We at Daily Kos Elections are continuing to clear the decks on all the links that we've accumulated post-election that were interesting but not terribly time-sensitive;
we previously looked at the big-picture issues surrounding the election, like poll failures and voter suppression, and now we're turning to some of the behind-the-scenes stories about some of 2014's most hotly contested races.
FL-Gov, FL-02. Maybe the single highest-stakes race (in sheer terms of number of constituents, and the possibility of Medicaid expansion for millions of people) was the governor's race in Florida. The race went down to the wire, with Republican incumbent Rick Scott winning by 72,000 votes. The result was a bit of a surprise, since the majority of late polls gave Charlie Crist a lead, albeit a tiny one, usually around one point. The Miami Herald's Marc Caputo's retrospective suggests that it shouldn't have been that much of a surprise; Crist's underperformance in the Democratic primary (where he lost many conservative Panhandle counties to Nan Rich, his little-known opponent) and Alex Sink's underperformance in the FL-13 special election provided notice that they weren't getting their base voters to the polls in the off-year.
Peter Schorsch of St. Petersblog goes into even more detail about what held Crist back. Some things were fixable: Schorsch suggests Crist could have rolled out his campaign later but more emphatically; debated Nan Rich in the primary; or gotten Barack Obama to campaign in person on his behalf. Others issues were more difficult, like getting better turnout from the LGBT community (suspicious of Crist because of his earlier support for an anti-same-sex-marriage amendment while he was still a Republican) and the Cuban community (suspicious of his embargo policies). Weakness with both of those groups can be seen in how greatly Crist underperformed in Miami-Dade County.
Matthew Isbell, on the other hand, thinks that the problem wasn't Miami-Dade but Crist's performance in the aforementioned Panhandle. Crist's weakness in the primary against Rich just continued in the general election: While he still overperformed Barack Obama in most of the Dixiecrat counties, he ran way behind Alex Sink's 2010 gubernatorial performance in those same northern counties, as you can see in the map above. And while Crist overperformed Sink in the I-4 corridor (especially Orange and Osceola Counties), he underperformed Obama in that area.
That contrasts sharply with the results in Florida's 2nd District, one of the Democrats' few bright spots from the election, where Gwen Graham picked off GOP incumbent Steve Southerland in a Republican-leaning district. This is the same Panhandle turf where Crist lagged Sink, but Graham, en route to victory, outperformed even Sink's 2010 numbers. Isbell's argument is that Crist came off as "just another Democrat" here, while Graham's retail politicking skills, as well as residual goodwill voters extended her thanks to her father (the moderate Democratic ex-Senator and ex-Governor, Bob Graham), helped her eke out a victory.
IA-Sen. Ordinarily I don't ascribe too much importance to candidate quality; a state or district's overall partisan lean trumps basically everything else, with money a contributing factor. Beyond that, any given candidate is pretty much just along for the ride. But Iowa's one case where candidate quality may have made the difference. Even with a strong Democrat, the race would have been close given that it was a midterm year and an open seat, but Bruce Braley didn't seem up to the task either. A Politico long-read chronicled what went wrong in several other seats as well (especially South Dakota), but the Iowa parts are particularly juicy:
Braley was so flawed a candidate that Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-Mich.) flew in to Iowa on an emergency mission to work rooms with him, make small speeches, just to show him, step-by-step, how to actually do it. The DSCC forced a shake-up of his campaign. Reid did several interventions of his own.
Ben Jacobs of the Daily Beast also
had an interesting hypothesis about the loss in Iowa: the Democrats' computer-generated GOTV model was casting too broad a net and may have reached a number of Republicans and right-leaning indies and encouraged them to vote. Even Jacobs himself doubts that imprecise model was conclusive in a race that Braley lost by 100,000 votes, but it seems like something Democrats will need to fine-tune before 2016 where there will doubtlessly be other close states.
VA-Sen. How close this race turned out to be was one of the night's big surprises, since little in the way of polling had predicted such a result. A variety of maps from the Washington Post's Philip Bump show what happened: As in many other races, there was a drop in turnout in Democratic areas. The northern Virginia counties that Democrats have increasingly been reliant on to win Virginia had lower turnout; meanwhile, the rural counties that Sen. Mark Warner did surprisingly well in, in his gubernatorial election a decade ago, didn't see turnout declines as big, while also voting somewhat more Republican.
