Within the Margin

We expect Senate control to be tight…but all the upside is with Dems. Click through for the map and big picture.

We’re at the end. And throughout this year, the founders of this website have bantered back and forth and studied the angles in an attempt to figure out where the electorate is going. Here it is, updated in quiet moments these final few weeks. Click through to take a look.

Campaigns do not rise and fall on VP selections. But if people are going to talk about it, please don’t talk about it nonsensically. One example? The obligatory “analysis” that “anyone Warren excites is already voting for Biden.” I have news for you: anyone “excited” by any VP pick in May, or July when the announcement is expected, or frankly September is already voting for Biden.  The argument for a VP pick who excites the progressive wing of the party is not to get them to show up to vote; it’s to get them to put in the work to get the guy (and his running mate) elected. That includes the door knocks (well, maybe less this year), the phonebanking, the texting, the small donations, the conversations with friends and family.  A lot of those folks will do the work regardless, but these things are won on the margins. That includes the margin between whether someone puts in zero volunteer shifts or one volunteer shift or twenty volunteer shifts. It includes the margin between whether someone chips in $10 zero times, once, or a bunch of times between now and November.

There is no one person who checks every box from an election-winning perspective, and we can debate at length whether the best choice would be geared toward a given ethnic or ideological cohort. I’m fairly agnostic on the topic. But it’s lazy to dismiss a nod toward progressives as securing votes that are already locked in: if Biden goes that route, it’s because he’s trying to marshal their energy for the actual work of campaigning, which means much more than just voting: it means a whole lot of voter contact with people for whom the parlor game of strategizing a vice presidential pick is much less scintillating than changing the limiting factors in their day to day life.

…and after all that, the hands are right where anyone’s would be.

Let’s play fast and loose with analogies for a moment, and assert that this Democratic presidential primary has been the Kevin Youkilis of campaigns. You see, when I first started getting into baseball prospect evaluations in a serious way, and thinking more intricately about how scouts examine players, I remember a significant “huh” moment when it came to hitters with unique batting stances: Kevin Goldstein and Jason Parks from Baseball Prospectus were talking on their podcast about how for all the machinations that hitters undergo with their arms, hands, legs, whatever while waiting for the pitch, they almost all end up in the same place at some point. The most important part of the swing is the swing, after all, not the stance. And swings are ultimately not so distinct from one another. So Youks could look awfully unique at first, and then when push came to shove he ultimately was just a hitter (and a pretty damn good one).

So it is, I think, with the race for the Democratic nomination in 2020, specifically with respect to the size of the field. Much was made about the crowding when it peaked at twenty-five candidates – even larger than the 2016 GOP field which was itself by far the largest in modern times. Think pieces were written. Countless social media posts were published – some fretting, some mocking. And yet, as we stand two months from the Iowa caucuses, more than a third of those folks have dropped out (with a couple more entering after the culling began). We’re currently at 15 – still high, yes, but we’d always have expected a big field since after all, Trump is both divisive and less popular than most first-term presidents. There’s blood in the water and that attracts more candidates. Locals might recall that we had nine different declared candidates for NY-19 in 2017-18, because everyone knew Faso was beatable. That was quite high for a Congressional primary. Plus, in the age of social media, I think it’s easier for prospective candidates to imagine themselves catching fire. Everyone’s just one viral tweet or video clip away from becoming a national contender, right?

Today is the third day in a row that someone has ended their campaign. I suspect that by the time Iowans gather at their caucus sites, the field will be in the low double-digits or high single-digits and after that, it’ll shrink very quickly. As it always does. More folks might stick around for each of the first four states than some years, if the current leading quartet (Biden, Buttigieg, Sanders, Warren) continue to cluster rather than someone opening up a durable lead. But by the time California votes, this will be a much smaller field than today. Everyone’s hands end up in roughly the same place when it’s time to make contact with the ball.

