The DCCC and the NRCC have filed their monthly financial reports with the FEC, and the news is still bleak for House Republicans. The GOP must like their favorite color quite a bit, because their House committee is still stuck in the red:
| Committee | Raised | Spent | Cash on Hand | Debt |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| DCCC | $4.1M | $3.2M | $29.2M | $2.1M |
| NRCC | $3.6M | $2.6M | $2.6M | $3.6M |
Jon Singer over at MyDD has more numbers, including the 2-to-1 cash-on-hand edge that the DSCC is enjoying over the NRSC.
Ask local political gossip blogger Joe Monahan, and he’ll tell you that Udall should “watch out for the alligators“. One such alligator, Albuquerque Mayor Martin Chavez, has a vicious bite:
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The changes in voting behavior in recent years have a distinct geographic flavor. In 1988, George H. W. Bush won with 53% of the vote; 16 years later, his son got 51% nationwide, pretty close to the same. We should be able to figure out something from the comparison, as both Democrats in the race were ‘Massachusetts liberals’ and both Republicans were Bushes, although the son has a very different persona than the father. If George H. W. Bush had run against Dukakis again in 2004, that would give us the most information about changes in voting behavior, but let’s take a look at what we do have:
Click to enlarge. Below, more on trends in voting and population growth in recent years.
Cross-posted at Open Left and DailyKos.
Despite similar nationwide vote percentages in 1988 and 2004, the maps above show striking and not-too-surprising changes. Just like in the distribution of the House seats, there is a widening gulf of increasing polarization, although this is likely in part an artifact of the definitions we are using (percent vote for President). In general, the Northeast and Midatlantic, Southwest, and the industrial Midwest trended towards Democrats. The Plains states and the Mountain West trended towards Republicans. Intriguingly, the South generally stayed about the same.
Let's look at change by county (voting data available here): the maps below show the intensity of a shift towards Republicans or Democrats (from 0 to 30 points between 1988 and 2004). This doesn't mean Kerry won the blue counties, it means he did better than Dukakis; the darker the blue, the greater the shift. The lightest color for each represents an increase of 0-5%.
Click to enlarge.
Kerry increased in performance over Dukakis solidly in the Northeast and down the East Coast to Virginia. Ohio, Michigan, Florida and South Carolina also show some consolidated increases. There's a checkerboard through the South and Southwest. The Plains show almost uniform increases for Bush II with a very solid pattern in the Mountain West and much of the Midwest and Ohio River valley. Texas, which had a horse of a different party in each race (Lloyd Bentsen in 1988), has the most dramatic changes, although note it is not uniformly red.
What portion of the changes we see can be attributed to the persona of Bush the Texas Rancher versus Republicans in general can't be sorted out. For now, it appears that Bush's fake cowboy swagger has infected the entire Republican brand, so the information may be relevant for the short term at least.
But this is not much of a story: if we are interested in voting behavior changes, we have to know how many votes we're talking about. So let's look at cartograms of the counties, using the method of Gastner and Newman, where the size of the counties are proportional to their populations instead of their areas (thanks to BentLiberal for the suggestion). The US map ends up looking strangely like Asia:
Click to enlarge.
Again, these maps show change in support, not who won. The pattern familiar from conventional wisdom now becomes clear: urban versus rural. Not only are urban areas generally Democratic strongholds, they have become even more so in recent years. There are some exceptions: rural New England, and some urban areas in the Plains and Appalachia, for example.
This still isn't the whole picture: we're looking at change, so we want to know how fast these counties are growing.
Click to enlarge.
If growth patterns were exactly the same between 2004-2014 as between 1990-2000 (an assumption which probably isn't reasonable), and voting patterns remained the same in every county as in 2004, the political split would still be about the same – the Republican vote would increase by 0.6 points for a hypothetical 2014 election in this hypothetically growing country. We do know, however, that since 2004 the number of people that identify as Republicans has decreased, indicating they're probably less likely to vote for a Republican for president; that alone throws off the entire hypothetical scenario. We might be able to think of it as a worst-case scenario, however.
So what can we take away from these maps? Well, one thing is to look at extremes in growth. First, those counties that lost population; the map on the left shows Bush's performance in 2004; the map on the right shows the change from 1988-2004, where blue indicates an increase in Democratic performance, and red an increase in Republican performance.
Click to enlarge.
The vast center swath of the country that looks so large on an area-based map has aligned with Republicans on the presidential level even more closely since 1988. But it doesn't have many people and is in the process of losing them. There's also a fair number of strongly Democratic and Democratic-trending urban centers that have lost population. Another interesting note, the Appalachian region increased its Republican support to a draw, more or less, as it lost population.
Next, only those counties that grew by 25% or more between 1990 and 2000.
Click to enlarge.
The high growth counties show us a bunch of circles in the South, Midwest, and West. These are the exurbs: they vary mostly from strong to very strong Republican support, but they are not all places of unbridled Republican growth. In a fair number of exurban counties – outside Chicago and Northern Virginia, for instance – Republican support actually decreased from 1988 to 2004.
Where do we go from here?