A separate article from the Post—certainly not a strongly-left-leaning newspaper—wondered whether Warner's tacking to the middle actually cost him votes, as the base yawned and swing voters went Republican anyway.
Finally, Bubble maps from Kenton Ngo contrasting not just Warner's 2001 gubernatorial run with his 2014 Senate run, but also his losing 1996 Senate bid, make clear his erosion in rural Virginia, especially coal country in the state's southwest. On the other hand, the 1996 map also shows that Warner actually lost Fairfax County, which, between its size and current light-blue status, is now the reason that Democrats consistently win Virginia. Warner won heavily in Fairfax in 2014.
TX-Gov. A lot of Democrats started out with high hopes for Wendy Davis in the Texas gubernatorial race, but she wound up losing by a wide margin. A pair of retrospectives by Jay Root, one for the Washington Post and one for the Texas Tribune, show that Davis' problems went a lot deeper than just the challenge of running as a Democrat in a Republican-friendly year in Texas. Part of the issue was incoherent messaging: The campaign never got around to telling Davis's up-by-the-bootstraps story and got the most attention when it was being negative on Greg Abbott.
There was also more dysfunction than you'd expect in a large campaign like this one, but that really was just icing on the cake. Ultimately, Davis found herself just running as "generic Democrat" in Texas when she badly needed to distinguish herself in some way.
AZ-01. One of the most surprising survivors of 2014 was Ann Kirkpatrick, who had one of the most Republican-leaning districts of any Democratic House member and still held on. Kirkpatrick, who lost in 2010 but won the district back in 2012, represents one of those rare cases of winning by knowing your district well and doing well at retail politicking. Roll Call's analysis of the race describes how Kirkpatrick was able to survive the GOP ad onslaught, in part because Arizona's 1st is a far-flung rural district where TV isn't necessarily a good investment. Kirkpatrick, by contrast, was able to put up a dominant performance among the district's large Native American population.
GA-12. John Barrow, on the other hand, was a Blue Dog Democrat in a rural southern district who was widely viewed as indestructible. Barrow evaded many GOP attempts to pick him off over the years, in large part thanks to effectively matching his district's politics—and its attitudes, by running corny but effective ads. The Daily Beast's description, though, points out that Barrow's loss wasn't quite so surprising; he didn't have as dark-red a district before 2012, and he survived 2012 by drawing an opponent who, despite being a state representative, was inarticulate and a poor fundraiser.
This year, even though Barrow's opponent hadn't held office before, Rick Allen was unquestionably stronger than Lee Anderson had been two years earlier. Part of what helped Allen was that he could self-fund, helping him stay alive before the NRCC got interested. While it's possible Barrow could win this seat back in 2016 with better African-American turnout, it sounds like he's ready to move on: He already put his house in Augusta up for sale.
NY-24. One somewhat surprising loss was Democratic Rep. Dan Maffei's in the Syracuse-area NY-24, where Republican prosecutor John Katko prevailed by a margin wider than you'd expect in an otherwise light-blue district. The problem, more than anything, was the lack of top-of-the-ticket enthusiasm for Gov Andrew Cuomo, which led to terrible turnout. The Syracuse Post-Standard explores some of the other reasons, though, including Katko simply outworking Maffei with appearances, some skillfully-done TV ads, and often-overlooked factors like simply having a huge extended family in the area and otherwise being well-connected at a local level.
NV-03. This was a race (against GOP sophomore Joe Heck in a swing district) that started out as a high Democratic priority but dropped off the viewscreen by the end of the cycle. The Las Vegas Sun's post-mortem makes this contest seem pretty archetypal of so many of the other races where the Democrats were on the offense this year. Erin Bilbray (the daughter of a former congressman looked good on paper but had never run for office before, couldn't really find an effective message, couldn't fundraise enough to sustain interest from the outside committees, and generally failed to gain any traction as the overall climate turned against the Democrats in the closing months.