Author: Crisitunity

Time for the thrilling conclusion to the Bang-for-the-Buck Index, begun yesterday with the Senate installment. Follow the link for full methodological nitty-gritty, but the main thing that you need to know is that this index shows which races are the cheapest media-wise (and thus where one netroots dollar gets stretched the furthest). This list covers all House races that Swing State Project projects as Dem pickup opportunities.

The middle column lists every media market that needs to be utilized in order to blanket the district, and the number next to each market is the number of thousands of TV households in that market. The more TV households, the more expensive the market. (When a market only grazes a small part of the district where there’s no major population center, I’ve deemed the market negligible, assuming that a smart media buyer wouldn’t use that market.) The number in the right column is the sum total of the thousands of TV households in all markets in the district, which provides a relative number that indicates how expensive a media campaign in that district is.

As you’ll see, there’s a huge amount of variation, depending on the number of ‘wasted eyeballs.’ The wasted eyeballs problem becomes huge in suburban districts in major metropolitan districts, where you may be paying to advertise to people in the adjacent 10 or 20 districts as well.

Let’s start with the cheap races:

If a few weeks ago you’d asked me what Congressional district is least likely to ever be the subject of a front-page post at Swing State Project, NY-10 may have been the answer. The Brooklyn-based African-American-majority district is the paragon of ‘safe Democratic’ at D+41 (3rd in the nation, behind only NY-15 and NY-16); it’s been represented since time immemorial (well, 1982) by Edolphus Towns.

However, there’s a competitive primary here this year, and the weirdness begins with who the challenger is: Kevin Powell, who played the role of ‘angry black guy’ on the very first season of MTV’s The Real World in 1992 (making him a ‘reality TV’ star almost a decade before that became a term). Since then, he’s been a hip-hop journalist for Vibe magazine, has written several books, and has returned to Brooklyn to be a community activist and organizer.

Powell has gotten a lot of support from local activists looking to oust the entrenched Towns (he’s doing pretty well at the fundraising game, too, ending the quarter with over 100K CoH). He has celebrity supporters on his side (including Gloria Steinem, a fan of Powell’s public repudiation of some domestic violence incidents earlier in his life). But one celebrity has gone further in extending his credibility to Powell, even hosting a fundraiser on his behalf, and it’s a pretty big celeb: Dave Chappelle.

Trouble is, Chappelle was nowhere to be found for last night’s fundraiser. The Brooklyn Paper has a good roundup of the night’s events, which turned into quite the little fiasco (follow the link for much more schadenfreude):

Earlier, Powell had urged the crowd to bear with him, suggesting that the comedian was “on his way.” But as the 700 campaign contributors grew restless and the vast press contingent started asking questions, Powell made his admission that Chappelle actually would not be appearing. He blamed travel mix-ups.

“We were on the phones non-stop with Dave’s management to get him here,” said a contrite Powell, 42, who promised that campaign donors would get into his next celebrity event for free.

Now granted, Dave Chappelle has been kind of… uh… mercurial for the last few years, but if you’re running in a D+41 district, he’s still someone you’d rather have hosting a fundraiser for you than prominent Republican African-American ex-Representative J.C. Watts, right? Well, not if you’re Edolphus Towns:

Former House Republican Conference Chairman J.C. Watts (Okla.), who now runs a Washington, D.C.-based consulting firm and other businesses, is hosting a fundraiser for Rep. Edolphus Towns (D) on July 17.

The breakfast fundraiser will be held at the headquarters of JC Watts Companies in downtown D.C. Suggested contributions are $500 for individuals and $1,000 for political action committees.

Yesterday Matt Stoller had a good rundown of Towns’s transgressions, including voting for the bankruptcy bill and CAFTA. Seems like Towns (who generally has a high liberal ratings) has been able to sweep these pro-business votes under the rug… but sharing the stage with a guy who, for many years, was the only black Republican in Congress, can’t help make the constituents back home feel like he’s looking out for them first and foremost.

