Kentucky's McVote for US Senate Pt. 1
Did the Republican red shift happen in KY?
Part 1 Objectives: Confirm if the red shift anomaly is real; improve as a researcher; propose questions to answer in Part 2.
This is part 1 of a longform 2021 series exploring Senator McConnell’s US Senate election wins from 1984 to 2020 against other data points. The year 1984 quickly brings some contrasting art to mind.1
The main goal is to understand our election trends and election security deeper - using one of the all-time obstructionists in American congressional history2 as my first observational experiment.
I am not Jennifer Cohn or any other election security expert like that. In part 2 of this series, her work and citations will be applied for me to better understand election security challenges and the real impacts they’ve already had. That should help me look at my Kentucky elections dataset with different eyes from the start of this to the end. I am not a lawyer. Just an amateur researcher3, learning in real time as I write.
Why look at McConnell’s wins? People I respect were talking4 about the need to review Senator McConnell’s 2020 win. A close family member of mine is an Amy McGrath fan. I mentioned to her in July that the polls5 and Kentucky history showed that McGrath would likely lose and it won’t be a close race. Kentucky is not great with electing women6.
I held back on fully reading the threads exploring KY’s 2020 Senate race results until at least Part 1 of this deep dive could be written - yeah, it’s been a few months. The red shift7, where McConnell won more votes than was expected, is one piece of the 2020 KY election that I’ll dig into during this series.
I don’t expect to uncover a great conspiracy or find the missing piece to oust McConnell, overturn the 2020 Kentucky election results, and install Amy McGrath. That is not an expectation or endgame here. It’s primarily about learning and swimming deeper for the future. Alright, let’s see what happens.
Observation Deck: Vote totals are pulled from .gov sources. Public list with all sources for these charts are here. Not organized in a super-sexy way but accessible and verifiable. "Presidential" refers to election totals for Kentucky voters. "Senate" refers to election totals for Kentucky voters. Any further delineation is stated below.
A. 2020: McConnell’s Poll Ratings vs. Votes
This is about the red shift in Kentucky’s 2020 Senate race. Did it happen?
YES.
The red shift happened. McConnell’s approval ratings during his last term outright mismatch with his vote totals for 2020.
McConnell’s job approval rating with Kentuckians was 47% in February 20218, 39% in October 20209, 41% in May 202010, 18% in August of 201711, and 36% in April 201312. You’d think a Republican leader on the national stage would have better numbers, even with their own voters.
McConnell had a 39% approval rating going into the 2020 November election. In the same term, just a few years earlier, he had an approval rating of 18%. That’s not a typo. And he won the 2020 election with 57.8% of the vote13.
Why is this Republican red shift significant at all? What is a job approval rating?
Gallup, a leading Pollster and analytics firm, defines Presidential job approval as “a simple, yet powerful, measure of the public’s view of…job performance at a particular point in time.”14 This applies to Senators for the states they serve.
For me, the job approval ratings don’t exactly equate to whether voters want a person replaced. It’s not a long walk to that assumption, but how someone responds to a Senator’s job approval poll is not a straight line to how they’ll vote for that Senator.
Even when there is a direct personal stake (like the status of additional stimulus checks based on which party was elected in 2020), 35-60% of voters15 won’t care enough OR have enough access to cast their ballot from American election to election. This is actually what VotingInfoHQ.com is about at its core - fighting voter apathy, misinformation, and inequity. Shameless promotion!
A lot of politics now runs along party lines16. The legendarily bipartisan Ginsburg-Scalia friendships17 aren’t here. When I see Republican voters disapproving of McConnell like they consistently do (oh, hey again 18%), it’s like a red flag on fire and screaming at me to pay it some attention.
B. 2020: Presidential vs. Senate vs. KY-03
Now that we have confirmed the red shift, what stands out in the data?
Analysis will be in Part 2. This is about observing the outliers in my research18:
Amy McGrath got 2.00% MORE votes than President Biden (38.20% vs. 36.20%), but McConnell got 4.29% LESS than the Former Guy (57.80% vs. 62.09%).
The 39% job approval rating for McConnell from October of 2020 would have equaled 832,672 votes for his 2020 election. He won 400,643 more votes than his last approval rating before the November election suggested he would. Again, this is not a direct line for me where the portion of Kentuckians that disapproved of McConnell were guaranteed to vote against him. That’s a major red shift though.
