Elections are complicated and multi-factorial. But come Wednesday morning everybody has a simple explanation for their wins or losses. Usually nothing more than beating whatever drum they’ve been beating all along. And nobody can really prove diddly-squat.
Were the 2014 mid-term elections predominately local or national? National according to the GOP and all the Democratic candidates that did their best to run from Obama. But is there evidence for that in the gubernatorial elections?
First consider those incumbent governors w/o a viable opponent (polling number is RCP average):
CA – Brown (D) +18.5; actual +17.6
MN – Dayton (I) +7; actual +5.6
NV – Sandoval (R) +25; actual +47
NM – Martinez (R) +13.3; actual +14.6
NY – Cuomo (D) + 23.3; actual +13.4
OR – Kitzhaber (D) +7.7; actual 5.1
Both Republican governors added to their polling leads and all four Democrats lost ground. On the west coast, less than a point for Brown, but Kitzhaber lost 2.6 points. Except late in the race there was an issue with Kitzhaber’s fiancee; so, it’s difficult not to see his drop as anything but a local matter. NY? Record low voter turnout. There didn’t seem to be any GOP wave in MN; so, Dayton’s drop is undefined.
So, how did incumbent Democratic governors fare?
CO – Hickenlooper (I) +0.5; actual +2.9
CT – Malloy (I) +1.7; actual +2.5
IL – Quinn (I) +0.8; actual -4.8
NH – Hassan (I) +3.5; actual +5.2
Somewhat more as would be expected in close races for all but Quinn, a slight uptick at the very end.
Open gubernatorial slots with an incumbent Democratic governor:
AR – Ross -8; actual -13.9
MA – Coakley -3.7; actual -1.9
MD – Brown ++; actual -4.7
RI – Raimondo +4; actual 4.5 (won w/40.8%; Ind 20%)
Coakley and Raimondo got an incumbent party uptick. But Ross and Brown lost 5.9 or more points.
Republican Incumbents (w/viable opponents):
AK – Walker +1.2; actual +1.4; Parnell (I)
FL – Christ +0.6; actual -1.1; Scott (I)
GA – Carter -4.6; actual -8; Deal (I)
KS – Davis +2; actual -3.9; Brownback (I)
ME – Michaud -1.4; actual -4.9; LePage (I) (Michaud led w/Cutler <10%; Cutler final 8.4%)
MI – Schauer -2.0; actual – 4.2 Snyder (I)
PA – Wolf +11; actual 9.8; Corbett (I)
WI- Burke -2.2; actual -5.7; Walker (I)
Other than Parnell – AK, all of the Republican incumbent governors got that uptick. Regardless of whether they were projected to win or lose. Corbett got the least, 1.2% and Brownback got the most, 5.9%.
Sure looks like a GOP wave – but how did they do that? None of the Democratic governors or candidates got anywhere near Obama. And several of the outgoing Democratic governors are leaving with high marks, and of the incumbents, the worst are the Republicans and only two of those lost.
Also consider that an electoral wave cuts below the top of the ballot. The open Democratic Senate seat in MI was won by the Democrat Peters by over 13%. And the MN incumbent Democratic Senator, Franken, won by 10.3% (RCP avg. 10%). OTOH, the “very popular” VA Democratic Senator barely squeaked out a win by 0.8% against Ed (freaking) Gillespie. (Gotta love VA voters for busting the chops of their “very popular Senators” who are looking to move up to POTUS or VP.)
There is something that all but one of the Democratic gubernatorial losers have in common. Also shared by two winners that had final upticks and three winners (all of whom were comfortably ahead) that had final downticks. But not shared by the other four winners. Democratic gubernatorial candidates that nationalized their elections didn’t fare well. Difficult to see how they could have done worse by hugging Obama. Not that anyone seems to have noticed this.
There is a pretty well established tendency for polls in Red States to break GOP and in blue states to break Dem.
Some of what you are showing here is consistent with that. Kansas, Arkansas and GA would fall into that category.
The surprises are WI, PA, and FL – though 2% error is pretty typical.
I think the CO and NH races bare study. I was pretty involved in the Hassan race. On election night I went to Concord to report the returns: and there the Gov and Sen and House race where all very close. Probably 95% of the voters in NH voted the same way in the Senate and the House.
This was a really good post.
Thank you. I prefer to look at the preference incumbents when evenly matched because incumbents reflect past voting behaviors and that’s what makes up our “red” and “blue” state identifications.
NH with reasonably well performing incumbents followed the generic “rule.” Except for Carol Porter-Shea which is a shame.
Something not yet explained happened in CO. They went for a minimum wage increase and rejected the personhood amendment, but voted in Gardner who is on the opposite side of those two issues.
Hickenlooper and Malloy are the two that interest me the most. Both struggled throughout the election, but in the end got their incumbent uptick and I suspect it was because they kept their campaigns focused at the state level and without calling in outside so-called “big guns.” Didn’t work for Davis, but he wasn’t the incumbent and it was KS.
Wisconsin is mostly Rural and the industrial areas have suffered from rust belt syndrome.
I’m truly interested in what dataguy has mentioned in another thread about Democratic failure is rural areas.
dataguy suggested in that thread that Democrats fund a major polling outfit to learn why rural whites are Republicans. IOW, he doesn’t know why. Hell, I can do better than that. But all rural areas are not the same. Places like Iowa and Kansas have a long tradition of being Republican because 1) that was the party of progressives when they were being settled and 2) farmers are independent business operators and the GOP was the party of small business. Rural south is nouveau Republican. Responding to African-Americans that switched to Democrat, particularly in the north when Truman integrated the military, and then the Democratic led civil rights acts of the ’50s and ’60s.
Doubling down began with the split on the Vietnam War. Then the New Deal Democrats began switching allegiance as Democrats were labeled communists/socialists which they knew they wanted no part of — and Democrats were too wimpy to say that the New Deal programs they loved were fucking socialism.
Oh, and when factories began moving south and then out of the country and farmers began going bankrupt (remember Farm-Aid) those workers blamed everyone but those responsible for their reduced circumstances. Reagan was their friend while his sponsors ripped off the working class. And they doubled down on religion — because when life sucks, praying to a magic being makes one feel better about how much life sucks.
I tend to agree with you, but as I said, I have no personal experience. I did live in a large housing development in a rural county in Virgina, but there I was a “damnyankee”, so it’s different from the midwest.
Even there, there were honest working men who weren’t prejudiced against blacks OR yankees. There were religious but not bible-thumping fanatics. Some did vote Democratic. We once had a Democratic Congressman,who came in with Carter, but he was swept out in the 1978 mid-term.
Harry S. Truman, May 17, 1952. (Could have been written yesterday.)
But how I wish he’d demanded repeal of Taft-Hartley after the Democratic Party got rid of the so-called “do nothing Congress.”
A dKos diary worth reading and sharing Surreal Ending to the CA17 Race. One background note. The CA open primary led to the incumbent Mike Honda running against a Silicon Valley tech community Democrat, Ro Khanna. Honda is one of the good guys. Yet it was an uphill battle for him against some big money and heavyweight forces:
Might be the only working class activists and twitter win of the election cycle.
A side note to CA17 that I’ve been thinking about wrt what is important over the remainder of Obama’s term. It’s Net Neutrality. Without this, Honda may not have won. Without this, the lessons of his winning campaign will be ever so much more difficult to replicate.
Check out how many of those candidates, even those that won, underperformed their pre-election polling numbers.