Midsummer Intensity

Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. It includes a chapter on congressional and state elections.  

An Ipsos/WP poll shows Democrats with only a slight lead in the congressional generic ballot.

Chris Stirewalt at The Hill:

There is a lot of evidence to support the idea that both parties are unpopular, as that Ipsos/Washington Post poll affirms. And that’s what you’d expect in a nation in which voters increasingly see themselves as independents.

Still, the problem for the GOP is that Democrats and Democratic leaners who loathe their own party are still fired up to vote against Republicans.

Democrats in the Post poll enjoy a 10-point advantage over Republicans on voter enthusiasm, 8 points more than in 2018, when Democrats romped. “And more than 7 in 10 Democrats say it is ‘more important’ to vote in 2026 than in previous midterm elections,” says the Post, “compared with just over half of Republicans.”

Now think back to that tied generic ballot of July 2010. The same poll that boosted morale at the Obama White House showed Republicans with a double-digit lead on voter enthusiasm.

And it goes on from there. In July 2014, Democrats were actually ahead in generic congressional ballot polls, but the enthusiasm edge at the time belonged squarely to Republicans.

The polls in July 2018 turned out to be very predictive of the 8-point stomping Democrats delivered in House votes nationally on their way to the best midterm for their party since the Watergate washout of 1974. No surprise that they had the edge on enthusiasm, too.

Four years later, summertime polls in 2022 started cropping up in July showing Democrats actually in the lead on the generic ballot. And, yet again, the party in power started talking seriously about holding the House. And while the Republicans failed to deliver on their own overhyped promises of a red wave, the ripple was enough to take back the House.

The best evidence for the GOP’s fizzle wasn’t in the generic ballot but, again, in the measurement of enthusiasm. After the Supreme Court’s decision overturning Roe v. Wade, Democrats rallied and closed the gap with Republicans. They might not have been willing to come out to boost a faltering Joe Biden, but Democrats were absolutely willing to come vote against Republicans.

Just more than 100 days before the elections, can Republicans replicate a similar enthusiasm booster for a base dispirited by high prices, the Iran war, very swampy behavior in Washington and a president who’s still trying to settle old scores?

Whenever incumbent parties are losing, they say they want a “choice not a referendum.” That’s what Republicans are saying this time with their “hate election” business. The problem for that plan is that a lot of Democrats already hate their own party, but they definitely hate Trump more.

The Iran War is getting worse, and oil prices are rising again.  The economic outlook might brighten this fall, but for GOP fortunes, any improvement will be too little, too late.  Perceptions bake in by Labor Day.

Senate Classes and the Six-Year Term

 In Defying the Odds, we discuss state and congressional elections as well as the presidential race. 

Always remember the importance of the six-year term for senators.

A Senate class elected in a midterm will face reelection in a presidential year, and vice versa.  The political conditions of the second will be different from the first.  A wave election brings in a set of senators who are vulnerable to defeat six years later.  The GOP took control of the Senate in the Reagan sweep of 1980, and lost it in 1986.  The GOP tied in 2000, suffered a big setback in 2006.  

Bridget Bowman at Roll Call:

The same group of Republicans who helped their party win control of the Senate in 2014 could be responsible for the GOP losing the majority next week. For these particular senators, a lot has changed over the last six years.

In 2014, it might have been incomprehensible that, six years later, Donald Trump would be president, Democrats would be raising millions in a single fundraising quarter, the 2010 health care law would be popular and the world would be grappling with a once-in-a-century pandemic.

But that’s the reality facing the GOP class of 2014, a group of senators that included some “rising stars” in the party, such as Iowa’s Joni Ernst and Colorado’s Cory Gardner. They’re now among the most vulnerable senators up for reelection, in part because of the dramatically different political environment.

“Six years is a long time in politics,” said Kansas Sen. Jerry Moran, who ran the National Republican Senatorial Committee in 2014.

Senate Republicans on the Defensive

In Defying the Odds, we discuss congressional elections as well as the presidential race. 

James Arkin at Politico:

Senate Republicans have been forced into a defensive crouch as they head into the final weeks of their campaign to protect their endangered majority.

The party is plowing some $100 million — nearly all of its Senate war chest — into reelecting eight senators in tough races. The few GOP candidates with a shot at picking off a Democratic seat have been left to fend for themselves, with no significant air cover from the national party for now.

The GOP is still confident it will win back Jeff Sessions’ old seat in Alabama that Democrat Doug Jones won in 2017 a special election — and they’re spending to do so. But that’s the only offensive target where Republicans are currently engaged: The party, for instance, has no outside money invested in Michigan between now and Election Day despite Trump carrying the state in 2016 and the GOP touting its candidate, veteran and businessman John James.
...

