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Analysis: Lessons For Democratic Strategists From 2014

Analysis: Lessons For Democratic Strategists From 2014

By Stuart Rothenberg,CQ Roll Call (TNS)

WASHINGTON — You could feel it from day one of this cycle. Senate Democratic strategists knew they were smarter than their Republican adversaries. They’d out-think them and out-work them.

Incumbent Democratic senators who run good campaigns rarely lose, I was reminded. Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, who had been appointed to his seat, won a tough race in 2010. So did Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada. And Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill did the same in 2012.

This cycle, vulnerable Democratic incumbents in red states such as Alaska, Arkansas and Louisiana had great political names and deep connections to the voters. They knew how to win, just like Democrats Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Joe Donnelly of Indiana did two years ago. (Of course, Heitkamp and Donnelly won in a presidential year, with its different dynamic.)

How many times did I hear or read that Sen. Mark Pryor was no Blanche Lincoln? That comment was meant to highlight Pryor’s political strengths, but also to throw Lincoln (who lost re-election in 2010) under the bus so party strategists didn’t have to look at why she lost and how hostile the Arkansas terrain has become for any Democrat.

“They have their own brands,” I heard repeatedly about Pryor and Sens. Mark Begich in Alaska and Mary L. Landrieu in Louisiana from Democratic operatives and journalists.

But, Bennet, Reid, and McCaskill were victorious because the GOP nominated horrible candidates against them, not because the Democratic candidates had such untouchable brands, Democratic strategists had unique insights, or party operatives knew how to win tough races.

To some Democratic strategists, their candidates weren’t only smarter and better connected to voters. Their campaigns also knew how to identify their voters and turn them out. Democrats were miles ahead of the GOP when it came to “field,” the party’s highly touted ground-game.

I can’t count the number of times I heard or read about the vaunted Democratic field operation, whether in Little Rock or the most isolated areas of Alaska. Even I came to think it might matter.

I was told, for example, Democrats were registering and would boost turnout among African-Americans in Arkansas, which would change the arithmetic in that race and improve Pryor’s prospects.

I wondered why black voters who didn’t turn out for the first African-American president in history were going to flood to the polls for Pryor, or how Pryor would do well enough with whites for the party’s field program to matter. But Democratic Senate operatives had their charts and graphs to show how Pryor could survive the midterm.

As it turned out, African-Americans constituted 12 percent of the Arkansas electorate in 2014 according to the exit poll, the same percentage they constituted in 2008 and 1 point more than they constituted in 2010. (There was no exit poll in Arkansas in 2012.)

But while Democrats did a decent job turning out black voters this year, Pryor received virtually the same percentage of white voters as Lincoln did in 2010 (31 percent) and Obama did in 2008 (30 percent). Not surprisingly, Lincoln’s 2010 statewide performance, 37 percent, wasn’t much worse than Pryor’s 2014 showing or Obama’s 2008 statewide showing (both 39 percent).

And then there was the subject of Republican polling. Democrats seemed shocked that a thinking person would give any weight to GOP polling, which, they noted quite correctly, was seriously amiss in 2012. But Republicans took steps this cycle to correct their errors, and GOP polling often was more accurate than Democratic polling during the 2010 midterms.

At various times throughout the cycle I heard observers — sometimes Democrats, sometimes Republicans, often journalists — announce prematurely one of the GOP’s top-tier Senate challengers was toast, a victim of his or her own weakness or the Democrat’s brilliant campaign.

I heard it about Alaska, where Begich allegedly had localized his race successfully and would win re-election even in a Republican wave, and about North Carolina, where Democrats had defined and destroyed challenger Thom Tillis.

And, of course, there was Arkansas, where Republican Tom Cotton was, so boring, so serious and so charisma-challenged that he couldn’t possibly beat Pryor, who understood how to campaign in the South.

