Last fall, Democrat Terry McAuliffe defied the odds and beat Republican Ken Cuccinelli in Virginia’s gubernatorial race. Democrats, already suffering from President Obama’s flagging approval rating and ominous Senate prospects, began hoping they could tune out other failures and use their strategy in that swing-state race as a template to win tough races in 2014.
To hear several Democratic operatives tell it, the McAuliffe campaign’s technological wizardry “cracked the code” by producing an electorate a lot like 2012′s and proved that those notoriously unreliable “casual Obama voters” — disproportionately young, urban and non-white — could indeed be cajoled to the polls in non-presidential years like 2014.
But drill down on exit poll and precinct-level data, and you’ll find that’s only half the story. CONT.
David Wasserman (Cook Political Report), FiveThirtyEight