At this point let me reiterate the cautions necessary in interpreting these changes: they are based on presidential vote, which can be quite different from local politics, and may have much to do with the individual candidates involved. And past behavior is no guarantee of future behavior.
Because populations don't just grow, they also change. We all die, and young people start voting, and people who move somewhere don't necessarily act like those who are already there, and communities change. And, both individuals and populations change their attitudes. All these factors favor Democrats on the national level over the long term; in the short term, the Republican brand is in the doghouse.
First, according to Pew's surveys, not only is the country as a whole – even Republicans – becoming less socially conservative, but each successive generation is less socially conservative than the last, and each generation itself is becoming less socially conservative over time. Pew measured this as the average number of socially conservative responses on six questions. Pew also found a recent increase in support for various government programs.
Communities change as well. Over the long term, exurbs and suburbs are becoming more like urban central cities in their problems and concerns, and, one might think, more like urban centers in politics as well. The housing crisis may very well accelerate this transformation.
Young people are far more progressive than the older voters they are replacing at the polls, as mentioned above. Republicans cannot use fear of non-Christian gay brown people to get them to vote Republican, because they and their peers are increasingly non-Christian, non-white, and openly gay themselves.
Finally, the population increase in this country is 5-15 times higher for Democratic-trending minorities than non-Hispanic whites, translating to a stunning 4 out of every 5 new residents. By focusing on appealing mainly to rural and exurban white Christian voters, Republicans may well write themselves into irrelevance over the long term.
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Thanks, guys!
These are just a few of my favorite bits of Republican misfortune this year. I’m sure you can think of more.
Crumb-bums will be crumb-bums; they can’t help it – it’s just in their nature.
Our hopes for a nasty Republican primary are officially dead:
Republican Jon Bruning has ended his U.S. Senate campaign, deferring to the candidate many consider a prohibitive front-runner, former governor and U.S. Agriculture Secretary Mike Johanns.Nebraska’s attorney general ends his five-month campaign after raising more than $1 million for his bid to replace outgoing Republican Chuck Hagel.
What a disastrous week for the GOP. First came New Jersey Rep. Mike Ferguson’s retirement, and now this:
In a stunning development, wealthy businessman Andrew Saul (R) is making calls to inform supporters and GOP insiders that he is dropping his candidacy in New York’s 19th District. Saul was widely regarded as a strong Republican recruit to take on freshman Democratic Cong. John Hall (D). Saul’s ability to self-finance and the Republican-tilt of the district made it a top GOP target. But now, his exit from the race leaves Republicans looking for a credible challenger.
As Rothenberg notes, Saul was a much-hyped recruit based on his immense personal wealth and his strong fundraising (he had raised $359,000 in the last quarter and had over $450K on hand). This is nothing short of a stunning blow for the NRCC.
UPDATE: Perhaps this had something to do with it.
We’ve just confirmed the veracity of this poll, which was conducted between Sept. 18 and 24 by Penn, Schoen, Berland Associates. The poll shows conservative Democrat Dan Lipinski vulnerable to a primary challenge. Here are the excerpts from Archpundit (likely primary voters):
Lipinski Re-elect: 35%
Generic Congressional Approval: 37%
±5%82%: Less likely to vote for Lipinski on the issue of choice once they learn that he opposes a woman’s right to choose and supports criminalizing abortion even in cases of rape or incest
83%: Less likely they would vote for Lipinski after they learned that he voted for the Bush energy proposal and voted to allow drilling in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge
76%: Favor a mandate calling for a pull-out of troops from Iraq beginning immediately with all troops out within a year as well as a cap on war funding to ensure the Bush Administration meets that goal
17%: Favor a proposal calling for a complete pullout within five years and no cap on funding.
Dan Lipinski has been one of the most out-of-touch Democrats in the House, consistently voting as if he were in a conservative area while representing a Chicago district with a PVI of D+10. With a credible primary challenger in the race — progressive attorney Mark Pera — Lipinski is roaming in very perilous territory right now.
You can view a copy of the polling memo here.
While there is no shortage of potential Republican candidates to vie for the open seat being left behind by retiring Rep. Mike Ferguson (R-NJ), it looks like the GOP’s top three choices have all taken a whiff of the race and said “no”.
GOP wunderkind Tom Kean, Jr. was the first to pull his name from contention last night. A known name statewide who gave Bob Menendez a competitive race last year, Kean could have been a good recruit here.
Next to pass is state Assembly Minority Whip Jon Bramnick, also considered a strong contender. In a conversation with PolitickerNJ.com, Bramnick implied that the rough national environment for Republicans was the deciding factor:
“There’s a big difference between federal and state politics. In Trenton, Democrats had a chance to govern and they did not do well. In Washington, everything hinges now on the economy and on the Iraq War,” Bramnick told PolitickerNJ.com.
The third top challenger to pass on the race? Former Rep. Bob Franks, who held the seat for four terms before he took on Jon Corzine (and barely lost) in the 2000 Senate race. Franks has “no desire” to run again right now.
Which GOP pretender will be next to smell the glove? Stay tuned!