We can
almost close the books on the 2014 general election now that almost every vote has finally been counted, although there are still a few races (like AZ-02 and the Oregon GMO labeling measure) trapped in the limbo of recounts or legal wrangling. We at Daily Kos Elections have been piling up interesting links about the election that haven't quite fit anywhere else, and with election season over, it's time to clear the decks on those links.
SPENDING. One of the most striking things that we saw was a graph created by political scientist Alan Abramowitz, presented as part of an all-around interesting collection of trivia from Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball. The chart (which you can see above) at least somewhat rebuts the widely held notion that Republican outside money bought the election for the GOP candidates. If nothing else, it shows that the Democrats lost the races where there was a heavy advantage for the Republican candidates in advertising from outside groups (Kentucky, Georgia, Arkansas, Iowa), but they also lost some of the key races where the Democratic candidates had the advantage in money from outside groups (Alaska, North Carolina).
The chart does find somewhat of a relationship between the Democratic candidates' margins and the disparity between how much help Democratic candidates received from outside groups versus how much help Republican candidates received. But that correlation seems largely because of how much Democratic allies spent on Gary Peters in Michigan and how thoroughly Peters clobbered Terri Lynn Land in that race. (If you're wondering where these ratios came from, you can see the actual dollar amounts at Open Secrets.)
If you want to dig deeper into where that money came from, the Brennan Center issued a full report on outside spending. A total of $342 million in outside group spending was put into the Senate races in 2014, compared with $259 million on 2012's Senate races. On top of that, the political parties spent another $89 million on the 2014 Senate races, and that doesn't even get into what the candidates spent themselves.
Of that outside money, $127 million was "dark money," from groups that don't disclose the identity of their donors. (These aren't true PACs, but rather groups that fall under 501(c) exemptions, most notably Crossroads GPS but also the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.) The majority of the "dark money" was on the Republican side, and the candidate who benefited the most from it was Cory Gardner in Colorado, for whom 89 percent of the outside money spent in support of him was "dark money." Contrast that with Peters in Michigan, for whom only 28 percent of the outside money spent in support of him was from undisclosed donors. Another series of charts from the Cook Report illustrates that disparity: the majority of all Democratic Senate ads came from the candidates themselves, while a plurality of all the Republican Senate ads came from "issue groups."
There's much more over the fold.
VOTING RESTRICTIONS. The Brennan Center also looked at the potential impact of voting restrictions on the election. While their description isn't conclusive—it's hard to ascribe an effect to voting laws unless you, say, poll the electorate and try to find a number of people whose attempts to vote were thwarted—they focused in particular on several states where the margin of victory potentially falls within the margin of disenfranchisement.
The most pernicious effects, though, don't seem to have anything to do with the usual voter suppression suspect, voter ID laws. One state is North Carolina, where the margin was 48,000 votes, but where, in 2010, 200,000 voters cast ballots using early voting days that were cut this year. In addition, in 2012, 100,000 voters used same-day registration, again a feature not available this year under new voting laws (passed by the legislature that just happened to be, at that point, run by winning Senate candidate Thom Tillis). Another is Florida, where 1.3 million potential voters were unable to vote because of felon disenfranchisement laws (which had been relaxed, ironically, during Charlie Crist's gubernatorial term, but restored during Rick Scott's term). The margin in Florida was only 72,000 votes.
NON-VOTERS. Right before the election, Pew released a study of who the non-voters are. Generally, the non-voters are in more marginalized groups, the very people who have the most to lose by not voting. While 22 percent of likely voters are non-white, 43 percent of non-voters are non-white. Similarly, non-voters are disproportionately young and less educated, more likely to receive government benefits, and less likely to have health insurance. One thing that's missing from the study, unfortunately, is the "why" behind their non-voting. Is it because they were legally unable to vote, physically unable to get to the polls or find time to vote, unenthused about what either party has to offer, or simply uninterested or unaware?