Interestingly, all of this smugness wasn’t apparent on the House Democratic side. Those folks seemed more realistic about their prospects from the start, possibly because House races are more susceptible to a partisan wave and the party was already in the minority.

It will be interesting to see whether Senate Democratic strategists sound more realistic during the 2015-16 cycle than they did over the past two years, as well as how Republicans operate when they don’t have the wind at their backs and a favorable map.

Republicans would be making a mistake to think that they have all the answers and have caught up with Democrats in all aspects of campaigning.

AFP Photo/Jewel Samad

GOP Triumph Tempered By Hard Problems, Now And In 2016

GOP Triumph Tempered By Hard Problems, Now And In 2016

By David Lauter, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — Republicans are waking up Wednesday morning with victories to celebrate but sobering realities to ponder.

Winning control of the Senate after eight years of trying is a big prize, made more sweet by the fact that only two years ago, the party seemed on the ropes. Republicans also expanded their ranks in the House, and, pending several late races, could end up with their biggest majority since Harry S. Truman left the White House.

But even before the votes were counted, some of the GOP’s leading strategists had begun to warn that those victories could blind Republicans to hard problems that the 2014 campaign had done almost nothing to solve. The barriers to a Republican victory in a presidential election remain formidable, they said.

“We shouldn’t be gloating over the fact of winning red states,” said Republican pollster Neil Newhouse, noting that this year’s Senate battles mostly took place in reliably conservative states in the South and interior West. “That’s not a very high bar.”

One-third of the Senate comes up for re-election every two years, and by luck of the draw, the states in this year’s batch are disproportionately conservative. Indeed, of the three classes of Senate seats, this year’s group has been the least representative of the country over the last few election cycles, according to an analysis of election data by Patrick J. Egan, a political scientist at New York University.

A win is a win, no matter the caveats. The GOP has solidified its dominance of the South, strengthened its hand in Washington and further weakened President Barack Obama’s ability to influence the national agenda.

And the GOP wave washed beyond red states. Republicans won Senate contests in Colorado, Iowa and North Carolina, all swing states. Two high-profile Republican governors, Scott Walker in Wisconsin and Rick Scott in Florida, won re-election in races shaped heavily by national partisan issues.

But amid the victories, the limits of the Republican tide were also clear. In New Hampshire, a long-established swing state, GOP challenger Scott Brown failed to beat Sen. Jeanne Shaheen. Earlier in the election cycle, Republicans had largely given up their hopes of taking Democratic Senate seats in more solidly blue states, including Michigan, where longtime Sen. Carl Levin is retiring, and Minnesota, where incumbent Al Franken won an extremely narrow victory in 2008. Democrat Gary Peters prevailed in Michigan, and Franken easily won re-election.

Newhouse, who was Mitt Romney’s chief pollster, cautioned that the victories Republicans achieved Tuesday should not distract them from the reality that “the image of the Republican Party has actually gotten worse since the end of 2012.”

The single biggest problem the party continues to face is the perception among many Americans that Republican elected officials don’t recognize — or care much about — the challenges faced by people who aren’t white and affluent. That’s a severe handicap in a country where the electorate, particularly in presidential contests, is increasingly nonwhite and suspicious of wealthy businesspeople.

“The Republican Party brand sucks, and so people don’t want to be a Republican,” Sen. Rand Paul bluntly said last week during a campaign appearance in Detroit. “Why?” asked Paul, who hopes to become the party’s presidential nominee in 2016. “The problem is the perception … that no one in the Republican Party cares.”

Polls show that view to be particularly common among younger Americans, minorities and unmarried women. Those three overlapping groups, along with college-educated white liberals, form the core of the coalition that elected Obama. And the Democrats’ already-huge advantage among some of those groups has expanded since the last midterm election.

Just before the 2010 midterm, nonwhite likely voters preferred Democrats for Congress over Republicans by 70 percent to 21 percent, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center. By last week, that preference had grown to 77 percent to 15 percent, a 62-point advantage.

