Sometimes good candidates lose. Why did Charlie Crist?
While the entirety of the election was a disaster and one is tempted to look to the pat answers (sixth year of a presidency, Democratic turnout dropoff in midterm elections, etc.) and just chalk up the disaster to that, it's important for Democrats to figure out what else went wrong.
The election I was following most closely was the Florida governor's race, which pitted new Democrat and former Republican Gov. Charlie Crist versus the incumbent Republican Rick Scott. I think this race is very instructive for the following reasons: (1) Charlie Crist ran, in my opinion, a quite good campaign; (2) Crist is in fact a good politician; (3) Rick Scott was a flawed candidate; (4) while Crist could never match Scott's spending (Scott used $13 million of his own fortune on top of the unprecedented spending by GOP billionaires like the Koches and Sheldon Adelson, among others), he was well-funded by Democratic state race standards. So what happened?
In this article, Florida Democrats point to Scott's last-minute ad blitz as key. And there's denying that Crist's polling appeared to drop in the last week. But the problem with this theory for me is twofold: that the last minute blitz was somehow different than the previous months of barrages of Scott negative ads and, ultimately, this exit poll result:
OPINION OF CHARLIE CRIST OPINION OF RICK SCOTT
Favorable 51% Favorable 44%
Unfavorable 44% Unfavorable 54%
I have never seen an election result diverge this sharply from personal favorability ratings. Indeed, that's why you run negative ads, to drive down your opponent's favorables. Now that I have set up the conundrum, I'll search for answers on the other side.
Any politician who can withstand a near-$100 million ad barrage in Florida and still show a favorable rating above 50 percent is not only not a bad politician, he is a very good one. Charlie Crist was that. So why did he lose? In their election postmortem piece, How Rick Scott won re-election as Florida governor, top Florida political reporters Adam Smith and Marc Caputo identify four reasons, and they argue:
By the time the Halloween memo from their pollsters arrived Friday, Charlie Crist's campaign team had already lost a good deal of confidence from a week earlier. Gov. Rick Scott was spending the equivalent of $1,200 a minute every day, every hour on TV ads, and it was moving numbers. "Scott's (TV ad) advantage has a taken a real toll," warned Crist's data crunchers. "Our margin has declined by about a point a day since Monday. . . . Over the past week, we've seen a real drop in support among white independents and over the past two weeks with Hispanics. Last week we led Scott by 9 points with white Indys, this week we trail with them by 8 points. We are now 4 points below our win number with Hispanics and continue to under-perform among white Democrats."
Does this explain it? Not according to the
exit polls. Crist won Independents by 2, 46-44. In
2010, Scott won Independents over Alex Sink by 8, 52-44. What about Latinos? Crist won by 20, 58-38. In 2010, Rick Scott
won Latinos over Sink, 50-48.
So I don't buy that Crist lost because he didn't hit his numbers for Independents and Latinos. So why did Crist lose?
Let me give you a remarkable statement: If the Florida 2014 electorate had been the same as the 2010 Florida electorate, when Scott beat Sink by the same raw margin—60,000 votes (and a slightly smaller percentage margin 1.2 versus 1.1 percent), Charlie Crist would have won by 2 points. That's right, the 2014 Florida electorate was dramatically worse for Florida Democrats than the 2010 Florida electorate.
Here are the partisan breakdown numbers: In 2010, the Florida electorate was 36 percent Republican, 36 percent Democrat and 29 percent Independent. In 2014, it was 36 percent Republican, 31 percent Democrat and 33 percent Independent.
Crist won 91 percent of Democrats (to Scott's 6 percent), 46 percent of Independents (to Scott's 44 percent) and 10 percent of Republicans (to Scott's 88 percent). In each of these categories, Crist outperformed Sink (among Independents, by 10 percent). But Crist did not have the 2010 turnout. It was 5 points worse for Democrats.
Was there a dropoff in Democratic voting from 2010 to 2014? In fact, there was not. What there was, was a large spike in Republican turnout, particularly in Republican strongholds, like the Panhandle and Duval County. Smith and Caputo write:
Scott significantly improved his performance over four years ago in Republican-leaning rural, North Florida counties. In the Jacksonville area alone, where some Democrats lamented how little time Crist spent there, Scott netted nearly 50,000 more votes than in 2010 against Sink. He beat Sink by about 91,000 votes in that northeast Florida media market and beat Crist by about 140,000.
In the Panhandle, Scott beat Sink by about 80,000 votes in 2010. In 2014, Scott beat Crist by about 153,000 votes. Do the math: Crist underperformed Alex Sink in the Panhandle and Duval (Jacksonville) by 125,000 votes. Coupled with the 60,000 vote deficit Sink had to Scott in 2010, Crist needed to outperform Sink by 190,000 votes in the rest of the state to win. He came 65,000 votes short.
Think of it this way: In 2010, Alex Sink garnered 2,557,785 votes. In 2014, Charlie Crist was able to raise that total to 2.8 million, around 250,000 more votes, nearly a 10 percent increase. But Rick Scott went from 2.6 million votes to 2.86 million votes, also around 250,000 votes.
Voter participation in Florida in 2010 was 42 percent, based on voter eligibility. In 2014, it was 43.1 percent a 1-percent increase. But most of the increase was Republican and Independent, not Democratic. While the rest of the country may have seen Democratic voter falloff, that wasn't the case in Florida. Thus, while Charlie Crist out performed Alex Sink in each partisan category, the more unfavorable makeup of the electorate prevented him from winning.
So is it the old refrain? Democrats just don't vote in large enough numbers in midterms? Well, yes, but also note this: Republican increased their turnout as well. In many ways, this Florida race was reminiscent of the 2004 presidential contest when Kerry hit his numbers but didn't account for Republican increasing their turnout.
But what about those favorable/unfavorable numbers and their mismatch to the voting totals? That one I can't figure out.
But here is an optimistic observation to close: Florida looks very winnable for the Democratic presidential candidate in 2016. At presidential turnout levels, Charlie Crist wins a landslide over Rick Scott. There is no doubt a Democratic presidential candidate will have a very good chance of carrying Florida again (Democrats have won Florida in 1996, 2008, 2012 and yes, Al Gore won it in 2000, too.)
