Do political scandals still matter? Or is ticket-splitting dead?

Compared to last year — and compared to next year — this is going to be a quiet November at Silver Bulletin. But it’s Election Day next Tuesday in Virginia, New Jersey, California and New York City. The election is (obviously) important if you happen to live in one of these places. And California’s Prop 50, which would remove control of the redistricting process from a bipartisan commission and allow Democrats to aggressively redraw boundaries, has major implications in the redistricting wars.

But we have to be honest: Nate and I are more skeptical than most analysts about the forecasting power of off-year and special elections. Yes, elections are fun (at least if you win). And we’re always starved for hard data, especially if you don’t trust the polls.1 But it’s easy to miss the forest for the trees by focusing on minutiae in every election and using them to make pronouncements about the broader environment.

But also, these races have been, to use a technical election analysis term, boring. For instance, we’d be covering Prop 50 more if its passage didn’t look like nearly a foregone conclusion. Meanwhile, Democrats had held strong leads in polls of Virginia’s three statewide races (governor, lieutenant governor, and attorney general) for most of the year. And in general, the party out of power tends to do well in these elections — more good news for Democrats in VA. Did I watch the Virginia gubernatorial debate? Yes, but only in the background while building a piece of IKEA furniture.

Then on Oct. 2nd, news broke that Jay Jones, the Democratic candidate for attorney general in Virginia, had been convicted of reckless driving in 2022 after going 116 miles per hour in a 70 mph zone. As a former Florida driver I normally wouldn’t look twice at that number.2 But more controversially than the speeding ticket, Jones served 500 of his 1000 hours of court-mandated community service at his own political action committee.3

And that was just the oppo appetizer. On Oct. 3rd, National Review published texts Jones sent to a Republican member of Virginia’s state legislature in 2022 about Virginia House Speaker Todd Gilbert. Here’s an excerpt:

Three