GROUND GAME. The Democrats reportedly had a vaunted ground game in key states, through something called the Bannock Street Project, but it didn't seem to make much of a difference in terms of winning those states. Or maybe more accurately, it did make a difference, but ground game can only gain you a few points at the end, and those races were already more than a few points in the hole, thanks to the overall fundamentals. An overview of controlled experiments about GOTV by Vox suggests that even though canvassing is much better at stimulating turnout than, say, mailers or phone calls, canvassing also needs to involve actual good, organic conversations. Simply rushing through the script in order to maximize the number of "knocks" isn't much more effective than forcing people to sit through TV ads.
LATE DECIDERS. This may pass for good news—you might think that late deciders broke toward the Republicans, but in fact, a study from the Public Religion Research Institute indicated that they broke toward the Democrats. Not that that helped much, but it suggests that things could have been much worse. That's also puzzling, in that it doesn't jibe with the polls, where a number of races saw the Republicans overperform their poll numbers. The simplest explanation for that would be that the undecideds mostly broke toward the GOP at the end.
But they didn't. The poll says that people who decided on Election Day, in the final week, and in the final month, all went heavily in the Democratic direction, and that it was the Republican voters who had made up their minds months before. The Washington Post's Aaron Blake has a good explanation for what probably happened here—the decision wasn't between Democrats and Republicans, but between Dems and not voting at all: "Also, it's quite possible those Democratic late-deciders are simply partisans who weren't all that enthusiastic about voting and, thus, didn't technically decide until the very end, even as their votes were basically foregone conclusions."
POLLING. Speaking of Republicans overperforming the polls, there's still the question of why the polls didn't pick up on that. The errors in the polling average were greater than usual this year, and, unlike 2012, the errors didn't work out in the Democrats' favor. The Huffington Post's polling expert, Mark Blumenthal, offered several theories for that, in addition to the previously discussed one that undecideds "broke" for the GOP at the last minute.
One is that a lot of Democratic voters fit into pollsters' likely voter model, dutifully reported that they were going to vote for Democratic candidates, and then didn't turn out. (Though, again, that doesn't get at whether they were thwarted from voting, or whether they just lost interest and figured somebody else would pick up the slack for them.) Another possibility is simply that pollsters were overcompensating for having been surprised in 2012, and weighted their 2014 models too heavily based on the populations that showed up in 2012.
ORPHAN RACES. When we talk about Democrats not turning out, though, there was a wide disparity among the states in terms of turnout. States with hard-fought Senate and gubernatorial races had pretty solid turnout. Unfortunately, there were ones without hard-fought Senate and gubernatorial races where Democrats lost key House races simply because there wasn't anything driving top-of-the-ticket turnout. These are often known as "orphan races," and the Cook Report's Dave Wasserman describes how those really made the difference between the expected high-single-digit Democratic losses in the House and the actual low-double-digit losses they suffered.
Probably the most notorious case of that this year was Nevada, where the Democrats barely bothered to field a gubernatorial candidate at all, with nobody willing to challenge Brian Sandoval and the party's best options heading for the down-ballot races. This was a bad idea, as having nothing at the top of the ticket led to not only losing those same statewide down-ballot races, but also losing both chambers of the state legislature and even Steven Horsford in light-blue NV-04. This also happened in New York, where few Democrats bothered to turn out for Andrew Cuomo, which took down incumbents in NY-01 and NY-24, and in Texas, where the gubernatorial race didn't wind up being very competitive and the diminished turnout took out Pete Gallego in TX-23.
WHERE TO GO NEXT. A lot of the post-mortems (this one by Josh Marshall is a particularly good, if pessimistic, example) about the election have invoked the confusion about how, on paper, the economy is doing well, and yet, people are dissatisfied with how the economy is treating them in particular, which undercut any Democratic efforts to point to the economy and say that what they're doing is working. John Judis's essay is a case in point, also focusing in particular on how it's easier to make that sort of case when running against one easilycaricatured Republican (like Mitt Romney in 2012) than against a nebulous collection of Republicans. (Hence the Democrats' ill-fated attempts to turn the Koch brothers into some sort of all-purpose villains in 2014.)
Ed Kilgore looks for a way forward on talking about the economy, not so much a question of "more" or "less" populism but about getting everyone on the same page with one message about the economy, one that focuses on how inequality hampers growth in general. (That sounds a little too much like trying to condense Piketty into a 30-second soundbite, but I agree with the general thrust there.)