Posts tagged with "FiveThirtyEight"

Above, former President Donald Trump. (Image source: Damon Winter/The New York Times)

Trump pledges to get revenge on Ron DeSantis’s backers

March 3, 2023

Several former supporters of ex-President Donald Trump attended a donor retreat hosted by Florida Governor Ron DeSantis over the last weekend in February and—after learning who was in attendance—Trump has promised retribution, reports Newsweek.

The former president launched his third run for the White House last November; and many 2024 polls suggest his main rival for the Republican nomination is DeSantis, who has yet to reveal his plans. In most polls, Trump ranks above potential opponents—including DeSantis, former Vice President Mike Pence; and Nikki Haley, who announced her bid in February.

The DeSantis donor event took place in Palm Beach, just a few miles from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort where the former president held his own gathering on Thursday, February 23, according to CBS News.

The guests at the DeSantis gathering included Roy Bailey, who was national co-chair of Trump’s fundraising effort with the Republican National Committee in 2020,; and Mick Mulvaney, who served as Trump’s White House chief of staff for 14 months.

However, the name on the guest list that most seemed to perturb Trump was David McIntosh. The former U.S. representative is now the president of the Club for Growth, a conservative nonprofit that advocates for tax cuts. The organization opposed Trump’s campaign for the Republican nomination in 2016.

Trump singled out McIntosh in a post on Truth Social late on Tuesday night, February 28, aiming jabs at the former lawmaker and his advocacy group.

“Failed former Congressman David McIntosh and his Globalist friends at Club for No Growth, who fought me all the way in 2016, and LOST, and then fought me again in 2020 Senate Races in Ohio, Alabama, North Carolina, New Hampshire, plus more, and LOST AGAIN, are now threatening to spend money against me early because their new boy, Ron DeSanctus, the man who wants to cut Social Security and MediCare, has dropped so drastically in the Polls to me,” he wrote. “No Growth Members know there will be RETRIBUTION!!!”

Some Republican  have voiced concern over Trump becoming the GOP nominee in 2024—suggesting that the former president is a distraction and more divisive than other primary candidates.

Lori Davis, who worked on Trump’s 2016 campaign in New Hampshire, said his critical and judgmental approach had turned some supporters against him. “I like Donald Trump. But he has gone too far polarizing. It’s going to be an uphill battle for him in this primary because of his divisiveness. People are tired of the drama,” Davis said.

“I’m seeing that people want DeSantis. He has a lot of the Trump philosophy, but is not as bombastic,; he’s not attacking people 24/7. People are tired of that. It gives them headaches.”

However, poll tracker FiveThirtyEight still shows Trump leading DeSantis in the race for the 2024 Republican nomination. In a compilation that includes research by YouGov, Emerson College, Morning Consult, and Echelon Insights, Trump is in front of DeSantis in every head-to-head, sometimes by as many as 30 percentage points.

Research contact: @Newsweek

Photo source: pattybenson.org

Blue wave or bust? Today’s primaries may provide some perspective

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June 5, 2018

California is not the only state holding primaries today although it has gotten the lion’s share of newsprint and posts on the subject. In fact, nationwide, June 5 will be the closest thing we get to a Super Tuesday in a non-presidential-election year, the news site FiveThirtyEight points out this week.

The following three states will hold primaries—and FiveThirtyEight has given us a heads-up on which races to watch:·

  • Alabama (2nd Congressional District): Republican Representative Martha Roby could become the next congressional incumbent to lose a primary this cycle. She put a target on her back, FiveThirtyEight believes, when she announced she would not support Donald Trump in the aftermath of the “Access Hollywood” tape scandal in 2016. Furious Trump supporters waged a write-in campaign against her that dramatically cut down her margin of victory—and they still view her as a turncoat. While her two Democratic opponents may not beat her in the primary, all they need to do is keep her from winning more than 50% of the vote, which would force a one-on-one runoff in July. This race could tell us a lot about the importance of absolute loyalty to Trump in today’s GOP.
  • Mississippi (3rd Congressional District): No matter who wins this  six-way Republican primary, the open seat is unlikely to figure in November’s battle for House control. The 3rd District is 26 percentage points more Republican-leaning than the nation as a whole, FiveThirtyEight says, so there will be no drama.
  • New Jersey (S. Senate; 2nd, 5th, 7th and 11th Congressional Districts): With five of its 12 congressional districts expected to be competitive in November, New Jersey is one of a handful of blue states that, alone, have enough vulnerable Republican seats that they could decide which party controls the House next year, FiveThirtyEight says. We all should be watching these results closely.

What’s more, the Senate race will be a cliffhanger: Incumbent U.S. Senator Bob Menendez was “severely admonished” in April by the Senate Ethics Committee for accepting gifts from a wealthy friend, after a multiyear corruption scandal that ultimately ended with a mistrial and the government’s decision not to retry him. Although state Democrats have stuck by Menendez as he faces re-election, his legal trouble has left him unpopular with New Jersey voters. Menendez faces one challenger in the Democratic primary, Lisa McCormick, and her performance on Tuesday indicate whether New Jerseyans want to move on from Menendez’s scandal—or from Menendez, himself. Given New Jersey’s D+12 partisan lean, the Democratic winner will be heavily favored over the Republican nominee, who is likely to be wealthy former pharmaceutical executive Bob Hugin. Hugin has been campaigning on the platform that he will not bow to the whims of the current president, if he wins the job—but will concentrate on serving his constituency.

Research contact: @baseballot

Photo source: Golden Keys Care

Call your Mom!

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May 1, 2018

As Mother’s Day quickly approaches, many readers are marking their calendars to make a call on May 13. But how often does the average adult child dial his or her Mom during the rest of the year?

A FiveThirtyEight/SurveyMonkey Audience poll conducted in 2016 found that most U.S. mothers do not “feel like chopped liver,” according to the researchers. But, of course, they’d like to hear from you more often.

After surveying 194 mothers with adult kids who live at a distance and 513 adult kids who live apart from their parents, here’s the good news: Most kids are doing their part, FiveThirtyEight reported.

Still, fully 21% of moms said that they’d like to hear from their kids more than once a day.

It’s no surprise that twice a day is characterized as just “too often” for more than 90% of adult kids, who told the researchers that a “reasonable expectation” would be once a day or less.

However, adult kids do expect to be in touch fairly frequently: Over half (54%) said that they should call weekly or a couple of times a week, and luckily for them, that’s exactly what almost half of moms (49%) expected.

When kids and moms do talk, it tends to be on the phone, but it might not involve a voice call. Moms reported that they were most likely to hear from their children by text, while kids ranked texts second after phone calls.

Forty-one percent of kids reported that they contacted their mothers less often than they felt they should. Only 23% of mothers felt that their children weren’t contacting them as often as they would like—and, in fact, fully 8% percent of mothers would like to hear from their children a little less.

We, personally, haven’t met those mothers—but maybe they have very large families.

 Research contact: leah.libresco@fivethirtyeight.com