Mark Schauer, Democratic nominee for Governor (Michigan). Currently locked in a tossup race
Above, you see a photo of one Mark Schauer. Schauer is a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, representing Michigan's 7th district for a single term between 2009-2011.
Schauer's placement at the top of this essay was not just to highlight his hard-fought 2014 campaign to replace incumbent Republican Gov. Rick Snyder, though it is definitely one of the biggest races to watch on election night. His visage graces the top of the page because Schauer certainly knows a thing or two about electoral "waves," which is the topic of this Sunday essay.
You see, Schauer was ushered into the Congress as a result of the Democratic wave election in 2008, when the Democrats added nearly two dozen pickups to the 30 they had won in the 2006 Democratic wave election. And he was ushered out just two years later in the historically high Republican wave election, when the GOP erased two consecutive cycles of Democratic gains, and then some.
Today, a lofty number commentators both on the right and center (and an occasional whisper from the left of center) are forecasting a Republican wave. Their only bone of contention, it would seem, is the height and potential destructive capability (to the Democrats) of said wave.
Which brings us back to Schauer. He is challenging a first-term Republican Gov. Rick Snyder in Michigan. In a Republican year in 2010, Snyder easily dispatched Lansing Mayor Virg Bernero by nearly 20 points. This time around, polls show Schauer is right on Snyder's heels. Which would lead to a basic question that invites a more complicated response:
If this were really a "wave" election for the GOP, would Schauer have a ghost of a chance to win?
It's a fair question, and deserves a thorough response. Which you will get, right after the jump.
Justifications for the "Republican Wave" theory
Decrying bad punditry is a time-honored, and often justified, tradition. So here is where I play against type a bit: the better ones don't usually make sweeping electoral generalizations by pulling them wholly out of their backsides.
So, when there are more than just the "usual suspects" who are calling for 2014 to be a great Republican year, they have reasons for doing so beyond the usual hallmarks of crap punditry (cheerleading, ineptitude, failure to read polling data, etc).
The primary reason many analysts are pooh-poohing Democratic prospects in 2014 begins and ends, in no small part, with Barack Obama. The president's flagging approval numbers are not a media invention—they are real, and they are worthy of some concern. If you look at this compendium of approval ratings for the president, you'll see that if you average his past 10 polls, he sits at an approval rating that is a shade over 41 percent. That is almost 9 points lower than pre-election 2012, and even about 4-5 points lower than pre-election 2010. And the fact remains that, in recent history, at least, it is nearly impossible to find a midterm election in which a president polling that meekly saw his party thrive in the midterms.
Another argument for the "GOP Wave" theory is that a country that is generally pessimistic about the course of the nation will take it out on the party of its most recognizable figure: the president. And, for those who haven't surveyed the recent polling, the right track/wrong track numbers are abysmal. Depending on the pollster, voters are anywhere between 10-20 points less optimistic about the course of the nation now than they were two years ago. The right track/wrong track metric is about on par, and may even be a few points worse, than what we saw in 2010.
Finally, there is the persistent issue of the "enthusiasm gap." Democrats have long been convinced that if they could just harness enough of the presidential year electorate in the midterms, their path to the majority would be eased substantially. Of course, they are right about this. Polls do hint at this gap: a solid recent exemplar was last week's CNN/ORC poll in Arkansas, which showed a substantial edge for incumbent Democrat Mark Pryor among all registered voters, but showed his challenger (Republican Tom Cotton) leading by 2 points among likely voters.
Issues with those justifications—Why the "wave" is not inevitable
Earlier in the week, Aaron Blake of The Fix had a highly readable piece where he dug into some recent data from the ABC/WaPo poll. The poll had generally been seen as a net negative for the Democrats: Obama's job approval was languishing (disapproval had risen to a near-high water mark of 54 percent), and the generic ballot was edging in the GOP's direction among likely voters.. But Blake found something hiding within the numbers that hadn't received nearly enough attention in the public conversation:
But tucked inside Tuesday's new Washington Post-ABC News poll is a semi-encouraging figure for Democrats: Among the clear majority of Americans who disapprove of Obama (54 percent), a little bit less than three-quarters of them say they are voting Republican in the coming election -- just 72 percent.
I say "just" 72 percent, because that's in contrast to the 85 percent of Obama approvers who say they will vote for Democrats. In other words, opposing Obama is not an analogue for voting Republican in the upcoming election. And that's why Democrats still have at least a fighting chance to keep the Senate.
In other words: historically, logic would dictate that if you approve of a president's job performance, you will support his party at the ballot box in midterms, as that is the only tangible way to register support for your president when he is not formally on the ballot. Conversely, when the voter disapproves of the president, logic would equally dictate that they would register their dismay by voting against the president's party.
