2018 Congressional Recruitment/Fundraising/Ratings Megathread v2

[Virginiá]

Since old one is gonna be at 20K posts so setting this up so I look cooler .

Damn it, I didn't know it would boot you from first post if I merged the last page of the old thread with your new one. Sorry about that. I was just trying to preserve today's posts from the old thread.

It won't let me undo it either. Remind me with the next megathread and I'll put yours at the top.

[Virginiá]

It didn't reach 2k yet no - I just figured I'd retire it anyway since it was almost there. I figured since SMF is picky about removing/splitting the first post of a thread, that your post would stay at the top no matter what, but it didn't, and now it won't let me move KingSweden's post, since it's the new first post

[Virginiá]

Sessions (for now) looks set to pick up a decent share* of Clinton 16 voters. It's important to note that many voters in TX-32 went for Clinton but generally voted GOP downballot; these are the people who will determine the race, ancestrally Republican suburban voters. Not every one of them is rebelling in 2018, at least on House level, especially if a good incumbent is on the ballot. Sessions certainly looks set to have something of a competitive race considering the national environment but I remain deeply skeptical he'd actually lose at this stage. I may revise this if I see fit later on.

He could certainly hold on, and I view Texas House races with more skepticism than most, but I don't think this is good to go by. A lot of Republican House Reps won in Clinton seats, and many won very comfortably or by landslides. So there isn't anything unique about Sessions in that regard. Historically speaking, their performance in a past election is not the best guide to their future performance, particularly if there is a switch in control of the White House. 2006 and 2010 is littered with examples of Republicans and Democrats who won comfortably or by landslides in the previous election, only to get wiped out in the next.

[Virginiá]

I don’t think Clinton won a majority in This district either.

Clinton won a plurality in TX-32: 48.5-46.6.

In this context, it doesn't really matter whether she won a plurality or a straight up majority. It still means the same thing - that support in this area is eroding for Republicans, at least until Trump leaves office, but probably further into the future.

[Virginiá]

Lol it doesn’t mean it’s eroding for all Republicans. A plurality and majority are a huge difference.

That is your opinion. Despite Clinton's weaker national performance, these districts still swung bigly away from Trump, and there is evidence in other districts in the country that experienced similarly large swings that the results are actually sticking. So you can argue that her performance in these Texas districts is a fluke, and that Republicans are in no danger there, but there is more than enough reason to believe that you could be wrong.

In this case, the difference between a plurality and a majority isn't that big. 48.5 is 1.5+1 points shy of a majority. That is hardly anything. I don't see how you could argue that it is.

[Virginiá]

This is a seat predominantly populated by country club Republicans.
Moreover, many of the seats that flipped in 2010 were areas like VA-09 and MS-04 that flipped on presidential level years or even decades ago. I don't think it's really a good comparison since TX-32 is not as far along that process. The area covering TX-32 probably went Democratic on presidential level for the first time since the 60s just two years ago.
Sessions can obviously lose but this is probably 1) among the places the Republican congress is relatively the most popular, tax cuts etc; and 2) a seat that, if it flips by a truly significant margin, it's a sign the bottom has really fell out for the GOP.

That's a good point, but I still don't think it's the same deal today. There are very notable differences between the political environment of the 80s/90s and even 2000s vs the 2010s. The high degree of political polarization and the virtual extinction of split ticket voting means that people are more often choosing a party to support rather than a candidate. I know there are some states that do have more split ticket voting than most, but like I've said before, I think there is enough evidence to at least believe that it is possible for this kind of seat to open up to downballot Democrats much faster than it did for Republicans decades ago. I don't necessarily think Democrats need to win it either to prove that point. Just coming close, like 5% or 6%, maybe be good enough, because it suggests a lot of former Republican-supporting voters switching over.

[Virginiá]

He is 'half' correct. OPEN seats tend to be incredibly volatile, and special elections add even more volatility to the mix.  Now that AZ-08 has an incumbent, its massive R PVi should preserve her. However, any open seat may become a target in November.

I wonder what House elections would look like if people voted for a party rather than a specific candidate in each district (so they wouldn't even see the candidate names). That would theoretically neutralize the incumbent effect for most voters (aside from ones intimately aware of their elected representatives), no?

