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2014 Senate

Sabato's Crystal Ball

The presidency’s political price

Is politics a zero-sum game? Imagine, for a moment, if Sen. John McCain (R) had somehow won the presidency in 2008. How might the country be different? We would not have the Affordable Care Act. Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan would not be on the Supreme Court. And the stimulus passed at the outset of McCain’s presidency would probably have been considerably different from the one passed under President Obama. Oh, and there’s this: Democrats would probably still control the House, and they’d certainly still control the Senate. That’s because the president’s party almost invariably pays a price for holding the White House, a price that can be measured in the loss of House representatives, senators, governors and state legislators. Take a look at Chart 1, which examines the electoral history of the 12 presidents who served after World War II. Generally speaking, presidents left office with their parties having smaller House and Senate caucuses than when they arrived, and also fewer governors and state legislative chambers — often dramatically fewer. All in all, these 12 postwar presidents lost an average of 30 U.S. House seats; six senators; eight governors; total control of six state legislatures; and about 360 state

Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik, and Geoffrey Skelley

Senate 2014 and beyond

After Senate Democrats cut a deal with Republicans to allow confirmation votes on a handful of President Obama’s appointees, it appears likely that the Senate is returning to “filibuster city,” as Burgess Everett of Politico referred to it in an article earlier this week. “There’s already a queue forming of new Obama nominees, and Republicans aren’t about to lay down and let this group go through,” Everett wrote. That the battle lines in the filibuster wars are re-forming after a brief respite is nothing new. Ultimately, both sides have refused to significantly limit the filibuster despite having opportunities to do so in the past decade — the “Gang of 14” deal preserved the filibuster for judicial nominations in 2005 when Republicans threatened to go “nuclear” on Democratic obstruction of President Bush’s nominees, and this most recent deal on Obama’s executive branch appointees preserved the filibuster on non-judicial nominations after the Democrats threatened a nuclear strike of their own in response to Republican obstruction. So the Senate minority’s weapon against the majority — the filibuster, with its 60-vote barrier to action — remains intact. A so-called nuclear option would involve a bare majority of the Senate changing the filibuster rules to

Kyle Kondik

Take two

Last week, we highlighted 10 classic or notable political ads that we thought 2014 candidates might consider studying (or “borrowing,” to use a euphemism for copying) for their upcoming campaigns. We then asked readers to respond with their own ideas. Five of the best suggestions follow, along with some words of wisdom from a seasoned political pro about the limits of political advertising. “Spelling bee” Description: Missing from our initial list were ads that dealt with the spelling of a candidate’s name, which can sometimes lead to creative ads. For instance, former U.S. Rep. Ed Mezvinsky (D-IA) cut an amusing spot saying that while voters might not be able to pronounce his name, they’d know where he stood on the issues (credit to @johndeeth on Twitter). Former Sen. Paul Tsongas (D-MA) also cut some good ads on his last name, among others. But here’s our favorite suggested “name” ad — Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) won an improbable write-in campaign victory in 2010 after losing the Republican primary, and she ran a delightful ad featuring kids at a spelling bee. Who could use it: Any write-in candidate would do well to copy the Murkowski spelling bee ad, and someone with a

Larry J. Sabato and Kyle Kondik

Rinse and Repeat

In American politics, everything old can be made new again, including the themes and attacks in candidates’ campaign ads. Some of the most notable presidential ads of the past few cycles were basically just copies of old ads. For instance, Hillary Clinton’s most famous ad in her 2008 Democratic primary campaign against Barack Obama featured the “3 a.m.” phone call, which emphasized her experience. Well, 24 years earlier, Walter Mondale used a similar ad, featuring a phone, in his primary race against Gary Hart — “Mondale: This president will know what he’s doing, and that’s the difference between Gary Hart and Walter Mondale.” In 2004, George W. Bush ran a tough ad against John Kerry featuring wolves gathering in a forest, a symbol of terrorist threats in the first post-Sept. 11 presidential election. That ad was similar to a Ronald Reagan commercial from his 1984 campaign, in which a bear symbolizing the Soviet Union threatened an armed American hunter. Both ads have a similar look and feel, and they were both run by Republicans who were trying to make their Democratic opponents look weak. As we survey the developing House, Senate and governors races, we thought it would be fun

Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik, and Geoffrey Skelley

A Republican Senate? It’s much easier to imagine now

Republicans have not won the Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Max Baucus (D) since the advent of popular Senate elections. That they are now in position to do so speaks volumes about the importance of ex-Gov. Brian Schweitzer’s (D) surprising decision to pass on the race. Schweitzer opting against a run is arguably the biggest development in the race for the Senate so far this cycle. Sure, while three Democratic incumbents in seats that Mitt Romney won in last year’s presidential race decided to retire — the aforementioned Baucus, along with Sens. Tim Johnson (SD) and Jay Rockefeller (WV) — all of them were probably only at best slightly better than 50/50 bets to retain their seats. Schweitzer, who is more popular in Big Sky Country than his rival Baucus, probably would have been better positioned than the incumbent to win the seat. Had Schweitzer run, we probably would have switched the toss-up seat to leans Democratic, but now that he isn’t, we have instead switched it to LEANS REPUBLICAN. The likeliest Republican candidate appears to be Rep. Steve Daines, first elected last year. Daines was making noise about running even before Schweitzer made his decision, and some prominent

Kyle Kondik

Senate 2014: One direction, but how far?

This concludes our four-part update of the 2014 electoral environment. First, we proposed that 2014 might end up being a little like 1986; next, we described the narrow battlefield in the House and why Republicans might have a better chance to make gains than Democrats; then, we noted that a high level of gubernatorial incumbency might limit turnover; finally, below, we break down the state of play in the Senate. As a programming note, we’re taking off next week: The Crystal Ball will next hit your inbox on Thursday, July 11. So we hope you’ll join us in celebrating our independence by declaring your independence from politics for a long weekend. — The Editors It’s too soon to see which way the Senate winds will be blowing in the fall of 2014. But unless conditions somehow change drastically, one thing seems certain, even 18 months out: The seat flips will be mainly or entirely in one Red direction. Right now, Democrats aren’t seriously contesting any Republican seat (excluding New Jersey), while the GOP has an excellent chance to flip two Democratic seats (South Dakota and West Virginia) and at least a fair chance in four other states (Alaska, Arkansas, Louisiana

Larry J. Sabato, Kyle Kondik, and Geoffrey Skelley

NOTES ON THE STATE OF POLITICS

Massa-snooze-etts: A steady special election comes to a close The Massachusetts special Senate election is next Tuesday, and despite a lot of noise to the contrary, the race is not particularly close, nor has it been at any point of the contest. Rep. Ed Markey (D) has been and is a fairly strong favorite to defeat ex-Navy SEAL Gabriel Gomez (R). We’ve consistently held our rating of this race at “likely Democratic,” and that’s where it remains. Markey — at best an average candidate — has benefited from being a Democrat in a Democratic state, and Gomez has failed to morph into Scott Brown 2.0. Democrats, leery of a repeat of the 2010 Brown upset, have poured a significant amount of outside money into the contest, while the Republican outside groups have largely stayed out. The failure of national Republicans to invest in the race told us that they did not believe the race was really winnable. The public polling in this race has been pretty much static. In Huffington Post’s Pollster average, Markey has held a steady, high-single-digit lead on Gomez. On May 1 (right after the special election primaries), Markey was up 9.2 percentage points in the average;

UVA Center for Politics

COURSE CORRECTIONS: A MIDTERM THEORY

Over the next several weeks, we’ll run full updates on 2014’s House, Senate and gubernatorial races. But as an introduction we wanted to offer a little history about the ebb and flow of American politics from Ronald Reagan’s last midterm in 1986, a seemingly odd election that saw Democrats make big gains in the Senate while Republicans picked up many governor’s mansions. In the absence of major national forces that year, the map (in the case of the Senate) and incumbency or lack thereof (in the case of the governors) seemed to play outsized roles in the outcome. What might that mean for 2014? Read on. — The Editors On Nov. 3, 1986 — one day before the U.S. midterm elections — a Lebanese magazine first reported on what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. By the morning after the election, the scandal involving the sale of weapons to Iran in order to secure the release of American hostages held by Iranian terrorists in Lebanon hit newspapers in the United States. Iran-Contra did damage to President Reagan’s reputation, although from a strictly electoral standpoint, it’s hard to argue it had much of an effect: The story broke in the United

