Starting To Dig Into The Results

You already know what happened.  Some first thoughts as we start to dig in.

Here's the list of House and Senate seats that changed hands, including defeated incumbents.  What's striking is how broad the geography of these losses were for the Democrats.  Republicans gained seats in 33 states across the country.  This was not an election that was regionalized although some stretches of land were a killing field for the Democrats--namely Pennsylvania, New York, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin.  Essentially if I were to drive from my house to visit my parents, I'd traverse the land that gave the Republicans their majority.  I-70 stretches across this part of the country.  This sets up the battleground for Obama's re-election.  Expect him to spend a lot of time here over the next 2 years.  Not surprisingly, the Rust Belt has hemorrhaged jobs over the last decade with many parts having higher than the national average in unemployment.

The second source of Democratic losses, including some from the above states, was among the Blue Dog Coalition which essentially saw its ranks cut in half.  These conservative, often rural and southern, Democrats were no match for yesterday's wave.  Despite the fact that many voted against health care reform, cap and trade, and other parts of the Democratic agenda, they lost in droves.  The result of this is the creation of a smaller, yet more liberal, Democratic caucus.  Progressives have always criticized Blue Dogs as being Democrat-lite and impediments to more liberal policy.  Nonetheless, without them you don't have a majority.

Seniority wasn't insulation to defeat.  Normally the most difficult campaign that a member of Congress will have will be his earliest ones.  In the first few terms members are still learning the job, learning their district, and are thus susceptible to being knocked off.  They haven't built up a record and reputation to deter serious challengers.  Yesterday's losses were across the seniority spectrum.  26 of the incumbents knocked off were in either their first or second term--products of the 2006 and 2008 Democratic waves.  At the same time, 3 committee chairmen (Oberstar, Spratt, and Skelton) were also knocked off as were 14 term Rich Boucher (VA), 13 term Paul Kanjorski (PA), and 10 term Gene Taylor (MS) and Chet Edwards (TX).

Aside from these numbers and trends, another subject that has been discussed in the commentary today relates to the upcoming re-districting process.  With the census concluded, state legislatures will undertake the process of redrawing House district lines to correspond with population growth and shifts.  Results in governor's and statehouse races will obviously affect how this process proceeds on a state by state basis.  Something that I haven't heard discussed however, is how redistricting will have an immediate effect on the members elected for the first time last night.

All of the incoming freshmen members (with the exception of those from one district states) were elected from a constituency that is going to change over the next year.  Rather than have time to learn the contours of their district and develop the representative skills to maintain their seat, they have to assume that the people who just elected them are not necessarily going to be there to vote for them in 2012--many of them will be pushed into neighboring districts while others from surrounding areas are added.  This has to be unsettling to these members, especially those elected by small margins.  Furthermore, a number of states where Republicans made gains--Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York--are slated to lose seats in the reapportionment process.  Depending on how these states redistrict, GOP gains could be wiped out not by the 2012 elections but by the hand of mapmakers.  This is a dynamic that I would pay a lot of attention to over the next year or so.

That's it for now.  More to come.

A Counterfactual to the Conventional Wisdom

Now that the health care vote has taken place, we move into the post-mortem phase. For the past several months, as Democrats struggled to get this bill passed, the conventional wisdom has been that the 2010 midterms were going to be a bloodbath. Democrats will lose massive numbers of seats, the reasoning goes, possibly jeopardizing their majorities in both chambers. In the end, this may indeed be what happens, and I would bet that seats will be lost (although not necessarily because of health care).

However, what happens if the conventional wisdom (as is so often the case) turns out to be wrong? In the last day or so we've started to see evidence, both anecdotally and through polling, that health care reform may indeed prove to be quite popular and a net-plus for Democrats. President Obama is beginning a massive barnstorming push to sell the bill and we even have some Republicans taking credit for some of the bill's provisions.

In the run up to the vote, a lot of ink was spent talking about which Democrats might be the most vulnerable as a result of health care. The focus was on those Democrats who hail from districts also won by John McCain in 2008. In the end, of those 49 House Democrats, 31 voted against the bill. In a similar vein, Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com created this simple graphic that shows a pretty strong correlation between Obama's success in a district and how that member ultimately voted.

