It ends up grading everyone who tried to tilt the odds around them: the mapmakers, the donors and the party officials deciding who gets to run. Lines drawn to guarantee a seat can hand it to someone else, and money spent to sink a candidate can float him back. Voters don’t just pick winners.
Texas Republicans redrew the South Texas congresswoman’s seat into a district President Trump would have carried by 18 points, filling it with voters who had never seen her on a ballot, and she lost to the Tejano star Bobby Pulido by 24. The GOP’s new map traded voters who knew her for voters who knew him. Another target of the Texas gerrymander target list, the border Democrat’s district was turned into a seat Trump would have carried by 10 points.
After receiving a pardon from Trump that erased bribery charges, he won a 12th term anyway. Trump kept him out of prison, and Texas Republicans couldn’t get him out of Congress. The California governor answered Texas’s gerrymander with Prop. 50, and Democrats won all five seats it was drawn to win.
The Texas map flipped just one seat for Republicans. Texas started the map war and Newsom won it. The OpenAI president’s super PAC network made South Carolina Sen.
Darline Graham its biggest general-election bet, at about $2.7 million, and she ended up losing a state Trump won by 18 points to a pediatrician whose ads called her “Data Center Darline.” All Brockman’s money bought was her nickname. The crypto bros who famously accused Mark Zuckerberg of stealing Facebook put $7.4 million into Ohio to stop Sherrod Brown, part of more than $60 million in crypto money that failed to keep him from beating Senator Jon Husted. At least they got paid when Zuckerberg told them to go away.
Montana’s Democratic Senate nominee refused to drop out and clear the field for independent Seth Bodnar, then took 12 percent of the vote, just more than Republican Kurt Alme’s margin of victory. She couldn’t win the seat, but she could decide who did. Originally a staple of Newsweek's print edition, Conventional Wisdom used arrows to track whose stock was rising or falling in the political circus.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