Kyle Kondik

Notes on the State of Politics

2016 Presidential Update: The newest shiny object Last week, intense speculation centered on freshman Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) possible presidential aspirations. The revelation has prompted all sorts of reactions, including a positive one from the unlikeliest of sources. While some have asked questions about his constitutional eligibility to run for the highest office in the land, Cruz’s strong conservative appeal could very well make him a force in the next presidential race. For that reason, he deserves a place on our list of 2016 GOP hopefuls, though he starts near the bottom. In some ways, the rise of someone like Cruz into the Republican presidential discussion is unsurprising. Cruz is the newest shiny object for Tea Party members and constitutional conservatives in the GOP, supplementing those who prefer Rand Paul or Marco Rubio (though the shine is off Rubio because he favors immigration reform). It is a reminder that in the next three years, even newer, shinier objects may come to the fore. For example, if Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli (R) wins the state’s governorship this November, it is an easy prediction that he will consider a presidential run, with strong backing from his intense supporters. Barack Obama’s promotion

UVA Center for Politics

YEARNING FOR THE GOLDEN AGE OF CRISIS COVERAGE…THAT NEVER EXISTED

There were real victims in the Boston bombings last week — the dead, the wounded, the grieving families, the terrorized communities — but there was substantial collateral damage done to news media credibility. We’ll leave to others the listing of specific winners and losers. Goodness knows, there have been enough scathing reviews published already. Innocent “bag men” were plastered onto front pages, arrests that had not occurred were ballyhooed by several news organizations, and widespread media speculation about the groups behind the terrorism was dead wrong. Critics say it is just another example of the decline of journalistic ethics in our anything-goes era of live, continuous broadcasting, blogging and tweeting. Why can’t today’s reporters meet the same high standards achieved by their illustrious predecessors in the golden age of journalism? Well, the answer may be that the golden age never existed. If you doubt this, take a look back to the start of live TV reporting of national tragedy, the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Texas, on Friday, Nov. 22, 1963. The coverage of this watershed event has often been hailed as the epitome of sober, cautious treatment of a big breaking story. Yet this is partly

Larry J. Sabato

Senate update: Baucus leaving could be blessing in plain sight

So maybe Brian Schweitzer really is senile enough for the U.S. Senate. After the retirement of Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT) earlier this week, the former Democratic governor is certainly at the top of the Democrats’ wish list to run for the now-open seat. Schweitzer, who was very popular during his recently concluded two-term governorship, has repeatedly thrown cold water on the idea of serving in Congress: “I am not goofy enough to be in the House, and I’m not senile enough to be in the Senate,” he has said. But after the Baucus news broke, Schweitzer told John Adams of the Great Falls Tribune that, “I’m not ruling anything out, and I’m not ruling anything in.” Baucus retiring has prompted us to move this race from “leans Democratic” to “toss-up,” but if Schweitzer runs for the seat, he will start as the favorite. It is quite possible that Schweitzer would have defeated Baucus in a primary, and polling has indicated that Schweitzer probably would be a better general election candidate than Baucus. Baucus has been in the Senate for 35 years; there would have been a lot of ammo in the record for his opponents to use. If Schweitzer does

Kyle Kondik

Senate 2014: Blowouts as bellwethers?

