Many thanks to @mattgrossmann.bsky.social for having me on the @niskanencenter.bsky.social #ScienceofPolitics podcast to talk '26 midterms for the U.S. Senate & House!

TLDR; battleground looks expanded for Senate Democrats compared to year ago thanks to candidate recruitment efforts. Take a listen!

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

New article by @algaraca.bsky.social, Byengseon Bae, @edwardheadington.bsky.social, Hengjiang Liu, Bianca Nigri and Lisette Gomez uses presidential approval, party brands and polling gaps to forecast 2024 U.S. elections, improving on standard models.

Read more: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Senate Democrats’ two-cycle math The GOP won a four-seat gain in 2024. Democrats want theirs in 2026.

Now that the 2025 cycle is complete, fun to look ahead to the 2026 midterms in the U.S. Senate.

Fun talking with @nationaljournal.com on the state of play for the Senate majority in 2026 & even 2028.

TLDR; Democratic majority might be a two-cycle project.

www.nationaljournal.com/s/730098/sen...

What an incredible public good and contribution!

Absolutely incredible work and public good, thanks for launching this Elliott! Terrific and needed resource at a critical time!

For public policy scholars: JPIPE published our article that uses machine learning to code the universe of congressional and state legislative data since 2009 by the Comparative Agenda Project policy codes. That's 1.68 million bills. OPEN-ACCESS here: www.nowpublishers.com/article/Deta...

Such excellent work and a terrific public good—congrats Alex!!

Thanks!

Thank you, my friend!

Thank you, David!!

Terrific to see this new research note out w/ @djsimmons.bsky.social @isaachale.bsky.social in @repjournal.bsky.social

How an Independent Study Project Became a Published Election Forecast | Claremont Graduate UniversityClaremont Graduate University

Terrific to see my @claremontgraduateu.bsky.social Fall 2023 independent study being highlighted.

We developed a unified model of U.S. elections from theory to estimation/forecasting--resulting in a
@pspolisci.bsky.social piece: tinyurl.com/rarx8txk

Fun collaboration!

www.cgu.edu/news/2025/04...

Did Republicans Take Washington in a Landslide? Not So Much President-elect Donald J. Trump was the first Republican to win the popular vote in two decades, but by only a 1.5-point margin, the narrowest since 2000.

Great to be featured in this @nytimes.com piece highlighting incredible continuation of partisan continuity in county-level voting patterns during the 2024 elections.

Also neat to see our @electoralstudies.bsky.social data used for terrific data viz for public use.

www.nytimes.com/interactive/...

Congratulations to Senator Thune, the U.S. Senate’s Majority Leader in the 119th Congress.

Thune (2002) joins esteemed company w/LBJ (1941), Howard Baker (1964), & Harry Reid (1974) as Senate Majority Leaders that lost their first Senate election.

There’s a life lesson there!

Excited to see work w/@edwardheadington.bsky.social & others using new data on party & POTUS brands since 1938 to predict 2024 elexs at POTUS & congressional levels out @pspolisci.bsky.social!

Project stemmed from independent study w/talented
CGU students; neat experience!

🔗 tinyurl.com/37242ppc

Excited to share new work in the Journal of Political Marketing w/terrific grad student Seon Bae.

Using 1900-2022 data on *both* House & Senate; we find candidate quality & incumbency continues bicameral decline in salience but amateurs might've cost McConnell the majority.

🔗 tinyurl.com/ykxne95c

We find electorally strong majorities have little incentive to moderate bills while weaker majorities face strong incentive to motivate bipartisanship towards reaping electoral benefit.

Clear trade-off between public support & majority partisan agendas.

Link: www.nowpublishers.com/article/Deta...

Excited to see our article out at JPIPE, especially in the issue commemorating the 30th anniversary of Cox & McCubbins' Legislative Leviathan.

Josh Ryan & I ask are there exogenous sources of variation in ideological policy concessions the majority makes to the minority in Congress?

Yes!

1/2

Interesting new poll on the mass public's approval of the U.S. Congress...but is 8% the new "normal?"

Nope, looks like the chaos in theHouse might be drawing congressional approval to *historic* lows according to universe of polling from 1974-2022.

8% approval is the third lowest ever recorded!

Great opportunity for first post on BlueSky!

Excited to have an article in this Electoral Studies special issue on comparative Affective Polarization w/my good buddy @roizur.bsky.social .

Check out all the neat comparative work on measurement, parties, and role of policy in AP!

Just had our big U01 kickoff meeting for the next phase of the Understanding America Study! A reminder to everyone in polisky that there's an enormous amount of existing data here and that if you field a survey using the UAS you can easily merge.

https://uasdata.usc.edu/index.php