Sean Trende sounds the alarm for Republicans that even with some good polls floating around, they’re underperforming:
In this sense, I think the large number of undecided voters — who almost certainly disapprove of the president by large margins — are a potential red flag for Republicans. At this point, what more can Republicans do to convince them to make up their minds? Mark Warner has been stuck in the high 40s/low 50s for several months now. In theory, Ed Gillespie should be making a race of it by now. Yet he remains mired in the high 30s (although he has closed the gap somewhat). There seems to be a substantial chunk of the Minnesota electorate that isn’t prepared to commit fully to Al Franken, yet isn’t excited about Mike McFadden.
If these voters ultimately opt disproportionately to stay home, it would transform an electorate where the president has a 42 percent job approval into one where he has a 46 percent job approval. This probably wouldn’t be enough to save the Senate: Democrats who trailed would still lose, albeit by small margins. But it would probably cap Republican gains in the House, and would probably transform an opportunity for a huge GOP night in the Senate into a modest wave of six or seven seats.
Is this what separates the GOP candidates with solid and consistent leads from the ones without? Is it that these low-motivation, Obama-disapproving voters see something in Cory Gardner in Colorado, Tom Cotton in Arkansas, and perhaps Joni Ernst in Iowa that they don’t see in Thom Tillis in North Carolina and Terri Lynn Land in Michigan? Or Gillespie and McFadden? Or Pat Roberts in Kansas and Scott Brown in New Hampshire? Yes, they’re all different candidates, running in different states and in different electorates.
Presuming Election Day follows the current polls — and obviously, polls in close races can be wrong — some will shoehorn the evidence to fit a narrative that “authentic conservatives” like Gardner, Cotton, and Ernst won while “establishment Republican” candidates like Tillis and Land lost.
To do this, you have to really blur your definitions of “establishment” and “conservative.” Gardner was first elected to office in 2005, and Cotton is a congressman.
Meanwhile, it’s hard to classify a first-time candidate, like Oregon GOP Senate candidate Monica Wehby, as part of any “establishment.” Georgia GOP Senate candidate David Perdue has never run for office before — but he’s been a successful executive, so Georgia Democrats are running the Romney playbook against him. (If you’re a successful businessman, do Obama-disapproving, low-motivation voters automatically perceive you as part of an “establishment”?)
And the man everyone classifies as part of the “establishment” — Senator Mitch McConnell — is looking pretty solid in Kentucky.
The shortest explanation is that the GOP Senate candidates who are doing best are just plain good candidates: good life experiences and résumés, good on the stump, good on television, good in debates, good at the little stops shaking hands and meeting people, and (mostly) good in interviews. Chalk it up to charisma, chalk it up to instinct, chalk it up to luck — and perhaps note that it helps to have a flawed opponent.
Life for Republicans would be a lot easier if nomination of an “authentic conservative” — or, for that matter, an “Establishment Republican” — guaranteed victory on Election Day. Unfortunately, the candidates in either category have to be good at campaigning.