In the United Kingdom, it’s fairly routine for folks to represent a parliamentary constituency (what we in the states would call a district) other than the one in which they’ve been living and working. The parties will often work to find a safe constituency for a rising star, frequently after he or she does the party a solid by running a respectable campaign in a hopeless constituency. Hence Labour’s Tony Blair, as a young party operative in the Hackney area of London, running in the safe Tory constituency of Beaconsfield in suburban Buckinghamshire before finally landing in the Labour stronghold of Sedgefield, way up north in Durham. Or Boris Johnson decamping for Henley, an Oxfordshire seat, at the start of his political career despite hailing from London and knowing nothing of the local area. Then, during Johnson’s second term as London mayor, there was talk of him needing a Tory seat somewhere in the country to open up in a by-election so that he could return to Parliament (ultimately he waited until the 2015 general election and found an open seat in outer London).

It’s a basic part of British political culture, but in the United States brazen carpet-bagging is often frowned upon by commentators – though voters seem to care more about party than geography when push comes to shove. So we see Alex Mooney winning a Congressional seat in West Virginia in 2014, after serving in the Maryland senate and then as Maryland GOP chair until 2013. But he ran in a red seat in a red year, and won accordingly. In my neck of the woods, Congressional bids by new arrivals are quite common and often successful. Antonio Delgado captured NY-19 two years after arriving from New Jersey – his upstate roots from his childhood in Schenectady certainly helped, but he was new to the district. Kirsten Gillibrand had roots in the capital region and a career in New York city, but ran for Congress in 2006 in the upper Hudson Valley’s old NY-20 – close to but not including her childhood home and certainly not where she had been living until she was getting ready to run. In a swing district in a Dem year, she won and became quite popular. The Hudson Valley’s two Seans offer divergent results: Sean Maloney moved into the region and won in 2012 against the unpopular Nan Hayworth; Sean Eldridge tried to replicate that and lost in a landslide in 2014 to the popular Chris Gibson.

But those are folks who were getting ready to run for Congress for the first time. The new push, at least in Republican circles, seems to be suburban members fleeing districts where they could no longer win in search of redder digs. Late last month, it became clear that Darrell Issa will be running in California’s 50th district, a very red seat currently inhabited by indicted incumbent Duncan Hunter while he awaits trial for illegally using campaign funds to pay lavish personal expenses. Until this year, Issa was the representative for a district including parts of Orange and northern San Diego counties; after a near-defeat in 2 016 he retired last year rather than be washed away in the coming blue wave as it became clear that most of the GOP’s SoCal seats were in danger. Trump nominated Issa to head up the United States Trade and Development Agency, but he is considered unlikely to be confirmed due to “problematic and potentially disqualifying” information in his FBI background file, according to the LA Times. With that option seemingly foreclosed and his old seat looking bluer by the minute, Issa is headed to a southern San Diego County district where, “potentially disqualifying” information or not, he still presents a more attractive option for his party and for voters than the more clearly corrupt Hunter.

This week brings word that a Republican who was defeated before he could escape a rapidly blue-ing district, Pete Sessions, is eyeing am entirely new district. Sessions was the longtime incumbent for Dallas’ 32nd district and held an assortment of leadership positions and committee chairmanships during his time in the House, before losing to Colin Allred by six and a half percentage points last year. Once a solidly Republican district, it has moved quickly to the left in the Trump era: a 57-42 Romney district in 2012, it narrowly voted for Clinton four years later. But Sessions isn’t ready to be done: he’s looking to migrate south to TX-17, a Waco/College Station district with a bizarre tentacle into the northernmost part of Austin. Sessions did grow up in Waco – and is set to move back – but that was a long time ago and this seat is nowhere near his old turf in Dallas’ northern and western neighborhoods (as well as Highland Park and University Park). But it is soon to be open, as five-term incumbent Bill Flores is retiring. For what it’s worth, Flores is not too impressed with the idea. As powerful as Sessions was just 10 months ago, this is not the sort of place he can just walk in and expect the field to clear: central Texas is full of ambitious Republicans who have tended local fields and are now eager to move up with Flores’ departure.

