What the Gardner and Tillis Campaigns Are Thinking Right Now

Today on NRO VICTOR DAVIS HANSON: What’s with rich liberals who blast other people for being rich? Plutocratic Populism Pays. MOLLY ZIEGLER HEMINGWAY: Katha Pollitt’s abortion dream. Shiny, Empty Uteruses. THE EDITORS: Much to Russia’s chagrin, there won’t be any Communists in Ukraine’s next parliament. Putin Loses in Ukraine’s Election. NEW NRO BLOG: Unnaturally Political. SLIDESHOW: Cartoon of the Day: New York, New York. Morning Jolt . . . with Jim Geraghty October 28, 2014 What the Gardner and Tillis Campaigns Are Thinking Right Now I talked to a consultant who’s plugged in to the Republican party’s efforts in the Senate races in Colorado and North Carolina. For obvious reasons, he’s feeling good about Cory Gardner’s effort in Colorado, noting that Republicans continue to hold a big lead in early voting. The October 27 numbers for early voting indicate that the returned ballots are 42.8 percent from registered Republicans, 32.4 percent from registered Democrats, and 26.9 percent from voters who are unaffiliated. In 2010, Republicans led the early vote 39.5 percent to 33.6 percent over Democrats. In terms of raw numbers, 281,638 registered Republicans have voted so far, 213,738 Democrats, and 163,311 unaffiliated. This consultant said that unlike Ken Buck in 2010, the Republican base is rock-solid with Gardner, with more than 90 percent of Republicans supporting him. (According to CNN’s exit poll, Buck won 89 percent of self-identified Republicans, while Democrat Michael Bennet won 94 percent of Democrats.) Udall is getting 90 percent of Democrats, and the independents break slightly to Udall; as noted before, Colorado independents are more Democratic-leaning than in other states. He doesn’t expect Republicans to keep the ten-point lead throughout early voting, but he says it’s good place to be in at this stage of the early vote. The final turnout number should be somewhere around 2 million, not 2.3 million — so with 657,000 votes cast, close to a third of the vote is already in. In North Carolina, the outlook for Thom Tillis brightened somewhat. After consistently trailing by about three points through most of September and early October, Tillis and incumbent Democrat Kay Hagan are tied in the latest NBC News/Marist poll and the latest Survey USA poll. This consultant thinks that the ads from liberal outside groups in favor of Hagan may actually be backfiring. A key part of Hagan’s message for this reelection bid is to emphasize — or at least claim — her centrism, her independence, her willingness to defy the liberal party line. Then the airwaves are suddenly full of ads touting Hagan and attacking Tillis from the political action funds of . . . Planned Parenthood, the League of Conservation Voters, and union groups. “That’s the comparison we wanted!” the consultant chuckles. “Conservative vs. liberal is a better split for us than Republican vs. Democrat. ‘Conservative senator’ is the runaway favorite in what voters wanted, and Hagan had been trying to insist she’s a conservative. And now all these liberal groups are coming in [trying to reelect Hagan]. They don’t realize that it’s a dog whistle to independent voters.” This consultant does have one or two variables keeping him up at night. “We definitely need our ground game to work,” he says. “It’s been reinvented a lot since 2012. If they can turn out more low-propensity Democrats than they did in 2010, then we need to turn out more low-propensity Republicans this cycle than we did in 2010. There’s a really big opportunity here to win a lot of Senate seats. To do that, it doesn’t have to be a climate like 2010, but it needs to be close to that.” Overall, this consultant suggests that the disappointing early-vote numbers for Democrats in other states reflect that there are “a few” members of that party who are now begrudgingly recognizing that the Obama approach hasn’t worked. “It’s hard to generate enthusiasm for something that isn’t working,” he says, listing the Islamic State, Ebola, and the border crisis as “new and fresh reminders no one is running the shop.” Throw in the VA and the awful launch of Obamacare, and voters are concluding, “Maybe these people just aren’t good at government.” Maybe Not Quite So Many Non-Citizen Votes After All? The Washington Post’s Monkey Blog returns to the topic of non-citizen voting, and collects the evidence suggesting that the shocking report from Friday may be inaccurate. Apparently it is surprisingly easy for some people to forget whether they’re U.S. citizens or not. Nearly one-fifth of CCES panelists who said that they were not American citizens in 2012 actually reported being American citizens when they were originally surveyed for the 2010 CCES. Since it’s illogical for non-citizens in 2012 to have been American citizens back in 2010, it appears that a substantial number of self-reported non-citizens inaccurately reported their (non)citizenship status in the CCES surveys. Even more problematic, misreported citizenship status was most common among respondents who claimed to be non-citizen voters. The second table below shows that 41 percent of self-reported non-citizen voters in the 2012 CCES reported being citizens back in 2010. The table goes on to show that 71 percent of respondents, who said that they were both 2012 non-citizens and 2010 voters, had previously reported being citizens of the United States in the 2010 CCES. How does one forget something like that? What Was the Point of Wendy Davis’d Campaign? Over at Ricochet, Stephen Miller offers a theory on the Wendy Davis campaign’s true objective: Why lose with dignity when you can make the most absurd claims in hopes of headlines and an expanding national brand? And that’s where the real lesson of Wendy Davis comes into play. The point of Wendy Davis was never to become governor of Texas as it was to expand her national identity. The other tactical usefulness of the Davis implosion is as a canary in the coal mine for Democrats, leftists and media alike as they prepare for a Hillary (or Elizabeth Warren) presidential campaign. The Davis campaign was a mere dry run for the coming liberal feminist revolution we’re all about to beaten over the head with, non-stop, for the next two years. Davis served her purpose and will be hailed briefly as a martyred heroine who fought valiantly right before being aborted by the party altogether. “Ready for Grandma” and the national party will toss her aside while compiling data on what issues polled well and applying that data to a national war for women. We will see the exact same celebrity endorsements and, thanks to the ever-radicalization of liberalism, probably more jars of poop as well. Wendy herself will be forgotten, allowed to retire quietly into obscurity where no one will ever hear from or see her again — with her own show on MSNBC. Eh, perhaps. That theory ascribes a lot of deliberate strategy to what amounted to a dumpster fire of a campaign. (Note that last week some wondered if the entire campaign was a long audition tape for MSNBC.) One of the reasons there was such intense Democratic hype about Wendy Davis is because she represented a certain brand of liberal and Democratic wish-fulfillment. She did her fundraising in Manhattan, San Francisco, and Washington D.C., because her outspoken, uncompromising support for abortion on demand plays well in those corners of America. Liberal Democrats in places like this want to hear that their viewpoint is popular in the rest of the country. Unsurprisingly, it was a harder sell in Texas, and it is a harder sell in any red-to-purple state. You don’t see Kay Hagan, Mary Landrieu, Michelle Nunn, Mark Pryor, Mark Begich, Mark Warner, or Jeanne Shaheen stating, directly into the camera, “I support the right to an abortion — including partial-birth abortion procedures — at any time in the pregnancy, for any reason, at any age and bans on from any requirement to parental notification or consent.” There are a lot of Democrats who have convinced themselves that because of changing demographics and a rising Latino vote, the state will be blue or purple in the not-so-distant future. Whether or not it actually ever happens, liberal groups, big Democratic donors, and so on are spending money and investing time in Texas. You remember this . . . . . . and of those three, one is going to get blown out in that governor’s race, one is a first-term congressman who gets exponentially more attention because of his demographic profile, and the other is in that federal witness-protection program known as the Obama administration cabinet. (No, really, name anything Julian Castro has done at the Department of Housing and Urban Development so far. Castro was sworn in July 28 and promptly disappeared into the Bermuda Triangle of the federal bureaucracy.) The nomination and excitement surrounding Wendy Davis is a testament to Democrats’ ability to believe their liberal agenda is ascendant everywhere. ADDENDA: No Republican should get their hopes up too high over Maryland, but this gubernatorial poll result is pretty surprising: Hogan got a boost Monday from a new poll. The survey of 822 registered voters by Gonzales Research & Marketing Strategies suggested that Brown was ahead by two percentage points (46-44), within the poll’s margin of error of 3.5 percent. The poll was commissioned by the “Maryland, My Maryland” PAC, an independent group that supports Hogan. But it was carried out by Gonzales, a respected and nonpartisan firm. The poll projects voter turnout among African Americans, a key voting bloc for Brown, at 25 percent. To read more, visit www.nationalreview.com Why not forward this to a friend? Encourage them to sign up for NR's great free newsletters here. Save 75%... Subscribe to National Review magazine today and get 75% off the newsstand price. Click here for the print edition or here for the digital. National Review also makes a great gift! Click here to send a full-year of NR Digital or here to send the print edition to family, friends, and fellow conservatives. Follow Tweet NR Podcasts Send National Review, Inc. 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