Steven Law, the president of SLF, said the group was “keeping a close eye on Michigan” and called James a "compelling candidate," praising his fundraising ability. But like other Republicans, he pointed to Joe Biden’s lead in the state as a factor down the ballot. 

“I think the big question is going to be whether the presidential contest ends up narrowing,” Law said. “If it does, that's a race that could close.”

“In 2014, we basically ran the table,” Law added of the broader lack of offensive targets. “What that means is there isn’t a lot of low-hanging fruit left in this Senate class — except in a state like Michigan, where the Democrat was fortunate to run against a very weak candidate in 2014.”

Lindsey Graham has a fight.  Lisa Rab at Politico:

Jaime Harrison, the first African American chair of the South Carolina Democratic Party and now associate chair of the Democratic National Committee, has shattered fundraising records and forced Graham to play defense, running attack ads that cast Harrison as too liberal for his state. Harrison’s campaign raised nearly $29 million by the end of June, compared with Graham’s $30.9 million. Two recent polls, by Morning Consult and Quinnipiac University, showed the two men were virtually tied. Several political forecasters, including the Cook Political Report, Sabato’s Crystal Ball and POLITICO’s Steve Shepard, rate the contest as “likely” Republican, but RealClearPolitics now calls it a toss-up.

Saving the GOP Senate

At The Hill, Reid Wilson reports that the Senate GOP leadership and NRSC worked hard to save their party's majority.  They took early action to deter primary challenges.

From the beginning, [Ward] Baker, the hard-charging and brashly blunt retired Marine who ran the NRSC, pushed his candidates to insulate themselves from a national tide. After studying Senate races from 2012 and 2014, Baker and his team came to two conclusions: First, that candidates with strong favorable and job approval numbers tended to survive waves, and second, that the party’s money would be best spent to influence races early.
...

Though presidential turnout would favor them, Democrats started the cycle in a dark period. They hadn’t anticipated the depth of their losses in 2014, when Republicans took back the majority. Unexpected defeats of incumbents like Sens. Kay Hagan (N.C.) and Mark Udall (Colo.), two members popular among other Democratic senators, cast a pall over the caucus.

Two-thirds of the remaining 46 conference members had never served in the minority, and relinquishing power hurt. Some of the younger members even considered making a change at the top by ousting their leader, Harry Reid (Nev.). Reid’s team heard those rumblings and successfully navigated around what could have been an ugly leadership fight.

But both sides thought that the map favored the Democrats.

Even beyond the traditional battleground states, Republicans saw worrisome signs that some of their members could face trouble. In October, more than a year before Election Day, One Nation, an outside group tied to the Crossroads network, began running advertisements touting Blunt’s work on behalf of military families. Trump was surging among Republican voters sick of the political establishment, and some worried that Blunt — a longtime Washington insider with a family full of lobbyists — could be vulnerable in a climate that favored outsiders.

“You could see the vulnerability a long way away,” said Josh Holmes, a Republican strategist with close ties to McConnell.

Together, One Nation and the Senate Leadership Fund, another Crossroads entity, had budgeted $4 million to protect Blunt, who defied some pundits’ predictions and kept his seat.

Turnout in 2014

From the Census:

The 2014 congressional election turnout rate of 41.9 percent was the lowest since the U.S. Census Bureau first began asking Americans about voting and citizenship status in 1978. The 2014 voting rate was 7.0 percentage points lower than in 1978 and down from the 45.5 percent that reported voting in the 2010 congressional election.

These statistics come from Who Votes? Congressional Elections and the American Electorate: 1978-2014, which uses data collected by the Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. This report provides a detailed historical portrait of voters in congressional elections, and it examines voting patterns by age, race and Hispanic origin and includes a look at early and absentee voting.

... 

 In the most recent congressional election of 2014, nearly a third (31.2 percent) of all voters reported either voting early, voting by mail or using some other form of voting. This was about a threefold increase from 1996, when only 10.5 percent of voters reported voting by alternative methods.

In addition to the report, the release also includes a detailed table package.

The cliche is that midterm electorates are much whiter than presidential electorates.The white share of the 2014 electorate was 76.3 percent, was indeed slightly higher than 2012 (73.7 percent) but it was exactly the same as in 2008.  Instead, the big difference is in age distribution.  Whereas 19.5 percent of 2008 voters were 65 and over, the figure for 2014 was 28.4 percent.

Vendors and Non-Coordination Coordination

Russ Choma writes at Open Secrets:

OpenSecrets.org has analyzed the 2014 data and found 92 instances in which a candidate’s campaign and a single-candidate super PAC hired a common vendor. Some of the expenditures were small; others involved payments to the same airline or another unexceptional vendor. At the other end of the spectrum was spending in the hundreds of thousands of dollars by both campaign and super PAC on political consultants, pollsters, ad-buyers or lawyers.