[Virginiá]

I still don't understand why so much value is placed in Scott's fundraising (or rather, self-funding) abilities. These are expenditure totals from FL's elections website:

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That doesn't take into account outside group spending and such, but it's a rough overview. Scott blew her out of the water in spending and he still only won by like 1% in a Republican wave year. He's not a particularly strong candidate, and while he may have better approvals now, history is still a lesson that money can only do so much for a person - and even less for someone as well-known as Scott.

[Virginiá]

He also moved NC-09 to Toss Up. So it all evens out.

Just came here to post something like this. Manchin doesn't get his toxic dream opponent, but as a consolation prize, Democrats get a Republican-held open seat race in North Carolina, in a district that was probably only truly winnable as an open seat.

[Virginiá]

No, the others are correct. My point was that $30 million Adelson gave is useless because the Republican establishment has proven time and again they don't spend money effectively.

That's literally what I said your point was....and your point doesnt matter because the Democratic establishment is just as bad at picking candidates.....

He clarified his own words though. Plus, spending money inefficiently is not the same as picking bad candidates (although Republicans have blown their share of winnable races, obviously).

I'd counter that money in general has very real limits in elections, particularly with candidates who are well-known. The more high-profile the race, the less effect the money has. And since Scott has been in two statewide elections now and spent considerable sums of money, we can tell that for whatever the reasons, it doesn't seem to help him that much. He outspent Sink by a lot in 2010 and he still barely won, and in a GOP wave year too. Odds are that even if he's more popular now, that would be countered by what will probably be a strong Democratic year.

[Virginiá]

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/special-elections-so-far-point-to-a-democratic-wave-in-2018/

Certainly more valuable than the notoriously noisy and frequently outright wrong generic ballot. But even if it wasn't, what's your point? That Dems won't win 80-100 seats? Most people already know that.

LOLOL

I read that article before at face value, but after reading it again, I cannot believe they published this crap. They used a sample size of six election cycles (every midterm since 1994), two of which the special election average was significantly more friendly to the out-party Democrats than the midterm election actually ended up being¹. And color me skeptical of their 2010 finding - I remember NY-23 and PA-12 being huge disappointments for Republicans (I suspect Scott Brown and Charles Djou are skewing the average there a tad)².

If anyone at 538 had bothered to learn statistics, they would know that such a small sample size would warrant a t-test to calculate the confidence interval. Comparing the special election to the subsequent midterm for these six cases gives an average Republican overperformance of 2.5%, standard deviation of 3.1%, at t-statistic for 95% confidence and 5 degrees of freedom of 2.57. For a special election margin of D+12, that could mean subsequent midterm performance anywhere between D+17 and D+1 (spoiler: the House would not flip at the right tail of that distribution)

As far as those G. Elliot Morris tweets, I would want to know the same thing - what is his sample size of special elections being compared to midterms? From what I can tell it seems to be the same as 538 (1994 and on). Again, it is fine to make 'projections' based off of such data, but one should acknowledge how huge the confidence interval is going to be based on the limited number of data points.

¹In fact, now that I look at it even more carefully, Democrats did worse in the midterms than the special elections would predict in all but one of those six midterms, so using 538^TM logic, Republicans should probably outperform their special election performances.
²I am trusting that they were not dishonest enough to include the special elections held on Election Day of the following year, ideally it would only include the special elections held up to this specific calendar date in past midterms. It would be nice if they made the number crunching publicly available, rather than tasking any would-be fact-checkers with starting from scratch to check their work.

They talked about two different sets of data there, legislative+federal special elections, which is a much bigger sample set, and federal only. You are only talking about the federal set, of which they had to say this:

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The legislative+federal was:

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I don't see what the big deal is. Your post would be more relevant if they left out certain statements and didn't do anything for legislative special elections, but they did, so..

[Virginiá]

Any chance this works?

http://www.kansas.com/news/politics-government/article212306569.html

I don't know, but I sure hope so. There is no way that Estes loses and doesn't spend the rest of his life sucking on a glass of straight bourbon at 12am in a dark room with the TV playing static, wondering how he ended up there. He'll mutter "but I'm Ron Estes..", and somewhere in DC, from his Congressional office, other Ron will say, "but not the real one."

[Virginiá]

It blows my mind that Jersey has a 6-6 congressional delegation.

7D - 5R now, it was 6D - 6R pre-2017. New Jersey was actually pretty favorable turf for downballot Republicans during the Obama era. Well, at least in the popular vote, anyway. Republican legislative candidates may have actually won he popular vote on occasion but were kept out in the cold by crafty maps.

