How Election Week 2022 Went Down
Fivey’s been tweeting about some interesting issue polls today. In case you aren’t already following FiveyFox on Twitter, I’ll occasionally share some of the tweets here. Here’s what Fivey had to say about a recent poll about young likely voters.
We’ve got some early results from Ohio. First off, ABC News projects Republican incumbent Gov. Mike DeWine will remain in the governor’s mansion. In the Senate race, with 13 percent of the expected vote reporting, Tim Ryan is in the lead with 63 percent to J.D. Vance’s 37 percent. But these are mostly early and absentee ballots that are expected to skew toward Ryan. Similarly, in OH-1, with 33 percent of expected vote reporting, Democrat Greg Landsman is leading with 61 percent.
Polls in Kansas are about to close, so here’s a quick rundown of three of the big races on the ballot.
Incumbent Rep. Sharice Davids is favored to win in Kansas’s 3rd District tonight. Davids is one of nine openly LGBTQ members of Congress and one of five Native American representatives. She and her opponent, Republican staffer Amanda Adkins, have faced off against each other before for this same seat — but with different district boundaries. The 3rd was redrawn this year to make it more rural, shifting the balance from D+4 to R+3. The shift has brought lots of Democratic spending into the race, in an effort to keep the seat. Spending against Adkins in this race has been big, too, outstripping even the spending in favor of Davids. And money going to a Libertarian candidate also seems to be anti-Adkins.
In the Kansas governor’s race, incumbent Laura Kelly has built her brand on kitchen-table issues like education, Medicaid expansion, high-speed internet access and small-business investment. Her challenger Derek Schmidt, in contrast, has zeroed in on hot-button culture war issues — abortion, gender identity and what he sees as Kelly’s totalitarian COVID-19 policies. She’s slightly favored to win tonight, partly because Schmidt’s approach to this race might be losing him some support among moderate Republicans.
The race for Kansas attorney general features another comeback attempt by former Secretary of State Kris Kobach after losing the 2018 gubernatorial race and the 2020 U.S. Senate election. In keeping with his career-defining themes, Kobach wants to fight illegal immigration, which he blames for everything from voter fraud to terrorism. In contrast, lawyer and former police officer Chris Mann seems to largely be running on a platform of not being Kobach. It’s not a bad strategy, given the number of times Kansans have already rejected Kobach, whose resume includes losing a trial to implement a citizenship voting law and being sent to remedial law classes by the judge. The latest poll has Mann and Kobach running basically neck-and-neck.