Smaller shifts toward the Democrats took place among likely voters earning less than $30,000, those with postgraduate degrees and those younger than 50.

Among all voters, only 39 percent of registered voters had a favorable image of the GOP, with 55 percent viewing the party unfavorably.

The Democrats’ standing, by contrast, is merely mediocre — 48 percent unfavorable, 47 percent favorable in the Pew survey.

“No major party has ever been as unpopular in the history of polling as the Republican Party is,” pollster Mark Mellman said at a recent discussion sponsored by the Bipartisan Policy Center, a Washington think tank. Mellman is one of the Democrats’ most prominent pollsters, which would make his judgment on the GOP suspect but for the fact that many Republican strategists share it.

Republicans have been able to make gains this year in large part because voters tend to use midterm elections to vent frustrations at the party in the White House. Presidents Reagan, Clinton and George W. Bush all saw their party lose control of the Senate during midterm contests.

The GOP has also benefited from the nature of the Democratic electoral coalition, built around younger voters and minorities, which suffers much more from the typical drop-off of voters between presidential and midterm contests.

Take Milwaukee as an example. The largest city in one of the nation’s most closely divided states, its residents, 55 percent of whom are nonwhite, vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. In the 2012 presidential race, 72 percent of the city’s voting-age citizens showed up to vote. Two years earlier, in the 2010 midterm, only 47 percent did, according to an analysis by The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel.

Similar swings can be seen in other urban centers in battleground states.

Because the voting preferences of older and younger Americans diverge much more than they used to, and Democrats rely more heavily on the young, the country now has two very different electorates. One shows up during midterms and the other — younger, less white, less conservative and bigger — turns out in presidential years.

None of that means a Republican can’t win the next presidential contest.

“No party has a permanent lock,” says GOP pollster Whit Ayres. But reorienting the party “requires a presidential candidate running with a different message,” much as “Bill Clinton did in 1992,” he said.

Republicans had little incentive to forge that kind of message this year. Obama’s unpopularity, particularly in conservative states, gave their candidates all the arguments they needed.

But that meant the party had little incentive to resolve divisions on high-profile topics, including immigration and health care, or to persuade people other than committed partisans that Republicans have solutions for the nation’s problems.

Instead, the campaign has only deepened a sense, expressed by voters repeatedly in polls and focus groups this year, that neither party has an answer to what ails the nation.

In both the 2006 and 2010 midterms, polls showed that voters had a clear preference for which party should run the government. By contrast, a Gallup survey released Monday delivered a very different message.

On the eve of the GOP’s victory, the poll found that barely 1 in 4 voters thought Republican control of Congress would make the country better. The largest group of voters, 40 percent, said the country would be “the same regardless of which party controls Congress.”

Photo via Flickr

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Analysis: A Good Year May Not Save These Three Vulnerable House Republicans

Analysis: A Good Year May Not Save These Three Vulnerable House Republicans

By Nathan L. Gonzales, CQ Roll Call

WASHINGTON — In his recent column, “Weak GOP Candidates May Need More Than a Good Year,” Stu Rothenberg pointed out how a handful of underperforming Senate candidates could cost Republicans the majority. Similarly, though the House of Representatives is not in play, a trio of GOP incumbents could cost their party larger gains in the House.

Even as the House landscape continues to shift in Republicans’ favor, Reps. Lee Terry of Nebraska, Steve Southerland II of Florida and Michael G. Grimm of New York are perched atop the list of most vulnerable incumbents. And it’s not hard to see why.

Terry, Southerland, and Grimm are all vulnerable because of self-inflicted wounds, and a great Republican year might not be enough to save them. Meanwhile, some of their colleagues, such as Reps. Rodney Davis of Illinois, David Valadao of California and Chris Gibson of New York, are facing much brighter re-election prospects — despite being early targets and representing more Democratic districts than Terry or Southerland.