We’ve added a new tool to our website that makes these kinds of searches possible.
...
So how is it possible that a campaign and a super PAC — which legally can’t coordinate their spending — can both hire the same people to work for them and not run afoul of the coordination rules? Clearly, the fact vendors are shared indicates common interests and perhaps common strategies, even if there’s no official consultation between the campaign and super PAC. And in some cases the line may be crossed.

But there are scenarios where it is permissible for the two sides to share vendors, and those likely account for a number of the instances found in the OpenSecrets.org analysis.
For starters, the rules prohibit sharing a vendor only for certain types of work — preparing ads, selecting audiences for the ads, media-buying, polling, voter identification and fundraising.

In addition, timing matters. If there’s a four-month gap between a vendor’s work for a campaign and for its supporting super PAC — a cooling-off period of sorts — there’s not a problem, according to the FEC. There are plenty of examples of vendors working for both, but not at the same time. For instance, the campaign of then-Sen.Mark Begich (D-Alaska) spent $403,000 on polling research from Lake Research; and Put Alaska First super PAC, which did nothing but support Begich, hired the firm as well, paying it $18,350. But, according Lake Research, the firm did work for the super PAC after the election was over, a fact that FEC records seem to bear out.

Still, many of the common vendors identified in the OpenSecrets.org analysis appear to have done work — a great deal of it — for both sides at the same time. In those cases, the standard way for vendors to try to avoid trouble with regulators is by establishing what’s known as a firewall — an internal barrier prohibiting discussions between employees working for one client and those working for the other.

Democratic Weakness, GOP Strength

Why can Hillary Clinton coast? At The Weekly Standard, Jay Cost writes:

[The] Democratic bench is now so thin that the party cannot even give its voters a real choice. At this point, the only three other candidates seriously considering the race are: Martin O’Malley, former Maryland governor who is decidedly lackluster; Jim Webb, the quirky one-term senator who -- oh by the way! -- used to work in the Reagan Administration (Democratic voters will love that); and Bernie Sanders, who does not even call himself a Democrat (he’s a socialist).

Why are the only three challengers such fourth-raters? Peruse the sitting governors who are Democrats. Don’t worry, it won’t take you very long. You’ll see that none of them could be serious contenders. They either hail from small states, were just recently elected, were barely reelected, or arequirky/problematic.

Now take a gander at the party’s Senate caucus. If you squint really hard you might imagine some of them could be presidential material, but not really. The overwhelming majority are too old, too dull, too new, or barely won reelection. Elizabeth Warren is the only exception out of these 45 senators, and she looks like she is not going to run.

The media, in their relentless focus on the micro-political cycle (not to mention their eager cheerleading for the Democrats), are representing the party as being in a strong position. “Obama is up in the polls (a little bit)! Hillary is going to raise lots of money! They’re back!”

But look past those two, and you see precious little in terms of quality would-be candidates. On an aggregate level -- combining House, Senate, state governments -- the Democrats have not been so weak since 1928.

Chris Cillizza writes at The Washington Post

Everyone knows by now that 2010 and 2014 were very good to the Republican Party. What they don't understand (or understand well enough) is just how good. Yes, Republicans now control the Senate and have their largest majority in the House since World War II. But it's downballot (way downballot) where the depth of the Republican victories over the past three elections truly reveal themselves -- and where the impact will be felt over the long term.

In the past three elections, Republicans have gained 913 state legislative seats, according to calculations made by Larry Sabato at the University of Virginia. Here are Sabato's figures in chart form -- and with historical comparisons -- via GOP lobbyist Bruce Mehlman.

Now, there are more 7,000 state legislative seats in the country, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, which makes that 913 number slightly less eye-popping. Still, the Democratic losses between 2010 and 2014 amount to 12 percent of all state legislative seats nationwide.

A Liberal Advantage in Campaign Finance

At AP, Philip Elliott reports:

For as often as Democrats attack the conservative billionaires Charles and David Koch for their heavy spending on politics, it's actually the liberal-minded who shelled out the most cash in the just completed midterm elections. 

At least, that is, among those groups that must disclose what they raise and spend.

Among the top 100 individual donors to political groups, more than half gave primarily to Democrats or their allies. Among groups that funneled more than $100,000 to allies, the top of the list tilted overwhelmingly toward Democrats - a group favoring the GOP doesn't appear on the list until No. 14.

The two biggest super PACs of 2014? Senate Majority PAC and House Majority PAC - both backing Democrats. 

In all, the top 10 individual donors to outside groups injected almost $128 million into this year's elections. Democratic-leaning groups collected $91 million of it.

Among the 183 groups that wrote checks of $100,000 or more to another group, Democrats had a 3-to-1 cash advantage. The biggest player was the National Education Association, at $22 million. Not a single Republican-leaning group cracked the top 10 list of those transferring money to others. 