Issa and Sessions are attempting more dramatic moves than some of the folks vying to replace Chris Collins in NY-27. Collins finally resigned yesterday under indictment for insider trading, and two of the candidates in that race lived outside the district. But state senator Rob Ortt only lives half a mile outside NY-27 and currently represents much of the Congressional district in the senate. And Chris Jacobs, a Buffalo state senator whose district also overlaps with part of NY-27, announced today that he has bought a house inside the district he wants to represent next year. Will Issa join Jacobs and Session in at least going through the motions of relocating to the communities they think they can best serve? I’m skeptical. And will they ultimately win their parties’ primaries? Because that’s the real question: Americans will furrow their brows at extreme carpetbagging but they’ll turn around and vote for their party’s candidate in the end.

***Addendum: I had completely forgotten that Bobby Schilling was district-hopping too. He was elected to a single term in Illinois’ Quad Cities-based 17th district in 2010 and lost re-election two years later. Now he’s seeking the GOP nomination for the open seat IA-2 across the river. Different state, though some overlap in metropolitan area as the Quad Cities region crosses the border.

Watching the right and left battle on social media spaces ranks as one of the least enjoyable activities available to us on the internet today. With few exceptions, I don’t wade into threads anymore, be they populated by friends or strangers. Persuading the person I actually disagree with seems nigh-impossible, especially given the bad-faith argumentation that dominates such discussions, so the only hope is that silent and undecided observers of the thread might come around to my way of thinking. That’s a worthy goal, but it’s one that I put into practice through my governing and political activities damn close to 365 days a year. So I simply don’t have much interest in doing it online, and never less so that November and December when I’m coming off of months of 12-18 hour days on the campaign trail without days off let alone these mythical “weekends” that people sometimes reference as part of their lives.

But shortly after the recently-concluded campaign, I found myself sitting at a table with several conservative Republicans in a dynamic lending itself to banter and occasional verbal jousting. No more Democratic bubble of the campaign office, full of agreeable voices – now I was in the Dutchess County Board of Elections for an absentee and affidavit ballot count. Or, more accurately, for the dwelling-upon of said ballots to find excuses not to count them. My candidate was trailing in a tight state senate race – we wanted every legal ballot opened as that was the only path for us to make up the numbers. The Republicans were in a different position. Knowing that absentee ballots in Dutchess County include a high proportion of Dem-leaning second homers and college students, they had two goals:

• slow the process down, so that the inevitable shrinkage in margin unfolds tediously and the status quo is cemented in public perception (“Serino’s still ahead – this thing’s not changing.”)
• find reasons to throw out ballots (like a blurry postmark, or an affidavit ballot envelope missing information that the election inspector should have alerted them to cure, since a basic tenet of democracy ought to be that election workers facilitate eligible voters in casting ballots rather than hindering them).

Having once worked at the BOE myself as a staffer, I had seen many of these counts up close, and heard many of the frivolous arguments for challenging ballots. But either the quality of discussion around the ballot-tossing table was higher ten years ago, or my tolerance for cliched, predictable, bad-faith banter has declined.

Each day, my face would tire from the brow-furrowing that came with reacting to the GOP election commissioner and a local Republican operative argue for or against this ballot or that one. Dozens of ballots would be treated one way, and then *poof* – conditions change!

Let’s take military and overseas ballots. We all want to ensure that those serving our country in the armed forces or foreign service can participate in our democracy, right? Quick digression: this has been a professional concern of mine for years, as I work in the New York State Senate. There, the Democratic conference has tried for years to join the Assembly in passing a bill to consolidate the federal and state/local primaries in June, rather than the June/September split that currently exists. Senate Republicans – in the majority the last eight years and seventy-seven of the last eighty – have insisted on an August consolidation, even though this does little to protect those military/overseas voters from a drawn-out primary certification that could result in them getting their ballots too late to return them on time. We had ballots postmarked by the deadline that arrived days after the later military/overseas postmark this year…in other words, the voter did everything right but the post office just takes too long to move the mail. We need as much time as possible between primaries and general elections to ensure that those voters have the lead time necessary to receive and submit ballots.

Back to the counting table: dozens of absentee ballots get tossed because an envelope is unsealed, or the voter failed to fill out the inner envelope correctly. And then comes a military/overseas ballot with the same problems…and the GOP commissioner wants to count it. OK, I say: I understand that we feel badly about this individual, likely in the armed forces, losing their vote. But what’s the legal argument for treating it differently, I inquire. “I have none,” says the GOP commissioner. “Ok…well, what’s the logic, then? I’m trying to find a path here to count this vote that isn’t arbitrary, since plenty of similar ballots have been challenged.” “I have none, comes the reply. “I just want it to count,” he says.