[Virginiá]

I think it’s pretty clear that if Beto flips Texas, it’ll be on his own without any air support

(I don’t think he’s winning, btw)

And if he barely loses, it'll lay the groundwork for an internal feud over how the party blew even more gains, particularly if they just miss a Senate majority.

[Virginiá]

Lol this article was written June 17th, it's writing as if it's still May...

http://www.kitv.com/story/38443700/recent-special-elections-suggest-democrats-may-not-ride-a-wave-in-november

I'm curious how the locations of the special elections in each year compare. Not all states that have had special elections see equal swings, and 2018 hasn't featured the same set of special elections as 2017. Off the top of my head, and I could be wrong, but I think Florida saw some weak performances (compared to the rest of the country), whereas some of the strongest backlashes appear to be areas that swung hard to Trump in 2016, such as the Midwest. Wisconsin is a good example of that, and true to form, delivered a pretty strong performance in the state Senate seat special.

[Virginiá]

Here are some folks who thing the GOP might grab a Senate seat in Minnesota:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2018/06/blue-wave-not-where-i-live.php

Just to give some of indigestion and give some of you the opportunity rage against me and call me names.  

I'll take a stab:

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1. It's not even anymore and it hasn't been for week(s). It's back to D+7 - D+8, depending on the aggregator. By the time the wider public started picking up on the narrative that the Democratic advantage was waning, it had already shifted violently back to where it was pre-decline. It did that so fast that apparently people like this author didn't even notice. Since Trump was elected, the most stable numbers for the GCB is D+7. The December tsunami numbers and the Republican surge of early 2018 were outliers. The stable numbers still point to a 2006-level wave, give or take.

2. Whenever reading partisan articles or analyses, always, always doubt those who say the party that controls the White House is going to have a wave, particularly when the overwhelming narrative of late has been that the out party is going to have a wave.

The party that controls the White House tends to lose grounds in midterms for a number of reasons, but it's a very accurate assumption because in virtually every midterm it has been the case. The only times it isn't is when the incumbent president is super popular - like 60%+ approvals, which Clinton and GWB were above in 1998 and 2002, respectively. The only other time I imagine it would happen is a major realignment like the Great Depression, and even then, I suspect whatever president is riding that realignment would be massively popular.

Point being that if a Republican president is in office and Joe Blow Republican says this midterm will be a R wave, laughter is appropriate. He's blinded by partisanship and probably doesn't have a clue what he's talking about. The same applies to Democrats when a Democratic president is in office.

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I mean, I'll let someone else with more knowledge of MN politics (and Smith) answer that directly, but conservatives are always calling every Democrat some hardcore liberal or flat out socialist. It's not accurate at all most of the time. Some of the people conservative pundits call commies or socialists would not pass the smell test with actual socialists. Not even remotely.


-

This guy seems to be relying on anecdotal evidence (and what appear to be large partisan bias?) in whatever analysis he's making about the general climate. There is a reason anecdotal evidence should be treated as worthless. What if this guy just happens to live in a super conservative area of Minnesota? Or perhaps just a neighborhood? To him, it looks like everything is fine, but it really isn't. Or perhaps he lives in a more neutral area but for some reason he only seems to remember the things that back his idea of what it "should" be.

This is why relying on actual data is best. Not someone's feels.

[Virginiá]

I do not understand how all the turmoil in the Democratic Party is helpful to Democrats.

Any intra-party turmoil is unhelpful but it doesn't necessarily hurt their electoral prospects. The Republican base was stirred into a frenzy after Obama was elected and essentially waged a partisan civil war against their party's "establishment" wing, and yet they still consolidated quite a bit of power.

The point here is that when a group of people is faced with what they perceive to be a large threat to their way of life, they may fight amongst each other about their vision for America and the way forward but they will still support their people when it comes time to vote.

[Virginiá]

These are the same talking points that have been routinely debunked here for the past year now. #3 is literally being debunked on this page. It's getting a bit tiring to hear them now.

It's also getting tiring to hear different people claim simultaneously that the Democrats are too centrist and too progressive to win anyone new. It's become clear that not liking Trump is good enough for the lion's share of independent voters.