Overall, for the campaign season that just ended, donors who gave more than $1 million sent roughly 60 cents of every dollar to liberal groups. Among the 10 biggest donors, Democrats outspent Republicans by an almost 3-to-1 margin.

California Governor: Record Low Turnout, Smallest Raw Vote Total Since 1978

The California Secretary of State reports that turnout in the gubernatorial election was 42.20% of registered voters, 30.94% of eligible voters -- a record low.

John Myers reports at KQED:

The final tally from elections officials is that 7,317,581 votes were cast in the two-man race between Brown and GOP challenger Neel Kashkari. Brown won 60 percent of those votes, the most lopsided gubernatorial contest since 1986. It was also, it seems, the least inspiring in more than a generation.

State elections data show last month’s gubernatorial election saw fewer votes cast than in the previous eight quadrennial contests. Only 1978’s race between Brown and Republican Evelle Younger saw fewer total votes cast (6,922,378) than did 2014.

...
As we pointed out just after the election, the real legacy of the tepid turnout is the amazingly new low threshold for getting an initiative or referendum on the 2016 and 2018 ballot — a threshold that by law is set by the total number of votes cast for governor....

For the 1980 and 1982 election cycles, the threshold to qualify an initiative — 346,119 voter signatures — represented about 3.4 percent of the state’s registered voters.

For the 2016 and 2018 election cycles, the threshold to qualify an initiative — what we think will be 365,879 voter signatures — will represent just 2 percent of registered voters. And if you look at the state’s eligible electorate, a group that’s vastly larger than it was in 1978, it’s clear that there’s about to be a big boost of power for a relatively small number of Californians in forcing a statewide vote on a proposal of their choosing.

The Decline of the Personal Vote and Cross-Partisan Lawmakers

At The Washington Post, Brian Arbour uses the 1988 election as a point of departure for discussing partisan voting in congressional elections. Even though the Dukakis-Bentsen lost Texas, Bentsen won reelection to the Senate by a wide margin, running 16 points ahead of the ticket.  In 2014, by contrast, no Democratic Senate candidate in a key race ran more than five points ahead of Obama’s 2012 total.

Bentsen’s experience was not unusual. That year, 16 other Senators won election in a state their party’s presidential nominee did not carry (15 Democrats won in Bush states; two Republicans won in Dukakis states). The same was true in the U.S. House. Democrats won a majority for the 18th straight election, winning the popular vote 53 to 46 percent — the reverse of the presidential popular vote, when Bush defeated Michael Dukakis 53 to 46 percent.

In 2014, Election Day was a bad day for Democrats in red or purple states precisely because they didn’t do what Bentsen and other Democrats did in 1988. Democrats today had very little of what political scientists call the “personal vote” — the portion of a candidate’s support that derives from his or her personal qualities and qualifications. Many fewer voters were willing to go against their presidential party preferences in 2014 than they were in 1988.

...

As they have for several elections now, national factors such as partisanship and presidential approval largely drove the results of the 2014 election. According to the exit poll, 92 percent of Democrats and 94 percent of Republicans voted for their party’s House candidate. As voters have sorted themselves more clearly as Republicans and Democrats, they have become more likely to support candidates of the same party in different elections and have become less likely to be swayed by personal factors such as a candidate’s personality or political record.

Red Autumn

Republicans are in a very strong position. Aaron Blake writes at The Washington Post

House
Republicans will control at least 246 out of 435 seats. That's tied for the most since the 1929-30 Congress (the GOP also had 246 seats in 1947-481948-49). And if McSally wins -- she currently leads -- it will be the single biggest GOP majority since the onset of the Depression.
...
Senate
Republicans will control 54 out of 100 seats. That's tied for their fourth-highest number of seats since that same 1929-30 Congress, but the larger three were majorities of 55 seats -- i.e. only one more seat.

Governors
Republicans will control 31 out of 50 seats. That's tied for their fourth-biggest number since -- you guessed it -- 1929 and 1930, according to the National Governors Association. But again, the three previous highs were 32 seats -- just one more seat.

State legislatures
Republicans control more than 4,100 out of 7,383 seats -- about 56 percent. That's their highest since 1920, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. They also control 69 out of the 99 state legislative chambers (including Nebraska, which is technically nonpartisan and has only one chamber, but which is for all intents and purposes under GOP control) -- the highest since at least 1900, which is the oldest data NCSL has.

Margaret Talev writes at Bloomberg:

Republicans are enjoying a five-year peak in popularity after their wins in the midterm elections, according to a new Bloomberg Politics poll, while President Barack Obama struggles with his lowest job approval rating, at 39 percent. The White House also is facing a backlash from independents who oppose his unilateral moves on immigration, and just 24 percent say the country is on the right track, the lowest rating since September 2011.