Well, that’s great. So do I! But I wanted the other ones to count, too. Remember, we have no idea what their party affiliation is at that point. Those college absentees include plenty of Republicans, and those military absentees include plenty of Democrats – including the former treasurer of the county Young Dems, a good friend of mine now residing on a naval base. My goal is to maximize the franchise, so if we want to let unsealed inner envelopes slide because we think maybe they got jostled open in transit, hey: I can do the benefit of the doubt thing even if the legality is iffy – if we’re being logical and consistent. What I can’t do is support an arbitrary process, treating one class of human being differently from another when it comes to voting. This country shed blood over that very issue, and established legal protections accordingly. But to call for consistency in one direction or the other is met with mocking disdain: because it implies an interest in governing or in good faith, and this is not about either of those things. For them, it’s about point-scoring and controlling the discussion – owning the libs, in other words. It’s not as nasty in person, at that counting table, as what we see in online spaces, but it has the same effect of rendering discussion devoid of any greater meaning.

This sort of thing was punctuated by interludes of talking about state politics, given the impending Democratic majority in the state senate, which has promised to unlock voting reforms long-stalled under Republican rule in the chamber. The Republican commissioner and party operative would raise the perils of early voting and their assurances that it would lead to voter fraud – never mind the infinitesimally-rare occurrences of it in states already using early voting. They’d extol the virtues of no-excuse-needed absentee balloting as being sufficient to open the franchise to all who desire to cast a ballot…while literally sitting a table tossing out absentee ballots because the post office failed to execute its job properly. 

To sit with these talking points merchants for hours and argue over absentee ballots and public policy is not to engage in political discourse with the hope of persuading one another on the merits. Nor is it to arrive at a place where each says, “hey, we’re just weighting certain components of this question differently and arriving at a different conclusion accordingly.” Instead, one simply furrows one’s brow and shakes one’s head as contradictions are uttered with a bewildering joyfulness, as the subject is changed every time a previous statement is challenged, and as their interest in actual governance recedes further into the rear-view mirror amid the pursuit of landing one more blow for willful public ignorance. I knew that good faith discussions among strangers had largely disappeared, and even among acquaintances and friends behind keyboards. It wasn’t until this fall that I realized the extent to which it has disappeared from in-person discussion among people making decisions in that moment, in that space, about the very functioning of our democracy.

I spent a good chunk of 2018 running the field operation for a state senate campaign in New York’s Hudson Valley. Democrats needed to flip one seat to finally retake the senate after spending 77 of the last 80 years as the chamber’s minority conference while stalled legislation piled up at the feet of a Republican majority unwilling to move the state forward on voting reforms, on ethics and campaign finance reforms, on reproductive rights and contraceptive access, on justice for victims of child sexual assault. It has been my calling and my mission for many years to flip this body, and toward that end I put everything I had into winning the 41st Senate District this year.

Statewide, we succeeded! We flipped eight seats. But in the 41st, the result was not so triumphant. We lost by less than 700 votes, or about 0.58% of the total votes cast. It was heartbreaking, but make no mistake: it was vastly better to come close than to be blown out. 683 votes is a better margin than 684. And I’d rather it be 682. Or 681…you get the idea.

