Selected highlights from the post–Election Day Morning Jolt:
Kind of beautiful, isn’t it? It’s everything we wanted to feel in 2012 and didn’t get to enjoy.
You’ve heard of the “Red Wedding” from Game of Thrones? This was the “Red Election.” Or you could just call it, “America’s correction.”
Almost every Democrat in a big race went down last night, and a lot of them went down by a lot.
Charlie Crist in Florida. Kay Hagan in North Carolina. Mark Udall in Colorado. Bruce Braley in Iowa. (By 8 points!) Mark Pryor in Arkansas. (By 16 points! A rout!) Michelle Nunn in Georgia. (By 8!) Allison Lundergan Grimes in Kentucky. (By 16 as well!) Mary Burke in Wisconsin. Pat Quinn in Illinois. Martha Coakley in Massachusetts. Anthony Brown in Maryland. So-called “independent” Greg Orman in Kansas. (Lost by 11!)
And maybe Mark Warner in Virginia.
Some key lessons:
The 2008 and 2012 election results revealed an Obama coalition, not a Democratic coalition. The Democrats’ “coalition of the ascendant” — African Americans, Hispanics, young voters, unmarried women — will NOT show up for just any Democrat. We saw this in 2009 and 2010, and then the Democrats went back to the lab and revised their get-out-the-vote tactics and terrified the heck out of Republicans.
The big story in the 2012 post-mortems was the Democrats’ fascinatingly ruthless micro-targeting, data-driven messaging and get-out-the-vote effort that changed the makeup of the electorate on Election Day from what Republicans expected. It was a nightmare scenario for the GOP; the opposition appeared to have effectively figured out a way to manufacture more voters when they needed them.
Democrats do not have a button that they press to ensure big turnout among demographic groups that usually support the party. They failed to push it in some key places, and may have lost Virginia, lost Maryland, and failed to sufficiently mobilize these voters in any of the key races, other than perhaps New Hampshire.
Maybe Barack Obama isn’t this figure who helped Democrats how to win national elections. Maybe he was just a cult of personality who had just enough gas in the tank to get over the finish line in 2012.
He didn’t usher in a Permanent Democratic Majority, as so many liberals believed, and as so many conservatives feared. He may end up leaving his party in as bad a condition as he’s leaving the country.
At some point during the evening, NBC News’s Chuck Todd said Democrats will not win back the House until 2022 at the earliest. Republicans are likely to get 54 seats, maybe 55 if Ed Gillespie wins in a recount. Republicans had a phenomenal year in the governor’s races, only losing Pennsylvania.
In a perfectly symbolic revelation, we learned Daily Show host Jon Stewart didn’t vote. He said he moved, and just never got around to looking up his polling place. Later on, he said he was kidding and that he did in fact vote. But the exit polls indicated Stewart’s young audience didn’t vote in significant numbers. They’ll laugh at Republicans night after night, but they won’t show up in off-year elections.
Sometimes the polls really are skewed. Really. Time to order some servings of crow for myself. A few days ago, I wrote this . . .
The great revelation of the phenomenally popular Nate Silver is his observation that the polls — particularly the state poll averages — are usually right. Right before Election Day 2012 I went through the recent history of polls, and there were some glaringly bad cases, such as Zogby’s results in 2004 and the mess at Research 2000. But pollsters have attempted to account for low response rates, the possibility that some groups may be less inclined to talk to a pollster, cell-phone-only households, and so on. Conservatives — probably including myself in the past — may have developed a too-skeptical view of modern polling, and built the habit of looking for reasons they could be wrong, rather than recognize that the election isn’t going the way we hoped.
The notion that the polls are usually right, and the bigger the lead, the more certain they are, is pretty obvious. If you lead by 4 points or more, you’re in really solid shape. If you lead by 2 to 4 points, you’re in pretty good shape, but not quite a lock. If you lead by 0 to 2 points, it’s shakier.
. . . and then late on Election Night, Nate Silver concludes . . .
The pre-election polling averages (not the FiveThirtyEight forecasts, which also account for other factors) in the 10 most competitive Senate races had a 6-percentage point Democratic bias as compared to the votes counted in each state so far.
We aren’t counting Alaska, where polls haven’t closed yet. We also aren’t counting Virginia, which is much closer than expected. But Mark Warner’s close call makes more sense now given the margins we’re seeing in other states.
The bias might narrow slightly as more votes are counted; late-counted votes tend to be Democratic in most states. Still, this is a big “skew,” and it comes on the heels of what had been a fairly substantial bias in the opposite direction in 2012. The polls — excepting Ann Selzer’s — are having some problems.
So my gut feeling about the polls in 2012 was correct for 2014, and my gut feeling for the polls in 2014 was correct for 2012.
It’s a Ronald-Reagan-Riding-a-Velociraptor kind of a morning.