Why did Democrats lose seats in the 2020 elections? More incumbents ran in more competitive districts.

Despite expectations that they would ride Joe Biden’s successful presidential election coattails to an increased majority in the US House of Representatives, the Democrats are likely to find themselves with a reduced majority heading into the 117th Congress. Ryan Williamson and Jamie Carson write that moderates likely lost their seats in this election because they were defending very competitive and often Republican-leaning districts in a nationalized election. With this in mind, they comment that Democrats must now consider how to promote their often diverse messages in ways that satisfies both the progressive and more moderate parts of the party

Why taking moderate positions may help the Democrats to retake the House this fall

Partisan polarization has steadily increased in recent decades, culminating in record highs in recent years. In new research, Jamie Carson and Ryan Williamson compare the ideology of winning and losing candidates in US House elections between 1992 and 2012. They find that winning candidates are much less ideologically extreme than those who lose elections. Though some districts prefer more extreme representatives, these are a minority. Together, these findings show that if challengers were more skilled at winning elections, polarization in Congress might be even greater than it is now

The story of the midterms is the triumph of the moderates – on both sides

Following this week’s midterm elections, in 2019 the Democratic Party will be in the majority in the US House of Representatives. Ryan Williamson and Jamie Carson have previously argued that more moderate Democratic candidates were more likely to win House seats. Analyzing the midterm results, they find that this year Democratic candidates who were more moderate were indeed able to win back seats from incumbent conservative candidates, and were also more likely to outperform Clinton’s vote from 2016

Michelle Nunn’s midterm result shows that Georgia’s demographics may be shifting to favor the Democrats

In Georgia’s Senate race Republican David Purdue defeated Democrat Michelle Nunn by nearly eight points, despite polling that had shown a much closer contest. Jamie L. Carson, Joel Sievert, and Ryan D. Williamson reflect on Georgia’s midterm election results, writing that in gaining more than 40 percent of the vote, Nunn outperformed many previous Democratic candidates in the state. They argue that if the Democratic Party continues to field good candidates in Georgia, shifting demographics may mean that they will be able to take statewide races within a few election cycles

Despite party pressures, House members’ support for their leadership in procedural votes is not guaranteed

Control of the floor agenda in the U.S. House of Representatives is integral if the majority party wishes to achieve its political and electoral aims. In new research, Jamie L. Carson, Michael H. Crespin, and Anthony J. Madonna find that parties will call on their members’ support during important procedural votes – which influence what is discussed, and the scope and length of the debate – when it is unlikely that voters will punish members for their support. However, despite these party pressures, members’ support is not guaranteed – more moderate and conservative members are less likely to support the leadership when requested

In order to increase competition in U.S. House races, states should look to extra-legislative bodies to redraw congressional boundaries

Politicians and pundits alike regularly bemoan the lack of electoral competition in congressional races as incumbent reelection rates frequently soar to over 90 percent. Redistricting and gerrymandering are often blamed as a way to lock members into their seats for at least a decade. Jamie L. Carson, Michael H. Crespin and Ryan D. Williamson ask if there are ways to inject more competition into elections during the mandated redistricting cycles. Based on an analysis of redistricting cycles from 1972 to 2012, they show that commission and court-drawn districts experience marginally more competition than those drawn by state legislatures. These results provide additional support for the argument that one way to increase the competitiveness of congressional elections is to allow extra-legislative bodies to draw congressional district boundaries

Constraining the Movement of the Spiral Features and the Locations of Planetary Bodies within the AB Aur System

We present new analysis of multi-epoch, H-band, scattered light images of the AB Aur system. We used a Monte Carlo, radiative transfer code to simultaneously model the system's SED and H-band polarized intensity imagery. We find that a disk-dominated model, as opposed to one that is envelope dominated, can plausibly reproduce AB Aur's SED and near-IR imagery. This is consistent with previous modeling attempts presented in the literature and supports the idea that at least a subset of AB Aur's spirals originate within the disk. In light of this, we also analyzed the movement of spiral structures in multi-epoch H-band total light and polarized intensity imagery of the disk. We detect no significant rotation or change in spatial location of the spiral structures in these data, which span a 5.8 year baseline. If such structures are caused by disk-planet interactions, the lack of observed rotation constrains the location of the orbit of planetary perturbers to be >47 AU.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figures, 1 table, Accepted to Ap

Policy Uncertainty and Manufacturing Investment: Evidence from U.S. State Elections

We estimate the effect of electorally induced policy uncertainty on investment in the manufacturing sector. Because state governors exercise considerable influence over legislation and considerable discretion over regulation and permitting, and because the policies relevant to business investment vary systematically by party, uncertainty over the partisan affiliation of the future governor is a source of political risk to firms considering business investment. More importantly, the lack of an incumbent in a race due to term limits raises uncertainty over the outcome, providing a convincing instrument that allows us to estimate causal effects. We find that, in a state with average partisan polarization, in the calendar year of a gubernatorial election, the elasticity of investment to the eventual margin of victory is 0.027. Both the significance and magnitude of this result are robust to various controls, measures, and estimators. Importantly, the investment decline is not reversed the following year. We show that own-state uncertainty is associated with a large and significant rise in neighboring states’ investment, suggesting that rather than postponing investment to the future, the effect of policy uncertainty at the subnational level is to drive investment to alternative sites