You may remember that Rasmussen poll from one month ago that momentarily had everyone in a tizzy when it showed Frank Lautenberg, in the immediate post-primary frenzy, leading Dick Zimmer by only 1 point, 45-44. Rasmussen’s back with another shot at it:

Rasmussen (7/7, likely voters) (6/9 in parentheses):

Frank Lautenberg (D-inc): 49 (45)

Dick Zimmer (R): 36 (44)

(MoE: ±4.5%)

This is very much in line with the June 26 Fairleigh Dickinson poll (Lautenberg 45, Zimmer 28) and the June 11 Quinnipiac poll (Lautenberg 47, Zimmer 38). So what happened on June 9? Well, outliers happen. Even if the best pollster in the world does everything absolutely right — gets a good sample, eliminates all bias from the instrument — 1 out of 20 times, it’s still going to be completely wrong, i.e. outside-the-margin-of-error wrong. That’s what the 95% confidence interval, a caveat buried in the fine print of every poll report, is all about. Happens to everyone, even Rasmussen.

First the bad news: there were high hopes that Rick Gallot, a prominent African-American state representative from Ruston, would challenge turncoat Rodney Alexander in LA-05. Yesterday, he said he won’t:

“After prayerful deliberation, I’ve decided not to seek the congressional seat at this time,” Gallot said. “However, I’m flattered that the (party) thought enough about me and the work I’ve been doing to approach me about running. I also appreciate the support I’ve had from so many people who expressed their support.”

So far, the only candidate challenging Alexander is fellow Republican Andrew Clack. I’d been hoping that between Gallot running and Don Cravins Jr. running in LA-07, that might undercut Michael Jackson’s contention that African-American candidates get the short end of the stick from the LA Democratic Party and dissuade him from running in LA-06 as an independent. Well, based on today’s news, that’s not working out either.

Now for the good news: a swarm of challengers has emerged to take on embattled (corrupt, indicted) “Dollar Bill” Jefferson in LA-02. The three-day ballot qualifying period kicked off yesterday; as was previously reported here, state Rep. (and “former Jefferson ally”) Cedric Richmond has been running since last month; so has Jefferson Parish Councilor Byron Lee.

Yesterday, former WDSU-TV anchor Helena Moreno kicked off her campaign, as did Kenya Smith, former political aide to mayor Ray Nagin. In addition, New Orleans City Councilor James Carter and former New Orleans City Councilor Troy Carter announced yesterday that they will qualify. The missing other Carter — state Rep. Karen Carter Peterson, who lost the 2006 runoff to Jefferson — apparently is not in the running this time.

Louisiana has eliminated its ‘jungle primary’ (where everyone ran against everyone, followed by a runoff for the top 2 candidates of any party if no one broke 50%) for federal office, so each party’s primary is Sept. 6, followed by each party’s runoff on Oct. 4. Dems compete against the GOP in the general on Nov. 4, although in the D+28 2nd, the primary runoff is the main event. (With at least 6 competitors, no one’s going to break 50%.)

Over the last few months, I’ve come out with a variety of indexes that focused on the potential efficiencies of electing various new senators and representatives (for instance, in terms of the largest overall right-to-left shift, here and here). Part of this is to help netroots donors have some quantitative basis for seeing how their meager dollars might be best invested.

One thing that’s been missing from the equation, though, is any sense of how effectively those netroots dollars will be spent: not in terms of whether the campaign is likely to make good decisions (which is unknowable), but in terms of whether the media markets where an election takes place are a good buy. Think about how much further one netroots dollar goes in a race in Wyoming or Alaska, where there are few eyeballs to reach and the media markets are cheap, versus a race in New York or Texas. And yet, the result is the same: one more senator or representative.

Last week, Nate at 538.com had a few very interesting posts on this topic (creating the Return on Investment Index, and, then analyzing specific states’ media markets). Nate’s concept of efficiency turned largely on the idea of ‘wasted eyeballs,’ in other words, advertising in markets that bleed across state lines and where therefore ads run in front of non-targeted voters. However, his analysis was focused on the presidential race, where the concept of ‘wasted eyeballs’ may be overrated as a problem; after all, even if ads run in swing state markets bleed over into non-swing states, the voters in those states are voting in the same presidential election too. It may not maximize efficiency in the way a skilled media buyer would like, but it’s all part of a bigger whole.

We don’t have that luxury in Senate, and especially House races, though. Take Virginia as a case in point: Mark Warner needs to advertise in the Washington DC market in order to reach suburban northern Virginia voters, but that means paying top dollar in one of the nation’s most expensive media markets to tell millions of Marylanders to vote for him. (Of course, he can afford it, so don’t break out the tiny violin yet.) Kentucky may be even worse from a pure efficiency standpoint; none of its markets are brutally expensive, but blanketing all of Kentucky means advertising in Evansville, Cincinnati, and Nashville.

