by Cliston Brown | Sep 20, 2014 | Election Analysis
The Wide World of Politics Blog Election Ratings reports two changes this week.
First, developments in the Kansas Senate race have led me to move this race from “Leans Republican” to “Leans Independent.” The recent ruling of the Kansas Supreme Court that Democrat Chad Taylor may, in fact, withdraw his name from the ballot is clearly beneficial to independent candidate Greg Orman, and one-on-one polling pitting Orman against incumbent GOP Senator Pat Roberts shows a clear Orman lead. This blog now sees Orman as a slight favorite, though it remains to be seen if the professional help Roberts has recently begun to receive from GOP HQ in Washington will help him right his sinking ship.
This rating change now puts the Republicans at 50 seats—1 shy of a majority—and the Democrats at 48 seats, with two independents, Orman and Sen. Angus King (I-Maine), positioned to determine the Senate majority. King currently caucuses with Democrats.
The second rating change involves the Illinois governor’s race. Incumbent Democratic Gov. Pat Quinn has been struggling for a plethora of reasons, but recent polling has shown Quinn rebounding considerably and moving ahead of Republican businessman Bruce Rauner. Given Quinn’s big move in the polls, and his history of overcoming long odds to prevail, not to mention the state’s strong Democratic edge, this blog has now moved the Illinois governor’s race from “Leans Republican” to “Leans Democratic,” though it also has been added to the Watch List.
This rating change now shows an even split at the gubernatorial level, with Republicans and Democrats each poised to control 25 seats, though two of this blog’s ratings (favoring Democrats in Michigan and Wisconsin) are out of step with most predictions at this point. This blog favors Democrats Mark Schauer in Michigan and Mary Burke in Wisconsin due to their recent upward polling trends. It remains to be seen if a plagiarism flap involving Burke will halt or reverse her momentum.
Click here for the newest ratings sheet.
by Cliston Brown | Sep 13, 2014 | Election Analysis
Now that all states have held their primaries and the general-election nominees have all been determined, I am publishing my first list of race ratings for the U.S. House of Representatives, the U.S. Senate, and governors’ races across the country. Here I will provide some basic explanations of my Election Race Ratings Chart.
First, I have selected only those races that have been deemed competitive, either by myself or another leading, reputable election analyst (such as Larry Sabato, Charlie Cook, Stu Rothenberg, etc.). Therefore, not every race will appear here. Those offices that are not listed are considered safe for the party currently holding them.
My chart lists, from left to right, the state or district; the Democratic candidate; the Republican candidate; and my current rating of the race. If the state or district is currently held by a Democrat, it is colored blue; if the state or district is currently held by a Republican, it is colored red. Lighter shades of blue or red denote an “open seat” race in which no incumbent is seeking reelection. In the candidate columns, incumbents are listed in bold type. In the rating column, races in which I rate the Democrat a favorite will be colored light blue if it leans Democratic; medium blue if it is likely Democratic; and dark blue if it is safe Democratic. Similarly, I use light red, medium red and dark red, respectively, for leaning, likely or safely Republican.
As to the ratings themselves, I will differ from the more established analysts in one crucial respect: I do not list any races as toss-ups. In races that appear extremely close, I am exercising my best judgment to project them either “Lean D” or “Lean R.” I make these judgments based on the following factors:
1) Current polling numbers (where available). This is the key factor, but these are much more available in Senate and gubernatorial races. Many House races have little, if any, reputable public polling readily available.
2) Current polling trends; even in a case in which a candidate may still be trailing by a small margin, if his/her polling trends are clearly moving upward, I may move a race rating in his/her direction. (Key examples here include the governors’ races in Michigan and Wisconsin, which I currently rate “Lean D” due to the upward trending of the Democratic candidates in that race. If those trends reverse in the coming weeks, I will reassess.)
3) The district’s electoral history—for example, if a state or district has a history of flipping depending on whether it is a presidential year or a midterm; if the race is a rematch of a close race in a previous election; if the trends in a state or district are moving in favor of one party or the other; etc. (A key example is the 10th District of Illinois, which has a Democratic partisan voting index, but where Republican House candidates traditionally overperform and where the Republican candidate, Bob Dold, has previously been elected to the House.)
4) An unusually impressive (or unimpressive) candidate, or a relatively new or unknown candidate who may appear to have great potential (A key example is Republican nominee Marilinda Garcia in New Hampshire’s 2nd Congressional District.)
In marginal races that would normally be listed as toss-ups in which I still have a strong degree of uncertainty, I add a black box next to the rating to denote that the race is on my “Watch List.” A race may be watch-listed for any of the factors listed above.
