| Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty November 6, 2013 Ken Cuccinelli, Finishing Better than Anyone Expected Boy, it's too bad elections don't have point spreads, huh? Late last night, Kristina Ribali of FreedomWorks asked, "Cuccinelli did better than Romney, right?" It depends upon your measuring stick. Cuccinelli finished closer than Romney, but won a smaller share of the vote. Obama won, 51.1 percent to 47.28 percent. At this hour, McAuliffe won, 48 percent to 45.5 percent. At some point, accounting for all the variables gets maddening. Cuccinelli was drastically outspent, but he had a worse opponent. It's an off-year election, with lower turnout that traditionally is an advantage for Republicans . . . but he had to run away from the incumbent because of Governor Bob McDonnell's gift scandal. Then again, maybe he shouldn't have, judging from CNN's exit poll: "Virginia voters actually approve of McDonnell's job performance by 12 points (53%-41%)." Cuccinelli indisputably was hurt by the government shutdown . . . but then he indisputably was helped by running against Obamacare in the closing days. As Tuesday night wore on, the Republican firing squad assumed its traditional circular formation. Here's a scorecard of the scapegoats: It was the RNC's fault! On Twitter, a lot of folks were calling for Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus's blood, noting that the RNC spent $3 million helping Cuccinelli this year after spending $9 million to help Bob McDonnell in 2009. The RNC's had a better year than their Democratic counterparts, raising about $60.9 million this year, compared to $47 million for the DNC (and the DNC still has $17 million in unpaid debt from last year). Here's the short version of the RNC's summary of what they did to help Cuccinelli: In Virginia, the RNC has nearly 50 offices, significantly more than we had in the state during the 2012 presidential cycle and a comparable number of staff… In Virginia, we already have gathered more than twice the amount of voter data. We have also served as a resource to the campaigns up and down the ballot. For example, we have conducted both mainstream and ethnic media training efforts with Cuccinelli, Obenshain, Dels. Rust, Comstock, and Hugo as well as Freddy Burgos, who is a challenger in the 41st District. The RNC has a total of seven paid staffers dedicated to engaging minority communities and have attended numerous events on behalf of the Republican Party. The RNC has also done significant paid print, radio, and TV advertising in ethnic media outlets on behalf of candidates. Was that enough? Keep in mind, this race has looked pretty tough for Cuccinelli since at least midsummer. How much money do Republicans want the RNC throwing in to help a candidate trailing by seven or eight or nine points? I'll tell you this: If Cuccinelli had been within two or three points consistently this fall, the RNC would have spent a heck of a lot more money than it did. The problem is that from about mid-summer until, oh, one hour after the polls closed, Ken Cuccinelli looked like a dead man walking in this race. Bad polls, quiet debate performances, brutal coverage, an inability to capitalize on tough coverage of McAuliffe's scandals . . . It's Cuccinelli's fault! Earlier this week, I said you can't get outspent by $15 million and win a statewide race. Apparently I should have added an asterisk and said you can keep it close. Cuccinelli got a lot of help from right-leaning groups; a fair question is whether he raised enough himself to keep himself in the ballpark with McAuliffe: the Republican Governors Association spent $8 million to help Cuccinelli. The NRA Political Victory Fund kicked in $600,000. Focus on the Family, $238,000. As an attorney general, Ken Cuccinelli rarely ducked a fight and in fact picked fights that some Republicans might have avoided. The problem was that he didn't want to run for reelection as that guy. Of course, Terry McAuliffe's ad team was determined to turn Cuccinelli into a horrific funhouse mirror-version of that guy. From Ben Domenech, a.k.a. that guy who writes that other newsletter: Cuccinelli had the baggage of his past fights which the left used very well. This is true of Cuccinelli's fights on marriage, abortion, climate, but particularly true of the issue of his defense of a sodomy statute on the books in Virginia. I doubt Cuccinelli ever realized how big of a liability this would be, but again, he'd have been better off defending himself vocally than shying away from it. Gay Republicans openly compared Cuccinelli to David Duke, and the indication that Cuccinelli wants to go around rounding up people for engaging in consensual sex was ubiquitous to any conversation about him on social media. Of course, in my county, there are nine convicted child abusers and sex offenders who were