Recap of August 9th

Welcome again to Socialism on the Ballot, folks. Today’s update is an off-the-cuff and more brief one than usual, but is just as important as any other update: we’re going to be recapping last night’s results (August 9th)—and diving into a few races more deeply and whether my analysis for them was correct.

The Big Picture

As results go, you could not have asked for a better night. Out of 11 endorsements up for election, nine of them won their races outright, and another took first place in a nonpartisan runoff. Both DSA candidates won in Wisconsin, all three in Vermont did as well, and in Minnesota at least four socialists will be in the state legislature. Mai Chong Xiong was the candidate who took nearly 40% and the first slot of a Ramsey County Board of Commissioners race, outpacing opponent Ying Vang-Pao by 10%; the only loss of the night, Sheigh Freeberg in Senate District 65, put up 22% against an incumbent whose time in office is almost older than he is.

These result are good in their own right, but they also make a huge milestone very possible for the Democratic Socialists of America: a 50% win rate in general elections this year.

Currently, DSA’s general election win/loss record sits at 21-45 this year, but this is a deceptively bad number. There is an inherent asymmetry in the count prior to election day: any primary loss must necessarily preclude winning a general election and so counts as a general election loss, but many certain victors cannot be reflected until election day in November. Thus, for practical purposes, the informative number here is primary win/loss record—and right now that’s 44-44, with 12 runoffs and 30 races to be determined. Very close, and suggestive of a general election win/loss record that has serious potential to end with more wins than losses.

We only have two full years of data to go off of (imperfectly compiled by myself, and in all likelihood still not totally complete) for DSA’s win record in previous years, but they serve as a good enough baseline: in 2020, 44% of DSA races ended in wins and in 2021, 43% ended in wins. Anything consistent with this would be a win in my book, particularly given the once (and possibly still) unfavorable national environment for Democrats and candidates to their left this year—to have the possibility of winning more often than we lose in spite of that and without a massive change in endorsement numbers is a very significant development.

Of course, there are still at least 30 primaries to decide this year, so there is still the potential for negative change in the numbers here. But you would be hard pressed to say things aren’t looking very good for the overall electoral project of the DSA this year.

Let’s now switch gears a bit and dig deeper into a few of these races, and the analysis I did for each of them.

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Specific races

Omar Fateh (Minnesota State Senate District 62)

I expected Omar Fateh to win here despite a curiously-motivated ethics inquiry into some of his conduct, and that was an easy choice, but it seems I was also correct to not underestimate his opponent Shaun Laden. Fateh carried this district by 60.65 to 39.5—definitely comfortable margin, but not by any means a dominating one for an incumbent official. Given how late Laden hopped in, a longer campaign may have more seriously tested Fateh.

Nonetheless, there’s a lot to like here for Fateh in the deeper details. Although it came close in a few places, he won every precinct in the district, an improvement over 2020 when he lost 6 of them. His numbers held up well in the non-white portions of the district between 2020 and 2022, with particularly good margins in Phillips. Fateh also improved among white voters generally in the district—he padded his already good performance in the white parts of Whittier neighborhood, and received substantial improvements in his vote share in Kingfield, Lyndale, and Powderhorn Park, all of which are neighborhoods that rank much whiter than the district overall.

If there’s anything to comment on in the negative, it’s that these areas remain his weakest in the district—the ten precincts in which Fateh won less than 60.65% of the vote are all in these neighborhoods, and I appear to have correctly identified them as the backbone for any surprise Laden victory. The Fateh campaign should probably be mindful and work to consolidate his gains in these areas before 2026. Overall though, Fateh seems pretty comfortable in this district and I’d say my prognostication was pretty good here.

Sheigh Freeberg (Minnesota State Senate District 65)

My two predictions for Sheigh Freeberg were that he was not favored, and that he was comfortably ahead of Zuki Ellis—and both were vindicated, although the latter a bit less so than the former. This race ended up Pappas 65.56%, Freeberg 22.64%, Ellis 11.81%. As for Freeberg’s path to victory, I had that as “decisively consolidating the northern vote in this district, which is mostly non-white; and extensively shaving Pappas’s margins in the southern, mostly white section of the district, where she pulled close to 70% of the vote.” which I think held up well but is obfuscated by how well Pappas did. As you might have guessed by the margin, Freeberg did not come anywhere close to the margins needed to challenge Pappas seriously on either count. This was a tough race and by far the least likely to go DSA’s way of the lot.

