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The Democratic Strategist

Political Strategy for a Permanent Democratic Majority

Month: November 2014

A Critical Moment For Democratic Strategy

Yeah, this was a bad midterm election. We’ve known all along that the Senate landscape was terrible–uniquely terrible–and that the midterm turnout patterns virtually guaranteed major Republican gains, just as they did in 2010. We also knew the history of second-term midterms, and the impact of poor presidential approval ratings–which were especially poor in the Senate battleground states.
But the strong quality of some individual Democratic Senate campaigns, and a belief in the potential of the Bannock Street Project which aimed at changing the very nature of the GOP’s large midterm structural advantage, led a lot of Democrats to expect a lot better.
It didn’t happen. But the main analytic task at the moment is to figure out how much of this bad midterm was due to inevitable “fundamental” factors that cannot be changed in the immediate future and how much is attributable to Democratic mistakes that can be corrected. That in turn will help determine the extent to which the Democratic road to recovery requires a fundamental change in strategy and tactics or a more modest turn to take advantage of presidential cycle opportunities–and new leadership.
You can make a pretty good case that turnout patterns alone dictated most of the 2014 results, particularly if you think more conservative members of pro-Democratic demographic groups showed up disproportionately at the polls. But then again, if Democrats are ever to govern again, they cannot simply wait out every midterm and hope for temporary redemption in the following presidential election.
So this is a very important period for Democratic strategic thinking and discussion. We don’t need a “struggle for the soul” of the party so much as a struggle to think clearly and avoid the temptations of self-delusion or despair.


Insights from a Rout

There is no shortage of explanations about why Dems got creamed yesterday. Here’s a few of them:
David Corn at Mother Jones: “Obama and his team succeeded in transforming campaigning, integrating an intense focus on data and metrics with on-the-ground organizing. And they did it twice. But the president has not transformed politics. To beat back the expected oppositional waves of 2010 and 2014, he needed a playbook as unconventional, imaginative, and effective as those he used in 2008 and 2012. He needed to keep show-me independents on his side and Democratic-leaning voters, particularly those who otherwise would be unconcerned with politics, somehow engaged in the process. And he had to do this while presiding over a Washington that seemed to be a miasma of disorder and while contending with a troubled economy and all hell breaking loose overseas. He needed to keep the we in the mix.”
“This much-vaunted turnout operation turns out not to have deserved much vaunt.” – Michael Tomasky at The Daily Beast.
From Ezra Klein at Vox: “There wasn’t a secret rush of Latino voters the pollsters had simply missed. Focusing on cultural appeals like “the War on Women” didn’t work. For all the Obama campaign hype, the Democrats hadn’t actually discovered dark arts of GOTV that allowed them to survive a GOP year. The polls were wrong — but they were wrong because they undercounted Republican support. As often happens, Democrats fooled themselves after the 2012 election into believing they had unlocked some enduring political advantage. They learned otherwise.”
“Candidates from Arkansas to Kentucky, from Iowa to Georgia, lacked message discipline and skipped one opportunity after another to effectively target voters with any notable precision. For all of the bellyaching, tooth gnashing, and public wailing, Democrats have no one to blame but themselves. ..Rather than stand on and fight for progressive principles, these candidates fed voters a diet of stump speeches, campaign literature, and television ads that sought to gussy themselves up as non-confrontational centrists who are less likely to wage war with conservatives than they are to brew them a cup of hot cocoa and tuck them into bed at night.” Goldie Taylor at The Daily Beast.
At Fivethirtyeight.com, Nate Silver explains: “…the average Senate poll conducted in the final three weeks of this year’s campaign overestimated the Democrat’s performance by 4 percentage points. The average gubernatorial poll was just as bad, also overestimating the Democrat’s performance by 4 points.”
John B. Judis at The New Republic: “In Florida, Democratic gubernatorial candidate Charlie Crist lost whites without college degrees by 32 to 61 percent; in Virginia, Senator Mark Warner’s near-death experience was due to losing these voters by 30 to 68 percent. In Colorado and Iowa, they held the key to Republican Senate victories. In 2012, the Democrats benefited by facing a Republican who reeked of money and privilege and displayed indifference toward the 47 percent. Romney lost the white working class in states like Ohio. Democrats may not have that luxury of a Mitt Romney in the next election. And in that case, they will have to do considerably better among these voters, or else 2016 could turn out to be another nightmare election for the Democrats. ”
Harold Meyerson puts it this way at The American Prospect: “…the Democrats’ failure isn’t just the result of Republican negativity. It’s also intellectual and ideological. What, besides raising the minimum wage, do the Democrats propose to do about the shift in income from wages to profits, from labor to capital, from the 99 percent to the 1 percent? How do they deliver for an embattled middle class in a globalized, de-unionized, far-from-full-employment economy, where workers have lost the power they once wielded to ensure a more equitable distribution of income and wealth? What Democrat, besides Elizabeth Warren, campaigned this year to diminish the sway of the banks? Who proposed policies that would give workers the power to win more stable employment and higher incomes, not just at the level of the minimum wage but across the economic spectrum?”
Peter Beinart notes at The Atlantic, “This year has been different: GOP activists have given their candidates more space to craft the centrist personas they need to win.”
“…Exposed in this election were the fallacies of the Democratic establishment. Social issues alone can’t provide victory, since Republican candidates found it possible to rouse their base while donning sheep’s clothing on choice, or going silent on gay marriage. Sophisticated campaign targeting and get-out-the-vote operations can’t substitute for passion, clarity, and vision to motivate Democratic base voters to vote. White men and married women will be won not by adopting a corporate agenda or by joining in rigging the rules against them. They will be won by driving an agenda that will address the pressures they feel.” – Robert Borosage at Campaign for America’s Future.


