14 Points on the'14 Midterm Elections
After going over the results from last week, we had a number of bite-sized observations to offer — 14, to be exact:
1. The polls really were worse than usual
This cycle featured the largest average miss by the two major poll aggregators, RealClearPolitics and HuffPost Pollster, in recent competitive Senate races. This isn't a slight toward them — after all, they simply use the data that's available, and it seems the data may be getting worse. While the median miss has been somewhat up and down, the average has increased relatively consistently cycle-to-cycle. Why? Prior to this cycle, neither average had missed a race by double-digits, but this time at least one average missed the Arkansas, Kansas, and Virginia races by at least 10 points. Below you'll find the median and average miss per election cycle from 2006-2014 for both major poll averages.
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2. Republicans still ride roughshod in Appalachia
In 2012, we noted the remarkable shift in Appalachia toward Republicans. In 1976, Jimmy Carter won 68% of Appalachian counties (as defined by the Appalachian Regional Commission). Bill Clinton remained competitive here, winning 47% of them, but Barack Obama won 13% of those counties in 2008 and just 8% in 2012. So how did Democrats do without Obama on the ballot? Not much better. In 2014 statewide races, Democrats won 45 of 428 Appalachian counties in 13 states. Although Obama won 33 in 2012, most of the Democrats' very slight gains came from a blowout win in the Pennsylvania governor's contest and from Alison Lundergan Grimes' (D) loss in the Kentucky Senate race, where she ran seven points ahead of Obama in the Bluegrass State's part of Appalachia (33.8% versus 26.8%) and won five more counties than the president.
Table 2: Democratic performance in Appalachian counties, 2014 versus 2012
3. With some exceptions, Democrats remain dominant in urban areas
In the nation's 50 largest counties by population, Democrats won 34 of the 47 that had statewide elections this cycle. President Obama won 46 of the 50 in 2012, meaning Republicans did make some inroads, though many gains came in huge blowout races where Democrats essentially abandoned a major statewide race (e.g., governor's contests in Ohio and Nevada). Though it mattered little for the margin in the California gubernatorial race, Republicans can take heart that they won three of the swing counties in the state that Obama won in 2012 — Fresno, Riverside, and San Bernardino.
Table 3: Election results in the 50 largest counties by population, 2014 versus 2012
4. Who dominates the governors' mansions?
If the victors in the Nov. 4 gubernatorial elections all serve out their terms, what will the past 60 years (from the 1958 elections to 2018) of party control for governorships look like in the midterm states? Excluding New Hampshire and Vermont because of their two-year terms, here's the state of control through the next midterm cycle in the other 34 states that just held gubernatorial contests:
Table 4: Governorship control by party since 1958 projected forward to 2018
Overall, Democrats will have controlled 19 states for a longer period of time, Republicans 14, with Kansas tied 30 years apiece. Democrats' edge can be chalked up to a couple of factors. First, over the past 56 years, Republicans have held the White House for 30 years; the party that is out of the White House usually has better luck in races for governorships. (As we saw again in 2014, many contests are decided in midterm elections, which tend to go poorly for the presidential party.)
Second, Democrats once held control over Southern governorships by default, and now the reverse is true with Republicans dominating much of the South. Of course, the period we covered reaches back far enough that Democrats have been in charge in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Oklahoma, and Tennessee for longer.
Note that gubernatorial control does not always correspond to a state's federal political leanings.
5. Virginia Senate race's meager turnout bucks recent trend
There has been ample talk about the low turnout in the Virginia Senate contest between Sen. Mark Warner (D) and former RNC chair Ed Gillespie (R). At the moment, it appears that the Warner-Gillespie race will be the first two-party competitive Virginia midterm Senate race since 1982 to have lower overall turnout than the off-year gubernatorial election the prior year. In both 1994 and 2006, which saw highly competitive races for Senate in the Old Dominion, the turnout in the federal contests greatly outpaced the total vote count from the governor's race the year before.
Table 5: Comparing Virginia election turnout in gubernatorial and midterm Senate elections
The drop in turnout is reminiscent of an older pattern in Virginia, as both the 1978 and 1982 Senate elections featured slight turnout drops from the previous gubernatorial election contest. What's interesting is, without exception, every one of the midterm Senate races in question finished with a closer margin than the gubernatorial contest the year before.
How did the race wind up being so close? As noted by Philip Bump of the Washington Post, from 2012 to 2014 turnout in counties that Warner won dropped about twice as much as in Gillespie counties. The Virginia Public Access Project also found that turnout in the most Democratic congressional district, the black-majority VA-03, was the lowest of any of the state's 11 districts, with obvious effects on Warner's vote total. Hampton Roads saw a nearly 1% drop in its share of the total vote in 2014 compared to 2012. Also key to Gillespie's performance: He did better than Romney throughout the Urban Crescent, where at least 70% of the vote resides in statewide elections. Gillespie outpaced Romney in the two-party vote in all three Crescent parts — Northern Virginia, greater Richmond, and Hampton Roads.
Because the race didn't appear to be close, it may be that Democratic-leaning voters stayed home, believing Warner was in good shape, while Republican-leaning voters were more enthusiastic about participating this cycle. Another possibility: Democrats were more fired up to vote against Republican Ken Cuccinelli in last year's high-profile gubernatorial race than they were to vote against Gillespie, who wisely did not mimic Cuccinelli's stridently conservative profile.
6. Outside groups didn't buy the election
Crystal Ball Senior Columnist Alan Abramowitz ran a regression analysis to see what effect outside spending had on the Senate races. The correlation between the Democratic and Republican outside spending difference and the Democratic margin was .23, which is not statistically significant. In contrast, the correlation between the Democratic margin and incumbency status was a more significant .76, and the correlation between the Democratic Senate margin in 2014 and the Democratic presidential vote margin in 2012 was an even more significant .89.
In other words, partisanship in a polarized era, represented by the '12 presidential vote margin, was by far the strongest predictor of 2014's Senate vote. Naturally, incumbency status is also significant. But the difference between amounts of outside spending by groups affiliated with both parties has surprisingly little effect, perhaps because both sides spent so much that the money from Republicans neutralized the cash from Democrats, and vice versa.
7. Best 2014 candidates, blowout category
Missing in the acclaim for successful GOP Senate candidates like Rep. Cory Gardner (R-CO) and state Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) is a deserved salute to two blowout Republican Senate winners, Reps. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV) and Steve Daines (R-MT), both of whom crushed their Democratic opponents in easy victories. National Republicans did not have to worry much about victories in a seat they had never won in the era of popularly elected senators (Montana) or in a state where they had not elected a senator since the 1950s (West Virginia), and that is a testament to both candidates. Without question, though, both were helped by the national environment and, in the case of Daines, from the implosion of an opponent (the withdrawal of appointed Democratic Sen. John Walsh after plagiarism revelations).
Also deserving a hat tip is the only Democratic member of this year's crop of new senators, Rep. Gary Peters (D-MI). Peters benefited from an inept opponent in former Michigan Secretary of State Terri Lynn Land (R), and from the Wolverine State's blue hue, but this race could have been a lot more competitive, given the environment. Peters had a bit of a shaky start but quickly righted his ship with an early-year staffing shakeup, and he won by double digits.
