Close-Up: The Bill Clinton Effect

Vulnerable Democrats across the country are distancing themselves from President Obama, even as his disapproval rating continues to fall nationally. In some places that distancing takes the form of hand-waving the president's relevance to the election, as Sen. Mark Begich of Alaska has done by taking the line of "mend it, don't end it" on the Affordable Care Act. In other places, like Louisiana, it takes the form of outright chastising the president's agenda, as Sen. Mary Landrieu has taken to doing, especially on his energy policy.

And then there's Kentucky. In February, former President and Democratic "Explainer-in-Chief" Bill Clinton hit the campaign trail in support of Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, whose family has a long relationship with the Clintons. It's a boon to Sec. Grimes, who can campaign on the popularity of a former president, rather than campaign against the unpopularity of a current president. Among the Democratic establishment, Clinton commands better fundraising capacity than any other Democrat in the country, save for possibly President Obama himself. Unlike many Democrats these days, Clinton is still popular in the South, as he is across the nation. And if the psycholinguists at NC State are to be believed, even his accent can help with Southern voters. (Sec. Grimes's accent is still noticeable, although not nearly as recognizable as Clinton's.)

Ratings Update: April 27, 2014

Almost a month on from our first set of ratings, we've got new polling averages, new fundraising info, and we've also added 36 gubernatorial races to the mix as well as our original 36 Senate races. We're not going to list the ratings for all of our gubernatorial races here, but if you've been keeping up there are now two maps on the right-hand sidebar. We do, however, have some rating changes:

Brief notes on the North Carolina GOP Senate primary

SurveyUSA just released the first poll of the Republican primary field North Carolina's Senate election since they held their debate yesterday. And it looks pretty rosy for House Speaker Thom Tillis. Prior to the debate, Speaker Tillis had consistently led in the polls, but only by only by 6 or 7 percentage points, and not nearly enough to break 40%, which is the required plurality a candidate must win in order avoid a runoff election. Now he's at 39%, well within the margin of error of the necessary 40% and leading his closest opponent, Tea Party activist Greg Brannon, by 19 points. 

We can't say just yet that Speaker Tillis can comfortably assume an easy road to the nomination without a potentially grueling runoff campaign against Brannon or the other major contender, Baptist pastor Mark Harris of Charlotte. After all, this is just one poll, albeit one that comes after the second debate in which the candidates failed to distinguish themselves from each other. Specifically, the three other candidates who aren't Thom Tillis failed to distinguish themselves from the Speaker, who was the only candidate at the debate who held elected office. If none of the other candidates can present himself (or herself, in the case of nurse practitioner Heather Grant) as a viable yet distinct alternative to Speaker Tillis, current polling suggests that Republican voters will defer to the Speaker's superior political experience and name recognition.

But if we had to guess? We'd say an outright Tillis victory in the primary on May 6. If you happen to be a North Carolina Republican, go vote. Civic duty and all that.

New Polls Out, Have Political Junkies Questioning Meaning of Existence

I said something a while ago about one poll not being news. What about, I dunno, four?

Campaign junkies are (or at least, I am) either excited, disgusted, or perplexed by the latest set of polls out from Upshot, a new 2014-midterxtravaganza section from The New York Times, and the Kaiser Family Foundation. You've got David Lauter at the Los Angeles Times giving a positive "always look on the bright side of life" spin, especially on Sen. Mark Pryor's chances in Arkansas. Then on the other side you've got the always-prescient Karl Rove at Fox News raising some admittedly reasonable objections to the poll methodology. And then you've got non-partisans wondering why these polls bucked trends so hard.

That's me, the last one. (I'm also a bit excited, but only because these are the first polls to come out of some of these states in weeks.) 

So, first things first: what do the polls say?

Gerrymandering: Tough to Avoid

One of the most attractive scapegoats for the polarization of Congress is the practice of gerrymandering, the deliberate drawing of House districts to achieve a desired result in congressional elections. Because the districts are (for the most part) drawn by state legislatures, it's easy to see why this is a tempting argument: it places blame squarely on the politicians in Carson City or wherever that the people dislike so much. (Don't take it personally, Nevadans--I used you as the example because by several metrics you're the most gerrymandered state in the Union. It's only partially your fault, which I'll get to. For the most part I'll be dumping on Pennsylvania.) Pennsylvania is actually one of the less gerrymandered states for its size (it's apportioned 18 congressional districts, so there's a lot of room for creativity):

Pennsylvania House districts, 113th Congress (2013 - 2015).

Obama Ascendant: Is It Enough?

The results of the elections in November will in no small part be determined by President Obama's popularity by the end of the year. Republicans, who have been relentlessly hammering the president over the Affordable Care Act for the last four years, know it, and they've squeezed quite a bit of mileage out of it. Democrats know it too--especially Democrats running in red states that Gov. Romney won in 2012. The latest ad from Sen. Mary Landrieu shows the Louisiana Democrat calling the Obama administration policies toward oil and natural gas "simply wrong":

1,000 Views (A Thank-You Post)

No politics today; just a thank-you note to everyone who's been reading and following along. All one thousand of you.