Exit Poll Stats in GA, NC Shed Light on GOP Near-Sweep

Poll analysts are still chewing on data from the election, particularly CNN’s exit polls. Here’s some statistical nuggets from the results in NC and GA which offer some clues:
In GA, where David Perdue beat Michelle Nunn by 8 points, 31 percent of the electorate earned over $100,000. Nunn received 51 percent from those earning less than $100K (Perdue 47 percent), while Perdue won 62 percent of those earning over $100K (Nunn 35 percent). Nunn did better among those earning less than $50K (who were 34 percent of the electorate), 56-42 percent. But among the 66 percent of the electorate who earned more than $50K, Perdue lead 57-41 percent. Of those earning $50-100K, Perdue won their votes by 52-46. percent.
Also in GA, Nunn received only 19 percent of the vote from white males, who were 34 percent of the electorate. She got 27 percent of the vote from white females, who were 30 percent of the GA electorate. African Americans were 29 percent of the GA electorate, Latinos 4 percent (African Americans were 30.5 percent of GA’s population in 2010 Census). Nunn won 92 percent of the African American vote.
In NC, where Republican Thom Tillis edged out Kay Hagan by 2 percent, 24 percent of the electorate earned more than $100K. Hagan won the 76 percent who earned who earned less than $100K by 51-44, but Tillis won the over $100Ks by 59-39.
Tillis won 69 percent of the white male vote (36 percent of the NC electorate) and 56 percent of white women, who were 38 percent of yesterdays NC voters. African Americans were 21 percent of the NC turnout (21.5 percent of NC’s population in 2010), while Latinos were 3 percent. Hagan received 96 percent of NC’s African American vote.
Two of the most obvious conclusions that leap out from this data are: (1.) The Republicans did an excellent job of turning out their constituencies in both states, and (2.) Georgia is a long way from becoming a purple state. More later…


The Baloney in the ‘Right Turn of Young Voters’ Meme

From Kitty Lan’s “Harvard Poll Gets It Wrong: Millennials Aren’t Massively Shifting Right” at Campaign for America’s Future:

The “Survey of Young Americans’ Attitudes Toward Politics and Public Service” released this week by the Harvard Institute of Politics seems to send a simple, direct image: Democrats, you have lost the support of millennials.
But the tragedy of this poll is that it fails to tackle a fundamental question: Why? For that reason, it fails to paint an accurate picture of the challenges millennials face that underlie their political beliefs.
The biggest highlight of the Harvard survey is the reversal of Democrat’s strong lead in the last election cycle. “In 2010…according to exit polls, Americans age 18 to 29 favored Democrats by 58 percent to 42 percent, a 16-point margin. Four years later…the IOP survey finds that likely young voters prefer Republican control of the Congress by a slim four-point margin of 51 to 47 percent.”

However, adds Lan:

On Thursday the Youth Engagement Project issued a rebuttal to the Harvard study that pointed to a finding in the study that got lost in the mainstream media coverage. “Here is what the Harvard poll actually says,” wrote Alexandra Acker-Lyons of the Youth Engagement Project. “Millennial voters favor a Democratic Congress 50%-43 percent and self-identify as Democrats by +11 [11 percentage points more than Republican]. Only millennials who said they were ‘definitely voting’ in 2014 favored electing Republicans over Democrats, 51 percent-47 percent.
“The poll’s findings do not support the media narrative that millennials have become Republicans – they haven’t. Only likely youth voters favor Republicans. This is not without reason as likely youth voters are more likely to be white and conservative, which – as you might expect – does not reflect the youth voter overall.”
The Youth Engagement Project’s own poll with Project New America and Harstad Strategic Research concluded that roughly three-quarters of the millennials who voted for President Obama in 2012 would support Democratic Party control of Congress in 2014, while only 12 percent prefer Republican control. These voters could tip the scales for Democrats on Tuesday – if they show up at the polls.

While it seems unlikely that these younger voters will show up today in anything resembling 2012 turnout rates for their age cohort, it’s good to know that their MSM-trumpeted ‘right turn’ is just another example of crappy reporting.


Creamer: The Stakes

The following article by Democratic strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo:
Here’s the bottom line. The Tea Party Republicans and their Big Business and Wall Street allies plan to grab what they want while ordinary people sleep through this election.
They want ordinary Americans to stay home on Election Day.
To them, high voter turnout is like daylight to a burglar — or for that matter to a vampire. It stops them cold.
The corporate CEO’s and Wall Street bankers together with Tea Party extremists control the Republican Party. They see this traditionally low-turnout mid-term election as the perfect opportunity to take over the United States Senate, Governors’ mansions and State Houses with politicians who represent their interests.
They don’t want Senators from Iowa, Louisiana, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina, Alaska, South Dakota or Michigan. They want Senators from the Koch Brothers and their corporate and Wall Street allies — Senators who actually represent them and will do whatever they are told.
They want to know that when the chips are down they can count on government officials to continue rigging the economic game so they can continue to siphon off all of the economic growth for wealthiest one percent of the population.
That’s why, at the beginning of this cycle, the Koch Brothers’ network vowed to invest $300 million to smear Democratic candidates for office. That’s why Wall Street has redirected most of its giving to the GOP. And that’s why Republicans have spent the last two years passing laws to suppress voter turnout — especially among African Americans and Hispanic voters.
In order to continue taking our money, they need to take our votes. Where they can, they’ve passed “voter ID” laws that disenfranchise hundred of thousands — and impose what amounts to a poll tax — allegedly to stop the non-existent problem of voter identity fraud. Where they can, they’ve curtailed early voting periods and access to mail ballots.
In Georgia, the Republican Secretary of State has gone so far as to refuse to process 40,000 new voter registrations.
The smaller the turnout, the better for the plutocrats who want to continue to have unfettered access to virtually all of the economic growth generated by the American economy — just as they have for the last 30 years.