Obama's weakened standing comes as he and the rising congressional Republican leaders are poised to become partners—or adversaries—in guiding the nation. They will start in January on more equal footing, the poll shows. Forty-five percent of Americans say they now view the Republican Party favorably, while 47 percent hold an unfavorable view. That’s the best showing the party has had since the inception of the poll in September 2009. Opinion about the Democratic Party has plunged, with a favorable rating of 41 percent and an unfavorable rating of 50 percent. This was Democrats’ worst showing in more than five years.

The California Exception

Mark DiCamillo, director of The Field Poll, explains at Opinion Today why California bucked GOP tides in 2010 and 2014.  First, even in a low-turnout election, the CA electorate has more minorities than the US electorate, but the behavior of white voters is different, too.

While the California exit poll available publicly didn’t subdivide the electorate with regard to voter preferences in House races across the state, a good substitute would be to examine the preferences of voters in the state’s six partisan candidate elections other than governor (i.e., the “down-ballot” races) as measured in the final pre-election Field Poll, whose results closely corresponded to election outcomes in each race.

What it shows is that this year the state’s white non-Hispanic voters were evenly divided in their preferences between the Democrat and Republican candidates across the six down-ballot races, with each party’s candidates averaging about 44% of the voting preferences. This is in stark contrast to the 24-percentage point advantage that Republicans held over the Democrats in House races across the country.

Thus, one of the major factors underlying the very different election outcomes nationally and in California relates to the voting preferences of white non-Hispanics.

Second, region and ethnicity worked in tandem.

According to the [final Field pre-election] poll, white non-Hispanic voters living in the state’s thirty-eight inland counties were supporting Republican candidates in these races by an average of 20 points, 51% to 31%, similar to the 24-point Republican edge in House races.

By contrast, the poll shows that white non-Hispanics living in the state’s twenty coastal counties were supporting Democratic candidates in the down-ballot races by an average of ten points, 46% to 36%.

Thus, one of the biggest contributors to the Democratic Party’s electoral successes here versus its dismal showing across the country relates to the very different voting preferences of the state’s white non-Hispanic voters, and in particular, those living along the coast.

Schumer's Way

In a speech at The National Press Club, Senator Charles Schumer (D-NY)  admitted that the Obama administration's initial focus on health care was a political mistake. With unusual candor, he said:

It has been reported that only a third of the uninsured are even registered to vote. In 2010 only about 40% of those registered voting. So even if the uninsured kept with the rate, which they likely did not, we would still only be talking about only 5% of the electorate.

Give him credit for consistency.  In 2010, Jeffrey Toobin reported in The New Yorker:

After Brown won the Senate race in Massachusetts, and the Obama agenda seemed stalled, Schumer told a meeting of his fellow Democratic senators, “If we ignore that and don’t change, we are like Thelma and Louise. We are headed right over the cliff. They were all saying, in as loud a voice as they could, all the middle-class people of Massachusetts—listen to us.” As he explained to me, “What the public hates the most is when they think the politicians aren’t listening to them. They understand that we can’t solve all their problems with a snap of our fingers, but they sure want us to try, because we are public servants.” Schumer said that Obama needed to heed the voters in Massachusetts and change course. “They said, ‘We’re not against doing health care, but right now we are hurting. Jobs, the economy, stretching the middle-class paycheck—which even those with jobs are having a tough time doing—start doing that.’ That’s what they said.”

Schumer also called on Democrats to embrace big government and take on special interests.  Francine Kiefer writes at The Christian Science Monitor:

First, a gut check. Polls paint a different picture about Americans’ views of government than Schumer does. The 2014 midterm election exit polls showed that a majority of voters (54 percent) believe that the “government is doing too many things better left to businesses and individuals,” while just 41 percent think “the government should do more to solve problems,” The Washington Post reported.

From Gallup to the Pew Research Center, 2014 polls show Americans’ trust of government at historic lows.

Second, about those special interests. While liberal Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D) of Massachusetts champions consumers even as she charges at Wall Street, on Capitol Hill, Schumer is known as “Wall Street Chuck,” according to The Huffington Post. He has raised millions for Democrats from the financial sector, which he oversees as a member of the Senate Banking Committee.

“Chuck Schumer taking on special interests is like Kim Kardashian taking on media hype,” says John Pitney, a congressional expert and professor at Claremont McKenna College in California. “The likely 2016 presidential nominee is Hillary Clinton, who is also no stranger to Wall Street.”

Third, Democrats had a pro-government middle-class plan, and they still lost the Senate. The plan, called a “Fair Shot” agenda, included raising the minimum wage, pay-equity for women, and affordable student loans. Its chief architect? Schumer.

Schumer quoted Reagan’s “government is the problem” line out of context, omitting the crucial lines that followed moments later: “Now, so there will be no misunderstanding, it's not my intention to do away with government. It is rather to make it work--work with us, not over us; to stand by our side, not ride on our back. Government can and must provide opportunity, not smother it; foster productivity, not stifle it.”