Terry handed Democrats a gift during last year’s government shutdown, when asked if he would continue collecting his paycheck.

“Dang straight,” he said. “I’ve got a nice house and a kid in college, and I’ll tell you we cannot handle it. Giving our paycheck away when you still worked and earned it? That’s just not going to fly.”

His comments have allowed Democrats to keep the issue on the table in the 2nd District, even though it has faded virtually everywhere else.

In addition, Terry is not known for running the strongest campaigns, often making races closer than they needed to be. This could be the year it finally catches up with him.

A late, explosive television ad by the National Republican Congressional Committee could change the dynamic in the race, but if it doesn’t, the congressman will lose. The Rothenberg Political Report/Roll Call rating of the race is Pure Tossup, for now.

Southerland handed Democrats a gift by holding a men-only fundraiser while running against Gwen Graham, one of Democrats’ strongest candidates anywhere in the country. There is nothing illegal about the event, but many GOP strategists considered it politically tone deaf at best.

Also, it didn’t help when the congressman tried to joke about it by mentioning a “lingerie shower.” You can probably file that one under, “Things a male Republican officeholder should never say.”

Similar to Terry, Southerland has not been known for running strong campaigns. But he may have been insulated by the polarized nature of the 2nd District. There is no guarantee Southerland can count on that life preserver this year. The Rothenberg Political Report/Roll Call rating of the race is Pure Tossup, for now.

Grimm handed Democrats nearly two dozen gifts with a 20-count indictment in April. The charges include alleged fraud, tax evasion and perjury in a case involving how he managed his Manhattan restaurant before he was elected to

Congress. Now, Grimm has made himself politically toxic. The NRCC isn’t helping him like it normally would for a vulnerable incumbent, and Grimm’s own fundraising has lagged since donors don’t often flock to indicted politicians with legal bills.

But Democrats have been attacking Grimm for weeks on television, and it hasn’t been enough to bury the congressman. What’s more, Democrats have given Grimm the best present of all, an opponent from Brooklyn in a Staten Island-based district.

At the end of last week, we shifted the Rothenberg Political Report/Roll Call rating of the race from Tossup/Tilts Democratic to Pure Tossup, a move in Grimm’s favor. But he would likely be coasting to re-election if it wasn’t for that pesky upcoming trial.

Photo: House Foreign Affairs Committee Republicans via Flickr

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Have We Been Looking At Deficit Reduction The Wrong Way?

Jared Bernstein–formerly a top economic advisor to Vice President Joe Biden, and a key figure in the Obama Administration’s attempt to get the economy back on track–has published a fascinating response to Ezra Klein’s analysis of the administration’s response to the Great Recession.

Bernstein closes with a poignant critique of official Washington’s irrational, and destructive, fear of deficit spending:

“The main question we want to ask…is not ‘is the deficit getting too large’ but ‘is it large enough?’ As long as the economy is operating under capacity and the spending is temporary—think Recovery Act, not Bush tax cuts—to do too little in the name of deficits, bond vigilantes, and Treasury rates (which are now at historic lows), is to condemn millions to unnecessary unemployment, declining living standards, and even, in the case of the young, permanent scarring.

And, yes, for many in Congress it’s a tactic—they don’t care about the deficit other than its use a cudgel against doing something to help someone other than their funders. But as long as we fail to understand the dynamics of deficits—their need to expand as much as necessary in bad times and contract in good ones—we will never be able to meet the market failures we face now or in the future.”

According to Bernstein, we have been looking at our national debt in the wrong way. Although debt reduction has emerged as one of the most effective talking points in our political discourse–and as of June, 59 percent of Americans wanted the government to make debt reduction its primary concern, even if it meant slowing down the economic recovery–Bernstein suggests that we should be going in the exact opposite direction.

The divide between Bernstein’s opinion and the public’s will is just another clear example in a long list of signs that our most commonly used political talking points have little to do with economic reality.