And that is happening again this year. Just not as uniformly as it has in the past. And therein lies a critical point. In the past, a president with 54-percent job approval would be an albatross to his party. This year, though, given that as much as 30 percent of the anti-Obama electorate could vote Democratic, that could be enough to make a substantial difference.
Blake sums up the reason why that "approval vs. vote gap" has developed this year very succinctly:
Obama has a sizable 13-point gap—likely in large part because the Republican Party is held in such low regard these days. So while approving or disapproving of the president was a pretty good vote indicator in 2006 and 2010, it appears less so this year.
You could make a compelling argument that presidential approval (or, really, the lack thereof) is what drove the wave elections. The reason? Both times, the president had greater disapproval than approval, and equal proportions voted according to their judgment on the president. This time? The Democrats appear to be keeping more of Obama's supporters than they are losing the votes of Obama detractors. And with Obama averaging a net-negative approval spread in the mid-to-high single digits, that ability to "run ahead" of the president will be essential.
Blake's reference to the unpopularity of the Republicans is also critical to understanding this cycle. It is not that voters will automatically hold Republicans in contempt: we know in 2010, for example, that Democrats held a slightly better favorability spread than the Republicans, even as they were getting smooshed nationwide.
But there is a key difference in 2014. Whatever discontent may exist in the electorate cannot be laid solely at the doorstep of the Democrats. The Republicans could run as the "outsider party," and that allowed them to harness an outsized share of those "wrong track" voters, even if said voters continued to have reservations about the GOP.
In 2014? No such luck. Republicans control the House, and the majority of the governorships and state legislatures. And voters know it. Republicans might be slightly insulated, because of the tendency of voters to fixate on the presidency, but they will not be able to credibly run as the "outsiders" this time around.
This, too, could play into voter enthusiasm, thus lessening the enthusiasm gap. Anger can be a suppressor of the vote, but it can also act as a motivator. Voters on the right might be enthused about the prospect of heading to the polls and using their vote to "send a message to Obama," but there will also be a number of disaffected left-of-center voters, eager to send a message to an unpopular Republican governor or state legislature. We have actually seen a fascinating concrete example: In Wisconsin, last month's Marquette Law School poll (quickly becoming the "gold standard" poll in the Badger State) had an eye-popping top line. Republican Gov. Scott Walker, long a bane of progressive voters in the state, led Democrat Mary Burke among all registered voters. But he actually trailed by 2 points among likely voters. That's right, a Democratic performance in an election poll improved when a likely voter screen was added. That does not happen all that often.
Geography, the Senate, and "Building" a Wave
If this were truly a "wave year" where Democrats were the victims of the undertow, there would be Democrats, probably a number of them, who would be vulnerable in swing states. And while many are vulnerable, it seems like a huge stretch to say any of them are truly underdogs. Perhaps the best case could be made in Iowa, where half the polls taken this summer have either been tied or shown Republican Joni Ernst in the lead for the Senate race. Some would cite North Carolina, more so than the Hawkeye State. On the margins, they may be right (and our own poll model suggests as much). But a look at polling in North Carolina shows that, since the start of the summer, incumbent Democratic Sen. Kay Hagan has led more than twice as many polls there as her challenger, Republican Thom Tillis. It's damned close and Hagan could easily lose. But only a GOP cheerleader would declare her or Braley to be a goner, nor would it be easy to chalk off other Democrats in Obama '12 Democratic states like Mark Udall (Colorado) or Gary Peters (Michigan).
Which is precisely my point. If this were a true wave election, the whole window would shift. Marginal seats in normal years are locked-in pickups for the party benefiting from the "wave," and swing seats become imperiled enough that a solid number of them would be goners, too.
Think back (painful as it may be for Democrats) to 2010. Democrats remained hopeful to the end, but the prospects of senators like Russ Feingold in Wisconsin and challengers like Paul Hodes in New Hampshire were decidedly bleak by the summer. It was apparent that trouble was brewing.
Where do you see that phenomenon this year? Solely in states where Democrats typically struggle, in any event.
And therein lies one big part of the "wave" puzzle. What some are interpreting, and honestly misinterpreting, as Republican momentum is owed in no small part to a truly shitty map for the Democrats. Open Democratic seats in West Virginia, Montana, and South Dakota? Of the three, the best-performing state for Obama 2012 was a whopping 41.7 percent in Montana. That's not going to contribute to a lot of champagne corks popping on election night. Add to the list three incumbents who have had to work hard for elections in the past, or live in totally hostile territory (Landrieu, Begich, and Pryor). Their three states went for Romney with 58, 55, and 61 percent of the vote, respectively.
