Election News

The Road to 270 is a weekly column leading up to the presidential election. Each installment is dedicated to understanding one state’s political landscape and how that might influence which party will win its electoral votes in 2020. We’ll do these roughly in order of expected competitiveness, moving toward the most intensely contested battlegrounds as election day nears. 

The Road to 270 will be published every Monday. The column is written by Seth Moskowitz, a 270toWin elections and politics contributor. Contact Seth at s.k.moskowitz@gmail.com or on Twitter @skmoskowitz.

South Dakota

South Dakota has produced some of the most influential Democrats of the last half century. Tom Daschle served as the Senate Majority Leader from 2001 to 2003. The 1972 Democratic presidential nominee, George McGovern, was a former South Dakota Senator.

The state, however, has voted Republican in nearly every presidential election in its history. Democrats have only won here four times, most recently in 1964. However, the state’s populist character has allowed downballot Democrats to win favor with rural communities even as it repeatedly voted Republican for president. This populism traces back to 1892, the first presidential election in which South Dakota participated. First, though, we’ll look at the state’s pre-statehood era.  

A 5% or higher result in two national polls released Sunday has qualified Andrew Yang for the next Democratic debate.  It will be held February 7, in Manchester, New Hampshire, four days before that state's primary. 

Yang had missed the cut for the party's most recent debate, held January 14. He will join the six candidates who were on the stage that night: Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg, Any Klobuchar, Bernie Sanders, Tom Steyer, and Elizabeth Warren.  The deadline for others to qualify is February 6.  

Sen. Bernie Sanders has taken the lead among likely Democratic caucusgoers in Iowa, per a poll released Saturday by The New York Times and Siena College. Sanders saw 25% support, a gain of 6 points from the last Time/Siena poll conducted in late October.  That gain appears to have come at the expense of another progressive, Sen. Elizabeth Warren. The only other notable change in the race was a doubling of support - to 8% - received by Sen. Amy Klobuchar. 

Sanders also led the CNN/Des Moines Register Poll released January 10. This poll, conducted by Selzer & Company, is generally considered the 'gold standard' of Iowa polling. Former Vice-President Joe Biden has led a couple other polls in the interim, with the net being that the two are basically tied in the overall Iowa polling average.  Note that the final pre-caucus poll from Selzer & Company will be released next Saturday, February 1, at 9:00 PM ET. The reveal will be broadcast live on CNN.

Here's a summary of the current national polling averages, as well as those in the four states that will hold their primary or caucus in February.

Joe Biden has a small lead over Bernie Sanders nationally, both are well out in front of the rest of the 12 person field. However, the picture becomes much less clear when looking at the states that kick off the 2020 election calendar. This is important for a couple reasons. First, delegates are won at the state level, not nationally. More importantly, because the primaries/caucuses occur over an extended period, each contest will be affected by the results in the ones that precede it.

The Road to 270 is a weekly column leading up to the presidential election. Each installment is dedicated to understanding one state’s political landscape and how that might influence which party will win its electoral votes in 2020. We’ll do these roughly in order of expected competitiveness, moving toward the most intensely contested battlegrounds as election day nears. 

The Road to 270 will be published every Monday. The column is written by Seth Moskowitz, a 270toWin elections and politics contributor. Contact Seth at s.k.moskowitz@gmail.com or on Twitter @skmoskowitz.

Vermont

Vermont, now heavily Democratic, was once fertile Republican territory. The first presidential nominee of that newly formed party received 78% of the vote here in 1856. The state would vote with the GOP for the next 26 elections. That single party streak is the longest in American history. Between 1856 and 1988, the state only voted once for a Democratic nominee.

Vermont has often been an anomaly. Its state legislature was the first to legalize same-sex marriage and recreational marijuana use. It was one of just two states to resist Franklin Roosevelt’s 1936 landslide. This nonconformist tradition traces back nearly four centuries, before Vermont was called Vermont.

Qualifying criteria for the next candidate debate have been announced by the Democratic National Committee.  The debate will take place February 7, four days before the New Hampshire primary.  Candidates can make the stage by meeting either a Delegate Threshold or what the Committee is calling an Alternate Threshold.

The Delegate Threshold is new and seems pretty straightforward. Candidates that earn one or more of the 41 available pledged delegates in the February 3 Iowa caucuses qualify for the debate.  

The Alternate Threshold is a renaming of the Polling plus Fundraising requirement in place for the most recent debate. These requirements have changed very little.  

Although the official kick-off of the 2020 election calendar is Iowa on February 3, early in-person voting gets underway Friday in Minnesota.  The state's early voting period begins 46 days prior to an election. Vermont follows Saturday. Both states will hold their primaries on Super Tuesday, March 3. 

Some absentee ballots have been mailed in New Hampshire and North Carolina. Many more states will provide in-person and/or absentee early voting in the weeks ahead. 

Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming will not run for the state's open U.S. Senate seat this year.  Cheney will remain in the U.S. House where she has experienced a rapid rise through the GOP ranks. 

Sen. Mike Enzi announced last year that he would not seek a 5th term this year. Despite Cheney's decision, Republicans are heavily favored to retain the seat. The frontrunner for the GOP nomination appears to be former Rep. Cynthia Lummis, who held the state's at-large congressional seat for four terms before retiring in 2016.

Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey ended his presidential bid Monday.  Despite campaigning for nearly a year - entered the race last February 1 - he had been averaging only 2-3% nationally and in the four early states. While that placed him ahead of several candidates in the still-large field, it was no longer enough to qualify him for the debate stage. 

It’s with a full heart that I share this news—I’m suspending my campaign for president.

To my team, supporters, and everyone who gave me a shot—thank you. I am so proud of what we built, and I feel nothing but faith in what we can accomplish together. pic.twitter.com/Fxvc549vlJ

— Cory Booker (@CoryBooker) January 13, 2020

As the New York Times notes, "the departure of Mr. Booker from the crowded Democratic field, heralded at the outset as the most diverse in history, leaves just one African-American candidate, Deval Patrick, vying for the Democratic nomination in a party where black voters are an essential bloc of the Democratic base." Effectively, that means the party will not have a black nominee this year as Patrick, the former Massachusetts governor, has received close to 0% support in polling.

12 candidates remain in the race. Six of them will face-off in Tuesday's debate in Iowa, which comes just shy of three weeks before that state holds its 2020 caucuses.

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The Road to 270 is a weekly column leading up to the presidential election. Each installment is dedicated to understanding one state’s political landscape and how that might influence which party will win its electoral votes in 2020. We’ll do these roughly in order of expected competitiveness, moving toward the most intensely contested battlegrounds as election day nears. 

The Road to 270 will be published every Monday. The column is written by Seth Moskowitz, a 270toWin elections and politics contributor. Contact Seth at s.k.moskowitz@gmail.com or on Twitter @skmoskowitz.

Idaho

Pre-Statehood

Through the Revolutionary War and American Independence, much of North America was still unexplored by Europeans or their descendants. This included the territory that would eventually become Idaho. Lewis and Clark first explored the region in 1805 which was, at the time, home to about 8,000 Native Americans.