2014 General Election in Review, Meta-Analysis

These are some overall observations on Tuesday.  I’ll review the elections in later separate posts for the local and regional scene and the national scene.

*  Avoid the temptation to overanalyze things.

A lot of people with a lot of hidden agendas are trying to goose an interpretation of Tuesday to fit their hidden agendas, as in painting the dart board around wherever the dart landed on the wall.

All that happened last night is that the incumbent President is a Democrat, he’s unpopular, and the Republican Party is the other party on the ballot.

*  In Senate politics, the red team had the luxury of this being six years after a very good cycle for the blue team, which had won a lot of seats in light to solid red states.  The red team had a lot of low hanging fruit to pick this year.  Compared to the midterms of four years ago, when that was six years after a good Republican Senate cycle, so party flip opportunities were fewer, though there were still six D to R flips.  By the time it’s all over here, there will be nine flips.

Let me put it to you this way:  The Republicans better have flipped enough seats to take the Senate this year, with all sorts of winds to their backs.

*  Very low black and Hispanic turnout, lower than the 2010 midterms, helped the red team have an easy night.  It also explains why there was a consistent Democrat bias in the polls.  Even Nate Silver took notice, and calculated that there was an average 4% Democrat bias in Senate polling compared to actual results.  I think the non-nefarious explanation is that the professional pollsters assumed a 2010 racial turnout model and added a bit for blacks and Hispanics assuming that some of the race arsonist agitprop GOTV tactics would work.  In reality, it went the other way.

A whole lot of these races, as you will read in my later review posts of individual races, could have only turned out the way they did if black and Hispanic turnout was low.  Want a quick example?  The Congressional district that has East St. Louis (!!!!!!) will be represented by a Republican.

*  James Kirkpatrick and others at V-Dare were predicting no wave, because the polling showed that the white vote wasn’t at what everyone thought were the landslide percentages Republicans needed.  Well, they were half right.  The Republicans didn’t roll up landslide percentages of the white vote for the most part.  But it didn’t matter in the end, because blacks and Hispanics hardly turned out.

*  While I’m on that subject, I now think that exit polls do two things wrong:  They overestimate the percentage of the electorate that is non-white and underestimate white, and they overstate the percent of whites that voted Republican.  There’s one out there that figures on 64% of white men voting Republican; that’s too high, way too high.  If you combine a hypothetical 64% of white men voting R with the low black and Hispanic turnout, Tuesday wouldn’t have been just a wave, it would have been a megatsunami.

What got me to be suspicious of exit polls?  The only one done in Missouri in 2012 said that Romney got 66% of the white vote.  Okay, so how was Romney’s overall statewide percentage dragged down to 54%?  Sure, a lot of blacks voted, (no other non-white group is politically significant in Missouri), but there aren’t that many to do that.  The only explanation is that it wasn’t as high as 66%.  I figure more like 61%.

*  NOTE:  The following section was updated on December 17 in accordance with the final Congressional runoffs and recounts complete.

Are you ready to put the leftist hoopla over gerrymandering to bed?  Hold my hand and come with me.

In 2010, the national popular vote for Congressional candidates was 52.2% R 44.6% D.  In 2014, 52.6% R 44.4% D.  Notice how almost the same these results are.

Remember, the 2010 votes were fed into the Congressional maps drawn in 2001 and extant from 2001-2011.  This year’s vote is fed into these great evil Republican gerrymandered maps that are and will be extant from 2011-2021.

So you feed just about the same two party percentage split into two different Congressional district maps, and what do you get?  242 seats in 2010, 247 seats in 2014.  So this great Republican gerrymandered map only results in five more Republican seats using virtually the same popular vote percentages.

Then again, you already put the gerrymandering mania to bed, because you read this space.  Earlier this year, the NYT did a story about a study that several university professors did.  They fed the 2012 Congressional vote, which in raw terms was slightly more Democrat than Republican, into thousands of hypothetical national Congressional districting maps, ranging from the craziest pro-Democrat to the craziest pro-Republican and everything in between.  The researchers found that only a few of the craziest pro-Democrat maps would have resulted in an actual Democrat House majority; all the other maps, meaning most Democrat-favorable maps and all the neutral maps and pro-Republican maps, resulted in a Republican majority.  It also found that the real world map drawn in 2011 is, on the researchers’ relative scale, a moderately pro-Republican map, and not a crazy one.  Which makes sense, because not every state legislature in 2011 was Republican-run, and some Democrat-ones (think:  California and Illinois) did favorable Democrat gerrymanders in those states.  The researchers’ conclusion was that the main problem Democrats have in Congressional elections isn’t gerrymandering, (and they reminded us that gerrymandering’s original purpose was to draw short bus districts for blacks, the Republican benefit fell out of the design  accidentally), but the fact that Democrat voters are clumped up in small geographical areas, i.e. big cities.

