Midterms 2014: The Red Election

Today on NRO

JOHN McCLAUGHLIN: Democrats misunderstood the lay of the land. How the Wave Happened.

PATRICK BRENNAN: Conservative governors implemented their policies, and ran on them. GOP Governors Surprise to the Up Side.

JOHN HOOD: Why the Democratic firewall fell in North Carolina. A Big Swing and a Miss.

DAVID FRENCH: The election upended the way the Left thinks about social issues. I Thought They Only Helped Dems?

JONAH GOLBDERG: Do we really want more demagoguery? The Trouble with Early Voting.

Morning Jolt
. . . with Jim Geraghty

November 5, 2014

Midterms 2014: The Red Election

Kind of beautiful, isn’t it? It’s everything we wanted to feel in 2012 and didn’t get to enjoy.

You’ve heard of the “Red Wedding” from Game of Thrones? This was the “Red Election.” Or you could just call it “America’s correction.”

Almost every Democrat in a big race went down last night, and a lot of them went down by a lot.

Charlie Crist in Florida. Kay Hagan in North Carolina. Mark Udall in Colorado. Bruce Braley in Iowa. (By 8 points!) Mark Pryor in Arkansas. (By 16 points! A rout!) Michelle Nunn in Georgia. (By 8!) Alison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky. (By 16 as well!) Mary Burke in Wisconsin. Pat Quinn in Illinois. Martha Coakley in Massachusetts. Anthony Brown in Maryland. So-called “independent” Greg Orman in Kansas. (Lost by 11!)

And maybe Mark Warner in Virginia.

Some key lessons:

The 2008 and 2012 election results revealed an Obama coalition, not a Democratic coalition. The Democrats’ “coalition of the ascendant” — African-Americans, Hispanics, young voters, unmarried women — will NOT show up for just any Democrat. We saw this in 2009 and 2010, and then the Democrats went back to the lab and revised their get-out-the-vote tactics and terrified the heck out of Republicans.

The big story in the 2012 post-mortems was the Democrats’ fascinatingly ruthless micro-targeting, data-driven messaging and get-out-the-vote effort that changed the makeup of the electorate on Election Day from what Republicans expected. It was a nightmare scenario for the GOP; the opposition appeared to have effectively figured out a way to manufacture more voters when they needed them.

But Democrats do not have a button that they press to ensure big turnout among demographic groups that usually support the party. They certainly didn’t have one this year, and may have lost Virginia, did lose Maryland, and failed to sufficiently mobilize these voters in any of the key races, other than perhaps New Hampshire.

Maybe Barack Obama didn’t help Democrats figure out the secret of wining national elections. Maybe he was just a cult of personality who had just enough gas in the tank to get over the finish line in 2012.

He didn’t usher in a Permanent Democratic Majority, as so many liberals believed, and as so many conservatives feared. He may end up leaving his party in as bad a condition as he’s leaving the country.

At some point during the evening, NBC News’s Chuck Todd said Democrats will not win back the House until 2022 at the earliest. Republicans are likely to get 54 Senate seats, maybe 55 if Ed Gillespie wins in a recount. And Republicans had a phenomenal year in the governor’s races, only losing Pennsylvania.

In a perfectly symbolic revelation, we learned Daily Show host Jon Stewart didn’t vote. He said he’d moved, and just never got around to looking up his polling place. Later on, he said he was kidding and that he did in fact vote. But the exit polls indicated Stewart’s young audience didn’t vote in significant numbers. They’ll laugh at Republicans night after night, but they won’t show up in off-year elections.

Sometimes party loyalty is vastly overrated. Quoting the boss:

Jonah nailed it in his column a couple of weeks ago. By protecting Democrats from politically difficult votes, Reid made it hard for Democrats to differentiate themselves from Obama (assuming they wanted to). In addition, in the fallout over the end of the judicial filibuster, Republicans demanded cloture votes on judicial nominees. Those are inevitably party-line votes. So, Democrats were voting over and over with the president, giving Republican candidates one of their most powerful lines of attack in the campaign. Thanks, Harry.

Sometimes the polls really are skewed. Really. Time to order some servings of crow for myself. A few days ago, I wrote this . . .

The great revelation of the phenomenally popular Nate Silver is his observation that the polls — particularly the state poll averages — are usually right. Right before Election Day 2012 I went through the recent history of polls, and there were some glaringly bad cases, such as Zogby’s results in 2004 and the mess at Research 2000. But pollsters have attempted to account for low response rates, the possibility that some groups may be less inclined to talk to a pollster, cell-phone-only households, and so on. Conservatives — probably including myself in the past — may have developed a too-skeptical view of modern polling, and built the habit of looking for reasons they could be wrong, rather than recognize that the election isn’t going the way we hoped.

The notion that the polls are usually right, and the bigger the lead, the more certain they are, is pretty obvious. If you lead by 4 points or more, you’re in really solid shape. If you lead by 2 to 4 points, you’re in pretty good shape, but not quite a lock. If you lead by 0 to 2 points, it’s shakier.

… and then late on Election Night, Nate Silver concludes . . .

The pre-election polling averages (not the FiveThirtyEight forecasts, which also account for other factors) in the 10 most competitive Senate races had a 6-percentage point Democratic bias as compared to the votes counted in each state so far.

We aren’t counting Alaska, where polls haven’t closed yet. We also aren’t counting Virginia, which is much closer than expected. But Mark Warner’s close call makes more sense now given the margins we’re seeing in other states.

The bias might narrow slightly as more votes are counted; late-counted votes tend to be Democratic in most states. Still, this is a big “skew,” and it comes on the heels of what had been a fairly substantial bias in the opposite direction in 2012. The polls — excepting Ann Selzer’s — are having some problems.

So my gut feeling about the polls in 2012 was correct for 2014, and my gut feeling for the polls in 2014 was correct for 2012.

The country isn’t lost. Republicans have been walking around under this cloud since Election Night 2012. Time to put that away. The challenges before us are huge, but the opportunity is there to put our ideas and policies into place, and to enjoy brighter days ahead.

Meanwhile, at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue . . .

Do not expect President Obama to learn anything from this.

The midterm elections culminated a season of discontent for the president — and may yet open a period of even deeper frustration. Sagging in the polls and unwelcome in most competitive races across the country, Mr. Obama bristled as the last campaign that would influence his presidency played out while he sat largely on the sidelines. He privately complained that it should not be a judgment on him. “He doesn’t feel repudiated,” the aide said Tuesday night.

Also in that article:

But that was not the way Mr. Obama saw it. The electoral map was stacked against him, he argued, making Democrats underdogs from the start. And his own party kept him off the trail, meaning he never really got the chance to make his case. “You’re in the Final Four,” as one aide put it, “and you’re on the bench with a walking boot and you don’t get to play.”

Mr. President, you weren’t injured. You were benched.

ADDENDA: Thanks so much to Glenn Beck and all of the great folks at the Blaze for having me join them for several hours of live Election Night coverage. I thoroughly enjoyed it, and it seemed to go well — a much cheerier mood than Election Night 2012!

Perfect:

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