Interesting that they used the D+11-to-flip-house thing from BC when there are numerous other analyses out there imagining a substantially less gaping margin being required. Sabato posited that a winning margin as low as 5 points or so could flip the House. I'm not saying that is the actual threshold, but I'd surely bet that 11 points is not either. And what is up with that title - "[...] Republicans could still crush Democrats ..." - CRUSH? Really? I mean, what is the author talking about. Is it that Democrats will come just up just shy of winning, or Republicans will somehow deflate all the energy on the left between now and November and transfer it to the right, somehow resulting in a Republican wave, which would actually be something deserving of the term "crushed." It's really hard for me to even move past the title in this.

I think the author is just cherry picking arguments and data to bolster their preferred narrative (or perhaps just some bs they felt otherwise compelled to write).

[Virginiá]

I have to say, I was a bit worried when he said he wasn't going to fill up a PAC, but this is working out very nicely. Even more excited to hear he is investing bigly in GOTV and forgoing the usual consultant-driven money bonfire via TV ads.

Beto

[Virginiá]

GA-6 and GA-7 fundraising numbers for May-June.  Source

GA-6:

Karen Handel (R, incumbent): $278K raised, $1M cash on hand
Kevin Abel (D): $241K raised, $138K COH
Lucy McBath (D): $207K raised, $141K COH

GA-7:

Rob Woodall (R, incumbent): not filed yet
Carolyn Bourdeaux (D): $312K raised, $98K COH
David Kim (D): $34K raised, $441K loaned by Kim to his campaign, $86K COH

I'm surprised at Kim's low fundraising number.

Damn, those numbers don't look too good. At least in comparison to a slew of other competitive seat Democratic candidates.

How come there are two Democrats for each? Are they in the primary runoff?

[Virginiá]

Looks like, in terms of raw contributions, Fitzpatrick ended up outraising Wallace in PA-01, with Wallace raising $303,938.61 and Fitzpatrick raising $424,739.53. Wallace is really shaping up to be one of the weakest challengers of the cycle.

Yeah, I called that on primary day. He basically bought the nomination. The probable wave is the only thing keeping his candidacy afloat.

Isn't he considerably wealthy? He could and might just end up cutting himself a check. Cisneros also brought in a pretty weak sum, but I imagine he will just end up self-funding the rest. He definitely has the money to fund his campaign 20 times over.

No disagreement from me about Wallace's overall strength as a candidate, though.

[Virginiá]

D@mnit, he needed to try harder.

I mean, it's nice to look at these numbers and try to feel good about a race based on it, but in the end, even a number of incumbent Republicans who spend a good chunk more than their Democratic challenger will probably still end up losing. Past waves and special elections show enough examples. Some of these Republicans may inhabit seats that are just too D-leaning, or perhaps they are weak incumbents, or perhaps they waste a ton of their money on useless campaign strategies (such as TV ads in August/September), and the list goes on.

Money matters, but only up to a point, with a major one being that more well-known and polarizing politicians achieve more rapidly a state of diminishing returns.

[Virginiá]

^ DKE and RRH are simply too partisan for their ratings to be believed... Both are prepared by "sane" group of "activists" of corresponding parties (but still - activists), so - not really surprising. I, usually, take their predictions, and then calculate a probable real result as something equidistant from both...

Have you seen DKE's ratings so far? I'm not sure if they have changed much since I last looked, but if anything, they were being too conservative, and I saw blowback for it both on and off Atlas. I don't know anything about RRH, but I don't think it's fair in this case to wave DKE off just because of the partisan nature of DK overall.

[Virginiá]

Per Ballotpedia, they are CA-8, GA-8, MI-1, and NC-3.  There are 38 districts with no Republican candidate.  Source

Might be worth adding up the vote deficit for Republicans in those districts from, maybe, 2016, or the last election they ran in (this redistricting cycle) to see what # of votes they would have been expected to get. I imagine a decent chunk of those are probably absurdly Democratic districts where the number of votes they would have added to the R's national PV share wouldn't have been much.

[Virginiá]

Keith Rothfus lost a crimson red district in 2010 of all years. Then he barely won a district that was literally tailor made for him in 2012. Lamb won a gerrymandered R+11 district. The political climate is looking very good for Democrats. Trump barely won the district.

Sounds like a pure toss up to me!

Re-post from AAD, because I think it indirectly speaks to why he is a weak incumbent. Only DC insiders who are completely out of touch have to make ads like this:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-iV6ekGX1XM








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