Middleboro Review and so on

The Downballot has followed special elections more closely than anyone else for over a decade, which is why we’re pleased to bring you this special report looking back on races this cycle to help us understand what they’re telling us about November. When it comes to specials, we had two key insights. First, instead of looking at these races one by one, we aggregated them. And second, we realized we should compare them to the results of the most recent presidential election within each district, to give us a uniform baseline. That latter step was only possible, though, because we’d done the extremely hard work of actually calculating those presidential numbers on a district-by-district basis. Some other folks reputedly had data like that, but they kept it under lock and key. We, on the other hand, made it freely available to all. It was a long time before our methods achieved wide acceptance, but now everyone knows what you’re talking about when you say, for instance, that Democrats ar...

  Morning Digest: Wisconsin GOP seeks to curtail veto power that extended school funding 400 years Governors have wielded the "Vanna White" veto for a century, despite many crackdowns David Nir and Jeff Singer Feb 24 Democratic Gov. Tony Evers of Wisconsin. (Credit: Tony Evers Facebook) Leading Off WI Ballot Wisconsin’s GOP-led legislature  approved  a proposed state constitutional amendment last week to curb the governor’s extensive and unique partial veto powers—a move that comes three years after Democratic Gov. Tony Evers extended school funding  400 years longer  than Republicans had wanted. Evers, who has spent his entire two terms in office parrying a hostile legislature, was able to pull off that feat by wielding his pen on a line in a budget that said increased funding would be in effect “for the 2023–24 school year and the 2024–25 school year.” Evers deleted—vetoed— just enough characters  so that the funding would apply “for 2023–2425.”...