Consider these assessments of two 2012 Senate races, from Roll Call’s election preview published about a month before Election Day last year: Nebraska: “The Senate race, once expected to be one of the top races of the cycle, has slipped away from Democrats ever since state Sen. Deb Fischer surprised many — even some of her own staffers — by winning the GOP nomination.” North Dakota: “If there is one race this cycle that proves campaigns and candidates matter, it’s this one… [T]his once-sleepy race has become one of the most competitive of the cycle.” File these away. If a month or two before Election Day 2014, the common descriptions of the Senate races in South Dakota and West Virginia sound like Nebraska — where the Democratic candidate is widely regarded as a longshot — then Republicans might be on the way to winning the Senate. If they sound more like North Dakota — essentially, a toss-up that could (and did) go down to the wire — then Democrats likely will once again have staved off the GOP in the Upper Chamber. That’s because in the wake of Sen. Tim Johnson’s (D-SD) unsurprising retirement announcement Tuesday, the Mount Rushmore State

Kyle Kondik

Multi-Member Districts: Just a Thing of the Past?

Given that at least a third of Americans identify strongly with neither major party, it seems anomalous that the two major parties boast all but two of the 535 members of Congress, 49 of 50 state governors, 99% of the nearly 7,400 state legislators nationwide and every American president for more than a century-and-a-half. Many third-party supporters are convinced that Democrats and Republicans at the state and national level collude to restrict third-party ballot access and make fundraising more difficult for third parties and their candidates. Regardless of other ways the major parties reinforce their electoral duopoly, their real baked-in advantage is purely structural; namely, the near-universal use on the national level and widespread use on the state level of single-member districts with plurality rule. With the exception of Georgia and Louisiana, which use run-off elections for U.S. House and Senate seats, and Maine and Nebraska, which use the congressional district rule for allocation of all but two of their presidential electors, general elections for Congress and the presidency are winner-take-all, plurality-rule contests. As Maurice Duverger predicted long ago, systems dominated by single-member districts, plurality-rule elections should naturally gravitate into two-party systems. Is it time to scale back the use

Thomas F. Schaller

“No Mas,” No Problem?

Dick Durbin (D-IL) is that rarest of Democrats these days — a senator who apparently contemplates but passes on retirement. While the Senate majority whip, who will turn 70 a couple weeks after Election Day 2014, is gearing up to run for a fourth term, four other Democrats have announced their retirements — Sens. Tom Harkin (IA), Frank Lautenberg (NJ), Carl Levin (MI) and Jay Rockefeller (WV) — and another, ex-Sen. John Kerry (MA), left the Senate after winning confirmation as secretary of state. A likely retiree, Sen. Tim Johnson (D-SD), has not yet made an announcement. Such is life for Senate Democrats the past few cycles. In an institution where it’s common to overstay one’s welcome, members of the majority party have been retiring in droves this cycle and last despite, potentially, being able to run for another term. In 2012, Democratic Sens. Daniel Akaka (HI), Jeff Bingaman (NM), Kent Conrad (ND), Herb Kohl (WI), Joe Lieberman (the Connecticut independent who caucused with Democrats), Ben Nelson (NE) and Jim Webb (VA) all hung ‘em up. Would Democrats prefer their incumbents to run? Sure. But the dangers posed to the incumbent party in open seat contests can be overstated, while

Kyle Kondik

Why Section 5 is Still Needed: Racial Polarization and the Voting Rights Act in the 21st Century

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the latest challenge to what many consider the most important civil rights law of the past century — the 1965 Voting Rights Act. The challenge involves Section 5 of the law, which requires nine states — all but two in the South — to obtain prior approval from the Justice Department before implementing any changes in voting laws, regulations or procedures. The Voting Rights Act, including Section 5, was last renewed in 2006. At that time, overwhelming majorities of Democrats and Republicans in both the House and Senate voted to renew the law for 25 years based on extensive evidence of continued attempts to suppress or dilute the votes of racial and ethnic minorities in the states covered by Section 5. Despite this legislative record, the justice’s questions and comments during last week’s oral arguments suggest that there is a good chance that the court will vote to strike down Section 5. The five conservative justices on the court, including Chief Justice John Roberts, were clearly skeptical about the continued need for federal supervision of the states covered by Section Five. At one point, Roberts asked whether “the citizens in

Alan I. Abramowitz