Another Markey post, because I can, and because I think Dave Weigel might just be on to something useful:
… Before the media tosses this election down the memory hole, I want to pay tribute to our incurable addiction to narratives and the search for Meaning in elections. The search for Meaning overpowers things like data and political science. Anyone who looked at the numbers and candidates and parties in March could have told you that Markey would win, and yet the race was covered as a toss-up…
The spending perfectly predicted the election. The Cook Political Report, which briefly rated the race a “toss-up,” did so because the spending seemed to confirm a Markey panic. “We changed the rating [to toss-up] and then began to see some other numbers, from even more reliable pollsters/sources, with a wider margin that convinced us that the race either hadn’t closed or had widened back out,” says Charlie Cook. “The fact that the DSCC dumped in a seven-digit television buy around the same time suggested that we weren’t alone in thinking that Markey did not have the race in the bag.” He didn’t, but he never thought he did, so he spent money.
That money’s going to undergird the coming (probably brief) Republican autopsy of this race. Over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal reported on donors “sitting out” the Massachusetts race even though its candidate “fits the profile that many in the party see as desirable.” Politico finally declared that Gomez was “no Scott Brown redux” in part because “big GOP money never came to save him.” It’s like we all slept through those 2012 elections where super PACs blitzed the airwaves for Republican Senate candidates and the Democrats won anyway….
In a later post, Weigel quotes Charlie Cook directly:
… [Y]ou can bet that the NRSC and Crossroads looked very hard at it, spent considerable amounts of money on polling and just didn’t see it happening. After last November, the last thing they wanted was to raise the stakes and expectations then lose. Their donors would have gone nuts. So they very clinically and unemotionally looked at it and made the cold-blooded decision that it either wasn’t there or wasn’t worth the risk. But the final decisions weren’t made until not that long ago. At the same time, when you look at Dems effectively outspending Gomez by better than 2-1, sending both Obamas, Biden and who knows who else up, they were not taking any chances, retrospectively looks like using a shotgun on a gnat, but that is with the benefit of 20-20 hindsight. Had they lost it, heads would have rolled. Better to be safe than sorry.
Final point: While some have written about ambivalence among GOP donors in general, I think the point that is being missed is that these folks were told and really believed that Romney could and would win. They heard it from the campaign, the party committees, the superpacs and from Fox. They don’t know who to believe now. The GOP has to re-earn their donors trust, as does Fox. I can’t tell you how many Republican House members have told me that they had no idea that Romney wasn’t going to win, all the way to Election Day.
My emphases. I know every good Democrat gets depressed thinking about the GOP’s deep-pocketed donors, but maybe this is an indication that the Kochs and the Friesses and the Adelmans don’t like flushing their millions straight down the luzer toilet. The Democrats have the edge, nationally at least, when it comes to people — both organizationally and demographically. The Repubs have been doing their very best to ensure that money will count for more than (non-corporate) people, but perhaps there really are limits to what money can buy — as long as those of us without much don’t get discouraged out of trying.
The prophet Nostradumbass
Posted this in the last post, but this is an open thread.. this is a good article about a woman telling what it’s like to get an abortion.
Joey Maloney
They don’t like it, but what else are they going to do? Their only tool is the money hammer, so every election looks like a nail.
amk
Their only hope (and plan) depends on voter suppression and hence all the VRA shenanigans via their supreme court puppets.
Yatsuno
@amk: Even that has limits. Every roadblock has a means to get around it, and thanks to OfA there is a big engine out there to organise voters now, The Repubs might get a few victories, but they will only be temporary ones.
mdblanche
The important thing to remember is that Markey winning a higher percentage of the vote in Provincetown than any other town in the state and Gomez’s utter failure to brownwash his party’s image just go to show that gay men and Latinos are naturally Republican constituencies that will abandon the Democratic Party the very second they get their selfish political demands satisfied and vote for people who aren’t even hiding their contempt for them because tax cuts and abortion. If the Democrats don’t want to go the way of the Whigs we’re going to have to center our coalition around voters that won’t be going anywhere else soon like cranky elderly whites.
MikeJ
I don’t think they mind spending it on a lost cause, they just don’t want to be told they’re going to win when they’re not. Had they know up front that Romney was going to lose they would have let their freak flags fly. Romney would have run on a platform of capital punishment for sodomy and selling Yellowstone to BP. As it was they had to pretend to be human and they still got beat.
Djur
Oh my lord, look at that picture on the Weigel piece and tell me if that photographer doesn’t look like Dick Cheney.
srv
I don’t get this they must re-earn trust. The Kochs and all will keep flushing money to Turd Blossom. These people think strategically. You don’t found a half-dozen think tanks on a lark.
THERE IS NO PRICE FOR FAILURE with Republicanism. They just need to push the envelope enough that something like Keystone XL gets passed regardless. That $100M loss might have brought $2B in if Romney won, but still brings in $1B otherwise.
Villago Delenda Est
Well, as far as our utterly worthless major media political analyst cabal is concerned, 2012 might as well be 1812 now. Remember a few years back when some special election in upstate NY was the bellwether, a referendum on Obama until a Dem won it, and then they forgot it ever existed? They’ve got their fucking narrative, and if what actually happens doesn’t support it, they toss the actual election results down the memory hole because it upsets their digestion of fucking cocktail weenies at Sally Quinn’s.
Wipe them out. All of them.
Chris
@Villago Delenda Est:
Nice Palpatineism, if that’s what you intended.
mdblanche
@Villago Delenda Est: I think I remember. Wasn’t that “bellwether” a seat that had last elected a Democrat prior to the Civil War?
Villago Delenda Est
@mdblanche:
Aye, it was.