And make no mistake on this point, either: it was never supposed to be this close. The incumbent, Sue Serino, is vapid but popular. She’s reasonably visible in much of the district, and she hides behind her conference’s unanimous procedural votes to block popular legislation rather than actually ever having to vote against the bills themselves (with the occasional exception). As a member of the majority, she has been able to deliver dollars to her district. She maintains a friendly demeanor and until this campaign, generally received a pass for a decidely unfriendly voting record. On top of Serino’s strengths, the 41st Senate District (featuring most of Dutchess County and three towns in Putnam County) had a unique relationship to the governor’s race atop the ballot. Andrew Cuomo is not popular here, and his Republican opponent was the Golden Boy – Dutchess County executive Marcus Molinaro. While the latter’s gubernatorial campaign was underfunded and often flailed as he tried to thread the needle between appeasing his Trump-loving base and moderating himself for a blue state in a blue year, he was always going to do reasonably well in Dutchess. Previous elections offered a mixed bag in terms of Molinaro’s coattails, but the general political public’s expectation was that he would bring out otherwise-demoralized local Republicans and provide a boost to Serino by actively campaigning for GOP representation in Albany. Serino + Molinaro was supposed to be an unbeatable combo in a district with a long GOP history, and that voted for Hillary Clinton by a tiny margin, with a sizable third party vote.

But Karen Smythe ran a great campaign, and ran far ahead of Cuomo in Dutchess (and Putnam). Serino’s real estate allies spent big in an effort to bail her out in the campaign’s final weeks, but their paid out-of-district army of lit-droppers leaving generic door hangers at voters’ homes was not quite as inspiring as the legions of local Smythe volunteers talking to their neighbors about Karen’s background and ideas, and Serino’s problematic issue stances. We built a phenomenal field operation to back our engaging and indefatigable candidate.

***

There wasn’t any time to waste thinking about bizarre scenarios that would upend the race and weaken Sue enough to defeat her. There wasn’t going to be a corruption scandal (beyond all the forms of corruption that are perfectly legal in state politics). There wasn’t going to be a dramatic gaffe. There wasn’t going be a sexual harassment claim, or a shouting match with a constituent, or a comment about public hangings. Nothing was going to fall from the sky and gift us the glorious ending that we wanted. We had to win the race ourselves, one voter at a time, through the interactions Karen and her volunteers were having with volunteers, and through our mailers and advertisements. We came incredibly close.

We may find that the current president of the United States – who indeed offers a teeming pile of corruption, gaffes, sexual harassment claims, and horrific statements about racial violence – has already had all of his weaknesses priced in by voters, and it seems clear that his fervent base simply won’t leave him. Yes, he prevailed in 2016 against a similarly unpopular opponent and thanks in no small part to the third party votes cast by individuals who thought it safe to do so. But he did, nonetheless, prevail. One assumes Democrats will nominate a better candidate in 2020, but they might not. One assumes third party votes will drop, as they did in the 2018 midterms, but they might not – especially if a high-profile independent bid emerges (Kasich?) One assumes that the Mueller investigation, when concluded, will paint the president in an unflattering light, but one cannot assume it will lead to legal action or anything that damages the president beyond his already historically weak standing…standing that does not rule out his election.

He already has all the problems that we could never truly hope a Serino to have, and that hasn’t been enough to finish him off. To hope for more – a deus ex machina scenario where the shortcomings of the electorate, or the opposition party, or both are rendered moot, or a sudden reawakening of American idealism – cannot be the strategy. We have to win in 2020 the same way we tried to, and very nearly did, win 2018 in Dutchess and Putnam counties: one voter at a time, with a great candidate and fantastic volunteers having meaningful discussions with that segment of the electorate that can be persuaded and mobilized if only we put in the work – if only we make the ending ourselves.

Just a quick thought for tonight.

A new Economist/YouGov poll finds healthy Democratic leads in the generic congressional ballot – and poor Trump approval numbers – for the population at large. Even more notably, it finds Trump and congressional Republicans continuing to lose ground among college-educated white voters, who once provided the bulwark of support for Republicans. A 49%-40% edge for Democrats among these voters in the upcoming Congressional elections is remarkable, given much of American political history…and given their propensity to actually vote in midterm elections. These folks are a good bet to show up – education tends to be a strong indicator of turnout in midterms.

But it also means that 40% of college-educated white voters have looked at the first 19 months of the Trump presidency and Congressional Republicans playing dead in the face of the excesses of said presidency…and have decided they’re still totally cool with that.

We win these things on the margins, in the end. We sign up for that level of uncertainty, and we rise and fall with small changes. This set of changes looks promising. But this poll is a sobering reminder of how fine those margins are – because we cannot count on sensibility on the part of a significant minority who are otherwise thought to be credentialed, informed individuals.