The moral of this story:  Five seats.  Wow.  Some conspiracy.

* At 247 Republicans, the House is the reddest it has been since WWII, the previous post-WWII Republican peak was 246. Personally, that might not be good news for us, because now John Boehner has a RINO shield. What I mean by that is that if there’s a RINO-friendly piece of legislation, Boehner can withstand more Republican defections and still get the bill passed. As of this moment, with 234 Republicans, if 17 Republicans defect and all Democrats vote no, then the bill won’t pass. Now with 247, as many as 29 Republicans can defect and the bill would still pass.

*  The petulant crybaby that calls itself President is bitching that somehow Tuesday’s results aren’t legitimate because two-thirds of voters didn’t show up.

If they cared that much, they would have voted.  A big part of life is showing up, after all.

He might not want to open the Pandora’s Box of non-voters.  He assumes that most of them are his kind of people; I don’t think he’s very safe in making that assumption.

And also…for someone who voted “present” on many legislative matters while he was in the Illinois State Senate and only showed up to fewer than 150 full days of U.S. Senate business before he started running for President, being absent for a lot of Senate votes in 2007 and 2008, to kvetch about the political mandate of non-voters…you have a lot of nerve, Barack Obama.

Hell, if he couldn’t rely on this two-thirds didn’t vote bullshit, he’d be bitching about slavery and segregation and da terbul legusy.

* Why didn’t “war on women” work this time? Because “war on women” had nothing to do with the way 2012 turned out. That’s why I get paid the big bucks, to make such audacious hail mary toward the end zone observations like this.

* In spite of Rand Paul tweeting #HillarysLosers all over the place on Tuesday night, I’m going to run against the head winds of conventional wisdom and tell you that HRC emerged from the night stronger, at least in the context of 2016 Democrat Presidential politics, than she was when Tuesday started. As you will read in my national review, three of her big name potential rivals, Mark Warner, Andrew Cuomo and Martin O’Malley, emerged from the night with weaker hands. This means that the only real hurdles (“–“) in her way are Joe Biden, who will gaffe his way out of the race eventually, and the Dime Store Indian, and as far as she goes, HRC can box her out by casting herself as the better bet for vagina politics.

* I don’t quite agree with the notion that Tuesday was so great for 2A politics. Hickenlooper and Malloy eked out re-election, and the two 2A-related initiatives in Washington State went the wrong way. Sure, I do think that Bloomberg wound up wasting a lot of money, (like he cares), and Gabby Giffords’s former Congressional district finally went red.

*  I don’t quite agree with the notion that Tuesday was so great for immigration patriots.  How was it that open borders hacks Thom Tillis and Dan Sullivan toppled Democrat incumbents, squishes like Cory Gardner and Joni Ernst won by either toppling a Democrat incumbent or replacing a retiring Democrat, yet Scott Brown didn’t win?  Worse, blatantly open borders Special Ed Gillespie in Virginia came closer to turning out that Democrat incumbent than Scott Brown did to toppling Jeanne Shaheen.  And Scott Brown actually contrasted himself black-and-white to Shaheen!  Gillesipe was “me too and them some” vis-a-vis Mark Warner on immigration.

I would have also bought up Terri Lynn Land here, but as the campaign went on her immigration position became more and more liberal.

I will say that among the immigration successes of the night were Oregon Prop 88, Tom Cotton toppling Mark Pryor by a pretty big margin, Jeff Sessions being unopposed, and one other thing:

*  I would save this for the national analysis post, but I want to gloat now.

Last month, some left wing clickbait website predicted that Kris Kobach had a good chance of being bounced out.  Largely based on the three-way baby mamma drama in Kansas that ensnared Sam Brownback, Pat Roberts and Kobach for various reasons.

In the real world, Kobach won with 59% of the vote.  Compared to four years ago, when he won with…59% of the vote.

Yeah, Kris Kobach was really on the rocks.

* The total bill for this party? $3.67 billion. And that’s only direct media buys from candidates’ campaigns, interest groups, on-behalf-of candidates, Super/PACs, 527s, etc. That’s not counting the money spent on other things, like data mining, pavement pounding, GOTV, and it’s not counting money spent on ballot measures, some of that rain landed in my bucket. It’s not $3.67 billion spent on medical research, alternate energy research, some useful scientific/technological progress.