If your day-to-day thoughts have gotten swallowed up by the presidential race (and don’t feel bad if that’s true; I’m as big a House-race-nerd as you’ll find on this site and I’ve given the lower chamber almost nary a thought in the last month), you might have forgotten that there’s a pitched battle for control of the Senate, and, to a lesser extent, the House. Even if you assume Hillary Clinton will be the next president, there’s still the question of what she’ll be able to do! She won’t be moving progressive economic legislation without control of both chambers, and without control of the Senate, even her judicial and administrative picks may continue on in limbo.
The end-of-quarter fundraising deadlines are always a big deal, because that’s when campaigns have to report how much money they’ve raised and how much they have on hand. That’s important not just because it directly influences what the campaigns can spend on ads and GOTV, but it also indirectly shapes how the outside groups (the DSCC, for starters, but also outside groups like HMP, EMILY’s List, VoteVets, and so on) perceive the strength of various candidates. The better they sense the candidates are doing, the likelier they are to invest in those candidates down the stretch run. And those groups are able to bring millions of dollars to bear, unlike us in the netroots (even collectively). But what we can do is act as bird dogs, making enough of an impression with small dollars that it attracts the attention of the big donors to the candidates that we like.
In the last couple cycles, I’ve taken the opportunity at this point in the cycle to give some targeting suggestions, based not on “oh, I hear so-and-so is progressive,” but on actual quantitative measures. One is looking at candidates’ specific previous voting records to see which Dem candidates in fact are the most likely to be progressive, which Republican incumbents have taken the most odious votes, and where we have scores for both candidates, where the biggest disparities lie. (This I’ve always described as “where we can move the needle left.”) And the other is … for people who want to Moneyball their giving decisions ... looking for states or districts where your dollar gets stretched the furthest, because of lower advertising costs. (This I call the “bang for the buck” index.)
In previous cycles, each of those topics has gotten its own detailed post. For various reasons, there’s somewhat less to say about them this year, so I’m combining them both into one post. If you’re still on the fence about where to send your last-minute Senate contribution dollars, read on!
Today's the last day of the quarter, so please give $1 to each of these Daily Kos-endorsed candidates for Senate!
Let’s start with the question of moving-the-needle-left. In 2014, I used two different measures. One is the old stand-by of political science research, DW-Nominate scores. This is a scoring system developed by poli sci professors that aggregates all the votes taken by all members of Congress over history, and look for commonalities between who votes which way. While it doesn’t specifically set out to measure ideology, if you arrange all the first-dimension scores from highest to lowest, it just happens to give a very clear rank ordering of Congress members from most liberal to most conservative.
The other was Crowdpac scores, a newer system developed by political scientist Adam Bonica that looks at where contributions to candidates have come from, and instead of developing a web of votes, develops a web that looks at who else those same donors have given to. In the same way, if you arrange the web from top to bottom, you get a clear sense of the rank order of ideologies. The advantage of Crowdpac over DW-Nominate, for our purposes, is that it also lets you assess the ideology of people running for office who don’t have a federal-level voting record. However, Crowdpac seems inactive this year; there aren’t scores for the 2016 cycle, so there’s nothing to talk about on that front. We’ll only be focusing on DW-Nominate scores.
So, let’s start by looking at all the participants in the Senate races that are competitive. (For competitiveness, we’re going by Daily Kos Elections’ qualitative race ratings as of Sept. 30.) Here they are, listed from most liberal voting record to least.