Jefferson County is a serious population and Democratic power-center in Kentucky, with 17.16% of the 2019 Kentucky population19 and housing the 3rd congressional district. 230,750 votes for Amy McGrath came out of this one county around the Louisville area20. Kentucky has 120 counties21.
C. ‘84-’20: Presidential vs. McConnell
Further down the rabbit hole… what outliers are in the historical data?
1984: McConnell barely beats his Democrat challenger. The difference was only 5,269 votes. 49.91%-49.50%.
1990: The 2nd closest election for McConnell. The difference this time was 40,058 votes. 52.19%-47.81%.
2008: The 3rd closes election for McConnell. The total difference was 106,811 votes. 52.97%-47.03%.
Democratic Presidential candidates have won the popular vote TWO TIMES since McConnell was elected. 1992 and 1996. That would be Bill Clinton and Bill Clinton.
The KY-03 seat looks to be solidly Democrat since the 2012 election cycle, held by Rep. John Yarmuth (D) since 200622. There are a lot of votes to be had here for future Kentucky Democrats at all levels.
Part 1 Conclusions and Questions.a) McConnell's Republican red shift DID happen in 2020.
b) McConnell's approval ratings mismatch with his vote totals dramatically over his last election cycle. A deeper dive would be worthwhile in Part 2.
c) Why does McConnell wield so much power in Congress when he is so disapproved of and unpopular even by Republican voters in such a partisan era? Did he have any influence whatsoever in his wife receiving a Cabinet position, or was that given 100% for her own merits?
d) How much does the coattail effect play in Kentucky?
e) Is it normal for a politician to barely win their first Senate election and go on to basically trounce opponents in most future elections while being noticeably - and at times historically - unpopular with their own political party’s voters?
e) The voting from KY's 3 biggest counties will be examined in Part 2, accounting for at least 25% of Kentucky's total 2020 vote. Will the observations from Part 1 align or clash with data at the county level?
f) Do the outliers and observations here in Part 1 have any relation to known, documented instances of election security issues? This could lead to an exploration of voting machines and more, related to what Jenny Cohn broke down in a brilliant thread with unbelievable scope23. We’ll see.
I’ll do my best to address these questions in Part 2.
The research continues soon.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DUdw325GzeEOOtWSZzLs7Pp2Z35mtzTB/view?usp=sharing
https://forwardky.com/lets-have-some-fun-with-the-great-obstructionist-mitch-mcconnell/
https://twitter.com/VotingInfoHQ
https://twitter.com/GrassrootsSpeak/status/1336713647050153984
https://ballotpedia.org/United_States_Senate_election_in_Kentucky,_2020#Polls
https://women.ky.gov/Legislation/Pages/default.aspx#:~:text=In%20Kentucky's%20history%2C%20no%20woman,women%20throughout%20history%20to%20Congress.
https://twitter.com/jennycohn1/status/1336914739469795329?lang=en
https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/538518-majority-of-kentuckians-disapprove-of-mcconnells-job-in-senate
https://spectrumnews1.com/ky/lexington/news/2020/10/31/polls-mcconnell
https://www.publicpolicypolling.com/polls/mcconnell-under-water-on-approval-in-kentucky/
http://ourlivesontheline.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/08/KentuckyResults.pdf
https://www.politico.com/story/2013/04/mitch-mcconnell-poll-089815
https://www.politico.com/2020-election/results/kentucky/senate/
https://news.gallup.com/interactives/185273/presidential-job-approval-center.aspx
https://electionlab.mit.edu/research/voter-turnout
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2019/12/17/in-a-politically-polarized-era-sharp-divides-in-both-partisan-coalitions/
https://medium.com/@OPERAAmerica/justice-ruth-bader-ginsburg-and-justice-antonin-scalia-as-supernumeraries-in-washington-national-2d802e1d6f95
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1rEaSjKE_Ju6XJ4CYYztCs6qOr_g40vRfzomc0yykiv8/edit?usp=sharing
https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/jeffersoncountykentucky
https://elect.ky.gov/results/2020-2029/Documents/2020%20General%20Election%20Results.pdf
https://ballotpedia.org/Counties_in_Kentucky#:~:text=Kentucky%20has%20120%20counties.
https://ballotpedia.org/John_Yarmuth
twitter.com/jennycohn1/status/1379533252730396672?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet