Newly elected Rep. Mark Sanford (R-SC)
Political and elections junkies could not help but be faintly amused by Twitter on Tuesday night. In a wonderful display of how the punditocracy simply cannot control itself, they spent all Tuesday morning and afternoon sagely reminding readers that you simply
cannot draw any conclusions from an event as prone to quirks and idiosyncrasies as a special election.
Then, within minutes of the Associated Press placing a red checkmark beside the name of former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, many of those same political chatterers took to Twitter to ... what else? ... draw big conclusions about the race, and even draw implications to 2014.
Such silliness. Special elections can have predictive value for the next round of elections, but they rarely, in fact, do so. Instead, the lessons from the results in the Palmetto State mainly reinforce things that we should have known, and should have remembered, before the battle was joined.
In retrospect, based on a couple of different facts, no one should be surprised that Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch came up shy in this battle on South Carolina's coast, and perhaps even the reasonably comfortable margin should not have been a surprise, either.
Follow me past the jump for the explanation ...
The nearly universal belief that the race was a tossup, and possibly even one where the narrowest of edges went to the Democrat, was predicated on polls that showed anything from a one-point Sanford lead to a nine-point lead for Colbert Busch, and turned out to be off the mark.
But PPP's recent, and almost uncanny success, at polling special elections obscured a classic rule of polling: low turnout special elections are notoriously difficult to poll. Add to that a very checkered past for one of the candidates, and polling grew even more troublesome.
Indeed, part of me is willing to wonder aloud if there was somewhat of a reverse Bradley effect at work in this race, where voters were unwilling to tell pollsters that they were going to vote for a moral dwarf like Mark Sanford, but ultimately planned to do so in the ballot box, free from judgment. I actually tend to doubt that theory (both public polls in the race were IVR pollsters, and people would tend to be more likely to be truthful to an automated poll than to a live interviewer whose judgment they might fear), but it would help explain the disparity.
Polls aside, there were a couple of different things that should've hinted to us that Sanford was very much the betting favorite. Two things, in particular, come to mind:
1. Oftentimes, districts are destiny.
Mark Sanford's personal liabilities obscured what should have been a central fact in this race: This was, at the end of the day, a reliably Republican congressional district. In both 2008 and 2012, the Republican presidential nominees ran at least 20 points ahead of their national margins in the South Carolina 1st.
What this means, of course, is that Elizabeth Colbert Busch would not only need to run ahead of Barack Obama's performance to claim a victory, she would have to run far ahead of him to notch the win.
Special House elections do not often mimic the margins of the presidential election, but they are often a pretty decent predictor of who will emerge victorious in the special election, even if there is some disparity among the candidates.
In an odd way, the best model for this week's election might have been the reasonably obscure special election right in my backyard: the special election in the summer of 2011 in CA-36. In that race, you had a Republican riding solo to his party's nomination who had done a decent job of energizing both local and national Republicans, who smelled a winner. His name was Craig Huey, and he was a self-funding businessman who had long suffering GOPers in this blue slice of the coastal Los Angeles suburbs thinking they might have a legitimate shot. On the Democratic side, things were more muddled. Many progressives were saddened when their preferred candidate, California Secretary of State Debra Bowen, barely finished third in the all-party primary election. The Democrat who made the runoff was Los Angeles city councilwoman Janice Hahn, who was both well-funded and well-connected, with a family name that is nearly synonymous with Los Angeles politics. There was no shortage of Democratic concern that the schism in the Democratic vote during the primary, plus Huey's ability to be competitive on the fundraising front, and a national climate that seemed, at best, muddled (this was eight months after the GOP tsunami election of 2010), might combine for an upset.
It didn't happen.
A late PPP poll showed Hahn leading Huey by eight points, and that was basically where the race ended up. Hahn defeated Huey on Election Day by a margin of 55-45. The dominant force in the election? The fact that the race was being held in a district where Barack Obama ran 23 points ahead of his national margin of victory over John McCain.
Recent upsets for Congress in special elections seem to have, for many observers, obscured the fact that it is awfully tough to dislodge a party in a district that favors them so clearly.
However, those upset wins for Congress, almost without exception, had a common thread beyond the caliber of the respective candidates in that special election.
In two of those cases (Bill Owens' win in NY-23 and Charles Djou's win in HI-01), quirks in the electoral rules aided in the upset win for the outparty. In Owens' case, it was the presence of a conservative third-party candidate overshadowing the GOP nominee (and eventually leading to her dropping out of the race) that muddied the waters for the GOP and allowed for the upset victory for the Democrat. In HI-01, it was the all-comers nature of the special election that allowed Republican Charles Djou to win with just 39 percent of the vote, even as the Democrats in the field combined for nearly 60 percent of the vote.
In three other upset wins for the out-party, the outgoing member of the Congress was leaving under a considerable cloud, which led to a bit of a drag on the party in question. Back in 2011, both Democrats in NY-09 and Republicans in NY-26 had to bear the burden of outgoing incumbents who resigned in a cloud of sexual impropriety, which meant that an endorsement from the previous occupant in the office would have been more detrimental than helpful. In 2003, in South Dakota, Republicans had to deal with an outgoing Congressman who had actually killed a man, and was awaiting sentencing on a conviction of vehicular manslaughter.
In three other "upset" wins for the out-party, the common thread was the year: 2008. In that year, three Democrats (Bill Foster in IL-14, Travis Childers in MS-01, and Don Cazayoux in LA-06) won special elections. In retrospect, of course, 2008 might have been one of the best electoral years for Democrats in my lifetime.
So, to recap, the upset wins in House special elections over the past decade, with one exception (Ben Chandler's win in KY-06 in 2004) had one of three characteristics: a split for the incumbent party in the cast of electoral characters, a deeply flawed outgoing incumbent, or the presence of an electoral wave. None of those were present here.
All we had, essentially, was the presence of a nominee whose personal history was extraordinarily flawed. And that, as it happens, segues nicely into the second major lesson from Tuesday night:
2. (Republican) Voters do not really care about "values" in their candidates. They care about "values" in their candidates' voting records.
On Tuesday night, I was actually pretty quiet on the Twitter. But, in a brief flash of pique, I did post this one minutes after the AP declared the election for Republican Mark Sanford:
GOP voters, feel free never to talk about issue of values ever again. #youelectedSanford #youelectedDesJarlais
— @stevesingiser via web
In the moment, I absolutely meant it. Republicans love to talk about how God should inform our policy, and then, in the next breath, they flood the polls to elect guys who have broken the 10 commandments in new and exciting ways. Last fall, for the love of all things, they elected a dude who had pressured his mistress (a patient in his medical practice, no less) into obtaining an abortion. And, to compound the insult, the final margin of victory for the Republican "values candidate" in question (freshman Rep. Scott DesJarlais) over Democrat Eric Stewart was not really all that close (56-44).
But, the fact of the matter is, personal failings rarely are fatal at the polls. In recent past history, this has mostly impacted Republicans. Sanford's electoral resurrection wound up being by a reasonably comfortable margin (54-45). DesJarlais won easily (56-44). And Louisiana Sen. David Vitter, whose bloviating on the subject of the sanctity of marriage took a sizable hit when he was enmeshed in the "DC Madam" prostitution scandal, won his next election over a legitimate opponent (Democratic Rep. Charlie Melancon) by a 57-38 margin.
Democratic voters, likewise, have been forgiving of personal failings, even some pretty remarkable ones, for incumbents whose voting records they respected (for examples, you can peruse this fairly entertaining list of great 20th and 21st century sex scandals involving politicians of all stripes).
Does that mean that the Appalachian Trail (which, in a sign of America's greatness, was a trending topic on Twitter on Tuesday evening) didn't hurt Sanford? No, of course not. It cost him some support. It simply did not cost him enough support to lose him the election. The New Republic's Nate Cohn, in his preview of the SC-01 special election, cited a study from Professor Nicholas Chad Long of St. Edward's University that showed that personal scandals cost an incumbent member of Congress around nine points. In this case, that's close to the mark—the South Carolina 1st ran 20-21 points ahead of the national average, and Sanford won by nine points. So, in this case, the scandal was damaging, but not fatal.
Indeed, if I were to advise a political figure enmeshed in a personal scandal, I am now reasonably certain my advice would be "ride it out." Voters, if recent past history is any indicator, are pretty forgiving. Or, perhaps, more accurately, their opinion of politicians is already low enough that one has to screw up awfully bad to actually disappoint the electorate to the point that one becomes truly toxic.
So, in the final analysis, the Mark Sanford victory last week did tell us two things: special elections are usually more predictable than we tend to think, and district tendencies will wallpaper over a lot of flaws in a candidate. But, in terms of predictive value for 2014, it is really quite hard to see anything of value here. Democrats can crow that they overperformed a district that was heavily GOP, and the Republicans can crow that the Democrats dropped a ton of money into a district where the GOP didn't spend a dime, and still nearly won by double digits. Neither of those things tell us much about 2014. The Democrats will not be running their competitive races on such hostile turf, and the GOP will not have the burden of a candidate as unspectacular as Sanford.
We head along the path to the 2014 midterms knowing little more about what to expect than we did before the battle was joined between Sanford and Colbert Busch. Anyone who suggests otherwise, in all probability, is spinning for all that they are worth.