… Democrats have a turnout problem because they have a motivation problem. In 2010, their biggest problem was that they ran into an energized Republican electorate. The rise of the tea party and hostility to Obama’s health-care law brought Republicans to the polls while Democrats stayed home. Obama’s vaunted political […] Read more »
The grim NBC News/WSJ survey: The ‘14 reality is likely worse for Democrats
Democratic after-action reports on their Florida-13 special election loss are clear: they lost because they didn’t turn out the vote. While there is much parsing on the who, what, when and where of Obamacare, the facts are that Republicans showed up while Democrats didn’t. … The internals of the most […] Read more »
America Exports Democracy, Just Not the Way You Think
… Like bluegrass and Abstract Expressionism, the party primary is a unique creation of the American 20th century, an alternative to the “smoke-filled rooms” that dominated politics in the 19th. In the rest of the world, however, parties effectively remained clubs, bounded by pledges and membership fees, with responsibility for […] Read more »
Democrats pinning Fla. special election loss on dismal turnout effort
Democrats spent Wednesday trying to explain away a disappointing loss in a Florida special congressional election that they had been expected to win. … Already facing a difficult task in reclaiming the House majority, some Democrats said the loss in a district that President Obama won twice should serve as […] Read more »
Midterm Falloff By the Numbers
One thing that the FL-13 special election results should encourage everyone to do is to get very serious about the phenomenon I write about metronomically here: the “midterm falloff problem” for Democrats. We don’t have exit polls for FL-13, so we can’t figure out exactly who turned out and who […] Read more »
Midterm Signals and Noise
… The current consensus in Washington is that 2014 will be a Republican election – that they will gain some seats in the U.S. House, that they have a realistic chance of recapturing a bare majority in the U.S. Senate and that they will continue to enjoy a sizable edge […] Read more »