The 2016 election will be about reality, not messaging. If the economy is doing okay and we are not in the middle of an international crisis, then the Democrats have a very good opportunity to hold the White House. If events go south, so do Democratic chances.

Meanwhile, the best advice is a paraphrase of one of President Obama’s favorite lines: don’t say stupid stuff.

Archie Bunker Still Lives, and He Is Not a Democrat

At the Washington Post, Philip Bump correctly notes that, although white working-class voters are shrinking as a share of the electorate, there are still a lot of them.

The concern is obvious in this chart, which shows House exit poll data broken out by race and education. (We use education as a proxy for class because it correlates with income levels and isn't subject to shifts from inflation.)

The higher up the line on this chart, the better Republican House candidates did with the voting population. That light red line that's cruising along above the dark red one represents the shift toward the Republicans by white non-college graduates. The gap between college-educated whites and non-college graduates is the widest it's been -- and to the GOP's benefit.

More on Why the GOP Won

At FiveThirtyEight, By Harry Enten and Dhrumil Mehta write:

This year was different from other wave years because of the unusually strong influence of the presidential vote in individual states in the last two cycles. It explained over 75 percent of the variation in results across the races this year. That’s the highest ever.

When controlling for the presidential vote, incumbency had 40 percent of the explanatory power it normally does. While it would be tempting to assert that incumbency doesn’t matter as much as it used to, it would also be wrong. In 2012, controlling for the presidential vote, the explanatory power of incumbency pretty much matched the historical average from 1982 to 2014.

In other words, negative feelings towards President Obama almost entirely overwhelmed the incumbency advantage in 2014. That’s why Democratic Sen. Mark Warner — a former popular governor who won his seat by 31 points in 2008 — nearly lost in Virginia even though Obama won the state twice. Republican Thom Tillis beat Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan in the purple state of North Carolina. And in Iowa, which has voted just once for a Republican presidential candidate since 1984, Republican Joni Ernst beat Democrat Bruce Braley.

They go on to mention candidate quality as another reason for the outcomes.  Right after the election, David Brooks surveyed the biographies of newly-elected GOP senators and governors:

Let’s pause over some of the institutions mentioned in these mini-bios: IBM, Reebok, the Red Cross, McKinsey and the Army. These are not fringe organizations. These are the pillars of American society.

Republicans won this election in part because they re-established their party’s traditional personality. The beau ideal of American Republicanism is the prudent business leader who is active in the community, active at church and fervently devoted to national defense.

The 2016 Target List for House Dems is Mighty Small

It was a good year for House Republicans, and they are already in reasonably good shape for 2016. Philip Bump writes at The Washington Post:

If we look just at how each party did in its margins of victory each year, you can see 1) that most races are won by 10 points or more, and 2) Republicans had a remarkably low number of victories that were in the single digits -- 17 to be exact. That's the lowest number of similarly close races for either party in any of the last four cycles.

Missed GOP Opportunities

It was a good election for the GOP but it could have been even better.

Steven Shepard writes at Politico:

For two years, Republicans had been working to correct one of the party’s greatest embarrassments of recent years: the flawed polling that led so many in the party to believe Mitt Romney was on the cusp of victory in 2012. But after dramatically underestimating Democratic turnout in 2012, it was now obvious that the GOP had erred in the other direction in 2014. Their pollsters had understated Republicans’ leads in a number of states, causing the RNC and GOP campaign committees to pour money into places where it wasn’t needed and hold money back from places where it might have made a difference — such as Virginia, where Republican Ed Gillespie lost by less than a percentage point.

“It’s just as bad to be wrong by being too conservative,” said [RNC chief of staff Mike] Shields. “It’s just as big a mistake to tell a client that you’re only winning by one point when they’re winning by eight. Especially at the party committee level, there are just too many decisions being made … That money can be used elsewhere.”

Jon Fleischman writes at Breitbart:

Nationally, Republicans had an outstanding election earlier this month. Besides the huge gains in the U.S. Senate, House Republicans made modest gains (12 seats), bringing their majority to an impressive 244 of 435 members. That said, one cannot help but note that House Republicans could have had an even better night but for being completely routed by Democrats in California. Here is a snapshot of nine separate House races, all likely won by Democrats, that could have gone Republican.

...
Obviously hindsight is, as they say, 20-20. But there is simply no way to look at all of these results and not conclude that, had the NRCC made different decisions, there could have been a whole bunch of new freshman Republicans from California, replacing Democrats. 2016, a Presidential election year, will make all of these seats more difficult for GOP pickups in two years.

