Mock Paper Scissors

H/T Scissorhead Skinny-D

It seems that in the recent elections, it wasn’t that Team Evil didn’t turn out, it’s that the Republicans voted for the Democrats (emphasis. mine):

After yet another disappointing showing for Republicans in Georgia’s Senate runoff on Tuesday, some conservatives — like Sean Hannity, Newt Gingrich and Kevin McCarthy — have begun to point to a surprising culprit: a failure to take advantage of early voting.

The theory seems to be that Republicans are losing because early voting is giving Democrats a turnout edge. It follows a similar conversation after the midterm elections, when a chorus of conservatives said Republicans needed to start encouraging mail voting.

But as more data becomes available on turnout in this year’s election, it is quite clear that turnout was not the main problem facing Republicans.

Pay attention here:

In state after state, the final turnout data shows that registered Republicans turned out at a higher rate — and in some places a much higher rate — than registered Democrats, including in many of the states where Republicans were dealt some of their most embarrassing losses.

Instead, high-profile Republicans like Herschel Walker in Georgia or Blake Masters in Arizona lost because Republican-leaning voters decided to cast ballots for Democrats, even as they voted for Republican candidates for U.S. House or other down-ballot races in their states.

Show your work, NateCohn/NYTimes!

Take Maricopa County in Arizona. It’s home to Phoenix and around 70 percent of the state’s voters. Some Republicans say — without any clear evidence — they faltered in Arizona because some Maricopa voters were unable to cast ballots at the polls on Election Day, but the final turnout data shows that 75 percent of registered Republicans turned out, compared with 69 percent of Democrats. That was enough to yield an electorate in which registered Republicans outnumbered Democrats by nine percentage points. Yet Republicans like Mr. Masters and Kari Lake lost their races for Senate and governor.

Or consider Clark County in Nevada. There, 67 percent of Republicans voted, compared with 57 percent of Democrats, implying that Republicans probably outnumbered Democrats statewide. Yet the Democrat — Catherine Cortez Masto — prevailed in the Senate race while Republicans won the governorship and also won the most votes for the House.

Going back to a highlight above, Nate concludes:

Wherever I’ve dug into the data, I see a similar story. You can read comprehensive analyses of North Carolina, Florida or New York, all showing a considerable Republican edge as well.

In the key Senate states mentioned in this article, Republican House candidates received more votes than Democratic ones. The final Times/Siena polls showed that voters in Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada preferred Republican control of the Senate.

It’s fair to say voters in these key states probably preferred Republican control of government, in no small part because more Republicans showed up to vote. They just didn’t find Republican candidates they wanted to support at the top of the ticket.

I have a hard time believing that a Republican would split their vote and pull the lever for a Democrat, but I do not have a hard time believing that they might leave it blank, and that effectively is a vote for the Democrat. A possibility that Cohn doesn’t analyze but might be in play is that the Republican voter might have thought that their candidate was a RINO.

It happens on the Left all the time. The Susan Sarandons  never, ever hold their noses and takes one for the team. They will NOT be sullied!

There’s all sorts of reasons why a Republican might not vote for their candidate, and the Republican Purity Patrol lurks in their ranks just as they do in ours.

UPDATE 1: in the comments, Scissorhead BDR spots a really obvious, glaring error:

I call shenanigans. https://azsos.gov/elections/results-data/voter-registration-statistics

A THIRD of registered voters in AZ are ‘Others’, aka ‘Independents’

Any analysis that tries to figure this out by only comparing R/D turnout is bullshit.

Steaming, rank, FTFNYT bullshit.