Image 01 Image 03

2014 – The Great Debunking?

2014 – The Great Debunking?

That’s what David Wasserman at The Cook Report is saying, The GOP’s Built-In Midterm Turnout Advantage:

If and when Republicans gain a modest number of House and Senate seats in November 2014, the Beltway set may be tempted to interpret the results as a sixth-year itch rebuke of President Obama on everything from IRS/DOJ/Benghazi to rocky implementation of the Affordable Care Act. To do so would be to ignore simple demographic math: likely GOP success in 2014 has much more to do with a shifting electorate than shifting opinions.

Wasserman explains, the electorate is getting older as a whole and older (and wiser – my edit) voters still vote Republican:

Midterm elections have always drawn older voters, and usually drawn white voters, to the polls in disproportionate numbers. Older voters are less transient, have grown deeper roots in their local communities, and pay much more attention to non-presidential elections than their younger counterparts…. Today, that amounts to a built-in midterm turnout advantage for Republicans….

Republicans’ built-in midterm turnout advantage really began to emerge in the early part of the last decade but has ballooned in the Obama era. That’s because partisan voting patterns are more polarized by age and race than they ever have been, and Obama’s coalition is more highly dependent on young and non-white voters than any presidential coalition before it….

The American electorate has steadily aged in the last 20 years, thanks to both increased life expectancy and the maturation of Baby Boomers. The share of voters under 45 fell from 56 percent in 1992 to 45 percent in 2012. But, the drop-off in younger participation in midterm elections has been amazingly consistent. Since 1994, the share of the electorate under the age of 45 in each midterm has fallen an average of 9.6 percent versus the presidential election immediately preceding it….

For most Democratic House candidates, a good rule of thumb might be to subtract two to three points from the 2012 Democratic percentage in the district to come up with a reasonable approximation of a “starting point” for a 2014 race. That means most Democrats probably need to perform about five percent better among Independent voters in 2014 just to stay afloat at 2012 levels, and would need an even higher share of Independents to pick up seats. Wow.

I think you need to compound that analysis by a conservative and Tea Party base highly motivated by the IRS targeting.

Call 2014 The Great Debunking:

DONATE

Donations tax deductible
to the full extent allowed by law.

Comments

Subotai Bahadur | June 1, 2013 at 9:45 am

There is some truth in the margins for midterm elections; however there is another factor. When you have controlled the voter registration and vote counting mechanism for decades, it is a lot easier to create that 5% margin and then some out of thin air than it is to actually convince real, legal, registered voters to get to the polls and cast votes.

The margin of Democrat fraud in this country now vastly overwhelms the margin of error in political calculations. And the Left only has to win one more time.

Subotai Bahadur

I would like to change just a small part of this sentence:
I think you need to compound that analysis by a conservative and Tea Party base highly motivated by the IRS targeting.
To read:
I think you need to compound that analysis by a conservative and Tea Party base highly motivated by the revelation that the IRS and other federal agencies are attacking fellow citizens based on their beliefs.

I remain unconvinced as to the “shifting” of the voter base to reflect actual events.

The liberal/progressive/democrat base promotes “free” stuff and with the dumb downed public now a reality, recovery to sanity is much more difficult.

Keep in mind that the democrats are much more cunning than any Republican and that makes it a difficult hill to climb…

Bitterlyclinging | June 1, 2013 at 10:50 am

Bull.

As John Fund in his recent NRO article about Obama’s transporting the Chicago Way to DC one rule states “Never leave election results to chance”

2012 was the consummation of the efforts of this lady and thousands more like her

http://weaselzippers.us/2013/05/31/obama-poll-worker-who-may-have-voted-six-times-pleads-guilty-to-4-counts-illegal-voting/

as well as Mr Shulman’s efforts at the IRS obstructing political groups who simply wanted to put a halt to Obama’s willfully deliberate trashing of the Constitution all the way down to an exquisitely timed block by a fairly hefty CNN reporter on Mitt Romney when it apeared to all watching there was nothing but open field and touchdown against Barack Obama during the second presidential debate.

“That means most Democrats probably need to perform about five percent better among Independent voters in 2014 just to stay afloat at 2012 levels, and would need an even higher share of Independents to pick up seats. ”

As a former dem now registered Independent, yea good luck you hypocritical disgusting dems getting indies to vote for scum like you people who are fine with using the IRS to go after political opponents!

Wonder how you jerks would react if Bush had pulled off such thuggery, ooooh, yea, I can guess how you people would have reacted!

Pass “immigration reform”, GOP, and watch what happens to your turnout.

    gwest in reply to raven. | June 1, 2013 at 12:28 pm

    Yes. And there’s been a huge media silence on this in the face of the ongoing scandals, thus allowing the Senate (as well as the house) to move this ball forward unnoticed and unimpeded.

    I’m deathly worried about this. All of my adjurations to conservatives to stay on top of this issue – and stay in touch with their senators/representatives – are increasingly met by shrugs. Are we really that media-driven? It would appear so.