The precinct-level details tell a pretty straightforward story: Pappas did what she did in 2020, and that was more than sufficient. Pappas won every precinct with >50% of the vote (she lost a single precinct in 2020), and her margin went up slightly overall, despite two challengers this time. Strong margins in the white, southern half of the districts propelled this result—it seems likely she actually gained some ground here, an obvious and crushing blow to any primary challenger given her already punishing margins there. The northern half of the district is more of a mixed bag for her, though. Pappas did not do poorly here, per se, but north-central Saint Paul definitely appears to a consistently weak area for her. Food for thought for any future socialist candidacy in this area.

Darrin Madison (Wisconsin State Assembly District 10)

I’m not going to say this was a hard race to figure out the dynamics of, but if you asked me to highlight any of the predictions I made, this was the one I think I nailed the best. I wrote as follows for this district in my primary preview:

[…]this race will be heavily influenced by rate of turnout in northern Milwaukee versus turnout in Glendale and Shorewood; on this point, Kennedy is probably a minor favorite.* […] The second variable definitely favors Madison: a majority of the district’s population is in Milwaukee and Black (both by total and voting-age population), giving him the potential to cushion any turnout gap. […] Look for Madison and Kennedy to do extremely well in their respective bases, and watch the margins in the handful of transitionary precincts between Milwaukee and these suburbs.

* […]due to its close association with northern Milwaukee and the district previously, Shorewood may not necessarily be a reliable area for Kennedy in spite of its demographics resembling those of Glendale.

As it turns out, my biggest mistake was assuming it’d be very close but favoring Madison. Madison actually carried this race 58.19% to 41.58%—a substantial win.

Beyond the margin however, this was a very good prediction. Despite the city having less than half of the voters of the Milwaukee section of this district, Glendale had substantially higher turnout: 2,600 votes against 2,900 for Milwaukee in this race. (Topping them both however was Shorewood, where 3,100 people voted!) In the battle of the bases, both got solid margins, but Black voters helped Madison much more than white voters helped Kennedy: it was 59-41 for Kennedy in Glendale, and 72-28 for Madison in Milwaukee. The transition precincts I mentioned proved prescient—Madison comfortably carried them. And Shorewood, as I mentioned in my caveat, was not necessarily the reliable area for Kennedy that its 81% white voting-age population suggested. Shorewood has been grouped in with northern Milwaukee for at least the past 12 years and it voted accordingly: it backed Madison 60-40.

Brianna Westbrook (Arizona House of Representatives District 5)

Finally, let’s go back a week to analyze this race, just because it has complete data where Tanya Vyhovsky’s race does not, and I made a fairly explicit prediction here like in that race. I had very little to go off of overall for HD-5, which I noted in the recap, and by far of any prognostications I’ve made in the short course of this blog, this is the one with the least data analysis underpinning it:

Perhaps the best barometer is Bernie Sanders’s performance in 2020 here; he likely won the southern half of this district, which is more Hispanic, while losing the northern half of the district, which is more White. Appealing to the sizable Hispanic population of the district is almost certainly the best choice for Westbrook and where, if she were to win, I would expect her to do best in.

But, to my big surprise, I got this one pretty correct too, it looks like. Westbrook took 14.59% here when all the votes were counted; she exceeded that mark by probably one to two percent on average in the more Hispanic precincts in the district—not a terrible overperformance, but definitely something at least. She also did noticeably worse in whiter parts of the district, often three or four percent worse than her district-wide total. One thing I did not pick up on in my prognostication was a small but pronounced regional effect of her support corresponding to Westbrook’s campaign zipcode of 85067. In this small part of the district she clocked in around 20%, a very respectable margin—although likely still insufficient to crack the top two.

Overall, I’d call this my prognostication track record pretty good so far, even though it’s not done with particular sophistication. We’ll see how this holds up in future races to come—to put it politely, I am not a statistician or anything of the sort and I do not make promises about the accuracy of my prognoses—but at least to start out with, it does seem I have a handle on the dynamics of DSA candidates better than I thought.

Postscript: the next month-ish of posts

I try to keep a pretty good cushion of posts on here for a variety of reasons, so here’s what you can expect at minimum over the next month or so.

• On Saturday, a longform article on an endorsement gone wrong.

• New York’s primary preview

• Rhode Island’s primary preview

• Delaware’s primary preview, which may or may not need two parts (leaning toward yes—we’ll see how it develops)

• Two additional longform articles between the primary previews. TBD on subject, but I have a lot of these in drafts.

I don’t know how frequently you’ll get individual recap posts like this, but there may also be one or more of these from the coming primaries depending on my time and the convenience of doing so. Rest assured however you will not be lacking in content, at least for the next while.

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