Over the flip, let’s look at all of the competitive Senate pickup opportunities. I’ll explain the methodology and the asterisked races after the table; for now, all you need to know is that the lower the number on the right is, the less expensive the race is.

The GOP is facing a deep hole. The McCain camp is in disarray, Mitch McConnell has admitted that there’s no way for the GOP to pick up seats in the Senate, and in the House… well… the fact that Tom Cole is up to Deathwatch No. 9 says it all.

With the Republicans finally realizing that rebuilding their permanent majority is going to be a long, multi-step process, it seems like they’re engaged in some soul-searching about where to start the demolition work. And today’s thought-bubble isn’t about rebranding their line of dog food, let alone deciding not to try to sell poisoned dog food in the first place. It’s about doing what the Republicans do best: manipulating the electoral process, in this case via gerrymandering. This means seizing control of the statehouses in 2010, which is something that we’ve already talked about at length at Swing State Project.

Sam Stein at HuffPo has the dirt.

“The 2010 elections are almost as important or equally important as the elections this year. After redistricting in 2011, the governors are going to have a huge influence in determining the political makeup of this country,” said Chris Schrimpf, a spokesman for the Republican Governors Association. “We could feasibly see 25 to 30 congressional seats swing as the result of redistricting. And the state legislatures and governor could determine that swing. Can the National Republican Congressional Committee make a statement like that with a straight face? It would be harder for them.”

Now it may not be surprising to see the spokesperson for the Republican Governors Association doing the over-selling of the importance of the role of governors in the redistricting process; after all, the RGA has funds to raise, and they need a fresh new angle to do so in an environment where GOP donors are increasingly sitting on their wallets while looking for a sign of a pulse.

But he’s got a point: in many of the states where new House seats will be added or lost via the 2010 census, there’s also a 2010 governor’s race… California, Texas, Florida, Arizona, Georgia, Nevada among the gainers, and Illinois, Iowa, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Ohio, and Pennsylvania among the losers. (Plus one likely lost seat in a state with its gubernatorial race this year: Missouri, where luckily we’re on track to pick up the governor’s seat.)

Now, of course, the governor doesn’t actually draw the lines (that’s generally the legislature’s job, with disputes usually winding up in the courts rather than on the governor’s desk). But via veto power in some states, or redistricting commission appointment in other states, the governor has a huge role in the process.

And while it’s easy to be sanguine about many of these 2010 governor’s races (is there any Republican in California who can retain the governor’s seat post-Arnie?), don’t underestimate the Republicans’ ability to fight back with their favorite methods when backed against the wall:

“In the worst case scenario, 2010 would be the first, most important evidence that there is life in the Republican Party,” said Craig Shirley, a longtime Republican strategist. “The elections that year will be vitally important because it will put on stage the worst creative skills of ever politician… Members of Congress aren’t bright about handling Social Security, Medicare and the budget but they are astonishing bright at self-preservation… and drawing favorable [political] districts.”

Some of you may have had the same “wtf?” moment that I did upon seeing James’s Q1 Cash-on-Hand Competitiveness from a few months ago: the Democratic representative who was in the deepest fundraising hole vis-à-vis his or her opponent wasn’t Carol Shea-Porter or Nancy Boyda or Tim Mahoney… it was David Scott, sitting in GA-13, a safe black-majority district in Atlanta’s suburbs. He was being outraised by Deborah Honeycutt, who had actually raised 105% of CoH that Scott had.

There’s a not-so-simple explanation at work here: GA-13 is ground zero for the efforts of a shadowy Republican direct-mail group called BMW Direct that specializes in using national fundraising appeals on behalf of conservative candidates at the local level. Josh Marshall summed up BMW’s agenda succinctly:

finding nonsense Republican candidates in hopeless races, raising tons of money for their hopeless campaigns and then funneling all the money back to themselves and sundry contractors and cronies.

Honeycutt has posted some remarkable fundraising numbers, raising $1.7 million this cycle ($500,000 of that in Q1 alone), and burned through $1.5 million of it. (This despite being the 2006 candidate, and losing to Scott by a 69-31 margin as a result of having “no presence” locally.) The odd thing is: only $16,695 of that money got spent on the ground in Georgia. The rest simply disappeared into BMW’s internal operations, or got farmed out to BMW contractors for activities like data processing and list rentals.

