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November 21, 2010 09:32 PM UTC

The Bottom Line Hasn't Changed

  • 20 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

As the Colorado Independent’s John Tomasic summarized Friday, all this talk of a “Republican wave,” both nationally where conventional wisdom says it rolled strongly and in Colorado where it “hit a bump,” was more a question of whether or not Democrats had their hip boots on:

In Colorado, Republicans won a one-seat House majority by 197 votes, or 0.8 percent of the 25,279 votes cast in HD-29. In Washington, Republicans won a majority in Congress by roughly 250,000 votes or 0.3 percent of the 75 million votes cast.

Nationally, Republicans won a lot of seats. Yet the pivotal 26 seats that decide majority and minority status in Congress were won by very narrow margins, many of them by low four-figure vote totals and, as a whole, by an average of only 8,192 votes.

A win is a win of course but the vote totals suggest the political reality in the United States is different than the picture blustery pundits have been drawing over the past two weeks. The ballot box totals suggest American voters remain almost evenly split in their choosing between Republican and Democratic politicians…

A point reinforced by astute freelance columnist Ed Quillen, who might nonetheless read a little too much into that closeness on his blog at High Country News last week:

And so Democrat Bennet pulled out a narrow win, about 10,000 votes, over Republican Buck.

But if you look elsewhere on the ballot, it wasn’t a good Election Day for Democrats. Republicans gained control  of the state house of representatives. Democrats kept the state senate, but only by the narrowest of margins — had only 2,504 votes changed in four districts, Republicans would have gained the state senate…

But most surprising, to me at least, was the state treasurer’s race. Democrat Cary Kennedy was elected in 2006. I read nothing but praise for her performance in office during difficult economic times, and she was out campaigning in October.

Even so, she was defeated by Republican Walker Stapleton, a cousin of George W. Bush. And the only reason I can see for it is the R after his name. It appears that a lot of Coloradans were ready to vote Republican, but couldn’t abide the top of the GOP ticket.

If you look at the margins by which individual U.S. House races around the country were won, even though they aggregate into a large gain for Republicans, you continue to see the closely-divded electorate that has prevailed in the United States for well over a decade. The same appears to hold true in Colorado, where more state legislative races, not to mention the U.S. Senate race, were decided by razor-thin margins than at any time we can remember.

Given the wider margins Democrats enjoyed in Colorado prior to 2010, it’s clear that short-term national trends did have an impact on races where there weren’t the resources to effectively counter it. Where that trend was countered, it’s a credit to the Democratic infrastructure at all levels that got out just enough of the vote to prevail, as well as an indictment of the quality of specific Republican candidates. Where it wasn’t, we’re still talking about a margin that moved a couple of percent–a small fraction of voters here or there–that the pundits are trying to overanalyze into a prognosticative statement one way or the other.

Because our readers hate that stuff, here’s what we’ll say are the lessons you can bank: extremism, or the perception of it, is toxic to both sides. When recruiters fail to properly vet their candidates, or primary voters make self-absorbed extreme choices, you start at a disadvantage trying to win Colorado’s decisive moderates and independents–even in “wave years.” The daily messaging battles we love here are critically important to both sort out what’s working, and reach voters at all the unpredictable times they may happen to tune in; you might not enjoy it, but it cannot be neglected. Finally, field operations to get every last vote out: the pullout of resources from the Republican Governor’s Association could fairly be called decisive, though other circumstances certainly apply, in a number of close legislative races Democrats barely won.

If this seems like old news to you, it’s because it’s the same thing we’ve been talking about for years in Colorado politics, “wave years” and regular years alike, and nothing about this year really changed the bottom line. Given the dynamics at work in both parties in this state, the barebones fiscal situation in Colorado undermining the GOP’s core message, and the types of candidates Democrats and Republicans have been nominating, the long-term outlook still favors Colorado Democrats overall. Republicans, on the other hand, must moderate from the hardcore Republican Study Committee-dominated status quo, and develop better candidates to capitalize on anything that happened in 2010; after the most favorable climate they’ve enjoyed in years, and are likely to see for many more, again exposed these as systemic weaknessness.

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20 thoughts on “The Bottom Line Hasn’t Changed”

  1. The Democratic takeaway from your analysis seems to be:

    1.  Recruit strong candidates.

    2.  Better run and better financed campaigns at all levels.

    3.  Continue and try to fine-tune our superior GOTV efforts.

    However, the tendency by some of our candidates to soft-pedal important Democratic legislative priorities still disturbs me.

    I would also like to see Hillary Clinton replace Biden for the No. 2 spot.  I think that would help the Dems in 2012.

  2. Of course the lesson Pols learns is the one they knew all along, and to learn it they ignore all contravening evidence.

    It is most likely true that if you go too far afringe than you are unelectable, but to say that this was the lesson of 2010 is to ignore the decimation of the Blue Dogs whose percentages shrank while Progressive caucus dems fared much better.

    Markey, Salazar, Beuscher and Kennedy were in no way far from Colorado’s center, and they were solid and well vetted candidates. You can pick and choose the data to claim that victory is in the middle, but there is a lot more to indicate that even bad candidates with passionate support did well in many races where tepid voters abandoned good CoPols style favorites.  

    1. What you’re saying is dangerously close to what DeMint the teabaggers are saying about the right. I think the Pols are saying that voters are leery of ideologically rigid candidates on either side, and they’re correct.