First, huge thanks to Harry Enten at FiveThirtyEight, Brendan Nyhan at Dartmouth College, and The Monkey Cage at The Washington Post for tweeting or re-tweeting out the blog/articles. Another thanks to whoever it was that sent our post on names to Mark Blumenthal at The Huffington Post (if it was Harry, Prof. Nyhan, or the folks at The Monkey Cage, double thanks to you). We have huge spikes in viewership from all of them, and I'd guess that the majority of you readers have come here because they told you to. In particular, Prof. Nyhan's input was extremely helpful when we were getting started. So, thanks to all of them.

Now some fun facts that you probably think it's kind of creepy that I know (it shows up in my Blogger dashboard; it's not my fault):

Incumbency: Better the Evil You Know

One of the most secure jobs in the United States is as a Justice on the Supreme Court. But being an incumbent senator comes pretty damn close. Look at this graph:

Sen. Cochran's line actually goes off the chart twice because no Democrat ran in 1990 or in 2002.

(Still) Born to Run: Don't Count Christie Out

It's a bad day for your administration when your state hero and personal idol takes the time out of his touring schedule to parody his own biggest hit just to personally criticize you. (Although, to be honest, I wouldn't mind it if Bruce Springsteen wrote a song about me.)

"You got Wall Street masters stuck cheek to cheek / With blue-collar truckers / And man, I really gotta take a leak / But I can't / I'm stuck in Governor Chris Christie's Fort Lee, New Jersey traffic jam!" -- Bruce Springsteen, "Gov. Christie Traffic Jam", The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, January 13, 2014

Lundergan, Carter, Nunn: What's in a Name?

In the South, 2014 is a "name" election. The trick to telling is by counting how many candidates are introduced Viking-style, as "[name], son/daughter of famous state politician". And especially in the South, there are a quite a few candidates who, at least early in their candidacies, got this treatment:

• "Alison Lundergan Grimes, daughter of former Kentucky Democratic Party chairman Jerry Lundergan...."
• "Michelle Nunn, daughter of former Senator Sam Nunn...."
• "Jason Carter, grandson of the former president and Georgia governor...."

Don't be surprised, by the way, if the candidates' actual qualifications are tacked on as an afterthought: "Oh, by the way, Grimes is also Secretary of State of Kentucky. Shoulda mentioned that."

Close-Up: Turning Out Tar Heelers

North Carolina in 2008 was simply something that was not supposed to happen. Four years earlier, in 2004, the state voted for President George W. Bush over Sen. John Kerry by almost 13 points--despite Sen. Kerry's running mate, Sen. John Edwards, hailing from the town of Robbins, in Moore County. In 2007, incumbent Republican Sen. Elizabeth Dole was expected to win re-election comfortably over her Democratic challenger, state senator Kay Hagan, and the state was not expected to go to Sen. Obama--if it did, it was said, it would just be icing on the cake. 

As it turns out, it was: Sen. Obama didn't really need North Carolina's 15 electoral when he had 350 more. On the other hand, Hagan's surprise victory, below, was no mere icing; her vote proved invaluable in obtaining the 60-seat supermajority required for the Senate to pass the Affordable Care Act in 2009.

2008 North Carolina Senate election by county and margin.

One Poll Isn't News

Republicans are abuzz with the latest news from New Hampshire: former Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown is leading incumbent Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen 49-44 in the latest poll.

The Demographics of Victory [Fiddling with Numbers]

When we ran the various possible House models last week, one of the most interesting (yet not at all surprising) results was a strong and statistically significant correlation between the gain for the opposition party and the party of the president. That is, all other things being equal (such as the president's approval rating and the generic ballot), House Republicans tended to do better against Democratic presidents than House Democrats did against Republican presidents. This was not something immediately obvious, but makes sense when you consider that a tie in the generic ballot predicts a six-seat gain for Republicans. The reason for this is primarily because of fundamental differences between presidential elections and midterm elections, which boil down to this graph:

Source: McDonald, Michael P. "American Voter Turnout in Historical Perspective." In Oxford Handbook of American Elections and Political Behavior, ed. Jan Leighley. Cambridge, UK: Oxford University Press, 2010.

McCutcheon and the Landscape of Political Expenditures

Last Wednesday's 5-4 Supreme Court ruling in McCutcheon v. Federal Election Commission, as you've no doubt, heard struck down the aggregate limits on campaign contributions imposed by the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act (2002). What they did uphold was a cap on donations to individual candidates and parties. Under the new, Roberts-approved BCRA, an individual still cannot donate more than $2,600 to any one candidate per election, but the ruling in McCutcheon means that they can give $2,600 to each single candidate. Before, they could only donate a maximum of $123,200 for each election cycle.