The Boston Globe broke the story, focusing on Charles Morse’s 2006 race against Barney Frank. Morse raised $700,000 for the race in MA-04 via BMW’s direct-mailing efforts, but 96% of that money, rather than being spent in the district, was paid to BMW. The net result of Morse’s amazing fundraising? He won a total of 145 votes in the primary, failing to qualify for the general election.

BMW does apparently help a few legitimate officeholders (including Robin Hayes and Jim Ryun), but their efforts mostly seem to center on fleecing low-information right-wing grannies to give money to invest in candidates on the basis of flimsy appeals, all the while knowing that the candidates are going nowhere and running bare-bones campaigns, allowing them to keep almost all the money for themselves. (As several TPM commenters pointed out, this is almost exactly the plot line from The Producers.) Rarely has there ever been such a clear illustration of the giant pyramid scheme that is the Republican Party.

The Republicans in the House have a clever acronym for their analogue to the DCCC’s Red to Blue program: ROMP (Regain Our Majority Program). I suspect the long line of Republican recruits challenging Democratic incumbents and holding out their tin cups to the NRCC are looking at the newest list of ROMP recipients and saying “Man, that is flagrant false advertising!”

Here’s the newest list of fresh-faced, eager young recruits, ready to bring their grassroots-powered outsider energy to picking off do-nothing Democrats standing in the way of conservative progress:

Rep. Shelley Moore Capito, WV-02

Rep. Phil English, PA-03

Chris Hackett, PA-10

Rep. Tom Feeney, FL-24

Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, FL-21

Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, FL-25

Steve Stivers, OH-16

Pete Olson, TX-22

Add that on top of the previous list of ROMP recipients from April:

Rep. Michelle Bachmann, MN-06

Rep. Vito Fossella, NY-13

Rep. Sam Graves, MO-06

Rep. Ric Keller, FL-08

Anne Northup, KY-03

Erik Paulsen, MN-03

Rep. Bill Sali, ID-01

Rep. Jean Schmidt, OH-02

Rep. Tim Walberg, MI-07

Darren White, NM-01

So, um… let’s get this straight. The Republican route to regaining the majority is by spending a lot of money to defend a 14-year incumbent against a woman who runs an arboretum?

The newest ROMP installment, out of 8 recipients, features 2 seats where the Republicans are trying to defeat a Democrat, plus one where they’re trying to hold an open seat. Add in the previous ROMP installment, which, out of 10 recipients, targets one Democratic seat for pick-up (plus 2 open seats for holds). So, if they add 1.5 more new Democratic targets every three months until the election, they’ll have a full slate of ROMP recipients for picking up those 19 seats they need in order to Regain Their Majority in… uh, let’s break out the calculator here… early 2011?

Last week I wrote about Where We Can Make the Most Progress in the House, where I tried to measure the biggest probable right-to-left swings that might result from the 2008 election in the House (the biggest one would be swapping out Dana Rohrabacher for Debbie Cook, in case you missed it). In the comments, the question came up of what would happen if I ran the same analysis for the competitive 2008 Senate races.

I have been reluctant to do so, because when I did the House, I relied on a demographic model for predicting which caucus new House members might join and, from there, predicting their likely DW-Nominate score. That just doesn’t work with the Senate: demographics-wise, states don’t break down as cleanly as do House districts. And Senators tend to disobey their states’ partisan lean much more so than Representatives: consider that we have two moderate Republican senators in one of our bluest states (Maine), two populist Democratic senators in one of our reddest states (North Dakota), and the swing states in the middle give us as wide a range of personalities as Russ Feingold and John Sununu.

So, I decided to try a different approach, more speculative than I generally prefer, where I tried to project prospective Democratic senators’ voting preferences by averaging out the scores of already sitting senators who seem to have some commonalities with them. As a vague rule of thumb, I tried to use one senator who had the most in common geographically and one who seemed to have the most in common ideologically and/or stylistically, although these categories pretty thoroughly blended. Here’s a case in point: Mark Warner. I decided he had a lot in common with Jim Webb (- 0.359), a fellow Virginian and someone else who knows how to connect with white working class voters, and also with Joe Biden (- 0.338), another mid-Atlantic senator with a mix of liberal intentions and pro-corporate leanings. Average those, and voila: Warner projects at – 0.349. (Some of my comparables, or the resulting scores, may strike you as completely misguided. This is all pure speculation on my part, so feel free to argue why in the comments, or ask for some clarification on a particular choice. My feelings won’t be hurt.) One exception: if the Democratic candidates have a House record, I used their most recent score from there.