Tag: campaign 2014

IT’S A TRAP: Obama delays executive action on immigration

~ Jim Eltringham ~ 1 Comment

There won’t be any executive action on immigration policy before the November elections, according to President Barack Obama. Nationally, the issue has looked like a loser for Democrats, so it seems like a pretty obvious move.  Delaying action protects Democrats from being saddled with yet another unpopular Obama policy.  But as one of the great military leaders of our time said, “It’s a trap!”

For Democrats running in tough states where independents can be persuaded (and weak Republicans can be persuaded to stay home) based on immigration issues, this move is exactly what it looks like. But it also gives GOP candidates a false gift: the ability to claim that the looming threat of mass amnesty of illegal immigrants looms over the nation. That’s not a bad issue – for now. But remember that in 2002 and 2004, protecting state-sponsored traditional marriage was a good issue for Republicans; by 2012 the issue had reversed. In addition to the light cover offered to 2014 Democrats, Obama’s immigration delay paves the way for future Democrats to point to 2014 GOP rhetoric as evidence of racism. All it would take is for one candidate to Mourdock up a debate by talking about “the Mexican menace at our border” or some such crap.  It could also work as a shorter-term micro-issue: Democrats could identify pro-immigration pockets of both parties and drum up the issue as an example of Congressional intransigence. It wouldn’t be a stretch with the data infrastructure that’s already in place.

The messaging on this issue, as with all issues, has to be nuanced; the do-nothing message cuts both ways. Immigration could be one more issue on which the President has chosen not to lead. And that opens the door for campaign-trail discussions about new solutions that use the best of Republican and Democrat ideas – and casts aside the worst ideas, like wholesale amnesty or the President’s refusal to compromise on anything. The real opportunity for Republicans on immigration is to re-orient public positioning on the issue for 2014 and beyond.

 

The NRSC’s Horrible, Horrible Video Game

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

The NRSC released Mission Majority this week, a simple online game with an 8-bit look that is just absolutely awful.

The game follows the adventures of an elephant named Giopi – like GOP, get it? – who is collecting keys and flipping switches to help the Republican party take back the Senate.  It’s obviously pure click bait, intended to draw in people and maybe squeeze out a donation.  It is kind of fun to play if you’re looking to waste some time at work.

The real problem is that the NRSC is not a video game company, so making a fun little time-waster isn’t enough. With 64 days to go until Election Day, everything released by a party committee has to have a message. Giopi’s mission is, as the game suggests, winning back the majority of the US Senate.  If you beat the game, you get a congratulatory note about how taking back the Senate will mean the end of the “red tape” and “regulations” holding America back.

“Red tape?” “Regulations?” Is that the compelling case the GOP is making to American voters this year?

People have lost their health coverage or been forced to pay more. Hourly workers are seeing their shifts cut short because the money isn’t there to pay them. Middle East terrorists are operating with no fear of retribution.

Maybe it’s just a game, but the NRSC’s tone deafnesses and inability to verbalize what they can offer the electorate in such an easy setting should be unsettling to anyone thinking about cracking their wallet open.

 

The “Against the Spread” Election

~ Jim Eltringham ~ 1 Comment

Princeton University’s Sam Wang thinks Democrats have a 65% chance of holding onto the Senate.  Republicans should be spreading that news far and wide.

Unfortunately for the GOP, most of the news media seems to take a Senate flip as fait accompli.  The concept of the “point spread” – a staple of fall once football season kicks off – applies to elections, too.  Expectations are the point spreads of politics.  For example: Conventional wisdom in January stated that Sens. Mark Pryor and Mary Landrieu were toast.  But both are legacy politicians in states which favor such things, making the incompetence and indifference of their party’s nominal leader less relevant.  Fewer people than anticipated in Arkansas or Louisiana seem ready to link their November vote to the fact that the last year of the Obama Presidency has looked like a mix between a Jerry Lewis movie and that scene in Office Space where Peter stops pretending to care about his job.