It is worthy of note that strong performances were made by two GOP incumbents in tough seats in California — both in the Central Valley — Jeff Denham and David Valadeo. And it should be said that this year the California GOP turned the tide back a bit in the state legislature, going from 12 up to 14 members in the 40-member State Senate, and from 25 to 28 members in the 80-member State Assembly. These state legislative gains were in no small part due to a strong focused and well-financed plan largely orchestrated by State GOP Chairman Jim Brulte.

The United States of Republican Ambition

In his influential 1991 book, The United States of Ambition, Alan Ehrenhalt argued that Democrats had a fundamental advantage. Smart, ambitious Democrats tend to go into politics, he suggested, while smart, ambitious Republicans go into business. Therefore they have better candidates. As a prime example, he cited Democratic gains in Wisconsin, quoting a Democratic state senator: "The Republicans hate government. Why be here if you hate government? So they let us run it for them."

Lower offices are the farm clubs for higher offices.  If your side is short on state legislators, you will also be short on good candidates for the House.  And if you do not elect a lot of House members, you will be short on good candidates for the U.S. Senate.

Things seemed to change with the election of a GOP Congress in 1994.  But during the decade of GOP dominance that followed, Democrats retained considerable strength in state legislatures. And as we point out in After Hope and Change, GOP setbacks in 2006 and 2008 appeared to be putting American politics back on the path that Ehrenhalt described.

But now, after the 2010 and 2014 drubbings, it is the Democrats who have the underpopulated farm club.  

Alexander Burns writes at Politico:

At the start of the 2014 campaign, Democrats envisioned an election that would produce new national stars for the party in at least a few tough states – Georgia Sen. Michelle Nunn or Kentucky Sen. Alison Lundergan Grimes, for instance, or maybe even Texas Gov. Wendy Davis. Even if the party fell short in those “reach” states, Democrats hoped to produce new heavyweight blue-state Democrats – Maryland Gov. Anthony Brown, the country’s only black state executive; or Maine Gov. Mike Michaud, who would have been the first openly gay candidate elected governor.

Any of them could have landed on a vice presidential short list in 2016.

Instead, all of them lost.

Joining them were numerous down-ballot Democrats widely viewed as future contenders for high office: attorney general candidates in Nevada and Arizona who looked like future governors; aspiring state treasurers in Ohio and Colorado who could have gone on to bigger things; prized secretary of state candidates in Iowa and Kansas as well as countless congressional hopefuls around the country.

Dan Balz writes at The Washington Post:

When President Obama was elected in 2008, his victory signaled a generational change and the prospect of renewal for the Democratic Party. Instead, the opposite has occurred. Over the past six years, the party has been hollowed out.

The past two midterm elections have been cruel to Democrats, costing them control of the House and now the Senate, and producing a cumulative wipeout in the states. The 2010 and 2014 elections saw the defeat of younger politicians — some in office, others seeking it — who might have become national leaders.

 As the post-Obama era nears, the Democrats’ best-known leaders in Washington are almost entirely from an older generation, from the vice presidency to most of the major leadership offices in the House and Senate. The generation-in-waiting will have to wait longer.

...
The more serious problem for Democrats is the drubbing they’ve taken in the states, the breeding ground for future national talent and for policy experimentation. Republicans have unified control — the governorship and the legislature — in 23 states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Democrats control just seven. Democrats hold 18 governorships, but only a handful are in the most populous states.

At Vox, Libby Nelson writes:

The next redistricting isn't until after the 2020 Census. But the overwhelming Republican control of state legislatures already matters for elections down the line in at least one key way: by weakening the Democrats' legislative bench.

Statehouses are fertile ground for candidates for higher office from both parties. Nearly half of all members of Congress started out in statehouses. Forty-three Senators were once state legislators, including 27 Democrats. So were 217 voting House members, the majority of them Republicans. And, of course, there's a former Democratic state senator from Illinois with a pretty important elected office right now.

There are still plenty of Democratic state legislators out there. But the fewer statehouses there are under Democratic control, the fewer opportunities those legislators have to make policy, become visible, and rise through the ranks. That's a loss with ramifications that could last a generation.

How the GOP Did It

Public Opinion Strategies has a slide deck of election findings: click here.

Alex Roarty writes at National Journal that GOP party organizations and outside groups learned from Senate disappointments in 2010 and 2012.

"Defeat can be a great teacher because it forced us, and the committees especially, to look at everything we had done and not done and figure out how we could do it better," said Steven Law, president and CEO of American Crossroads.

For Law, that meant months of in-depth discussions and seminars with Silicon Valley strategists and former committee leaders to determine how it could improve the quality of its TV ads and data analytics. AFP removed much of its senior national staff after its effort at grassroots mobilizing in the 2012 presidential election failed to materialize much influence on voters. The changes were biggest at the NRSC, which invested time and money in recruiting candidates and then training them to handle the high-pressure scrutiny of a Senate race.