convicted under the statute, and I'd like to know which ones of them deserve to go off the books… but that defense was never offered. It was the Libertarians' fault! Let's get one thing straight: A big chunk of Robert Sarvis's voters aren't really libertarians, or they don't fit a definition you and I would offer for that philosophy. As Biased Girl and I have observed, some sub-segment of standard-issue liberals are self-identifying as libertarians, sort of a political hipsterism. They get to keep all of their usual liberal views on social issues, support smaller government in theory but never in practice, complain about taxes, and act like they're so much more sophisticated than everyone else. Jonah Goldberg's self-proclaimed "socially liberal, fiscally conservative" friend "Bob" fits this description. Sarvis's voters are young -- he got 15 percent of voters between 18 and 29. He took 15 percent of those who self-identified as "independents," 8 percent of those who identified as moderate or liberal Republicans, and 4 percent of those who self-identify as liberal Democrats. Among those who said they "somewhat oppose" Obamacare, he took 17 percent; among those who said they "somewhat support" Obamacare, he took 10 percent. One glitch from the exit polling: "Libertarian Robert Sarvis, may have made it closer for McAuliffe than it would have been otherwise. Had he not been on the ballot, a third of his voters said they'd have supported McAuliffe -- slightly more than twice as many as said they'd have gone for Cuccinelli." It's the Tea Party's fault! Under this narrative, Chris Christie won because he's a moderate, Cuccinelli lost because he's a scary tea partier, and New York is now run by the Sandinistas because the country is rejecting conservatism in all its forms. There's a molecule of truth to those arguments; perhaps more significant to tea partiers is the result in that special U.S. House election in Alabama: "With 100 percent of precincts reporting, Bradley Byrne, a staid former state senator, led Dean Young, a conservative real estate developer who likened himself to Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, 52.5 percent to 47.5 percent." But then you look down ticket, and you see the candidate on the Right beating the candidate on the Left over and over again. You see it in the Virginia House of Delegates elections . . . where Republicans won 67 out of 100 seats. You see it in Colorado's referenda on tax hikes for education . . . Voters emphatically rejected a $950 million tax increase and the school funding revamp that came with it, handing Amendment 66 a resounding defeat Tuesday night. . . . and you see it in New York outside of the city . . . Westchester County Executive Rob Astorino gave his victory speech a few minutes before 11 p.m. Tuesday night, according to the Journal News. At midnight, the incumbent had 55 percent of the vote with more than half of precincts reporting. Nassau County Executive Ed Mangano also declared victory, claiming 60 percent of the vote, Newsday reported. Astorino has been floated as a possible challenger for Gov. Andrew Cuomo, and although he'll face a significant fundraising challenge and the governor's relatively high popularity, his win in the affluent suburb where Democrats have a 2-to-1 enrollment advantage shows he has cross-party appeal. And we'll be playing woulda-coulda-shoulda for a few weeks. High among them: Would Cuccinelli have reversed these results with another couple of weeks of brutal coverage of Obamacare's rollout? The Really Key Political Battle of 2013: The 'Tech Surge' vs. the 'Glitches' You know what's really going to impact the 2014 midterms? How long it takes the Obama administration to turn Healthcare.gov into a functioning website. The president who was totally convinced it was ready to rock and roll October 1 has a team that assures us it will be ready at the end of November. Well, beginning of December. Monday night, Obama chuckled, "We're only one month into a six-month open enrollment period. Everybody who wants to get insurance through the marketplace, they'll be able to get it. It's not as if this is a one-day sale or something." Yes, Mr. President, we're one month in . . . and this coming month looks like it's shot, too: Federal health officials said that consumers can expect further outages at ObamaCare's troubled enrollment portal as the site undergoes repairs in the next four weeks. A spokeswoman for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) downplayed the site's semi-regular breakdowns, widely interpreted as a sign of the deep technical problems facing repair teams. "This really is an expected part of the process as we make improvements," said Julie Bataille, communications director for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. "As we expose more volume to the system, we may identify