Election forecaster changes prediction in race between Joe Cunningham and Nancy Mace
The tight presidential race between President Donald Trump and Democratic nominee Joe Biden may be having a significant down-ballot impact on congressional races, including South Carolina’s highly-competitive coastal race, according to a new forecast of the race.
On Thursday, Sabato’s Crystal Ball at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics shifted the state’s 1st District congressional race between incumbent Democratic Rep. Joe Cunningham and Republican state Rep. Nancy Mace to “lean Democratic” from “toss up” — one of 14 U.S. House rating changes Crystal Ball made. Ten of the rating shifts favor Democrats while four favor Republicans.
Another election forecaster, Cook Political Report, still lists the 1st District race as a “toss up.”
Sabato’s Crystal Ball says the shift in ratings this year may speak to the fact that despite a charged presidential contest, voters may not necessarily cast ballots along party lines, setting up wins for parties who stand opposite of the presidential candidate who win that district.
“The power of incumbency is sometimes dismissed in this nationalized era, and it is true that both parties are less likely to win districts that vote strongly for the other party’s presidential candidate than they used to,” wrote Crystal Ball’s Kyle Kondik. “But there is still ticket-splitting, and sometimes a dramatic amount of it.”
Trump won the state’s Lowcountry district by 14 percentage points in 2016 over then-Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.
But two years later, Cunningham shocked political observers when he beat then-Republican candidate Katie Arrington by 1.4 percentage points after Arrington unseated longtime U.S. representative and former Gov. Mark Sanford in the GOP primary.
Cunningham’s win took the coastal district away from Republicans, who’d held it for about four decades.
Cunningham has so far been able to hold a lead over Mace, particularly in fundraising and ad spending. His advantage comes despite an aggressive ad and ground campaign from the state’s Republican Party and other Republican spending groups, including the Congressional Leadership Fund which the Wall Street Journal reported this week had launched field operations in 12 competitive districts, including the state’s 1st District.
Though Cunningham faces a “well-regarded challenger” in Mace, Cunningham also cuts through “the political clutter by running lighthearted, positive ads,” Kondik says.
“More to the point, and based on the numbers we’ve seen, Trump seems likely to run significantly behind his 2016 showing in SC-1, and Cunningham probably will run ahead of Biden in the district as a well-funded incumbent,” Kondik writes.
Kondik also points to a state legislative seat located in the 1st District that flipped from red to blue in a special-called election last month. The seat, S.C. House District 115, was vacant after Republican Peter McCoy resigned to take a post as the state’s U.S. attorney.
“That’s enough to give him a slight edge, at least for now. It’s sometimes tricky extrapolating from special legislative elections, but results from a district in the area last month suggest that some Democratic trends may be taking hold in the Charleston area.”
This story was originally published September 3, 2020 at 10:30 AM.
