People are confused by this "VERY BACK-OF-THE-ENVELOPE" calculation, so let me explain. There are 29 districts where Rs or Ds never appeared on the ballot, either because of a top-2 primary (in CA, WA and LA) that Rs or Ds failed to make, or b/c the cand. is unopposed. 2/
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So you have districts like WA-10, where Ds get 250k votes, where the "real" vote total would be more like 175k-75k if an R had been on the ballot, or TN-05 where Ds and Rs get zero, but would get around 200k and 100k, respectively, if Cooper had been opposed. 3/
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There are sophisticated ways to deal with this, but they would require all the votes to be counted and/or data that we don't yet have (like Presidential vote by CD). Hence the very rough calculation. 4/
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And it goes like this: CA-38 was unopposed. Find the last race where Linda Sanchez drew opposition, which was 2018. Multiply the vote totals for Rs and Ds by 1.26, to account for the fact that fewer votes were cast in 2016 than in 2020. 5/
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Then shave 3.5% off of D vote totals and and 3.5% to R vote totals to account for 2018 being a year where Ds won by 8.5% (without using imputations) and this being one where they'll probably end up 1% or so using imputations. 6/
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You end up with 169k votes for Sanchez and 82k votes for [Republican], which actually is a reasonable heuristic (Obama and Hillary got about two-thirds of the vote here). Repeat as needed (so in AL-05 Rs get 207k votes and Ds get 123k, instead of zero and zero). 7/
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Like I said, as we get better data, we can generate better estimates. And these counts will change as we get mail-in ballots from NY, CA, and elsewhere. One interesting thing: This is a lot less dramatic than 2018, where imputation knocks a full point off the D p.v. margin. 8/
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Finally, this illustrates some of the problems with using popular vote counts as fine-grained instruments, *especially* for Congress. They're sensitive to things like this, as well as things like candidate quality, fundraising, etc. 9/9
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interesting, suggests the maps are not that inefficient for the Democrats this year?
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The skew in CA, NY, and MA (and maybe a few other states) largely offset Republican Gerrymanders elsewhere.
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