MaggotAtBroadAndWall | June 1, 2013 at 11:48 am

This strikes me as the exact same type of thinking that we relied on in 2012 and got blindsided. Most of us believed the 2012 electorate would not have the same demographics as the 2008 electorate. In fact, it was worse from a Republican standpoint. Black turnout as a percent of the electorate exceeded whites (for the first time ever) and hispanics went more Democrat in ’12 than ’08 (31% for McCain in ’08 to 27% for Romney in ’12). The Obama campaign got lots of disengaged, low information people registered and part of the process in ’08 and ’12 who don’t vote on policy. They vote on cult of personality. Guessing how many of them will not show up at all and how many will show up and blindly vote Democrat since that is Obama’s party affiliation seems hard to gauge.

Democrats want to continue to liberalize voting laws. Democrat states like Oregon and Washington now have universal vote by mail. Same day voter registration is becoming increasingly common, etc. Democrats are not pursuing liberalized voting laws because they are committed to democracy. They are doing it because they have reason to believe they benefit from it electorally.

Also, Democrats are feeding stories to the media that their 2014 electoral chances are improving because the economy and job growth are improving and will continue to improve through 2014 (see Ben White’s story at Politico – which he also went on CNBC to pump this week). Barring some unforeseeable exogenous event they are right about the economy.

I don’t buy Wasserman’s analysis. The statistics may very well be true, but as GrumpyOne noted the lure of “free” stuff will continue to attract the attention of the low-information voters.

There are other reasons why the GOP’s chances in 2014 may not be as rosy as Wasserman thinks. The first is the rise in voting fraud. What is a normal occurrence in Cook County is going nationwide. In Ohio, 20% of the voters on the rolls may be fraudulent:

http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2013/05/28/report-20-of-ohios-registered-voters-are-bogus/

Another reason is the GOP itself. The GOP establishment absolutely loathes the Tea Party in particular, and conservatives in general. Establishment Republicans are nanny government tax-and-spend liberals who are only slightly less crazy than their Democrat counterparts (the years that Republicans ran both Congress and the White House were not exactly noted for their fiscal restraint). There are many Republican bigwigs who would rather lose elections than give up going on spending binges.

Finally, the Republican Party seems to have a knack for finding new and creative ways to lose elections. The GOP is easily distracted by every bright and shiny object the Democrats hold up – immigration, homosexual marriage, gun control, the “war on women”.

Mitt Romney is perhaps the most obvious symbol of the GOP’s troubles. Unlike most of LI’s readers I had no desire to see Romney as President. Romney was a failed one-term governor from a deep blue state who barely won election in 2002 and left office with an approval rating in the 30% range. Romney was a poor governor: he pushed global warming legislation, made questionable appointments, and was responsible for the monstrosity called Romneycare, which he passionately defended during the 2012 campaign (so much for being a fiscal conservative). The Romney campaign for President was a sick joke from start to finish. With very rare exceptions he was weak, vague and passive who seemed to have an endless series of deer-caught-in-the-headlights moments. The media certainly did their part for Obama, but remember that Reagan and both Bushes won in the face of similar media hatred. What is Romney’s excuse, especially since he had the wind at his back from Obama wrecking the economy?

My own opinion is that the GOP is beyond salvage. There are too many Republican officeholders who are nothing but leftist hacks who occasionally mouth conservative platitudes. I did not vote for Romney in 2012 (I voted for Johnson, who was the lesser of several obvious evils), and unless the situation improves radically I don’t think I will vote for a Republican for President ever again.

But if you disagree, then you need to fight for your conservative principles. It means no more Mitt Romneys, John McCains, Tommy Thompsons, Olympia Snowes, Lamar Alexanders, or Chris Christies. It means being in the battle for the long term, where success is measured in decades instead of one or two election cycles. The nanny-government liberals running the GOP are purists who have no desire to co-exist with you, so why not return the favor? At the very least, if a Republican promises you a half-loaf you should not settle for one crumb less.

One wild card still out there is the brutality and chaos that Obamacare is going to start unleashing in January ’14.

There’s a reason that the GOP hasn’t worked to defund or repeal Obamacare, and I’m convinced that it’s because they believe the misery it’s going to be causing in 2014 will work to their advantage. They’ll be able to claim that if they can win the majority in both houses, repeal of Obamacare will be their top priority.

We’ll see.

    There’s a reason that the GOP hasn’t worked to defund or repeal Obamacare, and I’m convinced that it’s because they believe the misery it’s going to be causing in 2014 will work to their advantage.

    Perhaps. But two Tea Party candidates – Toomey and Rubio – were elected at least in part promising to repeal Obamacare. Once in office, however, Toomey suddenly decided that gun control was the most pressing issue facing the nation, and Rubio felt that the Republic would cease to exist if we did not grant amnesty to tens of millions of illegal aliens (immigration laws and high crime rates be damned). And in 2012 the GOP threw away the issue of Obamacare by nominating the father of Romneycare to run for President. It will be very hard for the nanny government liberals in the GOP (such as Toomey, Rubio, Cristie, Collins, McCain, etc.) to say I told you so when they are working both sides of the street on the issue of out-of-control government.

    Moe4 in reply to gwest. | June 1, 2013 at 1:40 pm

    I’m beginning to think Obamacare will be put off for a year, to avoid the wrath before the election. To enforce the new law will be too “hard” and will need more time.

      Henry Hawkins in reply to Moe4. | June 2, 2013 at 12:32 pm

      BINGO.

      “Today the White House announced it will delay implementing Obamacare until at least mid November 2014, explaining that ongoing investigative witch hunts by the GOP House have crippled the ability of the IRS to provide the services necessary to Obamacare.”