This site will publish an updated list every Saturday between now and the election. At this moment, my ratings indicate the Republican Party will pick up a net of 7 seats in the U.S. House, for a 241-194 majority, and 6 seats in the U.S. Senate, for a 51-49 majority. The Democratic Party, meanwhile, appears headed for a net pickup of 3 governors’ mansions, which, if accurate, would leave the Republicans with a 26-24 advantage.
In future ratings, this site will also make estimates as to the partisan control of state legislatures after the November elections.
For the current race ratings, please click here.
by Cliston Brown | Oct 14, 2013 | Election Analysis
I almost always take the position that odd-year state races say little or nothing about what will happen in national elections a year or two away. Generally, these elections are very localized, and the fact that a particular party may win a particular state in an odd year does not necessarily indicate a national trend. To wit: Democratic gubernatorial victories in Virginia and New Jersey in 2001 were followed by Republican victories in the 2002 Congressional elections.
But I would hedge my normal statement by inviting readers to take a long, close look at what happens in Virginia next month. As astute observers of the political scene may know, Virginia has become, in recent years, a bellwether in presidential elections. In both 2008 and 2012, Virginia came the closest of any state to the overall national margin; in fact, the margin of victory in Virginia for President Barack Obama in 2012 was only 0.02 percentage points higher than his national margin. (Virginia had been 0.98 percentage points more Republican than the national margin in 2008, also the closest correlation between any state and the overall margin).
Now, keep in mind the fact that I’m not talking about the gubernatorial race or the other down-ballot statewide races. Barring some sort of colossal screw-up over the next few weeks, Democrats Terry McAuliffe and Ralph Northam, respectively, are shoo-ins to win the governor’s race and the lieutenant governor’s race. Both have consistently led in virtually all polls conducted since the spring. Their victories would be all but certain regardless of whether the national Republican Party was in the process of torching its brand in Washington these days. Republican gubernatorial candidate Ken Cuccinelli is too far right on social issues to appeal to the suburban electorate in this demographically diverse swing state, and the party’s candidate for lieutenant governor, E.W. Jackson, has made such crazy pronouncements as to make Cuccinelli look liberal by comparison. And while there have been few polls in the attorney general’s race between Mark Herring (D) and Mark Obenshain (R), Herring does appear to have a slight lead, and he could give the Democrats a clean sweep of the statewide races.
The results of those three races will probably say much less about the prospects of Virginia Republicans than they will say about what happens when your party holds a convention rather than a primary—which, of course, draws only the truest of the true believers—and ends up nominating a bunch of candidates who are too extreme to pass the smell test. And the results of the statewide races probably say nothing at all of what may be coming in 2014 or 2016 on a national level.
But what I would suggest watching very closely is what happens in the Virginia House of Delegates. Currently, Republicans have a spectacularly outsized 65-32 majority (as compared to a 20-20 split in the state Senate, which is not up for election this year). There are two vacant seats, both of which had been held by Republicans, and one independent.
I am not going to suggest that Democrats might take control of the House of Delegates this year. That’s not happening, and any political analyst who would predict that result should have his/her head examined. Democrats would have to pick up 18 seats, and while that kind of swing may happen in Minnesota or Maine, it is unheard of in Virginia. It took Republicans two cycles to go from a 53-45 majority to their current 65-32 advantage, and the 2009 and 2011 elections took place in a period when the Tea Party movement was flying high.
But there are opportunities for Democrats to eat into the Republican edge. The question here is: how much?
Geoffrey Skelley, one of the very talented political analysts at the University of Virginia Center for Politics, did a comprehensive analysis of this year’s Virginia legislative elections on August 8th. By his estimate, it may be possible for Democrats to pick up six or seven seats, which would cut the GOP advantage to something around 60-40. But there are 12 legislative seats currently held by Republicans in districts that went for the president in last year’s elections, and two more where Obama barely lost.
For Democrats to pick up as many as six or seven seats could probably be explained away as a simple matter of political gravity. It is very difficult to see how Republicans could win any more than 67 of 100 House seats in Virginia, even taking into account issues of gerrymandering and inefficient distribution of Democrats. In short, the Republicans have maxed out in the House of Delegates; there’s really only one direction they can go, and it isn’t a good one from their point of view. Democratic pickups this year are to be expected, and would likely be expected regardless of the national environment.
