I’ll cut to the chase and say it will take a minor miracle for Cheney to win Tuesday’s Republican primary for Wyoming’s lone House seat. Statistically improbable things happen, but Cheney has both the polls and history against her. The truth is that Cheney has been an outsider for reelection since she voted to impeach Trump in early 2021. Trump is the dominant figure in the GOP, and voting to impeach Trump has proven to be a sin in the minds of voters that many do not they have forgiven it. For Cheney in particular, you can see this in CES polls of Wyoming voters taken in late 2020 and then in late 2021. Cheney’s approval rating in this deeply Republican state rose from 26% before her vote for reference to 72% thereafter. Cheney’s deep unpopularity led to a rush of primary challengers. The one who broke out of the pack and won Trump’s endorsement, attorney and former Republican National Committee member Harriet Hageman, appears to be a heavy favorite on Tuesday. Based on reading all the data out there, Hageman is very likely to win by 20 points. Betting markets have Hageman more than a 95 percent favorite to be the next member of the Wyoming House. You can see the momentum behind Hageman in Wyoming and other data points. Although Cheney has raised over $9 million out of state to Hageman’s over $1 million, Hageman has more than doubled Cheney’s in-state fundraising (nearly $800,000 to more than $300,000). It could be argued that Cheney would have had a better chance if she hadn’t been steadfastly defying Trump. After all, she is the vice-president of the January 6 Parliament selection committee. I’m not sure, however, that it would have mattered what Cheney did after her vote to impeach Trump. There were 10 House Republicans who voted to impeach Trump. Four announced their withdrawal before facing voters again. Three have been defeated in the primaries and two have made it to the general election. A look at the two who passed in the general election (Calif. Rep. David Valladao and Washington Rep. Dan Newhouse) doesn’t provide much encouragement for Cheney. Both took about 25% of the vote and advanced to the general election in primary systems, where all candidates, regardless of party affiliation, ran on the same ballot with the top two vote-getters advancing to November — meaning there were multiple ballots. non-Republicans. Only one candidate will advance to the general election in Cheney’s primary, and 25% of the vote likely won’t be enough to win. And unlike California and Washington, Wyoming’s primaries are partisan. You must choose a Republican ballot to vote in the primary. Cheney tried to encourage non-Republicans to cast that ballot, but more than two-thirds of Wyoming’s registered voters are Republicans. The effort is almost certainly futile. The fact is, about two-thirds of Republicans nationally have said the party should not accept at all or not much acceptance of Republicans who voted to impeach Trump, according to the Pew Research Center. Unless something dramatic happens in the next few days, that number, more than anything else, will tell the story of why Cheney’s days in Congress are numbered.
Democratic overthrow in the special elections
You may have noticed that I mixed polling and real-world data in our last section. That’s because I’m always looking for examples of what we see at the polls play out when voters cast their ballots. As for whether Democrats have picked up momentum nationally, recent special elections seem to confirm what the polls are showing. Both show Democrats in better shape now than they have been in a long time. Last week, Republican Brad Finstad beat Democrat Jeff Ettinger in a special House election in Minnesota’s 1st district. But his victory was only 4 points. Trump had won the district by 10 points. That was, in other words, a 6-point outperformance for Democrats compared to the 2020 baseline. Interestingly, this was the second special election since late June where Democrats had encouraging news. The Democratic nominee topped the 2020 baseline by 6 points in Nebraska’s 1st District special election on June 28. What makes this election unusual is that Democrats have, as a whole, underperformed the 2020 baseline in this congressional special election. Instead of Democrats doing 6 points better than the 2020 baseline, as they did in the last two special elections, they averaged about 6 points worse in previous special elections. It would be easy to dismiss these data points as outliers, but Democrats are getting a sudden boost in their support lines with polling data and events. Democrats trailed on the national congressional ballot by an average of 3 points a few months ago. This test is now tied. This comes as the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, which polls show was an unpopular decision. We saw this in Kansas, where voters in this deep red state overwhelmingly decided to support abortion rights. In addition, the unpopular Trump is dominating the headlines due to the Jan. 6 House Select Committee hearings and now the Mar-a-Lago search. Whether Democrats are able to sustain this momentum in the coming weeks and months is unknown at this time. We’ll get a few tests this month, though, with Alaska’s lone House district having a special election on Tuesday and two congressional districts in New York holding special elections the week of Tuesday.
For your brief meetings: The WNBA playoffs begin this week
It may be hard to believe, but the WNBA started 25 years ago. This week, the women’s professional basketball league regular season ends as the playoffs begin. Ratings for the WNBA playoffs reached their highest level since 2017 last year, with an average of more than 500,000 fans tuning in. We’ll see if that can be topped this season. As with their male counterparts, the highest rated professional final game is actually surpassed by the college final. About 5 million people tuned in to watch the NCAA women’s basketball final earlier this year.
Residual data
Facebook isn’t cool anymore: Just 32% of American teens say they ever use Facebook, according to a new Pew study. From 2014 to 2015, 71% said they did. Websites and apps with over 50% usage among teenagers are YouTube (95%), TikTok (67%), Instagram (62%) and Snapchat (59%). Americans are not good with e-cigarettes: A new Gallup poll finds that 61% of Americans want laws and regulations covering e-cigarettes to be stricter compared to 7% who say less strict and 30% % who think they should be kept as they are now. A majority of Democrats, independents and Republicans believe they should be stricter. More are hungry worldwide: Gallup now predicts that about 10% of people will be undernourished in 2021. If this projection turns out to be true, it would be the highest rate of undernourishment globally in over a decade.
