Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) “received $1.87 million from the securities and investment industry, making him the top recipient of Wall Street money this election cycle,” NPR reports. “Booker also received more money from real estate groups than any other member, as well as more from the entertainment and tech industries, accountants, and groups considered to be pro-Israel.”
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) “got the second highest draw from Wall Street – $1.26 million.”
Alaska Gov. Sean Parnell (R) “conceded the governor’s race to independent challenger Bill Walker, who has maintained a close lead in the vote count since election night,” the Alaska Dispatch News reports.
“Walker, who has been careful not to declare victory, has assembled a transition team that will meet next weekend in Anchorage to begin planning for a new administration.”
Nate Silver: “As the election season wore on, new polls hewed somewhat more closely to the polling averages. But the change was marginal until the final week or two of the campaign, when they started to track it much more closely. By the eve of the election, new polls came within about 1.7 percentage points of the polling average.”
“Perhaps you could construct some rationale, apart from herding, for why the polls behaved this way. Maybe it became easier to predict who was going to vote and that made methodological differences between polling firms matter less… But there are two dead giveaways that herding happened. One is the unusual shape of the curve. Rather than abiding by a linear progression, it suddenly veers toward zero in the final week or so of the campaign.”
“The other giveaway is… By the end of the campaign, new polls diverged from the polling averages by less than they plausibly could if they were taking random samples and not tinkering with them.”
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Nate Cohn: “Does the decisive Republican victory mean that the Bannock Street Project, as the Democratic field operation was named, failed to live up to its promise?”
“The preliminary and qualified answer is that the Democratic field effort was probably a success. An analysis of precinct and county-level returns, supported by exit polls and limited voter file data, suggests that the turnout in key Senate battlegrounds was generally more favorable for Democrats than it was in 2010. When it wasn’t, the Democratic turnout still seemed impressive when compared with the states where they did not make significant investments, like Virginia or Maryland.”
“The evidence for a fairly successful Democratic turnout effort is straightforward. Whether judged by county or by precinct where available, turnout tended to increase most over 2010 levels in Democratic-leaning counties in core battleground states. The drop-off in Democratic counties and precincts compared with 2012 — a presidential year, when turnout is higher — was generally more modest in the Senate battlegrounds than elsewhere.”
Charlie Cook: “There’s an old saying that there are only two ways for an incumbent to run: scared or unopposed. Many incumbents raise money almost continuously—call it paranoid or just cautious—as if a multimillionaire self-funder were poised to announce a challenge at any moment. This year, an unusually large number of seemingly out-of-the-blue challengers came within a whisker of pulling off upsets against sitting members—and a few actually did. This suggests that some incumbents forgot to run scared.”
Pew Research: “Among those who were registered to vote but chose not to, two-thirds (67%) gave reasons related to lack of time: 35% had work or school conflicts and 34% were too busy, ill, out of town or simply forgot. Two-in-ten (20%) registered non-voters say they either didn’t like the candidate choices or issues on the ballot, didn’t care about this election or didn’t have any or enough information to vote. And 10% of non-voters reported having a technical reason for not voting, either having missed the registration deadline, recently moving, or not have transportation to the polls.”
A controversial ad by Sen. Mark Begich (D-AK) attempted to link former state Attorney General Dan Sullivan (R) to an allegedly lax record on sentencing sex offenders but it backfired badly.
The Fix: “Begich pulled the ad — but the damage was very much done. Up until that point — early September — Begich had been the candidate with the momentum, maintaining a steady polling edge over Sullivan despite the conservative nature of the state. The Active ad ended that momentum. From that point onward, Begich’s numbers tumbled while Sullivan’s soared.”
New research from Alan Abramowitz: “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.”
Internal memos obtained by the Texas Tribune finds that consultants for Wendy Davis (D) warned her campaign months ago that she “was headed for a humiliating defeat in the Texas governor’s race unless she adopted a more centrist message and put a stop to staggering internal dysfunction.”
From the January memo: “The campaign is in disarray and is in danger of being embarrassed. The level of dysfunction was understandable in July and August, when we had no infrastructure in place — but it doesn’t seem to be getting better.”
“No, I haven’t seen any discussion about the complete lack of message. I think they need to figure out what they stand for and then talk about it.”
— Former DNC Chairman Howard Dean, quoted by The Hill, on the Democratic losses in the 2014 midterm elections.