But if Democrats can somehow win more than six or seven seats, perhaps taking upwards of 10 or 11 of the 14 GOP-held districts where Obama won or barely lost in 2012, that would be harder to explain away as mere gravity. It would almost surely indicate an electorate that has turned against Republicans in a major way, in a state that recently has more closely mirrored the national electorate than any other. That would be significant, and that’s why the Virginia House of Delegates is what you should be watching on the night of November 5th.
by Cliston Brown | May 7, 2013 | Election Analysis
My boss asked me this morning who was going to win the special U.S. House election between former Gov. Mark Sanford (R-South Carolina) and his Democratic opponent, Elizabeth Colbert Busch, sister of comedian extraordinaire Stephen Colbert. I told him Sanford was going to win by about 52% to 48%. I was a little short on the margin, which ended up around 55%-45%, but correct on the result.
I was able to pick Sanford in part because the polling had swung wildly in his direction, but also due to the inescapable fact that the 1st District of South Carolina is heavily Republican. It voted for Mitt Romney by 18 percentage points last year, a significantly larger margin than Romney achieved in the state as a whole. And if your district is to the right of South Carolina as a whole, it’s not voting for any Democrat, regardless of circumstances.
I also picked Sanford because of the trend we are seeing across the country, which is that voters are voting much more based on ideology than on personal characteristics. We saw an example of this in the easy reelection of Sen. David Vitter (R-Louisiana) despite his prostitution scandal.
It is true that sometimes, people go against their own partisan grain if their party’s candidate says or does something particularly offensive, and we saw that in the landslide defeat last year of former U.S. Rep. Todd Akin (R-Missouri) in his Senate race against Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Missouri). I’m not convinced that Akin would have won that race if he hadn’t made his idiotic comment about rape—I think McCaskill is a much better politician than she gets credit for, and I cannot believe that her landslide win was entirely due to Akin’s flub—but I think it’s clear that the race would have been much closer without Akin’s disastrous gaffe.
That said, it appears, more and more, that while some mistakes can still sink a candidate, a candidate’s marital infidelity is no longer one of those fatal miscues. Admittedly, this hasn’t really been tested when it comes to female candidates—and it would be interesting to see how such a scenario would play out—but can you name the last male candidate for high office who lost an election, which he otherwise would likely have won, strictly because he cheated on his wife? We might have to go back to Gary Hart, whose promising 1988 presidential run tanked after he was discovered to be having an affair.
For all the talk about “family values” and the “sanctity of marriage” emanating from the GOP, Republicans in South Carolina’s 1st District had no qualms today about sending an admitted adulterer to represent them in Congress, just as their Republican compatriots in Louisiana had no issue reelecting Vitter. And on the other side, the job approval of Democratic President Bill Clinton was never higher than it was when Republicans—led by confirmed adulterers Newt Gingrich and Henry Hyde—impeached him for the fallout surrounding his affair with an intern.
It looks like the big lesson from Mark Sanford’s victory tonight was that marital infidelity doesn’t matter in politics, as long as a candidate remains faithful to the ideology of his constituents.
by Cliston Brown | Apr 27, 2013 | Election Analysis
A few weeks ago, I did an analysis of all the final 2012 election results broken down by region. I wanted to see how the results came out if we compared the South against the rest of the country, and also to see what kind of majority President Obama compiled outside the South.
While the results were by no means a surprise, they did demonstrate, as expected, a stark political difference between the South and the rest of the country.
I broke the country into four regions: Northeast, Midwest, West and South, each containing either 12 or 13 states in order to make the comparisons as apples-to-apples as possible. As a result, West Virginia ended up as the only red (Republican) state in the Northeast, even though I think most people would rightly consider West Virginia a Southern state, culturally and politically. But it also has historical ties to the Northeast as well, so one can make a case either way.
And I included Oklahoma in the South, which—based upon virtually every interaction I’ve ever had with Oklahomans—seems to me to be a fair and correct designation. I know many Oklahomans consider themselves Midwesterners, but as a native Midwesterner myself, I see Oklahoma having far more in common—culturally, politically and geographically—with the South than the Midwest.
I also designated Kentucky as a Southern state, and I can’t imagine I’d get much disagreement from anyone on that one. I challenge anyone to find a Midwesterner, or even very many Kentuckians, who’d consider Kentucky a Midwestern state.
Feel free to disagree with any of those designations, but let’s say, for instance, that we shifted Oklahoma into the Midwest and West Virginia out of the Northeast and into the South; neither move would have changed the results for any of those regions by very much. For example, the Midwest would have gone from favoring President Obama by about 51%-48% to about 50%-49%.