Political Strategy Notes

Election watchers looking to prep for Tuesday night may want to check out National Journal’s “Hotline’s 2014 Election Night Cheat Sheet: Key races, poll closing times, counties to watch, and–just in case–recount procedures in nearly two dozen states with Senate and/or governors’ races.”
Sam Wang suggests watching returns in KY and NH, where polls close early on Tuesday, for clues about which party will have a U.S. majority. Although McConnell in KY and Shaheen in NH are slightly favored in most of the polls, “If either party outperforms polls in these states, that might indicate a broader trend nationwide.”
Key closing opinion polls are trending red, and that’s a bad sign for Dems. While pundits have made much of the midterm jinx in combination with low presidential approval ratings, there is one historical reality pundits have neglected: The last time Republicans took two or more U.S. senate seats from Democrats was in 1980 — over a third of a century ago.
Wang has another post up, on “Late Breaks and Polling Biases,” which notes that “several polls today have pushed the Meta-Margin almost almost as far as it’s been toward Republicans this campaign season.” However, the last minute polling bias for midterms surveys is five times larger than it is for presidential election years. Thus, Wang cautions “Candidates could still win if they trailed by a margin of less than 3 percentage points in the week before the election…There are six Senate races whose medians are within two percentage points. Republicans could win all six – and Democrats could win all six. Based on past midterm polling, both of these outcomes are within the range of possibility.”
John Harwood’s New York Times article “In a Partisan Atmosphere, It Can Even Be Hard to Find Numbers That Agree” is about the seeming irrelevance of a different set of numbers in the midterm election outcome calculations: “Consider the economy. The unemployment rate has declined to 5.9 percent from 7.9 percent in January 2013. The Dow Jones industrial average has risen more than 25 percent in the same period. In the third quarter of this year, the overall economy grew at a healthy 3.5 percent rate, completing the strongest six-month period of growth in more than a decade.” Yet the President still has low approval ratings. Harwood speculates that growing inequality may be a leading factor: “Benefits flow disproportionately to a high-earning minority, while average families struggle.” But that pretty much describes the central principle of Republican economic policy.
NYT’s Jonathan Martin has a couple of useful charts depicting five plausible paths to senate control for for each party.
With so many close races being decided on Tuesday, Dems are very concerned about voter intimidation and other shenanigans. At The Hill Alexandra Jaffe writes about the legal preparations of both parties for monitoring midterm voting.
Could electronic voting be on the way out?
Humility was never their strong card. But GOP swagger about winning the Senate is reportedly over the top. Norm Ornstein argues, however, that “A Republican Senate Victory Could Splinter the Party.”


Nate Cohn: Early Voting Encouraging for Democrats

From Nate Cohn’s “Early Voting Numbers Look Good for Democrats” at The NYT Upshot:

Democratic efforts to turn out the young and nonwhite voters who sat out the 2010 midterm elections appear to be paying off in several Senate battleground states.
More than 20 percent of the nearly three million votes already tabulated in Georgia, North Carolina, Colorado and Iowa have come from people who did not vote in the last midterm election, according to an analysis of early-voting data by The Upshot.
These voters who did not participate in 2010 are far more diverse and Democratic than the voters from four years ago. On average across these states, 39 percent are registered Democrats and 30 percent are registered Republicans. By comparison, registered Republicans outnumbered Democrats in these states by an average of 1 percentage point in 2010.
The turnout among black voters is particularly encouraging for Democrats, who need strong black turnout to compete in racially polarized states like Georgia and North Carolina. In those two states, black voters so far represent 30 percent of the voters who did not participate in 2010. By comparison, 24 percent of all those who voted in those states in 2010 were black.

All of that said, The Upshot’s turnout model still gives the Republicans a solid edge in the battle for a Senate majority, owing to their historically superior midterm turnout patterns. Nonetheless, adds Cohn, “…the figures are still good news for Democrats. The early-voting surge gives them a chance to pull off upsets in crucial states, particularly if they continue coaxing new voters to the polls in the final week of the campaign.” Read Cohn’s entire post for more data analysis.