Should Pryor and Landrieu pull off razor-thin victories, pundits will cluck that even in red states, Republicans were unable to win enough support to topple vulnerable incumbents.  On a national scale, if Republicans fail to win the Senate despite major media outlets anticipating a flip, there will be similar indictments of the GOP’s messages and strategies.

Now would be a good time to temper national expectations.  Party officials should talk about the lack of a national wave, while pointing out that frustration has been building for some time.  Political reporters should hear a steady drumbeat of phrases like:

  • “This isn’t 2010.”
  • “People are frustrated with all of Washington right now, we’ll see how individual races shake out.”
  • “A Senate flip would be pretty drastic based on the numbers of seats we’d have to pick up. We have some great candidates, but that might be a little bit of a stretch.”

A round of stories right around Labor Day throwing cold water on the national excitement wouldn’t be the worst thing (though it might have been better about a month ago). By framing a Senate switch as drastic, historic, and improbably, the GOP could have been in a position to claim an even greater popular mandate heading into 2015.

As it is now, a Republican majority is something the chattering class are expecting – which would frame even an appreciable gain of five Senate seats a crushing national loss.

Brat vs. McDaniel

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Tea Partiers should be watching Mississippi and Virginia very closely and watching the difference between two upstart candidates.

In Mississippi, conservative activists feel slighted by national Republican groups who supported Sen. Thad Cochran. Given the last-minute, over-the-top race baiting rhetoric that all but accused the Tea Party of resurrecting Jim Crow laws, you can see where McDaniel supporters are coming from. (Even if the NRSC or other Republicans didn’t green-light the strategy, the guilt-by-association isn’t a huge jump.)

And McDaniel walked right into it.

Even as an incumbent, Thad Cochran was not a great primary candidate.  A good opponent with a good campaign would have knocked him off without even needing a runoff. McDaniel could not jump over the low ankle hurdle of competence. How bad was he? He was a worse candidate than Cochran.

McDaniel’s sketchy connections with neo-Confederate groups were already in the public discourse. So when Cochran’s allies floated the idea of “expanding the electorate” to win the runoff, McDaniel’s response – deploying poll watchers to shoo away ineligibles – fed the narrative. Creating mental images of militant racist whites intimidating black voters was an easy bridge to cross in the minds of many voters.

The right response to Cochran saying he’s expanding the electorate should have been: “Bring it on, Broseph.” Well, maybe not the Broseph part, but you get the picture. He could have added: “I invite all Mississippians who are eligible to come to the polls. As we showed in the runoff, the more people who hear about our vision know that we stand for a brighter vision for all of Mississippi. I welcome the vote of anyone who agrees.” Or something like that.

That’s all he would have had to say. And yet, McDaniel kept talking about outsiders invading the primary- and he’s still talking, exploring ways to challenge the outcome. In defeat, McDaniel has talked more than the guy who pulled an actual upset, Dave Brat.

Brat has been pretty quiet since giving the political world a rare surprise by defeating Rep. Eric Cantor. Think about it: In a world of constant analysis and near-ubiquitous news coverage, no one saw Brat’s win coming. And he didn’t just squeak it out – he beat an incumbent in leadership by 10 points. (Disclosure: The firm I work for did work for Cantor’s campaign.) In the weeks since, outside of a statement criticizing the President’s immigration policies, Brat has been pretty tight-lipped in the national media.

Any so-called “Tea Party” candidate is going to wear a big old target on their back during this election cycle – just like they did in 2012. Democrats looking to cut their losses will surely look to take any candidate’s misstep and blow it up to build a national narrative. Brat hasn’t given them any ammunition; McDaniel practically loaded the guns for them. The candidate class of 2014 will need to speak carefully to avoid McDaniel’s fate.

Project Ivy and digital coat tails

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Over at Communities Digital News, I have a new piece up about Project Ivy – the Democrats’ plan to deploy the digital tools that helped President Obama in 2012 and Terry McAuliffe in 2013 into down ballot races in 2014:

The data tools used this year may not help Democrats keep their hold on the Senate, or win more Governorships, or even gain ground in state legislative chambers. But all the data collected with those tools in 2014 will be mighty useful when a few hundred votes in Cuyahoga County could decide the White House in two short years.

