Democratic senators are pushing for significant changes to how the party runs campaigns after its efforts to make major gains in Congress’ upper chamber faltered for the third cycle in a row.“We’d be fools not to engage in some amount of self-reflection,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.).The party had hopes of winning a dozen Republican-held seats on Election Day after spending hundreds of millions of dollars of both grassroots and big-donor money to put the GOP on defense. Instead, Republicans have swept most of the competitive races, and Democrats have only netted a single seat after losing incumbent Sen. Doug Jones in Alabama and ousting Republicans in Colorado and Arizona.
Point One - the mainstream media is still trumpeting a Democratic victory, but political insiders, particularly are telling a much different story and a more accurate one. This will be a razor thin victory or defeat with much riding on the results of suspect practices such as ballot harvesting, open early voting, and dependence on counting results from a handful of Blue controlled counties where errors or fraud are more easily hidden. Whatever the top line result turns out to be, down ticket, Democrats faced strong headwinds. Given their dominance in fundraising (about a 45% advantage), Democrats had reason to expect good outcomes down ticket. Instead, they gained only a single Senate seat, insufficient for control. And in the House it was much worse. They have net lost seven seats so far with an expectation that their majority will shrink further.
I have seen hints about the internal angst from some blog sites which are consistent with HuffPosts reporting here and which are inconsistent with the MSM message.
But senators were particularly upset by losses in Iowa and Maine, where candidates they saw as strong contenders ended up losing by significant margins.
“There’s just become such a convergence between how presidential candidates do and how Senate candidates do. It doesn’t mean you can’t buck the trend, but it means there has to be something that pulls you over the top when your presidential candidate is losing,” said Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen, who chaired the DSCC during the 2018 election cycle. “I really think it’s important not to jump to conclusions in races like this.”
Point Two - Van Hollen is expressing a general truism, if top line candidate does well, there are generally coat tails which bring along down ticket candidates of the same party. It is not always true. Obama tended to do well at the top line but his coattails were narrow or even non-existent in off-cycle elections. Disastrously so after his first election.
Van Hollen is expressing frustration that their candidate, being seen among the party faithful as winning convincingly, did not bring along any of the strong down ticket candidates of whom they had high expectations.
Accepting the general dictum that as the top line goes, so goes the down ticket, there is a corresponding mystery for Republicans. The down ticket did well while the top line struggled. Top line brought in more voters than the last cycle but maybe not enough to defeat Biden.
This feeds the suspicion of systemic vote fraud - if the down ticket results are so good, why is the top line not winning as well? Its a good question. Adages are not laws. There are exceptions.
But when you add to the fact that it is much easier to generate fraud at the top line than the down ticket, suspicions deepen. Top line races almost always have more votes, making it easier to disguise small numbers of fraud or manipulation. Think of the ease issue this way. Is it easier to spot half a dozen swimmers without swimsuits (the fraud) in the water on a beach with a dozen people or on a beach where there are a couple of hundred people?
Montana Sen. Jon Tester, who watched Gov. Steve Bullock lose by 10 percentage points in what was supposed to be a close race, was focused on fixing the party’s internal polls. Tester, who chaired the DSCC in 2016, said the party’s surveys were off four years ago and were even worse this cycle.
“We need to get some answers on what’s going on the last few cycles with polling,” said Tester. “I got on the phone with many a donor and told them Montana was tied or within the margin, and you need to send money. And it wasn’t. That’s false advertising. That means we’re putting funds in places that aren’t working.”
Point Three - Forecasts were dreadfully wrong because they relied primarily on polling surveys. Polling surveys which performed even worse than in 2016. There are many sources of failure among forecasts but if polling surveys are not providing meaningful information, then the forecasts are going to broadly unuseful. Not because the models are necessarily bad but because of garbage in, garbage out.
This was pretty well understood in the 2016 debacle. And yet no one changed the forecasting process to take into account garbage inputs. And the garbage inputs got worse. My suspicion is that the cost of doing very solid and meaningfully useful surveys is probably in the hundreds of thousands if not millions. Very larger sample sizes, by orders not just factors. And far more stringent randomization which is extremely hard to do.
My hypothesis is that the small 1,000 person polls are so comparatively cheap and can be done relatively quickly, and are so good at generating media views, that even though they are garbage, they are still far more worthwhile than the cost of large structured and disciplined surveys which would actually tell you something useful.
As an example, when you do a 1,000 person survey across the nation which includes a sub question on the Hispanic demographic, you only get roughly 150 Hispanics in your survey. If you are lucky. Pollers, if they come up short, often will use what they got and then weight it to the 150 they needed. So only 120 Hispanics surveyed (as an example) will do double duty to represent the opinion of the 150 who were needed.
And even if it is 150, is that sufficiently random or sizable enough to pick up on further relevant sub-questions? No, Definitely and statistically No.
Many in the mainstream media have expressed astonishment at the Hispanic drift towards Trump or Republicans. But Hispanics, on average, tend to be pretty strongly family oriented, religious, hard working, self-reliant, patriotic, and socially conservative (as are African Americans as well). Those attributes fit a lot more comfortably within the Republican ethos than the Democratic platform. Are you going to pick up any of that on a 150 person survey across the whole nation? No.
There is a structural problem in the media and among political campaigns. They cannot afford the expense of the type of surveying that would yield meaningful information. They need the jolt of new information. So they go with the cheap garbage until the pain of inaccuracy becomes sufficient to change their ways.
Murphy said he was hoping to refocus small-dollar donor energy and cash toward “building permanent political infrastructures in every state rather than just channeling it toward the flavor-of-the-week candidate.”
“Why does Nevada move into the Democratic column more quickly than other Southwestern states?” Murphy asked rhetorically. “It’s because Harry Reid built the permanent political organization. Why does Georgia look different than Florida and North Carolina? Because of Stacey Abrams.”
Point Four - The Bubble is astonishingly strong. Stacey Abrams built a permanent political operation in Georgia? Not that I have ever heard. Even among Democrats her appeal is lukewarm. They love someone who can become the darling of national media but what has she done for the party in Georgia. What has she built? Absolutely nothing. That Murphy would put her in the same category as Reid is truly astonishing.
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