additional issues and address them," she said of the outages. Bataille spoke on a conference call to reporters several hours after HealthCare.gov unexpectedly crashed for approximately 90 minutes, the latest in a series of blackouts. Also note this detail: During a House hearing last week, CMS Administrator Marilyn Tavenner apologized for the problem-plagued rollout of the website. She struck a more optimistic tone at a hearing, Tuesday, pointing out that nearly 700,000 applications have been filled out by individuals through the federal and state exchanges. She also indicated that they anticipate enrolling 800,000 individuals in October and November. Remember, the administration's goal was 7 million by March 31. So they need another 6.2 million in the remaining four months. Of course, we still don't know much of anything about the demographics of these enrollees . . . it's possible insurance companies get millions upon millions of old and sick people with high costs, and not enough of those "young invincibles" that they need to avoid the death spiral. Robert Laszewski: The most urgent need is for the government to fix the back-end enrollment transactions between the government and the health insurance plans (the 834 problem). It will be impossible to conduct any kind of high volume enrollment through the health portal's front door so long as the data being transmitted to the insurance companies is unreliable. Has the government made progress in fixing the large variety of detailed 834 transaction issues? Yes. But the progress so far is incremental and nowhere near enough to be able to go to high volume processing. The Obama administration finally seems to have a strong group of experienced managers in charge of fixing Healthcare.gov. I don't mean to pile anymore bad news on them then they already have. But I also have to report that the confidence that this can all get fixed by December 1 is not high among the people on the other end of those 834 transactions. Allahpundit reads some tea leaves: The significance of December 1st is that it's just two weeks before the December 15th deadline for people to enroll if they want their coverage to begin on January 1 next year. If the site's still buggy at that point, the big post-Thanksgiving surge in enrollments by healthy people that the White House is counting on will be all but impossible, which means insurers will start next year with lots of sick people newly enrolled and few healthy ones to help cover their cost. It also means that the millions who have had their coverage dropped are at risk of starting the year without insurance because they can't get the damned website to work long enough for them to sign up. The "early renewal option" Laszewski mentions will solve that problem for some people, but not every insurer will offer it. Crunch time for The One, then: What does he do on December 1st if we're still stuck in 404 hell? Allow insurers to bring back plans that have been canceled under the new ObamaCare regs? Extend the enrollment deadline next year from March 31st to some later date, which raises the risk of adverse selection problems for insurers? Delay the entire law until HHS gets its act together? Nothing but bad options here as far as the eye can see. And lest you doubt that Laszewski's sources are right to be skeptical about December 1st, ask yourself why Obama would be wasting valuable "sign up!" cheerleading time this month on unrelated crap if he didn't agree. He knows it won't be ready soon. No sense spending more time and political capital on it until it is. ADDENDUM: From a reader: I'm a long-time Morning Jolt reader & first-time correspondent You certainly nailed it when you predicted the administration would blame Obamacare roll-out problems on the insurance industry! Something occurred to me today on that topic. Years ago, I heard an interview with Bernard Lewis promoting his book "What Went Wrong?" He said that in any human endeavor, when it becomes clear that the wheels have come off the wagon, we can go one of two ways: we can ask "What did we do wrong?" which immediately raises the question "What can we do to put things right?" Or, we can ask "Who did this to us?" which leads us down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories & a culture of victimhood. He was talking about the Arab world, but I wonder... I think that it's soon going to become clear that the wheels have come off the wagon in our attempts to revamp the insurance industry, and the administration is already encouraging us to ask "Who did this to us?" and serving up a scapegoat. But it's not just that: the 2008 financial mess? Greedy bankers. Our economic doldrums? The 1%. The question, I suppose, is whether people outside the president's supporters will go down that road... From Our Sponsor:
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