In this spirit, I decided to focus on the other side of the aisle. Rather than look at vulnerable Democrats, I wonder if there might be some Republicans who--should health care reform prove to be popular and a winner politically--might suffer as a result of their vote? The table at the top of this post shows those Republicans who represent House districts won by President Obama. I've included not only Obama's vote percentage but also the member's to provide a sense of relative popularity as well as the member's seniority. If we were to target which of these member's might have the most to fear, it would be those 1) whose own level of support is closest to Obama's--there are 10 members who received the same % of the vote or less than Obama; or 2) have less seniority in Congress. Usually members are most vulnerable earlier in their career, before they have the chance to build up a strong constituent base of support and familiarity. The final column of the table also might provide some indication of danger in that it highlights how salient the lack of health insurance might be to a district. Thanks to this Washington Post graphic, we can determine how much of a district lacks health insurance. If the number is sizable, and the member seems not to appreciate this, a "no" vote could prove problematic down the road.

Again, I'm not arguing definitively that this is how things will play out, but its always worth asking whether the dominant narrative is wrong.

West Tennessee Open Seat Creates More Ground For the Democrats to Defend

Well, it looks as if we might have been on to something in the last post. Yesterday brought word that one of the members I highlighted, Tennessee Democrat John Tanner (8th District), was announcing his retirement from Congress. While fear of electoral defeat does not appear to be the overriding factor in his decision making (he contemplated stepping down after his previous term despite the fact that he would ultimately run unopposed), his 2010 campaign was shaping up to be pretty daunting with his top challenger already having banked over $300,000 in campaign contributions.


Tanner has long been a leader of the House Blue Dogs and represents a rural chunk of western Tennessee. While west Tennessee has historically been the more Democratic part of the state, it has been trending Republican in recent cycles. John McCain garnered 56% last year while Bush received 53% in 2004. Native son Al Gore narrowly won the 8th with 51% in 2000. To expand a bit on the interesting geographic/partisan divisions of the Volunteer State, here's a bit from "The Transformation of Southern Politics":


The politics of contemporary Tennessee have their roots in the Civil War. The state rejected the Confederacy until after the fall of Fort Sumter and after President Lincoln asked for 75,000 troops. For almost a century after the Civil War, Tennessee politics remained frozen by the state's division in that conflict...Much of Middle Tennessee and most of west Tennessee was plantation country, but the mountainous East was dominated by small farmers who found slavery unprofitable and who rejected the notion that it was a divinely ordained institution.


The modern day 8th district is from that part of the state that supported secession and clung to its Democratic loyalties for generations. Thus, there is little history of GOP success in the region and it will be interesting to see whether the Democrats (who may push forward a credible candidate in State Senator and current gubenatorial candidate Roy Herron) are able to draw upon these longstanding loyalties and maintain control of the seat. Republican hopes lie in the fact that the district includes wealthier suburban areas of both Memphis and Nashville. Should the currently hypothesized "enthusiasm gap" between Democratic and GOP voters continue into next year, this could be where the race is won. Democrats, in addition to relying on history and tradition, have been able to draw upon the large African American population of the district--currently 22%. Their turnout will be crucial to preventing this district from flipping to the GOP for the first time since Reconstruction.


While I won't predict the outcome of next year's race, here's one thing that wouldn't surprise me. Congressman Tanner currently chairs the Ways and Means Subcommittee on Social Security. If President Obama, as has been reported, pivots from the current focus on health care to a focus on long term deficits and entitlement reform, expect Tanner to be tapped as a member of an entitlement reform commission charged with creating recommendations for Congress.


**An interesting bit of trivia: the city of Jackson in the southern part of the district is the home of the only Pringles production facility in the U.S. due to the local abundance of cotton seed oil. Who knew?

Vulnerable Democrats in 2010--Where Should We Look???

Yesterday, John and I attended a CQ-Roll Call hosted event on the 2010 elections. Billed as a preview of what might lie ahead, the event featured three pollsters (representing Quinnipiac, Public Policy Polling, and Rasmussen) plus CQ Roll Call's Greg Giroux. Given that you had three pollsters present, the analysis was derived heavily from recent polling both nationwide and in a number of key states. In this sense, I would have liked to seen some analysis that took a broader, more demographic and historical perspective rather than one dominated by the snap shots of polls, but given the panel's composition the numbers presented were very much geared toward the present landscape. Nonetheless, there were some interesting insights.

The main takeaway from all the presentations is that the current environment is quite perilous for Democrats. With independents showing a greater predilection to support Republicans (not out of an underlying movement ideologically to the right but out of dissatisfaction with the status quo) and Democrats displaying complacency (despite giving President Obama consistently high marks), you not only get the results that we saw a few weeks back in New Jersey and Virginia, you also have the recipe for large GOP gains next fall.

