Thanks to Open Secrets, fundraising data is readily available for all House candidates. This diary sorts through all the House races from the last three cycles to show the effects of money, incumbency, political climate, and party on the elections.
While money was clearly the most important factor, the big surprise was that once money was accounted for, running against an incumbent was only a little more difficult that running for an open seat, on average.
The effect of relative fundraising strength (the D/R Fundraising Ratio, Democratic $$ raised divided by Republican $$ raised) for all 2006 races is below:
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On the far left, when the Democrat raises very little money compared to the Republican (D/R Fundraising Ratio < 0.1), the Republican always wins. On the far right (D/R Fundraising Ratio > 10), the opposite case. Much much more below…
Cross posted at Daily Kos and Open Left.
Sorting Through the Data
First, notice the scale on the bottom of the graph above (and all of the ones to follow) is not linear (1, 2, 3,….) but rather logarithmic (1, 10, 100…). This is a way of showing a very large range of values on one plot. The line on the plot above is a smooth curve through the data. Notice that the curve flattens out at either end – these are the areas where one opponent basically has diddle squat. It doesn’t make much difference whether you have diddle squat or diddle squat times ten, you still can’t run a very effective campaign (although intriguingly there appears to be some effect).
But wait – is the shape of this curve influenced by the distribution of the partisan makeup of districts? There is an imbalance in district distributions – far more are very liberal than are very conservative. So, let’s look at only districts where 50-55% of voters chose Bush in 2000, a particularly large group.
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It’s still a pretty nice curve. A little lopsided though – so should it really be just one curve? Let’s plot the data by party of the incumbent:
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Party makes a pretty big difference.
Finally, that flat part – out where somebody is raising diddle squat – just isn’t very interesting if we want to know about the effect of money in competitive or near-competitive races. Let’s narrow things down to a range that appears to be relatively linear on these plots:
Click to enlarge.
Now we can put up some regressions, instead of just smooth curves. And, if we add open seats formerly held by Republicans, we see something interesting: open seats look pretty similar to seats with incumbents in their behavior. More on this in a minute.
So we see this: the more money a challenger raises compared to the incumbent, the better the challenger does. Not shocking, but we have a chicken-and-egg problem: Do challengers raise more money against some incumbents simply because the incumbents are more unpopular? In which case, would it be because the incumbents are more unpopular that they are doing worse, not because the challengers are raising more money?
Are Popular Incumbents Vulnerable to Well-Funded Opponents?
To check this, I tried to find Republican incumbents with decent challenges in 2006, who were nonetheless considered to be popular or relatively safe in their districts, and who did not have a strong challenger in either 2002 or 2004. I used some advice from a couple House experts, polls, and local news sources to choose the following districts: DE-AL, IA-2, MN-1, MI-8, OH-1, PA-4, VA-10, MT-AL, CO-6, CA-2, KY-2, IN-3. I could have chosen poorly on some of them but hopefully not all of them. Here’s a plot of the Republican performance in all these districts over three cycles, adjusted for the national mood (more on that later):
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If all the popular incumbents were truly Teflon-coated, then we would expect all the points for all years to fall on a flat line. Instead, they Republican performance decreases with increasing D/R Fundraising Ratio, just like all the other seats. Plotted individually, this is also the case for 10 out of the 12 districts (3, randomly chosen, shown here). In other words, a popular incumbent can be defeated with enough money, just like anybody else. It is getting the money and the candidate that is the hard part.
The 2006 Election
So then, let’s look at the 2006 data for Republicans in the competitive range I defined above, divided into categories based on Bush’s support in the district in 2000:
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As you can see, in each case there is a decent trend, but it’s not very tight. In other words, after accounting for the D/R Fundraising Ratio and the partisan makeup of the district, there’s still plenty of room for other factors, including, quite simply, the quality of the candidates.
It’s also pretty clear that the open seats (which were not included in the regressions) aren’t too different from the seats with incumbents after accounting for the effect of money. We also see, of course, that the open seat contests are far more likely to have fundraising parity (D/R Fundraising Ratio = 1) or better, which explains (mostly) why they are far more likely to change parties. In other words, incumbency matters for getting money and chasing off opponents and opponents’ supporters, but if a well-funded opponent shows up anyway, that opponent has nearly as a good a chance (on average) as if they were running for an open seat.
Another interesting thing is that the plots don’t look too different from each other.
The Last Three Cycles
Let’s look at all the regressions for Republican incumbents, and add in the Democrats, for 2002, 2004, and 2006:
Click to enlarge.
It’s hard to tell the lines apart in the graphs, but that is my point. There is surprisingly little difference between the regressions! Some of the lines are a little funny looking, but they are the ones based on only a small number of points (especially the ones for the most liberal districts). Republicans in very conservative districts perform better than those in moderate districts, given the same D/R Fundraising Ratio, but not 30 points better.
We can also see a difference between the years. The regressions generally shifted down in 2006 compared to 2002 or 2004. This means that the Democrats’ money was more effective in 2006, and the Republicans’ money was less effective. This is why predicting electoral success based on fundraising alone, extrapolated from 2002 and 2004 results, failed.
And, of course, the party of the current occupant makes a difference. If both candidates in a race raise the same amount of money, a Republican incumbent, or a Republican contestant in a Republican-held open seat, will (on average) score a good deal higher than a Republican challenger in a district with a similar partisan makeup.
Conclusions
Tomorrow, I will continue looking at the House races by exploring 15 factors and how they affected candidate performance between 2002 and 2006. In the meantime, we can say the following:
1. Money matters a great deal.
2. Safe incumbents are not really safe if a well-funded challenger runs against them.
3. Voters have a habit of voting for the party of the current representative, whether the incumbent is running or not.
4. The partisan make-up of the district matters, but not as much as one might have expected.
5. The national political mood matters, and right now, it is still surging against Republicans.
