Biden did better in Minnesota than Trump did in Texas

[Antonio the Sixth]

Minnesota is now more partisan than Texas. Hahahaha oh yes, love that little factoid about this election.

I mean, partisanship has to be measured in relative terms. MN is 3 points to the left of the nation and TX 10 points to the right. But yeah, it says something about the extent of Biden's victory that in raw terms he won MN by more than he lost TX.

[Antonio the Sixth]

I posted this on my Twitter Account a while ago, But I'll Say it again:

Trump received roughly 60% in Most of Rural Minnesota

Trump received roughly 75% in most of Rural Ohio

If the GOP can get that 60% of the vote to 70%, they could flip MN, and Ds probably don't have enough room in the Twin Cities Metro to make it up.

I don't buy the idea that all of rural America everywhere is going to inevitably end up voting >70% Republican. Sure there are a lot of places that now vote >70% Republican that I never would have expected to, but there are also plenty that don't, and I don't see why we just assume that the former represent the future for the latter.

[Antonio the Sixth]

It seems like Rural MN/IA/WI are voting the same as where Rural PA/OH/WV was 12 years ago

Yes, but to assume that they will follow the same trajectory is mere conjecture.

Minnesota is now more partisan than Texas. Hahahaha oh yes, love that little factoid about this election.

I mean, partisanship has to be measured in relative terms. MN is 3 points to the left of the nation and TX 10 points to the right. But yeah, it says something about the extent of Biden's victory that in raw terms he won MN by more than he lost TX.

Why?

Because obviously there are back and forths in the respective level of popular support of the two parties that aren't meaningful in terms of understanding the degree of partisanship of a given state, and there has to be some way to control for those, and the convention has traditionally been to do so by taking a hypothetical tied race as the baseline.

[Antonio the Sixth]

Minnesota is now more partisan than Texas. Hahahaha oh yes, love that little factoid about this election.

I mean, partisanship has to be measured in relative terms. MN is 3 points to the left of the nation and TX 10 points to the right. But yeah, it says something about the extent of Biden's victory that in raw terms he won MN by more than he lost TX.

Why?

Because obviously there are back and forths in the respective level of popular support of the two parties and there has to be some way to control for them, and the convention is to do so by taking a hypothetical tied race as the baseline.

This hypothetical tied race isn't real, though, which makes using it for analysis nothing short of useless. The actual numbers inform us that Minnesota is more Democratic than Texas is Republican. In fact, the idea that there are any back and forths at all is stretch to begin with. The last four elections are D+7, D+4, D+2, and D+5. Pretending Republicans have an equal seat at the table simply skews the numbers and obfuscates reality for no good reason.

But you can't say a state is "more partisan" than another based on how they vote in a presidential election, because the point of a presidential election isn't to measure partisanship, but to elect a President. The results contingent on specific candidates and a specific context. There's no good way to control for that, really, but the reason we take the PVI is to at least have a measure that's invariant to year-by-year cycles. Whatever variable represents the national environment can easily be extrapolated by seeing how a state result compares to PVI, so it's not like the process destroys information of anything. In fact, seeing Democratic candidates outperform PVI so consistently is evidence that they're more popular.