Split Ticket is proud to present a comprehensive, searchable, and downloadable candidate quality/WAR database for virtually every federal election, from 2018 on. We hope it helps readers and researchers alike to better understand candidate quality.

For our last piece with @PostOpinions, we take a look at how the Democratic Party’s base has changed since 2016 — and in area after area, the party’s voters have become more liberal across the board, even though its leadership has not always agreed.

The Texas GOP is set to use an old trick: redrawing Democratic-held congressional districts mid-decade. With Trump urging action, legislators could redraw 2–5 seats—echoing the 2003 playbook and potentially changing the 2026 House calculus. Read more here:

Six House Democrats in New England significantly outperformed Kamala Harris with low-propensity voters. Their edge? Moderate, bipartisan profiles—centrist voting records that resonated in crossover districts in an age of brutal polarization.

How did turnout look in the 2024 election? We break it down from a geographic and demographic perspective.

Split Ticket will be hosting a space to discuss the results of today’s primary elections in New Jersey as they come in.

The real reason Democrats can't compete for 60 Senate seats isn't just the "structural bias of the Senate". It's because ticket splitting collapsed over the last decade. Using our WAR models, we can show how the impact of candidate quality has plummeted.

Any corrections or questions are welcome. We hope this database helps people better understand candidate quality.

Finally, a full, downloadable candidate quality database can be found here. This contains five cycles of data, from 2016-2024. To download it, click "Get The Data" on desktop.

The 2016 Senate Wins Above Replacement model can be found here:

The 2016 House Wins Above Replacement model can be found here.

Today, Split Ticket is releasing a brand new set of Wins Above Replacement models, this time for the 2016 cycle. Our hope is that political observers can benefit from this new dataset to better understand candidate quality. We'll have a more detailed analysis up soon.

From the latest iteration in our collaboration with @PostOpinions: Catalist's data shines a new light on 2024, and suggests the election was even wilder and much more counterintuitive than the exit polls (and the takes around them) would imply.

Voters do not like Democrats. But it might not matter much for 2026. In our latest piece as part of our Washington Post collaboration, @maxtmcc and @Thorongil16 explore the odd phenomenon of midterm backlash and explain why current numbers can mislead.

ICYMI: Split Ticket continued its collaboration with the Washington Post with a piece on how Trump's gains were disproportionately large in immigrant neighborhoods.

The story of Wisconsin's Supreme Court election was turnout — while the state went from Trump +1 to Crawford +10 within 6 months, the large majority of that shift was driven by changes in who was voting, rather than voters changing their minds.

RT @PostOpinions: "Trump’s promised protectionist push has opened cracks in the Republican coalition," @politicsmaps and @maxtmcc of @Split….

🚨 NEW @SplitTicket_ piece in the Washington Post:. For the first time, Donald Trump has turned the economy into an outright liability for him, and surveys show that even his own voters are not enthused by the tariff chaos.

We take a look at the Wisconsin Supreme Court race between Brad Schimel and Susan Crawford, with @lxeagle17 and guest writer @giaki1310. The turnout looks good for Democrats, but it's more indicative of a deeper coalitional issue for the Wisconsin GOP.

Senate Democrats have tried backing independents in red states as a way of expanding a difficult map. The data suggests this strategy may have merits — but not all states are equal, and some are more receptive to the notion than othres.

Are moderates more electable? To answer this question, we took a deep dive into the last four cycles of elections, using our WAR metric, and then examined caucus groupings and voting ideology to try and answer the question conclusively.