Republicans may not need to match Democrats data point for data point to have a pretty good election cycle in 2014. But deploying their own tools with the future in mind will help build their abilities for coming cycles. 

You want more?  Here it is.

Democrats know they are facing an against-the-spread election this November. They’ll lose seats, but the question is how many. Dropping as many as five Senate seats to the GOP will look like a win if they maintain a voting majority for the next term.  And like a baseball team playing out the string with a 40-man roster in September, minor league talent in down-ballot races can help set the table for future victories.  Project Ivy isn’t really for 2014, it’s for 2016.

But if I bled Democrat blue there would be one major factor that rubs me the wrong way about Project Ivy: the name.

First off, ivy grows up, while the project takes high-level tactics and tries to push them down.  Maybe that strategy makes sense for Democrats, who put so much faith in federal government programs to cure the ills of small communities, but the metaphor is a bit off.

Second, remember Project ORCA? It was the widely panned GOTV app that Team Romney deployed in 2012, and was so named because the Obama team’s data processing system was nicknamed “Narwhal,” and orcas kill narwhals.  As it turned out, the narwhal was an octopus with tentacles everywhere, and orcas don’t do crap against octopi.  This metaphor is getting even more tortured, so let’s move to the point: A clever name often foreshadows failure.  The only political tactical operations with cool names that work are the ones you hear about after the election.

The best news for the GOP about Project Ivy might be the fact that the first news stories about it are in March 2014, and not the week after Election Day.

Three out of four ain’t bad…

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Turnout operations are critical in tight campaigns – and especially so in mid-term elections, campaigns can’t rely on national awareness to gin up attention to Election Day.  As I noted in my most recent Washington Times Communities post, mid-term turnout modeling means than Republicans can win big with just 75% of their 2012 voters coming back.

Obviously, to create that much excitement, Republican candidates are going to have to have good messages and be disciplined about sticking to them.  But with continued problems with Obamacare, the messaging environment will likely be in the GOP’s favor.  And people who voted Republican in 2012 – which was an off-year – are probably much happier with their vote than their Democrat friends and neighbors.

 

Wrapping up Cuccinelli’s loss

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Last week I started a column at the Washington Times Communities page called “By the Numbers” and started with a look at Ken Cuccinelli’s Virginia loss.  

With just 3.1%more of Mitt Romney’s 2012 voters, Cuccinelli could have celebrated a Dewey-defeats-Truman moment.  Instead, 780,000 Virginians who supported Romney’s losing effort stayed home, and Terry McAuliffe sneaked past by around 55,000 votes.  POLITICO profiled McAuliffe’s advanced data-driven operation, which read like the post-game analysis of Barack Obama’s win last year.  Meanwhile, Stu Rothenberg underscored Cuccinelli’s failure to bring back Romeny voters.

There were plenty of challenges thrown at Cuccinelli: a spending gap, infighting, an erroneously modeled Washington Post poll that depressed GOP turnout, and center-right outside groups staying on the sideline.  Blaming these things for the loss is like a football team blaming a one-point defeat on a bad call in the first quarter rather than a botched field goal on the last play of the game.  Those factors put Cuccinelli in a bad position, but he was still in a position to win.

Campaign plans are being hatched for 2014 right now, and would-be victors should look at Cuccinelli’s loss careful.  Luck – good or bad – is the residue of design.