WI-Sen: Russ Feingold (D): -0.406 (Lean D)
OH-Sen: Ted Strickland (D): -0.382 (Likely R)
IL-Sen: Tammy Duckworth (D): -0.276 (Lean D)
IN-Sen: Evan Bayh (D): -0.174 (Tossup)
FL-Sen: Patrick Murphy (D): -0.146 (Lean R)
AZ-Sen: Ann Kirkpatrick (D): -0.123 (Likely R)
IL-Sen: Mark Kirk (R-inc): 0.286 (Lean D)
IA-Sen: Chuck Grassley (R-inc): 0.343 (Likely R)
NH-Sen: Kelly Ayotte (R-inc): 0.368 (Tossup)
NV-Sen: Joe Heck (R): 0.373 (Tossup)
AZ-Sen: John McCain (R-inc): 0.378 (Likely R)
OH-Sen: Rob Portman (R-inc): 0.388 (Likely R)
MO-Sen: Roy Blunt (R-inc): 0.453 (Lean R)
NC-Sen: Richard Burr (R-inc): 0.469 (Lean R)
IN-Sen: Todd Young (R): 0.544 (Tossup)
FL-Sen: Marco Rubio (R-inc): 0.579 (Lean R)
PA-Sen: Pat Toomey (R-inc): 0.656 (Tossup)
WI-Sen: Ron Johnson (R-inc): 0.677 (Lean D)
If you’re wondering how we have voting records for non-incumbents in the Senate races, that’s by way of using their voting records from either previous stints in the Senate (Feingold, Bayh) in the House (Duckworth, Murphy, Kirkpatrick, Heck, Young, and even Strickland, though for him you have to go back to the 109th Congress, before he was Ohio governor). These are all DW-Nominate “Common Space” scores, which are designed to be generalizable across both chambers, and from one year’s Congress to the next.
If you’re wondering what the mysterious numbers mean, the scores run from -1 (most liberal) to 1 (most conservative). My rule of thumb for what they translate to, in terms of real world behavior, is usually that capital-P progressives are in the -0.400 range or lower, New Democrats in the -0.400 to -0.200 range, and Blue Dogs in the -0.200 to 0 range. On the GOP side, it’s usually moderates in the 0 to -0.300 range, establishmentarians in the -0.300 to -0.500, and social cons or Freedom Caucus wackos in the -0.500 or higher range.
Unfortunately, that leaves a number of Democratic challengers who’ve never served in Congress out of the system (Maggie Hassan in NH-Sen, Catherine Cortez Masto in NV-Sen, Katie McGinty in PA-Sen, Jason Kander in MO-Sen, Deborah Ross in NC-Sen, and Patty Judge in IA-Sen), so that doesn’t allow for direct comparisons. There is a fantastic system developed by Boris Shor and Nolan McCarty that attempts to measure the last few decades’ worth of state legislators using the same -1 to 1 system that DW-Nominate does (which would at least allow us to assign numbers to Hassan, Kander, Ross, and Judge going back to their times in the state legislature, but still doesn’t tell us anything about Masto or McGinty).
But based on past diversions between legislatives scores and DW-Nominate scores for people who’ve made the jump, I’m not convinced the Shor/McCarty scores are good indicators of how differently people behave once they’re in the different environment of Congress; for instance, when making the jump from a dark-red legislative district to a swingy House district or vice versa. (Consider the case of Cresent Hardy, who was an over-the-top 0.872 in a rural seat in the Nevada State Assembly but an establishment-flavored 0.351 in his freshman term in the House.)
Nevertheless, let’s look at the size of the gaps between candidates, in the six races where we can do a direct comparison:
WI-Sen: Feingold -0.406 vs. Johnson 0.677: 1.083
OH-Sen: Strickland -0.382 vs. Portman 0.388: 0.770
FL-Sen: Murphy -0.146 vs. Rubio 0.579: 0.725
IN-Sen: Bayh -0.174 vs. Young 0.544: 0.718
IL-Sen: Duckworth -0.267 vs. Kirk 0.286: 0.653
AZ-Sen: Kirkpatrick -0.123 vs. McCain 0.378: 0.501
It’s really no contest: the Feingold vs. Johnson matchup is by far the biggest ideological gulf. Feingold was always in the top 10 most progressive members of the Senate in his three terms, while Johnson, in his one term, has behaved more like a senator from Oklahoma than one from a light-blue state. It’s not clear whether Johnson doesn’t realize the peril he’s in or if he just doesn’t care and always assumed he was one-and-done, but either way, he’s never led in the polling of their rematch. In second place is Ohio, but Rob Portman has nearly locked this one down, based on recent polling.
