDaniel pulled in only an additional 30,000. That was more than enough to erase McDaniel’s 1,386 vote lead in the first round.

So there was higher turnout for both McDaniel an Cochran.

Enten then goes into this lengthy analysis using regressions and you can read that here. I’d rather just skip to the good part, if you will.

In the latter part of Enten’s analysis, he decided to keep the African-American vote where it was three weeks ago in the actual GOP primary and let the traditional Republican vote from last night’s runoff election remain as it was:

The result: Cochran loses a lot of votes. Instead of Cochran winning the runoff by 2 points, or about 6,000 votes, he loses by a little less than 8 points, or about 25,000 votes. He drops about 40,000 votes from his 190,000 vote total, while McDaniel loses only about 15,000 from his 185,000 vote total.

There you have it. Cochran would have lost big time were it not for the African-American vote that they scared into existence.

This is the GOP: Do whatever it takes to win, even if it means acting like Democrats.

That is, unless your opponent is a Democrat. Then just turn back into a milquetoast Republican, playing nice and refusing to fight hard.


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