The results were clear: the South is not just a political outlier, as compared to the rest of the country, but it is out of touch with the rest of the country by an extremely large margin. Using the breakdown I employed, I found that President Obama won the Northeast 58.6%-39.8%; the West 54.2%-43.2%; and the Midwest 50.7%-47.6%. His victories in the Northeast and West were by double-digit, landslide margins; his victory in the Midwest was close, but clear.
Taking all the non-Southern states as a unit, President Obama walked away with a double-digit landslide: 54.3%-43.7% For purposes of comparison, this margin of victory in the Northeast, Midwest and West would be roughly on a par with the national victories won by Presidents Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956; George H.W. Bush in 1988; Clinton in 1996; and even Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 and 1944. President Obama’s reelection victory was a landslide—if we exclude the South.
But in the South, it was an entirely different story. In this part of the country, even taking into account President Obama’s victories in the two most non-Southern states in this region (Florida and Virginia), Mitt Romney came away with a landslide victory of his own: 54.3%-44.5%. This is almost a mirror image of what happened in the rest of the country.
So when you’re thinking about how close the national popular vote was in the 2012 election (51.1%-47.2%) and thinking that we have a closely divided nation, you’re partly right and you’re partly wrong. The bottom line is that most of the country reelected the President by a large margin. But the dominance of cultural and political conservatism in the South is what created this artificial closeness in the overall electorate. When conservatives talk about “Heartland values,” they are really talking about Southern values. Don’t be fooled by this hooey; the Midwestern “Heartland” voted for the president.
Most of the country backed the president and his program by decisive margins. It is the South, the conservative outlier, that continues to pull the rest of country’s politics away from its natural, more moderate orbit. And it has been this way from the dawn of American independence. The tail, to a large degree, is wagging the dog.
So the next time you hear about “blue states” vs. “red states,” remember that it’s really more about the Blue vs. the Gray—just as it always has been and probably always will be.
by Cliston Brown | Feb 21, 2013 | Election Analysis, Political Commentary
I learned on MSNBC’s “The Cycle” today that the number of Americans between ages 18 and 30 is now 80 million—more than 1/3 of all current voting-age adults. As they get older, they are, statistics demonstrate that they are more likely to vote regularly than they are now.
And there are approximately 75 million Americans under 18.
In short, within 20 years, when most of the current plus-65 Americans are, statistically speaking, likelier than not to be dead, the millennials, and those younger than millennials, will make up somewhere in the ballpark of 60 percent (probably more) of all voters. And if Republicans don’t reverse the tide, and these current young people continue to skew progressive on social issues, Republicans will never be able to win a national election without getting upwards of two-thirds of the plus-50 vote. Considering that the 50-to-65 crowd, 20 years from now, will be comprised of the moderate-leaning 30-to-45 crowd of today—which first began voting during the Bill Clinton presidency—good luck to the GOP in getting two-thirds or more of that demographic.
Republicans can do this simple math just as easily as I can. They must know that if they don’t change, they are politically dead. Oh, they may win an election here and there, but it’ll be an increasingly rare occurrence—a death rattle. Yet, rather than making real changes, their actions seem to indicate an attempt to mitigate their decline rather than reverse it. One wonders if they are not just trying to stay alive long enough so that they can ensure their laws will survive after they are extinct.
Viewed in this light, it would seem the Republicans are fighting a rearguard, guerrilla-type political war. They are buying time to get their laws on the books (certainly at the state level, even if they can’t do so at the federal level). If they can get their laws on the books (backed by the numerous lifetime appointees to the federal benches they’ve made since 1981), no matter how badly they lose at the polls, it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for the eventual Democratic majorities to overturn them—at least, not for a very long time. For example: look at the union-busting measures recently enacted by Michigan Republicans. It is hard to see how they will not suffer at the polls for their actions—but if their chief concern is getting their laws on the books while they still can, then their course of action makes sense.
One would think that if Republicans were truly interested in future political viability, they’d start aligning at least some of their positions, particularly on social issues, with the millennials, who will be the dominant force in U.S. politics by 2030 (if not sooner). But the Republicans aren’t realigning on any of the issues. They are merely incessantly yammering about better messaging, but their problem is not primarily a messaging problem. The messaging difficulties merely are a symptom. Yes, their messaging is bad, but that’s largely because they’re selling a product that fewer and fewer people want to buy. If they think putting a fresh coat of paint on a crumbling house is going to change their fortunes, they are in for a rude awakening.
I am beginning to consider the possibility that the Republican Party is not, primarily, trying to survive. Perhaps not surprisingly for a party increasingly dominated by deeply religious people, it might simply be trying to ensure itself an afterlife.
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