November 21, 2010 09:32 PM UTC

The Bottom Line Hasn't Changed

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• 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.