I’ll just note that according to the link you posted, OR-6 has the highest % Hispanic representation in the state by nearly 5%.
So this is a definitional issue: is it accurate to call the most Hispanic district in the 14th most Hispanic state (per Wikipedia) “not a heavily Hispanic area or anything?”
So this is a definitional issue: is it accurate to call the most Hispanic district in the 14th most Hispanic state (per Wikipedia) “not a heavily Hispanic area or anything?”
We can answer this quantitatively.
17.4% of the citizen voting age population of OR-6 is Hispanic. Of 9 candidates who ran in OR-6, two, Salinas and Leon, are Hispanic, making Hispanics 22.2% of the candidate pool. So they were not particularly over- or under-represented in this race. It is slightly surprising that the strongest candidate in this race happened to be Hispanic, but 22.2% chances happen all the time. Obviously, referring to this as “chance” is in no way suggesting that Salinas won “by luck,” she’s clearly a skilled legislator.
Matt says that “this is the only viable opportunity to add a Hispanic Democrat to the caucus this year.” It seems like we have to consider four counterfactuals here:
1. Salinas didn’t run
I think it’s a safe assumption that people who vote for Hispanic candidates specifically because they are Hispanic and represent Hispanic issues are a subset of the Hispanic population.
Let’s say that the entire Hispanic vote in OR-6 went for Salinas (surely an overestimate), that this represents 17.4% of votes in this election, and that 2⁄3 of them would have switched their votes to Leon if Salinas hadn’t run. That would have given Leon an additional 6,000-7,000 votes or so, which would have been enough to beat Flynn if Salinas’s other votes were redistributed evenly or in proportion to vote share to other candidates.
That’s a pretty generous assumption in favor of the idea that Leon was a viable candidate in this counterfactual scenario, one that reasonable people could disagree on.
2. Flynn didn’t run
In this case, let’s assume Flynn’s votes would have been redistributed evenly or in proportion to vote share to other candidates. Then Salinas would still have won.
3. Salinas and Flynn didn’t run
In this case, let’s say once again that Leon would have received an additional 6,000-7,000 Hispanic votes, while the remaining voters would have been redistributed among the other candidates either evenly or in proportion to vote share. In this case, Leon would have been the frontrunner. Indeed, under this model, she could have received more like 1⁄3 of the Hispanic vote, with the remainder of the votes being split up equally, and been neck and neck with Reynolds. But reasonable people can probably still disagree on whether she’d have received even this much of the Hispanic vote.
4. Flynn had run in a district where his top competitor was white
Let’s say that Flynn had run in a different district where his top competitor had equal local appeal and political skill to that of Salinas. However, in this counterfactual district, the prospect of putting an additional Hispanic legislator in the Democratic caucus was not on the table, because Flynn’s top competitor was not Hispanic.
Matt is suggesting that, in this case, that competitor may not have been able to attract a big PAC spend of their own, and Flynn’s campaign funding, along with his qualities as a candidate, may have been sufficient to win him the election. I don’t read this as a dig against Salinas’s skill as a politician. I read it as an explanation for why she in particular, among other strong candidates in other districts, was able to attract over a million dollars in PAC spending of her own. Given that BoldPAC is an explicitly pro-Hispanic Democratic PAC, it seems like they themselves would agree that giving a strong Democratic Hispanic candidate extra funding to help them beat non-Hispanic rivals is exactly their agenda.
Flynn couldn’t help being from the district he was from, and in this election, there was an extremely limited supply (1) of explicitly EA candidates with a heavy focus on pandemic prevention. So the fact that he happened to be up against a main competitor who is Hispanic and could therefore attract this specific form of campaign financing does seem to be a matter of luck.
Analysis
It seems possible, but unlikely, that Flynn got “unlucky” in facing an unusually strong opponent. Salinas is clearly very good, and my guess is that in most contested primaries, there is at least one very skilled, appealing, and reasonably well-funded legislator in the running.
From the outside view, we ought to perhaps view an EA candidate as being basically a “random sample” of the candidate quality pool. As we can see in this election, vote distributions are long-tailed, and a randomly sampled candidate in a 9-candidate election will usually be lackluster. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea to take a shot. I think we should not update overmuch on the strategy of “just throw money behind EA-aligned candidates.”
For the hypothesis that BoldPAC’s late-campaign spend turned a Flynn victory into a Salinas victory, we are sort of positing that Salinas’s skill and Flynn’s money had them neck-and-neck, but that Salinas could benefit from an influx of cash and advertising much more than Flynn because of diminishing marginal returns. On May 5th, Salinas and Flynn polled at 18% and 14% respectively. So around the time of the BoldPAC ad buy, this hypothesis might have seemed reasonable. Looking at the voting results and assuming we should have known at the time that Salinas would receive twice the support of Flynn is just hindsight bias. Going further and denying that Flynn could have won in any election at all is “totally spurious” and an “ugly” and “backwards interpretation” analysis is, well, the sort of that I deleted my Facebook account in order to avoid.