The group hired Republican strategist Kevin McLaughlin in part to work directly with those campaigns in their home states. While the party's data and digital failures received most of the attention, McLaughlin told reporters on Thursday that the GOP's problem was closer to its core—something he told Collins and NRSC Chairman Jerry Moran when they hired him.

"Our candidates suck," he said then. "Our staffs suck. We are way behind."

As Sean Sullivan reports at The Washington Post, GOP officials said that they had learned their lessons.

"We didn't just win this election on Tuesday. It started a year ago by deciding we couldn't be Akin'd anymore. No more witches. No more gaffes," said Ward Baker, the political director at the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Baker, who briefed reporters alongside colleagues at the NRSC, was referring to Todd Akin and Christine O'Donnell, disastrous GOP Senate nominees in 2012 and 2010 who destroyed the party's chances of picking up states they had been poised to flip.

About 80 percent of 2013 was spent on recruiting candidates, Baker said. "There were people that were either going to run or have us arrested for stalking," he quipped.
Fresh off winning back the Senate majority Tuesday and perhaps gaining as many as nine seats, NRSC officials also said that effective spending and polling, a superior ground game and flaws with the Democratic strategy boosted them to victory.

...
The Republicans said their ground game worked well, despite the outsize attention paid to highly-touted Democratic efforts. The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee dubbed its $60 million, 10-state ground operation the "Bannock Street Project." NRSC spokesman Brad Dayspring argued that the effort fell flat and turned out to be "The New Coke" of the 2014 cycle.

Among other things, NRSC did shock training by confronting candidates with mock trackers at Reagan National Airport. Philip Rucker and Robert Costa report at The Washington Post:

From the airport, the startled candidates were whisked off to NRSC headquarters for a series of meetings. There were policy briefings led by Lanhee Chen, Mitt Romney’s former policy director, as well as communications boot camps and media training from Roger Ailes associate Jon Kraushar, who has mentored Fox News personalities.

Looming large were the ghosts of combustible campaigns past: Todd Akin, Richard Mourdock, Ken Buck, Christine O’Donnell, Sharron Angle.

“How do you fundamentally go about making human beings who are wildly unpredictable more predictable?” the NRSC’s Collins said. “It’s not about replacing what they believe. Pro-life is a majority view in this country, so how do you talk about it in terms that are relevant and not characterized as extreme?”

The efforts were not just an attempt to coach up their candidates; they were also designed to prove to donors that Republicans had what it takes to win.

After Romney’s devastating defeat in 2012, many donors “stood on the edge of throwing in the towel,” said Karl Rove, who spent 2013 trying to raise money for American Crossroads, a GOP super PAC. “They had real doubts about whether it was possible to get back in the game.”

When Sen. Rob Portman (Ohio), the NRSC vice chairman, met with major donors in New York early last year, he heard harsh complaints. “You guys blew it,” donors told Portman, according to a GOP official. “We blame you. It’s not just bad luck. You guys don’t know what you’re doing.”

After hearing similar grievances, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus narrowed the RNC’s core mission to data, digital and field operations, ceding expensive TV ads to outside groups.

The GOP party committees have a memo titled "How We Did It." 

And see a blog post about oppo and the role of America Rising.

State Legislative Blowout

Tim Storey reports at NCSL:

After a day of double-checking partisan composition numbers in the more than 6,000 legislative races this year, the extent of Republican success in legislative and governor’s elections is mostly clear. Suffice it to say, it was a banner election for the GOP.

There are two pieces still undecided. Control of the Colorado House remains up in the air pending tallies in several very close races. The Alaska governor is still undecided and will not be settled until absentee ballots are collected and tabulated. And ,of course, all of the results are preliminary pending certification and recounts. It does appear, though, that all is settled at the state level except for the Colorado House and Alaska governor.

Republicans ran the table, taking the majority in 10 legislative chambers previously held by Democrats. Those chambers were:

Colorado Senate (conceivable that Dems could still hold on after recounts)

• Maine Senate
• Minnesota House
• Nevada Assembly
• Nevada Senate
• New Hampshire House
• New York Senate
• New Mexico House
• Washington Senate
• West Virginia House.

The West Virginia Senate is currently tied at 17 D-17 R.

For governors, Republicans netted three after switching seats in Arkansas, Illinois, Maryland and Massachusetts. Democrat Tom Wolf won a governorship in Pennsylvania.
Factoring in all of those changes, here are the bottom line numbers (the Nebraska unicameral Legislature is nonpartisan):

• Legislatures: 29 R, 11 D, 8 split and 1 undecided (CO)
• Chambers: 67 R, 29 D, 1 tied and 1 undecided (CO House)
• Governors: 33 R, 26 D and 1 undecided (AK)
• State governments: 23 R, 7 D, 18 divided and 1 undecided (AK)