On the congressional side, one caveat stressed by Giroux, and one that I hinted at a few months back, is that the Democrats don't appear as if they'll have to defend a large number of open seats. Unlike in 1994 where Republicans picked up the vast majority of seats created by Democratic retirements, only a small handfull of Democratic seats, to this point, are being vacated (and even fewer of those are in truly competitive districts). Thus, Republicans appear headed into an election year in which they must hope (against longstanding historical norms) to knock off a significant number of incumbents.

So where might we look for fertile GOP hunting grounds??? Here, Tom Jensen of Public Policy Polling made a useful insight. He suggested that we look to parts of the country 1) in which GOP performance has increased, that are 2) currently represented by Democratic House members who 3) haven't had highly competitive races recently. These members might not be prepared for an anti-incumbent or anti-Democratic wave and might also be out of campaign fighting shape. When he mentioned this, I immediately thought of the map below, which I highlighted in the aftermath of the Obama/McCain campaign. The map chronicles change between the 2004 and 2008 election. Counties that became more Democratic in 2008 are shaded blue (with increasing darkness based on magnitude of change) while those shaded red became more Republican (also with increasing darkness based on magnitude). Thus, the vast majority of the counties in the U.S. gave Obama more support than Kerry.

In his remarks, Jensen talked quite a bit about some recently released polling from Arkansas. In it, Democratic incumbent Vic Snyder (2nd District) has seen his numbers crater as has Senator Blanche Lincoln. Snyder, especially, has had little challenge recently in his Little Rock based district. As we see from the map, Snyder (and Arkansas more broadly) fall into the band of counties that broke from the national trend and actually became more Republican last year. Similarly, if we extend our gaze northeastward we see how Tennessee counties also moved right. This brings to mind another handful of Democratic members, namely a cadre of blue dog Volunteer State Dems including Congressmen Lincoln Davis, Bart Gordon, and John Tanner who represent the 4th, 6th, and 8th districts respectively. A look at these gentlemen's recent elections show that they've been quite secure. Tanner has been the most insulated from a serious challenge. He was unopposed last year and received 73% and 74% in 2006 and 2004. Gordon's last three victories have come with 74%, 67%, and 64%. Davis has had closer races, winning with 59%, 66%, and 55%. A potential clue to their own sense of vulnerability might be gleaned from the much discussed (see previous two posts) health care vote from two weeks ago. In it, all three voted against passage.

Keep these two maps in mind as we continue through the health care debate and into next year's mid-terms.

Is It Too Early To Be Thinking About 2010???

As August wraps up and the Democrats emerge from a month long, town hall meeting inspired, collective freak-out, the punditry is already asking whether the Dems are doomed come next fall. A recent Politico story samples opinion from the likes of Charlie Cook and Nate Silver, both of whom seem to be forcasting dire straits ahead.

All of this seems extremely premature to me. With 14 months to go until the voting we (if we are honest) have to acknowledge that we have no idea what the political and party dynamics will be that far down the road. While the health care debate has been (predictably) ugly, confusing, and divisive, it's also pretty much assured that something will pass. When it does, things will calm down. Perhaps this isn't the best time to be making predictions. Its also useful to put the upcoming election into some broader context.

Toward the end of the Politico story, the issue of retirements comes up. This, I'd argue, is a good place to start. Open seat races caused by an incumbents' retirements have always provided parties with their best opportunity to gain seats. The formidable incumbency advantages of name recognition, legislative record, constituency service, and fundraising might disappear, creating a much more level playing field. Should the out-party manage to field and support a credible candidate they can feasibly gain the seat. A crucial variable in their ability to do this, of course, is the underlying nature of the district itself. A Democrat retiring from a solidly liberal district isn't going to be likely to change, whatever the Republican candidate does. To look at the role that retirements play in assisting party gains, I created the following chart, focusing on the House of Representatives. Senate races have a much more individualistic dynamic that we'll explore over the coming months.

The above chart shows each party's success in gaining seats for each congressional election cycle since 1960. Column 2 indicates the total number of House retirements for that particular cycle. Column 3 provides the total number of Democratic retirements, followed by the number of those retirements lost. Column 5 provides the percentage of retirements lost. Column 6 notes the total number of Democratic losses (open seat losses plus incumbents defeated). Column 7 (based on the Republican numbers) shows how many of the Democrats' total gains for that year were the result of their capture of open seats. The remaining columns provide the same data for Republicans over this period.