 

GOP 2014: Conservative Candidates, Moderate Tone

~ Jim Eltringham ~ Leave a comment

Today’s New York Times piece on Republican primary battles leads with Art Halvorson, the father of a former colleague who is running for Congress in Pennsylvania’s heavily Republican 9th District.  His opponent is incumbent Rep. Bill Shuster, who holds the seat his father held before him.  While much of the article falls into the oversimplified “Tea-Party-Versus-Establishment” narrative, Halvorson rejects the opportunity to bang the drum on more red meat issues, favoring a more populist tone:

“People don’t remember a time before the Shusters,” Mr. Halvorson said. “They created an aristocracy, and people are so accustomed to that’s the way politics is done around here, they don’t see how he can be toppled. I’ve got to show leadership’s what’s important, not seniority, and longevity is not leadership.” … “That’s the narrative everybody wants to know: What’s the Republican Party going to look like after Ted Cruz Tea Party people get done with it?” Mr. Halvorson asked, eschewing the Tea Party label even as he adopts many of its campaign tropes. 

Tea Party themes – less government, more freedom, less concentration of power – are more popular than the Tea Party label.  Candidates like Halvorson are wise to make their campaigns about ideas, rather than shorthand.

Who wins if Cuccinelli loses?

~ Jim Eltringham ~ 2 Comments

Ken Cuccinelli is on the ropes in the Virginia Governor’s race – which is one reason George Will raised some eyebrows last week with his glowing treatment of Robert Sarvis, the Libertarian candidate.  Why would a national, established Republican commentator like Will take what looks like an obvious swipe at a major party candidate in one of the two major races going on in 2013?

If trends continue and Cuccinelli loses, there will be another obvious dent in the narrative that the GOP brand is on the rebound  and well-positioned for victory in 2014.  Combined with the fallout from the government shutdown, it will be the second setback of the fall for Republicans, (overshadowing, to some degree, the failed rollout of Obamacare).

As the polls look now, it’s pretty likely to shake out that way.  But not all losses are created equal.  A less-than-50% win for Terry McAuliffe combined with a strong showing from the Sarvis, actually benefits some entities:

1.  Bill Bolling.  Remember Fredo Corleone’s reaction when he got passed over for his kid brother?  Supporters of party conventions over primaries like to say that the non-public, keep-it-in-the-family method of choosing a nominee is less hurtful, but that theory flew out the window in this case.  Rather than playing the good soldier and supporting his nominee, Bolling has waged an un-campaign by creating his own policy organization.  And the word on the street is that he has done some behind-the-scenes work for McAuliffe.  A race where Cuccinelli loses – but center-right candidates, combined, draw a majority – gives further credibility to Bolling in 2017 if he opts to run for Governor calling for a more moderate direction for the state party.

2.  Chris Christie.  Back in the day, the odd, off-off-year elections in Virginia and New Jersey meant split victories: Republicans would take the Old Dominion, Democrats would notch the Garden State.  This year, Christie’s runaway reelection victory will buck the trend.  As the most recent Republican winner, it will position him well with top donors and consultants as he prepares for his Presidential run in 2016.  There may also be some who look at a split-vote loss in Virginia as a sign that the GOP needs to moderate nationally.  While it would be a mistake for Christie or his team to make that case publicly, behind closed doors they can make that case to party leaders deciding where they ought to contribute their endorsements and dollars.

3.  Rand Paul.  Very quietly, Rand Paul has been having a great couple of months.  Once considered the most outspoken and conservative among the serious potential Republican field for 2016, Ted Cruz’s filibuster has allowed Paul to present himself as more publicly reserved than the Texas Senator.   While moderates would point to a Cuccinelli loss as a need for a philosophical shift toward the center, Paul could make the case that the split vote means the party has not done enough to make the case to voters equating smaller government with better government.  Since this argument does not involve telling conservative voters they are philosophically wrong, Paul could have the most to gain from a tight loss in Virginia.  (That Paul actually campaigned for Cuccinelli puts him in a better position, as well.)

4.  Conservative/Republican Commentators.  That’s not to say that any of the above folks, or their supporters, goaded Will into his story, of course.  Nationally, if Cuccinelli loses in part because of Sarvis, GOP talking heads can write off the loss as the product of vote-splitting and focus on what looks like an easy victory in New Jersey.  The tough loss might hurt the Commonwealth, but for the people who scream at cameras for a living, it provides an easy pivot point for cable news debates.