Last night should be a cautionary tale for Democrats—and pollsters. By all accounts, Kentucky Attorney General Jack Conway was going to win his race for governor. It didn’t work out that way. His opponent, Matt Bevin, won by nine points. That’s a rout.
Matt Bevin is not just your run-of-the-mill Republican. He’s an outsider who has never held office and ran against the Republican establishment. In 2014, he challenged the state’s senior senator and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell in a primary. He came back this year and squeaked through a GOP primary against an establishment candidate.
By most accounts, Bevin ran a disjointed campaign, alternately sparring with the GOP establishment and shooting himself in the foot. After pulling out of the state in September, the Republican Governors Association came back at the end with support. In addition, third parties were in the state supporting Bevin.
One third party ad should have Democrats in states like North Carolina watching closely. Americans for Prosperity ran ads clearly targeted to African-Americans calling for school choice and highlighting families stuck in failing schools. Democrats have drawn a line in the sand on voucher programs. However, the Democrats most supportive of traditional public education are those in school districts that are doing well and in counties where schools are subsidized by local taxes. African-Americans, at least in Kentucky, in failing schools feel they are being ignored or left behind. If Republicans can peel off even a thin slice of the African-American electorate using school choice as a wedge issue, Democrats could be devastated in bubble states like North Carolina.
So far, most of the post-mortem lays the blame for Conway’s defeat on Obama and Obamacare or an anti-establishment mood. The Democratic Governors Association said that Conway ran into “headwinds” in the “Year of the Outsider.” That should be the “Decade of the Outsider” and Democrats need to get that message.
Voters believe the political establishment has little to offer people still suffering from the effects of the recession. At the same time that I was watching the Kentucky results on twitter, I was also following Walmart Moms focus groups in New Hampshire and Iowa. Both Republican and Democratic women are still concerned about their personal financial situations. Neither group has much faith in Washington which translates loosely to the political establishment in general. In Kentucky, the sitting Attorney General was clearly the establishment candidate.
If Conway was the big loser last night, polling came in a close second. Most of the public polls showed Conway up by five points or so. I spoke with two consultants on his team this week and both were confident of a victory which means their internal polls must have had Conway up outside of the margin of error. But nine points isn’t close. The polls were off by ten points or more. While polling can continue to help campaigns shape messages, it’s not the tool it once was. Pollsters will need to figure out a new instrument for predicting voter behavior.
In North Carolina, a state that shares some similarities to Kentucky, Democrats should take notice. They need to be offering solutions that directly address the issues affecting people’s lives and not fall back on traditional Democratic talking points. They are not the establishment anymore so they should make sure that voters know that. They should be concerned that polling might be missing conservative voters as they clearly were in Kentucky and might have been in 2014.
Thomas Mills is the founder and publisher of PoliticsNC.com. Before beginning PoliticsNC, Thomas spent twenty years as a political and public affairs consultant. Learn more >
Another great article on what happened in KY – http://www.thenation.com/article/warning-from-kentucky-managerial-democrats-can-lose-to-extreme-republicans/
When your side does not win the best strategy is to blame the stupid voters.
Exit polls are no longer accurate because electronic voting machines can be easily rigged to swap votes – nothing else explains one improbable republican victory after another. It is probably too late now to demand voting paper trails, which should have been mandatory in the age of electronic tabulation as there is no other means of verifying the vote count accuracy! The powers that be want fascist authoritarianism in the US, and that is what electronic voting machines are making possible.
Conducted 100% on unauditable electronic voting machines in a commonwealth state legendary for its political corruption at the local level.
Down ballot races received more votes than the top of the ticket. How often does THAT happen, Thomas?
As BradBlog says:
“We’ve seen malfunctioning paper ballot op-scan systems report losers as “winners” until a hand-count corrects the record. We’ve seen how easy it is for hackers to game election equipment. We’ve seen election insiders, even as recently as last week, breaking in to computerized central tabulators. And we’ve even seen high-ranking election officials in Kentucky (including County Clerks, Circuit Court Judges and School Superintendents!) convicted for decades of insider election fraud, including the manipulation of electronic voting systems.”
Any political analyst worth his salt has to at least mention these “facts on the ground”.
This just goes to show how the Dems should do anything and everything to challenge Burr…he just might be very beatable.
The Democratic Establishment continually fails to realize that if a Republican is running against a Wall Street Democratic who is trying to imitate a Republican, the Republican voters will turn out to vote for the real Republican and many Democrats will just stay home for the election.
Those who are promoting Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders should heed this message.
There’s also something to be said about the recent and inexplicable variance between exit polls and “actual” results reported since the advent of electronic voting machines in the United States. Republicans may be benefiting from this. There was a time that exit polls were considered the safest and most accurate early measurement of voting results on election day. For some reason that has changed in the last decade or so.
Losers always talk strategy and tactics.
It couldn’t possibly be about the losers positions on issues voters care about. 🙂
Low turnout…that’s the key issue here. Had more self-identified Democrats bothered to vote, Conway would still have won, albeit by a narrow margin. Much the same thing happened with polling in North Carolina’s Senate race last year: Kay Hagan was presumed to be leading narrowly going into the last weekend of voting before election day. But apparently, a shift during the last two days of early-voting–and more pronounced on election day itself–toward Thom Tillis occurred, which pollsters didn’t catch. The conservative base turned out, and it was just enough to give Tillis a plurality win.
I think a voter has to feel that he or she gains something by voting, or will lose something very important (translate scary). Very few voters go to the polls simply from a sense of civic duty. Voters also tend to vote against rather than for, which is one reason why the negative ads (and Fox News) can be so effective with swing voters.
AND, I suspect many voters are just plain tired of the endless campaigns, the non-stop news stories that are repetitive and mostly either “gotcha” or boring, and wish it would all end for at least a few days.
“Get out the vote” efforts are still being done the same way they were 50 years ago, albeit with more targeted lists for calling or choosing neighborhoods. I am not sure what would work, but some serious thinking about how those efforts are done is long overdue.
Again and again and again, Democratic voters fail to show up at the polls in non-presidential elections. Until Dems learn how to drive the vote in off-year elections, disasters like Bevins in KY will happen again and again.
Accurate polling, especially in low turnout elections, is getting more difficult with each election. See the piece in the New York Times, dated November 3, 2015, by Kevin Randall, entitled: “Neuropolitics, Where Campaigns Try to Read Your Mind.” We are now entering the era of biofeedback, facial coding, brain imaging and incredible algorithms that, if not hard to comprehend, are at least scary. Stand by.
And I’m sure they blew tens of thousands of dollars on the pollsters and their expert advice!