So what do we see? First, both parties are quite successful in defending the seats of their retirees. Both parties lost, on average over the length of this data set, 29.5% of their open seats. Thus, if a party wants to rely on retirements to make big gains, they are going to need an extremely large number of retirements from the other side. The best example of this is 1994. I've highlighted 1994 in the chart (as with 2006) to show what happens during cycles when the party majority switches. In '94, Republicans managed to win 21 of the 28 vacancies created by Democratic retirements. These wins gave them 38% of the seats they captured that year. While they managed to unseat a very large number of incumbent Dems, these open seat wins were crucial.

A second trend that jumps out is that the Democrats have been more reliant on open seat wins to make their gains than Republicans have been. The Dems have averaged 46.5% of their gains through open seat wins as opposed to the Republicans 39%. Thus, for the Republicans in 2010, the data would seem to point to their need to knock of Democratic incumbents--at least given past trends. For them to do this, though, they'll need to target vulnerable Dems--probably those from moderate to Republican leaning districts. Hence, we've seen how the Blue Dogs have been at the center of the current hand wringing. One thing I've wondered about, as a result of how well the Democrats have done in the past two cycles, is whether the party is at its high water mark in terms of seats. In other words how many more districts, even under the most favorable circumstances, could possibly go Democratic? It's hard to think of many. Thus, any gains that the Republicans might make next year might be the result not of voter backlash against health care or Obama, but rather a natural correction in the electorate, a return to equilibrium if you will. Rather than doing so poorly now, it may be that the Democrats did too well in '06 and '08.

Looking ahead to 2010 with attention on retirements, what do we know at this point? Currently, 16 House members have announced their retirements (10 Republican and 6 Democrat). Looking at the range of this data set, one sees that even allowing for more retirement announcements in the future, 2010 doesn't seem like it will be a year with a large number of retirements--hence opportunities--for Republicans. With a new majority and now a President of their party in the White House, Democrats have an incentive to stay in office and push their policy agenda. One can also be sure that party leaders are pushing their members to stay put rather than retire or seek higher office. Thus, should some of these early prognostications materialize, they would seem to have to be driven by incumbent defeats. Not only are these difficult to produce individually, but to do so in large number and across numerous regions requires extremely unusual circumstances. While the current health care debate has certainly gotten some House Democrats scared, we shouldn't automatically assume that 2010 is going to be the equivalent of 1994 or 1966--years that saw the minority party make huge gains. A lot more would need to happen.

Keystone Konundrum: Is Arlen Specter the New Joe Lieberman???

Its never to early to be thinking about 2010 and a bruising Senate primary in Pennsylvania has the potential of giving Democrats the magic 60 seats they need to end minority filibusters. Like in 2004, Arlen Specter finds himself challenged from his right flank by Pat Toomey, former House member of the 15th district and now president of the anti-tax, fiscally conservative think tank Club for Growth. While Specter clearly enjoys his position as the fulcrum of the current Senate—one of a small cadre of moderate Republicans who decide what legislation will go forward (Yes on stimulus; No on card check)—he has opened himself up once again to Toomey’s claim that Specter is out of step with Keystone State Republicans. While Specter might have no problem winning the general election next year, he may not get that far given current trends in the state and national GOP. If we look back to 2004 and move forward we can see some clear signs of danger for Specter.

In the 2004 contest, Specter narrowly held off Toomey, winning by just over 17,000 votes out of 1.4 million cast. I’ve built a spreadsheet of the county returns that can be viewed here. The map at left gives a visual of each candidate’s regional strengths. Specter counties are in blue; Toomey counties in red. For the most part, the primary results hewed to the conventional wisdom about Pennsylvania politics. Namely, western and central Pennsylvania tend to be more conservative than the southeastern part of the state, centered around Philadelphia. The Philly area is not only the more liberal part of the state but it is also Specter’s base going back to the beginning of his career as Philadelphia District Attorney. The one exception to this pattern is the area to the north of Philly in the Lehigh Valley. This was the area represented by Toomey during his four terms in the House so it’s not surprising that they supported him in his Senate race

