Summary
- The senate election in Colorado, the quintessential battleground state, was nationalized. Obama’s popularity and partisanship defined the race. “There are no public land issues debated.”
- The proliferation of polls marshalled into powerful forecasts weeks before Election Day created the narrative of winners and losers.
- More than a hundred million dollars flooded into the state, mostly from sources independent from the senate campaigns and it dominated the media messages voters saw.
- Candidates became more isolated as strategies and messages were nationalized and the main task was to avoid mistakes.
The
heat of the 2014 midterm elections has barely cooled, and voters’ ears are
still ringing from the harangue of political ads. But how many of those appeals
to voters dealt with issues specific to Colorado? Former House Speaker Tip
O’Neill coined the long-used maxim, “all politics are local.” Recent midterm
elections have trended away from that dictum, but the 2014 midterms may have
buried it — at least in Colorado. The most distinguishing characteristic of its
two senate candidates, Cory Gardner and Mark Udall, was their red or blue
identity. Their biographies were known, but not salient. The most important
issues were the president’s popularity (or lack of) and
the control of the U.S. Senate. Gone are the quaint days when candidates
debated public land issues, building a water project or funding the interstate
highways.
Voters
saw the beginning of this phenomenon in the 2008 presidential race when
Colorado gained its reputation as a swing state and platform for presidential
politics and played host to the Democratic Convention. The success of Senator
Michael Bennet despite the 2010 Republican wave, highlighted the state’s
importance. Colorado’s new national political standing grew in the 2012
presidential election when the state was fully targeted and featured on the
maps of CNN, NBC and Fox and others. After decades of being a flyover state,
Colorado hosted a presidential debate and saw repeated visits from the
candidates, especially President Obama targeting Millennial and minority
voters. Millions of dollars in TV advertising were placed by the campaigns, and
frequent polls showed the oscillation between Obama, Romney and, finally,
Obama. The state became a key platform for the national analysts and campaigns
waging war in “battlegrounds.”
This
year, the attention was on party control of the U.S. Senate, and those races
became marque players in the national narrative. National Journal/CNN analyst
Ron Brownstein describes our federal elections as evolving into a type of
parliamentary system where the candidates and local issues take a backseat to
the national outcome – in this case, control of the Senate.
This
nationalization of the races greatly helped the Republicans this year. Mark
Udall and his equally vulnerable colleagues in states such as Arkansas, North
Carolina and Louisiana wanted to run local races on their own record as
incumbents. But they were rapidly swept into the national drama of the Harry
Reid vs. Mitch McConnell show and concentrated on how to avoid being seen or
associated with President Obama.
Throwing
gas on the fire of this nationalization was the proliferation of polling and
the introduction of multiple competing forecasting models. From Labor Day to
Election Day, Colorado saw a record number of more than 25 published polls on
the U.S. Senate race with a rush toward the end. Nate Silver, the main
proselytizer of the forecasting model that gained acclaim in the 2012
presidential race (his branded website 538), helped spawn more than a half
dozen models this year hosted by the New
York Times, Washington Post, and
liberal blogs Huffington Post, Daily Kos and others.
Although
there continues to be a debate about whether polls directly affect voters,
clearly they affect the reporting of a race and can alter the behavior of the
campaigns — in this case, to Mark Udall’s detriment. The forecasting models,
used for the first time in the 2014 “control of the senate” storyline, blend
local historical data, such as who won recent presidential elections, with
candidate information, such as incumbency. Before Labor Day, there were few
polls, but Colorado forecasts favored Udall – an incumbent in an Obama state. After
Labor Day the forecasts were dominated by poll results and suddenly Udall was behind.
That was mostly a product of the polls using their likely voter models and the
uptick in advertising for GOP candidates.
During
the last thirty days of the campaign, the forecasts showed Cory Gardner winning
by a couple of points, with probabilities of more than 70 to 80 percent. The
Udall campaign was tossed on the defensive. The campaign made public its own
polls that showed Udall ahead and maintained the Bannock Street Project ground
game would prove the forecasts wrong.
The
massive outside money pouring into the Colorado senate battle was also a
product of the nationalization of the race, and it harmed the incumbent. Of the
money spent, the candidates expended barely one-third with Udall ahead. But the
TV time purchases of both campaigns were swamped by the dollars from
independent expenditures, namely Karl Rove and the Koch brothers for the
Republicans, and the Harry Reid, Planned Parenthood and Tom Steyer committees
for the Democrats. In addition, Udall’s “war on women” theme was further amplified
by supportive independent spending making it even more overbearing.
The
nationalization of the campaigns also contributed to the isolation of the
candidates. As the TV advertising became dominant and the issues limited, the
candidates’ main task was not to make a mistake. The lesson learned from the
2010 and 2012 cycles, especially for Republicans, was to avoid all social issue
discussions and assume you are on the record and potentially viral at every
moment. Colorado U.S. Senate candidates became hard to find.
This
is the new Colorado election trend. Since this election re-affirmed Colorado’s
battleground status, the state can expect more of the same for the 2016
elections when Senator Michael Bennet will be up for re-election and the
country will pick a new president. What
can we expect? A couple of national themes, mostly around support and
opposition to President Obama; massive money, mostly from independent sources;
nonstop television advertising and starting early; forecast polling with predictions
on a daily basis; and candidates in controlled, mostly artificial environments.
Colorado is popular and this is the price. Can’t wait.
Floyd Ciruli, founder of Ciruli Associates, is
a Denver-based pollster and director of the University of Denver’s Crossley Center for
Public Opinion Research.
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