It is on that map that Democrats had to defend a 55-45 majority.
And therein lies one of the true absurdities of all this "wave" discussion. Our own Daily Kos Elections Poll Explorer (which you should bookmark, if you haven't already) gives Democrats, at present, a better than 50/50 shot at gaining gubernatorial seats. Meanwhile, most estimates of the U.S. House forecast, at best, single-digit gains for the Republicans. That, too, is also owed to some unfortunate geography (namely, Democratic retirements in some very red districts). The battle for state legislatures do not appear to be one-sided, either. And the latter are still reasonably competitive despite an all-in effort in 2011-2012 for Republicans to help lock in their gains with some truly inspired acts of gerrymandering.
Which raises a question that underlies this entire "wave" debate: Shouldn't an electoral wave, properly understood, impact more than just one arena of elections?
In 2016, hypothetically, if the Democrats were to win the presidency in a landslide, but did no better than holding in the Congress and state legislative chambers, would we call that a "Democratic wave" year? That'd be absurd. Debating whether this election is a "wave election" is no less absurd. Perhaps some, as Larry Sabato's election team did this week, would choose to frame it specifically as a "wave" in the Senate. But if it is solely limited to the Senate, can we really call it a "wave?"
Which brings us back to Mark Schauer. He's a heck of a good candidate, and he is an excellent counter to the "wave" hysteria. Rick Snyder is an elected Republican governor who, while he has some real dings on his ledger, does not have the automatic disqualifications that, say, Tom Corbett has in Pennsylvania (which is why he is all but a goner). If this were truly a "Republican wave", a la 2010, would Schauer even be in the game? An average of the last five polls in the race shows that Snyder has a 0.6 point "edge" over Schauer. But in the wave in 2010, Snyder beat the Virg Bernero by a 58-40 margin. Perhaps Schauer is nearly 20 points better as a candidate, but that seems less likely than saying that, quite simply, this ain't 2010.
A good Republican year in the Senate may well happen, but it would seem to be owed more to geography than partisan momentum.
Conclusion
All this discussion, for what it's worth, fails to even address the best argument against the "wave" election. The polling, really, doesn't seem to support it very well. A lot of ink has been spilled on congressional generic polling, but our own contributor here at DKE, dreaminonempty, graphically showed us earlier this month that the 2014 graph looks a lot more like the recent non-wave midterm (2002) than it does any of the two wave years (2006/2010).
And, race-by-race, on a micro-level, it isn't supported, either. You'd see vulnerable seats already chalked off, but really, outside of the three Democratic-held open Senate seats that look deeply imperiled, none of the remaining seats is simply a done deal.
If you look at the seven Democratic held-seats that are either tossups or leans Democratic in our DKE Senate race ratings, there isn't one where the Democratic candidate has not led at least 38 percent of the time in race polls since July 1. In four of them (Colorado, Michigan, Iowa, and North Carolina), the Democratic candidate has led in the majority of the polls since that date:
Percentage of polls led by Democratic candidate since 7/1/14 in the top ten vulnerable Democratic seats (discounting tied polls)
West Virginia (Tennant): 0
Montana (Curtis): 0
South Dakota (Weiland): 0
Arkansas (Pryor): 38
Alaska (Begich): 40
Louisiana (Landrieu): 50
Iowa (Braley): 67
North Carolina (Hagan): 73
Colorado (Udall): 75
Michigan (Open): 88
Now, leading in polls 70 percent of the time is no guarantee of victory, especially when margins are tight (which is why, as an example, our Poll Explorer model in North Carolina actually is considerably less certain about Hagan's re-election, though she is still north of 50 percent).
But this doesn't look like a set of data that screams "Republican ascendancy."
It screams, more than anything, "three brutal retirements on red turf, coupled with some incumbents who won by single digits in a great Democratic year. Oh, and Mark Pryor, because Republicans inexplicably let him run unopposed last time."
Which, not for nothing, we have known for some time. And therein lies the lesson. Waves, in the ocean and in politics, make themselves very clear close to crashing. It's a bit of a challenge to suggest that this election has changed dramatically as we have come ever closer to Election Day. Three Democratic open seats look very bleak, but they've looked pretty bleak for a long time. The GOP has only a small handful of vulnerable incumbents. But they have so few of them, so we've known that for a long time, too.
The Senate map is brutal for Democrats, but we have pretty much known that since the confetti was swept up in November 2008. To draw larger conclusions about partisan momentum, based on a map that we've known favored one party over another for six years, seems to be an incredible reach.