More importantly, we need to look at the county by county vote in terms of overall votes. Obviously the electorate is spread out unevenly across the state so the above map only gets us so far in understanding what happened. In my data set I’ve created a variable called “County Share” which calculates the percentage of the overall vote produced by a particular county. This allows us to see the concentration of voters. One thing we find, for example, is that half of Pennsylvania’s primary vote came from just 10 counties, as shown in the map at left. As we see, nine of these are found in the southeastern and south central part of the state. Another way of stating this is that the largest concentration of voters came from Specter’s backyard. This can be further seen when looking at the “Specter Share” or “Toomey Share” variable. Here, I look at how much of each candidate’s vote came from each county. If both candidates were equally strong in each county, we’d see no difference in these numbers. The fact that we see variance confirms the fact that each candidate had different bases of support. Again, for Specter it’s the Philadelphia area that allowed him to squeak by. Montgomery County is a good example. As I wrote during last year’s primary season, Montgomery County is a large suburban county increasingly characterized by voters who are affluent, highly educated, socially liberal, yet fiscally moderate. For the pro-choice Specter, this was the place to run up the score. In 2004, he received 9.2% of his votes in Montgomery, compared to Toomey who received only 6.6% of his votes there. Specter also won significantly more of his votes in neighboring Delaware (7% vs. 5.7%), Bucks (6% vs. 4.9%), and Chester (5.1% vs. 4.2%) Counties as well as the city of Philadelphia (4.1% vs. 2.9%). Thus, without the cushion provided in this part of the state, Specter would not have survived. Also helping him fend off Toomey were endorsements by President Bush and the state’s other senator, the arch-conservative Rick Santorum.

So, going into next year’s contest might Specter simply try and repeat his 2004 performance? While in theory this might be desirable, changes over the past several years make following the old playbook precarious. If we look at more recent elections it becomes apparent that much of Specter’s base of support has been defecting from the Republican fold. It must be noted that Pennsylvania primaries are open only to registered partisans. Thus, Specter cannot rely on independents or Democratic voters to carry him to victory. Only registered Republicans will determine his fate, despite his recent attempts to get state leaders to change the primary rules. If we compare party registration figures for 2004 and 2008 we see problems for Specter. I’ve isolated those counties that provided Specter’s best performance to illustrate this point. As we can see, over the past four years Philadelphia, Montgomery, Delaware, Bucks, and Chester Counties have shed over 124,000 registered Republicans. Democrats, meanwhile, have gained over 220,000 registrants. Whether these Republican losses have become independents or Democrats is irrelevant for the primary. The important fact is that they are now out of that electorate and out of Specter’s reach unless he can get them to re-register, a daunting process in the midst of a campaign.

To get a sense of how these changes in the Philly area have been changing the tenor of the state’s politics, its useful to compare the presidential vote in 2004 and 2008 (numbers are provided in the spreadsheet). As shown in the chart at left, Barack Obama performed significantly better than John Kerry in all five of these key counties. This is especially notable in the suburbs. Thus, whereas Kerry’s statewide victory was about 144,000 votes, Obama took the state by 620,000 votes. When Pennsylvania was called so quickly on election night it was because of the sizable shift to the left taken by this region.

To get a visual sense of how 2004 and 2008 played out on the presidential stage, the two maps at left illustrate some of the shifts. We see how Obama was able to expand the Democrats' perfromance in the southeastern part of the state while he suffered losses, relative to Kerry, in the more conservative parts south of Allegheny County (Pittsburgh). He also managed to extend the blue northward into the Lehigh Valley, the part of the state formerly represented by Toomey. Finally, he captured a scattering of counties in central PA, most notably Centre County which is the home of Penn St. University.

So, as Specter contemplates how to approach his looming primary fight, he’s confronted with the fact that the part of the state that has been his base of support for the past three plus decades is in the process of a steady move to the left. Those voters who, while moderate, were willing to stay registered as Republicans have been fleeing the GOP. A more conservative Republican electorate is clearly much more advantageous to Toomey. What Specter needs to hope for is that Republican voters see the virtue in having him in his current position—namely that of a dealmaker in the Senate. Toomey, while more in line with these voters' ideology, won’t have the institutional sway that Specter does. Is an influential, yet Republican-lite Specter more useful than a more pure, but marginalized Toomey? Specter will also hope that Toomey has lost the connection to the state that he had while representing it in Congress. The years spent running an outfit like the Club for Growth have necessarily removed him from the day to day workings of the state. He may thus be hampered in his attempt to swoop back in and knock off someone who has been courting and serving constituents for years.

Another option for Specter that has been discussed would be to run as an independent. Theoretically, he could decide to do this either before or after the primary. Given how much the landscape could change over the next year, its difficult to speculate on which option, if either, would be more desirable. A big unknown so far is what the Democratic field will look like. If Specter wants advice about how to go about this, though, he doesn’t need to go far--just a few steps across the Senate floor. Just three years ago, one of his colleagues went this route—Joe Lieberman. In many ways the Democratic Party’s version of Arlen Specter, Lieberman was challenged from his flank. Defeated in the Democratic primary by Ned Lamont, Lieberman regrouped and was elected as an independent. Thus, while we don't know how Senator Specter will ultimately play the hand he's been dealt, at this point there seem to be troubling signs ahead.