Here we could go off on a discussion of the legal arguments at work, whether money has a corrupting influence on politics or how compelling the government's interest in preventing corruption really is: that's all for our partner group, Dartmouth Rootstrikers. We're not going to do that; what we're really interested in here is the empirical effect the ruling in McCutcheon will have on campaign spending this cycle. Numbers, if you will.

Close-Up: The Quirks of "Red" Alaska

Alaska, to put it bluntly, is political backwater. Despite a spike in media attention to Alaska during former Gov. Sarah Palin's stint as the Republican nominee for vice president, commentators have given little coverage to elections in Alaska because at least in presidential elections, the result is a foregone conclusion: the Republican presidential nominee carried the state by double-digit margins in every election since 1996. National political campaigns simply don't reach Alaska, and for good reason--while Vice President Richard Nixon was in Alaska making good on his promise of a fifty-state campaign back in 1960, Sen. John F. Kennedy was busy campaigning in large swing states like Illinois and New Jersey. Guess who won that one.

Nevertheless, the politics of the Last Frontier are so wildly different from the rest of the country that we don't believe throwing it in the column of "red states" does it justice. A certain late-night live comedy show parodied Gov. Sarah Palin's use of the word "maverick" back in 2008:

Gaffes: Genes of the American Horserace

The biggest news out of Iowa this week is a comment by Rep. Bruce Braley (D-IA-1), currently the presumptive Democratic nominee to succeed retiring Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin. Here's the video of Rep. Braley at a fundraiser in Texas:

If you can't watch it or don't feel like it, the relevant part is this quote at 0:20:

"You might have a farmer from Iowa who never went to law school, never practiced law, serving as the next chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee. Because if Democrats lose the majority, [Republican senior Sen. from Iowa] Chuck Grassley will be the next chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee." -- Bruce Braley, at a fundraiser in Texas, March 25, 2014

Close-Up: Taking Stock of Scott Brown

The big news is out: Scott Brown is officially in the New Hampshire Senate race to challenge Democratic incumbent Sen. Jeanne Shaheen.

For the last year I was skeptical of the former Massachusetts senator running for Senate again, especially since he had specifically declared that he was too tired to run for any election in 2014; in fact, I was actually quite annoyed that polling for a man who hadn't even entered the race was crowding out polling for the real Granite Staters who were actually running. There were two reasons for this: first, I didn't like the idea of putting people in the simulator who hadn't even indicated that they were running. (I have the same feelings when it comes to everyone crowding around Hillary 2016--even though she's still thinking it over. More on that in later posts, though.) Second, I felt pretty sure that his move wasn't in preparation for a Senate run in 2014 but rather for a presidential run in 2016.

I still believe those decisions were the right ones at the time; of course, now that I've been proven wrong, we need to re-evaluate this race.

Obamacare and the House: In the Same Boat, Sink or Swim

Two days have passed since the deadline for the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate. March 31 was the last day you were allowed to not have health insurance without paying an extra tax. So, in true American fashion, hundreds of thousands of uninsured Americans put off their chores until the last day, then scrambled to connect to HealthCare.gov and flooded the already overloaded call centers.

The numbers came in yesterday: new insurance sign-ups had reached the magic 7 million number that was the benchmark for success by the Department of Health and Human Services back when they were rolling out HealthCare.gov. Meanwhile, the quintessential Louisiana Democrat (and we're not talking about any of the Landrieus here) had this to say about the implications for November:

"Democratic voters might now be motivated to stand by the administration’s top legislative achievement more than ever — the same ABC/Post poll found that Democratic support for ObamaCare has reached 76 percent, which is up 11 percentage points from January. My fellow Democrats feared we didn’t have a motivating issue.... I like being on the side of healthcare consumer. I think that is a winning argument for Democrats." -- James Carville, "O-Care a Winning Bet for Dems," The Hill, April 1, 2014

Why We Haven't Done All that Much with the House [WARNING: MATH AHEAD]

It's recommended that liberal arts majors turn back at this point. Or skip to the very bottom.

Most of the stuff you'll see on here is about the Senate. We've got a real nice map of our current forecast on the right-hand sidebar with nice colors, and there's a nice long summary of analyses of the 36 Senate races this year (also with nice colors).

So, you might wonder, what about the 435 House races?

There are a couple reasons we haven't gone into as much detail about House races as we have with Senate ones. First, the poll-to-race ratio is a lot lower than that for Senate races. We're still a good seven months off from the election, and the most competitive Senate races have considerable polling already by respected firms. By contrast with the House, there are about 40 competitive (Toss-Up or Leans toward one party) races as reported by Larry Sabato's Crystal Ball via 270towin.com. The number of races is large, congressmen are less well known than senators, and the races are almost always more localized than Senate races, so the audience for polls of individual House races is a lot smaller. It's simply not worth the money to conduct those polls.