In 2012, the Democrats are certainly going to have their work cut out for them if they want to retake the 25 seats they need to take back the house of representatives. Many of these gains will come from knocking off freshmen GOP reps who won in 2010, but in order to take back the house the Democrats will also probably have to run strong challenges against GOP incumbents who won reelection in 2010 but are potentially vulnerable in 2012. Often times, the person who was the challenger to an incumbent in the last election gets the nomination to challenge that incumbent in the next election by default (i.e. Dan Seals or Dino Rossi). These candidates may or may not be the best possible challengers (after all, they lost the last election), but it is often hard to tell whether their loss was due to a poor overall political climate, a tough district/incumbent, a badly run campaign, or some combination of the three. This diary is an attempt to make it at least a little bit clearer which of those factors was the case for all of the challengers on the Democratic side in 2010. Basically what I did is to take all the challengers in districts of a given PVI, group them together, and find the average percentage of the vote that they received. I ended up grouping multiple PVIs together in order to get more accurate averages, but that doesn’t matter much, as there is not a whole lot of difference between a district with PVI R+5 and a district with PVI R+7. Basically the question I am trying to answer here is: in a district with this partisan makeup, how well did Democrats do on average in 2010? Each candidate can then be compared to the average performance of democrats in 2010 in districts similar to their’s, in order to see whether they did significantly better or significantly worse than average. That should give us some measure of whether or not they were a good candidate.
I’m not going to post all the data here in the interest of saving space, you can find the more detailed data in a Google Doc I compiled here . If you find any errors in this data, please let me know in the comments here and I will update ASAP. Here is the most important part, the average performance of Democratic challengers to house incumbents in each PVI grouping:
D+4-D+2:
Avg Dem challenger received 43.3% of the vote*.
D+1-R+1:
Avg Dem challenger received 35.5%.
R+2-R+4:
Avg Dem challenger received 34.9%.
R+5-R+7:
Avg Dem challenger received 33.7%.
R+8-10:
Avg Dem challenger received 31.9%.
R+11-13:
Avg Dem challenger received 31.1%.
R+14-16:
Avg Dem challenger received 30.0%.
*This one may be a little off, as there were only three challengers, Manan Trivedi in PA-06, Suzan Delbene in WA-08, and John Callahan in PA-15, that fit this PVI grouping
Now comes the important part: who did better and who did worse than average? Here are the good ones, the ones who did >5% better than the average performance of Democrats in similar districts:
Rob Miller (SC-02): +11.9%
Jim Reed (CA-02): +11.8%
Bill Hedrick (CA-44): +10.7%
Ami Bera (CA-03): +9.5%
Steven Segrest (AL-03): +8.6%
Steve Pougnet (CA-45): +7.2%
Tarryl Clark (MN-06): +6.1%
Ed Potosnak (NJ-07): +5.7%
Tom White (NE-02): +5.5%
Paula Brooks (OH-12): +5.5%
Timothy Allison (CA-24): +5.2%
Pat Meagher (CA-41): +5.1%
And the winner is… Rob Miller, running against Joe “You Lie!” Wilson in SC-02.
Now let’s take a look at the candidates that underperformed. Here are the candidates that did more than 5% worse than the average.
Philip Fedele (NY-26): -7.3%
Howard Kudler (NY-03): -6.8%
Joseph Kallas (WI-06): -5.6%