Progress Pond

Obama’s Coattails

Martin Longman

Can we all agree that most people that go out to vote in November will be primarily interested in casting their vote for president, and not for Senate or the House? If you are Jeanne Shaheen, for example, and you are running against John Sununu for one of the New Hampshire senate seats, you can do almost as well by convincing people to get out and vote for Obama or Clinton, as getting them out to vote for you, right?

Presidential election years are different than midterm election years. When we think about blue senators in red states (e.g., Mary Landrieu or Tim Johnson) or red senators in blue states (e.g. Gordon Smith or Norm Coleman) it is much easier for a challenger to beat them in a presidential year than in a midterm year. The reason is greater turnout, and that favors the candidate of the same party as the presidential candidate that carries the state. It is just difficult to get voters to vote for one party for president and another party downticket.

If you’ve been paying attention, you know that there are 35 senate seats up for reelection this year (33 regularly scheduled and 2 special elections). Twenty-three of those seats are held by Republicans and 12 are held by Democrats. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. Let’s look at the seats.

To examine the differential coattails of Obama versus Clinton, let’s look at two things. First, let’s look at Charlie Cook’s Senate Rankings (.pdf) and then let’s combine that with the SurveyUSA polls for McCain matchups against Obama and Clinton.

In the 35 senate races, Obama is more helpful in 22, Clinton in 12, and they are tied in one. But if we eliminate the 13 ‘Safe Republican’ and 10 ‘Safe Democratic’ seats, the advantage is even starker. In that case Obama leads in 10 and Clinton helps in two (Landrieu and Wicker).

Considering the importance of maximizing the Democratic majority in the Senate, the coattails of Obama are an important consideration.

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