NSRF Nov 2014 Meeting & Election Results

8/10/2019 NSRF Nov 2014 Meeting & Election Results

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How Republicans turned Democrats' voter turnouttactics against themRepublicans won eight out of nine key Senate races, regained control of the upper chamber of Congress and

triumphed in crucial gubernatorial contests

One Republican nerve-centre was located in a small, detached house in a tree-lined area of southeast Denver.Behind the closed curtains, election operatives had for months been shaping the GOPs political messaging

in Colorado , applying the kind of sophisticated data analysis typically associated with their Democratic

opponents.

The people working there utilised a database into which they could plug in the name of any Colorado voter and

ascertain not just their political leanings but their personality traits, enabling them to micro-target advertising.

The Republican operatives, who were parachuted into the state and did not want to be identified because of the

confidential nature of their work, explain part of the GOPs success in Tuesdays elections.

From Colorado through to Iowa and North Carolina , strategists involved in successful Republican campaigns

claimed the party had finally cracked the data-driven science behind contemporary elections, a realm of

political warfare in which Democrats have reigned supreme since Barack Obamas election in 2008.

The consultants working in Colorado had overseen the messaging for local Republican candidates in the state

legislature. Some were considered long-shots, but with votes still being counted on Wednesday, all but one of

them appeared on course to victory, compounding Republican Cory Gardner s successful unseating of the

Democratic incumbent senator, Mark Udall .

Cory Gardner wriggled free from Democratic attempts to paint him asan extremist, to unseat Mark Udall in Colorado. Photograph: RickWilking/Reuters

Those Republican victories were rooted in turnout as much as

voter persuasion. In the lead-up to the election, Democrats had

bragged about what they anticipated would be a superior get-out-

the-vote effort, modelled on the campaign that secured the

election of Colorado senator Michael Bennet in 2010.

But on Tuesday, from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic coast, it was Republicans who appeared to have

mastered the process of turning out base voters.
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/coloradohttp://www.theguardian.com/us-news/coloradohttp://www.theguardian.com/us-news/coloradohttp://www.theguardian.com/us-news/northcarolinahttp://www.theguardian.com/us-news/northcarolinahttp://www.theguardian.com/us-news/northcarolinahttp://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/05/colorado-republican-cory-gardner-ousts-mark-udallhttp://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/05/colorado-republican-cory-gardner-ousts-mark-udallhttp://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/05/colorado-republican-cory-gardner-ousts-mark-udallhttp://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/05/colorado-republican-cory-gardner-ousts-mark-udallhttp://www.theguardian.com/us-news/republicanshttp://www.theguardian.com/us-news/republicanshttp://www.theguardian.com/us-news/republicanshttp://www.theguardian.com/us-news/republicanshttp://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/05/colorado-republican-cory-gardner-ousts-mark-udallhttp://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/05/colorado-republican-cory-gardner-ousts-mark-udallhttp://www.theguardian.com/us-news/northcarolinahttp://www.theguardian.com/us-news/colorado


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Why the Democrats Lost Obama proved that six years of low economic growth is a total political loser.Fifty years from now, no one will remember the names of the one-term Democratic senators or candidates who were

washed out in the 2014 midterm elections Hagan, Udall, Braley and the others. What they will remember is that the

Democrats in 2014 became the party of a modern Herbert Hoover. In Barack Obama , they were led by a detached president whose name history will attach to a prolonged, six-year economic catastrophe. They became the party of

economic despair. The party of economic despair will always lose.

That is the one certain thing we learned in the 2014 midterms: Low economic growth in the modern U.S. economy is a

total, across-the-board, top-to-bottom political loser.

In Wisconsin, where Gov. Scott Walker represented everything progressive Democrats abhor, exit polls said eight in 10

voters were worried about the economy in the coming year. Pre- election polls in Gov. Pat Quinn s Illinois said the same

thing. He lost. In truly blue Maryland, its new Republican Governor Larry Hogan built his come-from-behind campaign

around the states stumbling economy.

Normally economic growth is an economists term of measurement. But during these six lost years, that bad data was

physically felt. Barack Obama kept calling it the Great Recession. He got that right. Even the governments statisticians

felt it. Read between the lines of this paragraph in the federal governments October employment report, on the eve of the

election:

In September, 2.2 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, essentially unchanged from a year earlier.

(The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work,

and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months.

That reality killed the Democra ts. If theres one economists term of art the average person learned in the Obama era, it

islabor force participation rate. Its not good.

For decades after World War II, the U.S. economy had an annual average growth rate of 3.3%. Here are the growth rates

for each year of the Obama presidency (World Bank data):

2009: -2.8%; 2010: 2.5%; 2011: 1.8%; 2012: 2.8%; 2013: 1.9%

You preside over that performance, you lose. The 2014 growth uptick arrived too late to save the Democrats. The

economy was a spent political force for them.
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The Obama economic policy has had essentially two prongs: 1) the 2009 stimulus bills Keynesian Multiplier (the

government spends, and new jobs appear); and 2) let the Federal Reserve figure out the rest. Democratic economists and

pundits will still argue for their spend-and- hire theory. Feel free. But after this weeks political blowout, John Maynards

magic multiplier goes back on the ash heap of history. The Obama Fed, meanwhile, continues its mysterious, five-year

strategy of suffocating the interest-bearing savings of middle-class voters.

As to the Feds record - breaking Roman candle called the stock market, it didnt do a thing for turnout. At his news

conference Wednesday, Mr. Obama restated his pre-election prescription: Put people to work building roads, bridges and

air-traffic control systems.

If allowing economic growth to persist below the U.S.s historic achievement is a political death trap for the party in

power, the future looks bleak for the Democrats. The election elim inated the senators who passed for the partys political

center. Whats left is . . . the left. Operating from behind the Blue moats of California, New York, New Jersey and

Connecticut the left is fine with 2% growth. Progressive Democratic policies on Keystone, power-plant closures and oil

exports crushed younger, unionized job seekers. For them, a politics of sustainable but low growth amounts to, Let them

eat sunshine.

The partys heroine is the New England progressive, Sen. Elizabeth Warren. She initi ated a key Obama legacy, the

Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose arcane reporting rules are strangling small businesses and gagging

community banks the economy along Main Street. Sen. Warrens appeal with the partys progressive base has its

presumptive presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton , sounding like an American Evita. The Democratic path back to a level

of economic growth that will protect its vulnerable members does not exist now.

Will the majority Republicans escape the growth trap? It might. The GOP Senate class of 2014 is a victory for the serious

right. They are a big step up in quality. Ben Sasse, Tom Cotton, Cory Gardner and the others are not the second coming

of the 2010 elections seething young men, but they are not establishment Republicans.

They didnt seek the Senate as a trampoline to the presidency in 2016. They look like seven new allies for the Senates

caucus of serious Republicans: Ron Johnson , John Barrasso, Marco Rubio , Pat Toomey, Kelly Ayotte , Rob Portman ,

Lindsey Graham, Tim Scott and Mark Kirk.The ascendant GOP congressional majority needs to do one thing: Liberate the locked-in U.S. economy. Start opening

every valve the Obama Democrats turned shut. Thats the real gridlock. Voters didnt do this just so Washington could

work. Voters did this in the expectation that Washington will now enable them to work. Theres a difference. This is a bet

that the class of 2014 gets it.

Write to [email protected]
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NSRF Nov 2014 Meeting & Election Results

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