17.4% of the citizen voting age population of OR-6 is Hispanic
https://davesredistricting.org/maps#viewmap::9b2b545f-5cd2-4e0d-a9b9-cc3915a4750f
Wow, davesredestricting.org is a great tool, thanks for posting that!
I’ll just note that according to the link you posted, OR-6 has the highest % Hispanic representation in the state by nearly 5%.
So this is a definitional issue: is it accurate to call the most Hispanic district in the 14th most Hispanic state (per Wikipedia) “not a heavily Hispanic area or anything?”
We can answer this quantitatively.
17.4% of the citizen voting age population of OR-6 is Hispanic. Of 9 candidates who ran in OR-6, two, Salinas and Leon, are Hispanic, making Hispanics 22.2% of the candidate pool. So they were not particularly over- or under-represented in this race. It is slightly surprising that the strongest candidate in this race happened to be Hispanic, but 22.2% chances happen all the time. Obviously, referring to this as “chance” is in no way suggesting that Salinas won “by luck,” she’s clearly a skilled legislator.
Matt says that “this is the only viable opportunity to add a Hispanic Democrat to the caucus this year.” It seems like we have to consider four counterfactuals here:
1. Salinas didn’t run
I think it’s a safe assumption that people who vote for Hispanic candidates specifically because they are Hispanic and represent Hispanic issues are a subset of the Hispanic population.
Let’s say that the entire Hispanic vote in OR-6 went for Salinas (surely an overestimate), that this represents 17.4% of votes in this election, and that 2⁄3 of them would have switched their votes to Leon if Salinas hadn’t run. That would have given Leon an additional 6,000-7,000 votes or so, which would have been enough to beat Flynn if Salinas’s other votes were redistributed evenly or in proportion to vote share to other candidates.
That’s a pretty generous assumption in favor of the idea that Leon was a viable candidate in this counterfactual scenario, one that reasonable people could disagree on.
2. Flynn didn’t run
In this case, let’s assume Flynn’s votes would have been redistributed evenly or in proportion to vote share to other candidates. Then Salinas would still have won.
3. Salinas and Flynn didn’t run
In this case, let’s say once again that Leon would have received an additional 6,000-7,000 Hispanic votes, while the remaining voters would have been redistributed among the other candidates either evenly or in proportion to vote share. In this case, Leon would have been the frontrunner. Indeed, under this model, she could have received more like 1⁄3 of the Hispanic vote, with the remainder of the votes being split up equally, and been neck and neck with Reynolds. But reasonable people can probably still disagree on whether she’d have received even this much of the Hispanic vote.
4. Flynn had run in a district where his top competitor was white
Let’s say that Flynn had run in a different district where his top competitor had equal local appeal and political skill to that of Salinas. However, in this counterfactual district, the prospect of putting an additional Hispanic legislator in the Democratic caucus was not on the table, because Flynn’s top competitor was not Hispanic.
Matt is suggesting that, in this case, that competitor may not have been able to attract a big PAC spend of their own, and Flynn’s campaign funding, along with his qualities as a candidate, may have been sufficient to win him the election. I don’t read this as a dig against Salinas’s skill as a politician. I read it as an explanation for why she in particular, among other strong candidates in other districts, was able to attract over a million dollars in PAC spending of her own. Given that BoldPAC is an explicitly pro-Hispanic Democratic PAC, it seems like they themselves would agree that giving a strong Democratic Hispanic candidate extra funding to help them beat non-Hispanic rivals is exactly their agenda.
Flynn couldn’t help being from the district he was from, and in this election, there was an extremely limited supply (1) of explicitly EA candidates with a heavy focus on pandemic prevention. So the fact that he happened to be up against a main competitor who is Hispanic and could therefore attract this specific form of campaign financing does seem to be a matter of luck.
Analysis
It seems possible, but unlikely, that Flynn got “unlucky” in facing an unusually strong opponent. Salinas is clearly very good, and my guess is that in most contested primaries, there is at least one very skilled, appealing, and reasonably well-funded legislator in the running.
From the outside view, we ought to perhaps view an EA candidate as being basically a “random sample” of the candidate quality pool. As we can see in this election, vote distributions are long-tailed, and a randomly sampled candidate in a 9-candidate election will usually be lackluster. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad idea to take a shot. I think we should not update overmuch on the strategy of “just throw money behind EA-aligned candidates.”
For the hypothesis that BoldPAC’s late-campaign spend turned a Flynn victory into a Salinas victory, we are sort of positing that Salinas’s skill and Flynn’s money had them neck-and-neck, but that Salinas could benefit from an influx of cash and advertising much more than Flynn because of diminishing marginal returns. On May 5th, Salinas and Flynn polled at 18% and 14% respectively. So around the time of the BoldPAC ad buy, this hypothesis might have seemed reasonable. Looking at the voting results and assuming we should have known at the time that Salinas would receive twice the support of Flynn is just hindsight bias. Going further and denying that Flynn could have won in any election at all is “totally spurious” and an “ugly” and “backwards interpretation” analysis is, well, the sort of that I deleted my Facebook account in order to avoid.