      Didn’t they also say something about Blue Dogs in the Losers post? There is a difference between being a moderate and fighting your own party for political points, and that’s the Blue Dogs to me. Blue Dogs have no friends for a reason, but Blue Dogs are not the only moderates. The Brothers Udall are my kind of moderates, and they don’t have to fake it.

      Either way, I don’t think they were talking about Cary. They were talking about Ken Buck and Tom Tancredo. I wonder if it was a backhanded slap at Romanoff, but Romanoff was a gutless DLCer so prob not. He would have been closer to the lesson of the Blue Dogs than the Romanoff lovers would like to admit. Pat Caddell would have made him the “REAL tea party candidate,” and Buck would have won by 15 points.

    2. It has more to do with candidates being true to their beliefs–or their perceived beliefs anyway–and not trying to put on a show about how conservative you are when you vote with the Democrats 95% of the time.

      A principled candidate is always going to do better–no matter what particular ideology they fall under. Voters don’t want someone more left, and they don’t want someone more right, and they don’t want someone who’s the center of everything. They want someone who doesn’t say what people want to hear, and sticks to their guns.

      Whether that’s a conservadem or a progressive, or anything in between.

    3. That only makes sense if you think everyone’s running from the same district. They’re not. McCain won both Markey and Salazar’s districts two years ago. Those districts were only represented by Democrats (and Dems had such a big majority) because they were Blue Dogs, progressive Dems never would have gotten in the door. And when the mood shifts, of course those are the districts that swing back.

      1. Blue Dogs win in conservative leaning districts where a progressive  candidate wouldn’t have a chance.  Naturally, they are the first to go when they are part of a Dem majority in an election year fueled by dissatisfaction with the status quo. Since the reality is that these districts will either be won by Rs or by Blue Dogs and Blue Dogs still count toward majority status for Dems, the solution lies in learning a few lessons from Rs.

        The GOP is much better at pressuring their moderates to toe the line when push really comes to shove so they do them more good and cause them less grief than Blue Dogs do the main body of Dems. Dems need to man up, take back that PR high ground and learn how to go all GOP on their Blue Dogs when they have to since we’re not going to be electing progressives in conservative districts any time soon. As long as Dems lack the guts to take back command of the message and get tough with either Rs or Blue dogs, Rs will have the upper hand, even when Dems have a majority.

  3. I feel that there is a lack of clarity in this post. It is important to remember that we are talking about two very distinct issues here: (1) the political leanings of the electorate; and (2) the state of the two main political parties in Colorado.

    It is easy to conflate the two, but it is an important distinction.

    I agree that issue #2 certainly favores D’s going forward.  But I do not think that #1 is so clearly in favor of Dems.  National politics has, and will continue to have, a real impact on the mood of Colorado voters.  With the direction of the country in such flux, I think it is presumptious to assume anything.

    The distinction between these two discrete issues was illustrated perfectly in the recent election.  The Republican party held republicans back in the Gov/Sen races, but the mood of Coloradans has changed, perhaps temporarily, in favor of conservatives.

    If it werent for the D grassroots political organization, it would have been a drastically worse year for Democrats.  

    1. I think the electorate saw that the Dems in Congress were not focused on the economy/unemployment and therefore were not fixing it. In a case like that voting for an unknown beats voting for a known failure for many people.

      I think anyone who takes any kind of message about preference for conservative/liberal/whatever from this vote is just trying to justify their own biases.

      1. I dont think you understood my point. I agree with you for the most part, especially your reasons why people were disheartened by D’s. That’s why I said that “the mood of Coloradans has changed, perhaps temporarily, in favor of conservatives.”

        In other words, the political preference of the state “favors” conservatives, not that the preference of the voters is a conservative one.

        It cannot be doubted that the electorate swung in favor of the republicans last election, but that doesnt mean that they suddenly became uber-conservative.

        My point is that CoPols, and many others, try to conflate the preferences of voters with the political aptitude of the respective parties in Colorado in order to try to soften the blow of the recent election.  

      2. but if this election was a referendum on unemployment, where was the Republican plan to fix it? Republicans were clearly concerned about taxes and health care, but most of them didn’t even talk about “the ecomony” unless they were trying to distract attention from something else (like Ken Buck).

        I don’t think Republicans really changed a lot of independent minds in this election. Democrats didn’t energize the base in most of the country, and Republicans turned out about as much as they did in 2008. Considering how high unemployment is, it’s really remarkable how little of the national discussion it represented (compared to things like taxes, the deficit, and the politics of health care).

        Coincidentally this interpretation also reinforces the theory I had before the election. 😉

  4. I think that you can thank people like David Sirota, and Andrew Romanoff as excellent examples in suppressing Dem vote, and leaving down ticket candidates underfunded.  

    2. Will you ever stop the bitter broken record routine over Romanoff? Blaming Dem losses on Romanoff in light of all the other factors at work this time around is getting a little crazy. As for Sirota, to think he has that much influence over typical Dem voters in Colorado is even more crazy.  Bennet won.  Give it a rest.  We did much better here than in most purple states.    

        1. Time to stop making up reasons we lost, Ray, and start looking at why Republicans picked up seats all over this country, in both their state and federal level races.

          As a Democrat, I feel pretty relieved to live in Colorado, where we stayed a true purple and managed to keep both our Senate seat and Governor’s race blue…no small feat in a year where Republicans made major gains across the board and downticket in every state, including ours.  

  5. That just about all of Colorado’s projected population growth in the next decade will be through Latino’s, who are becoming a crucial demographic for candidates in the West.

    Colorado’s population is changing in a way that favors Democrats.

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