So, if you want a more competitive race, you have to move a little further down the list to Florida (Lean R, but a race where Murphy’s usually trailing by low single digits) and Indiana (Tossup, though that’s based largely on Indiana’s red-state status and Bayh’s rusty-seeming campaign; Bayh has consistently led in the polls). While Rubio and Young are both pretty conservative, Murphy and Bayh have moderate track records, so the gap isn’t as big.
Instead, I might suggest the Pennsylvania race, where we don’t have a number for McGinty, but Pat Toomey is nearly down with Johnson’s score. That may seem odd since Toomey sometimes gets some bipartisan cred, but that’s on social issues (like gun safety, where he co-sponsored the push for background checks). On economic issues, remember, he used to president of the Club for Growth, so he’s a consistent hard-liner there. On top of that, it’s about as pure a Tossup as we have on the Senate side, so every dollar counts even in an expensive market like Pennsylvania.
Finally, let’s switch over to the “bang for the buck” index. Like I said earlier, though, there’s not much to talk about this year … pretty much every state that’s up for grabs on the Senate side is a large, expensive one. There are a few exceptions, though, as you’ll see below:
IA-Sen: $255k (Likely R)
NV-Sen: $319k (Tossup)
WI-Sen: $365k (Lean D)
IN-Sen: $412k (Tossup)
MO-Sen: $630k (Lean D)
NH-Sen: $714k (Tossup)
AZ-Sen: $699k (Likely R)
NC-Sen: $735k (Lean R)
OH-Sen: $857k (Likely R)
PA-Sen: $1.10 mil (Tossup)
IL-Sen: $1.35 mil (Lean D)
FL-Sen: $2.18 mil (Lean R)
So what do those numbers mean? That’s the cost of a full flight of ads (1,000 GRPs, if you’re fluent in media-buying jargon: the cost of making sure that an ad runs at least 10 times in the outlets that will get it to 100 percent of its intended audience) in each state's "recommended" markets. Why is that important? If you give, say, $100 in an inexpensive market, it’ll go a lot further. In a cheap House district, it could actually pay for the airing of one ad. In a statewide race in a big state, or a House race in a major urban district, it’ll only pay for the tiniest fraction of an ad. If you’re one of those weirdos who thinks not in terms of maximizing your ideological leverage but your financial leverage with your contributions, that’s the key metric.
Unfortunately, there aren’t any true bargains this year. In 2014, for instance, the Alaska race was one of the marquee races, and 1,000 GRPs there cost only around $92k. Which is why Mark Begich got 100 percent of my contributions that year, personally (as well as the fact that I just like the guy). The least expensive state is Iowa, followed by Nevada. And given that Iowa is hanging on by a thread in the “Likely R” category while Nevada is a true “Tossup,” Nevada’s probably a much better use of your money. (Or, if you want to blend ideology with financial leverage, take a look at Wisconsin. It’s not much more expensive than Nevada, which suffers because of the pricey Las Vegas market, and that same investment gets you, well, Russ Feingold.)
You can probably figure out that the less populous a state is, generally, the less expensive it is to advertise there. There are a few exceptions, though: New Hampshire has an even smaller population than Iowa or New Hampshire, and yet it costs as much to advertise there as it does in states that are four (Missouri) or even six (North Carolina) times more populous.
That’s because of the “wasted eyeballs” problem; to advertise in New Hampshire, you have to advertise on Boston stations, which means spending millions on ads for millions of people who won’t have the chance to vote for you. It also explains why Wisconsin is relatively cheap compared to similarly-sized states; none of its “recommended” markets spill over the state lines. (You can pay a lot of extra money to advertise in the Minneapolis market to reach the state’s westernmost counties, but given that they represent only a small percentage of the state’s population, that’s an investment most campaigns don’t make.)
Time’s running out, so please give $1 to each of our Daily Kos-endorsed Senate candidates!