Mark Maynard (R) “owns a used car lot, runs a towing business and spends his spare time on a professional drag racing pit crew. And despite not raising a dime for his Republican campaign and agreeing with his Democratic opponent on almost all the issues, he defeated West Virginia’s longest-sitting state senator,” the AP reports.
“That was the kind of election it was for West Virginia Democrats. As voters took out their disgust with President Obama, Maynard defeated Sen. Truman Chafin (D), a lawmaker Republicans previously had bothered to challenge only once in three decades.”
Todd Bosnich, the former campaign aide to Carl DeMaio (R) who accused him of sexual harassment, was arrested on accusations he assaulted his mother, the San Diego Union Tribune reports.
“Bosnich’s sexual harassment allegations added controversy to the heated campaign between DeMaio and Democratic incumbent Scott Peters, who ended up holding on to his congressional seat in votes counted in the days following the election… Bosnich alleged in early October that DeMaio had exposed himself and sexually harassed him over a period of weeks, and said he was fired from his job as a campaign aide when he confronted DeMaio, then offered $50,000 and a job in the Republican Party to keep quiet.”
Ross Douthat argues that the midterm results “hammer another nail into the coffin that should house the terrible idea of another Mitt candidacy in 2016. Judging by their post-election activity, that doesn’t seem to be how Team Mitt is thinking, but the reality is that the midterms were big resume-burnishers for Scott Walker (who won re-election) and for Chris Christie (whose Republican Governors Association had a frankly amazing showing), and the results did nothing to discourage other prominent center-right figures (like Rubio, or Jeb Bush) from thinking that 2016 might be a good year to run. Romney has clearly suggested that he wouldn’t run if Jeb did, but the same (correct) logic should apply if the field doesn’t have Jeb but does have Walker, Christie and/or Rubio, because all three of those men would have stronger arguments for why the party establishment should back them in 2016 than a Romney re-replay would.”
“Only in a world where Ted Cruz is marching basically unopposed to the nomination would a Romney run make any sense … and even then, you’ll find me hanging our around Purdue University with a “Run, Mitch, Run” sign before I admit that Mitt should get back in the mix.”
“I do not believe what happened the other night is a wave. There was no wave of approval for the Republicans. I wish them congratulations, they won the election, but there was no wave of approval for anybody. There was an ebbing, an ebb tide, for us.”
— House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D), quoted by Politico.
Dan Sullivan (R) has defeated Sen. Mark Begich (D) in Alaska, according to the Associated Press.
“The Alaska race was too close to call on Election Night last week, with Sullivan up by about 8,100 votes, but it became evident Tuesday when the state began counting about 20,000 of absentee and questioned ballots that Begich could not overcome Sullivan.”
The Washington Post give the “award” to Rep. Bruce Braley (D-IA), “who, through sheer force of personality, not only lost a very winnable open seat race but lost it badly. Some races are a failure of the campaign. This was a failure of the candidate.”
“Braley’s loss was so horrible for two reasons: 1) It was a seat that Democrats badly needed if they had any hope of holding the majority (they didn’t) and 2) it was so avoidable. Braley deserved what he got because he simply didn’t perform close to expectations as a candidate in a race with massive national import. And for that, he was the worst candidate of the 2014 election.”
Share your nominations in the comments.
Morning Line: “We already know that the $4 billion spent on this midterm election was more than any other midterm in history. It was the most on congressional elections ever, including during a presidential year. What do the numbers really tell us? These two stats jumped out at us from a post-analysis done by the Center for Responsive Politics:
What that means is, as one of us noted on NewsHour Monday night money, more specifically who spends the most, is about as good a predictor that there is of who will win a race. Those numbers, by the way, are pretty close to the incumbent reelection rates.”
Charlie Cook: “In mid-summer 2009, polls universally showed that Americans wanted the president, along with the overwhelmingly Democratic Congress, to focus on the economy and job creation. Instead, in its infinite wisdom, Congress chose to focus almost exclusively and obsessively on health care reform. Although this was a worthy objective, the effort would likely have been better spent in a time when people weren’t so worried about their economic well-being. This horrific choice, to focus on the Affordable Care Act rather than the economy, besides costing Democrats their House majority—not to mention platoons of Democratic governors and state legislators who would have been handy in drawing the congressional redistricting maps the next year—created scar tissue that remains to this day.”
“Americans resent the policy choices that Obama and congressional Democrats made early on… Choices have consequences, and elections have consequences. The decisions of 2009 and 2010 just keep on having consequences for Democrats.”
Taegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.
Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.
Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.
Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.
Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.
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