The MSM forgot all about the importance of that particular race and instead fell in love with Chris Christie. Prior to the election, it was all NY Cong as the most important single race.
Linda Featheringill
There are a lot of very hard working Democrats. Sometimes they win and sometimes they don’t.
Look at North Carolina in 2012.
But it is nice to win.
geg6
@Villago Delenda Est:
I’m with you. And I’m slowly coming to the conclusion that our biggest single problem in this country isn’t so much Republicans and their sugar daddies, but the media itself. It’s the sheer avalanche of false information and misinformation and partial information that they spew that is killing this country. And it’s not just FOX, but it’s Politico and TIME and David Gregory and George Stephanopolis and Chris Matthews and Wolf Blitzer. It’s having Newt Gingrich as one of the hosts for the “new” Crossfire”. It’s Jon Stewart kissing John Yoo’s ass on TDS.
The media are my true enemy these days. I want them all to die. And I don’t mean figuratively. I want a giant meteor to take out the next WHC dinner and leave nothing but a smoking ruin. I want a building collapse at 30 Rock.
PeakVT
The moneybags aren’t going to stop supporting the GOP. They’re just going to spend the money on S&L races, where dumping money can have a real effect, and in primaries, so they can get the candidates they want.
Botsplainer, fka Todd
@mdblanche:
Nice play – however, Provincetown ain’t DC, or any of those blue cities that sit in pulsating red pustules.
jayackroyd
It also helps to refrain from taking idiotic policy positions, like cutting deficits during a huge recession following a major financial crisis that hamstrung private sector lending.
cleek
every good Democrat gets depressed thinking.
Ramalama
Well, Steve Schmidt (Rep strategist) was just hired by the ACLU to talk rational conservatives into consider embracing same sex marriage.
So maybe the far right edge will be scraped off the GOP shoe and flung to some other …hemisphere?
But then again, I’m probably just speaking ARGLE-BARGLE.
Frankensteinbeck
Not a damn thing is going to change. How do I know? Because when Karl Rove was proven an idiot by spending tens of millions (and that’s only the counted money) on losing races and didn’t even know he was losing, what happened? Was he punished, driven to penury or killed by ruthless elites who play to win and don’t follow the law? No. He told them that this time he totally knew how to fix the problem and they should give him more money. They did. There must be someone with brains in the GOP, but it doesn’t matter. The money comes from crazy people, and they will give it to grifters instead.
eric
@PeakVT: The play can be couched even more cynically. They want a GOP led national government OR a gridlocked national government that wont have the means of undoing what they can do at the local level. That is why the agencies (such as the evil EPA) matter. When Congress or the agencies are free to act, hen the misbegotten ALEC-written local laws can be undone. Sure they would love to employ 12 year olds nationally, but if not, then just in the Confederacy is fine, thank you very much.
Alex S.
Blahblahblah Charlie Cook…. In Georgia, they also say that ‘a perfect storm’ might give the open Senate seat to Democrats, so come on, Charlie, rate it as a toss-up, you’re not alone!
Alex S.
@Djur:
Haha, indeed.
PeakVT
@eric: That’s right. Status-quo at the federal level favors conservative interests. There’s a lot of legislation that needs to be passed to get the country back on track, and if the Repukes can block it, they win.
Matt McIrvin
@Botsplainer, fka Todd:
True. However, Lawrence, Mass. is, which is more to the point. Massachusetts Latinos went for Markey in a big way.
ET
The current version of the RNC and Fox are exactly what their market wants – someone/something to confirm all that they believe. Then when their magical belief don’t jive with the real world they get mad at the RNC and Fox when both are just reflective of the individuals that are complaining.
They are what is what is wrong with that side of the political spectrum.
Matt McIrvin
I’ve been amazed by this “Gomez closing fast” narrative for months, because it’s such a replay of 2012 in miniature. If you did a Google search for polls on the race, you’d find these articles on Politico and various conservative websites saying that the race was a tossup or Gomez was actually favored to win. If you looked at all the poll aggregators (RCP, HuffPo, TPM) you could see that that was nonsense: their averages were fairly stable as these things go, and ended up right on Markey’s actual win percentage. This happened even though few people were excited about the race and overall turnout was very low, which conventional wisdom says should hand a big advantage to any Republican.
schrodinger's cat
I don’t get cable and I mostly watch PBS, but I did not see a single ad this election cycle either for Markey or Gomez. Whereas last November we were constantly bombarded with ads both from Warren and Brown.
Suffern ACE
@Matt McIrvin: yes, but there needs to be some proof to confirm the notion that gay men are deceptive in their voting and will flee the Democratic Party in droves once they are able to.
schrodinger's cat
@Matt McIrvin: Really? Whenever I checked, most polls seemed to indicate that Markey was comfortably ahead.
schrodinger's cat
The only natural constituency that GOP has is rich people and crazy people, of all colors.
Matt McIrvin
@schrodinger’s cat: I think Markey’s campaign concentrated less on TV ads and more on GOTV in very Democratic areas, which is probably part of the reason why, percentage-wise, he did a bit better than Warren in blue towns and worse in red ones.
Matt McIrvin
@schrodinger’s cat: Exactly, most polls did always indicate that Markey was comfortably ahead. But people spun breathless stories out of one or two outliers, or squinted really hard at polls that had Markey ahead by 7, 8 or 9 and called it “single digits”.
PeakVT
@Matt McIrvin: Low turnout favors more committed voters. In many cases that favors Repukes, but not always. I think in this case it just reduced the margin of victory from complete blowout to solid win.
Ruckus
…as long as those of us without much don’t get discouraged out of trying.
We have to change around that entire line of thinking. We are discouraged and have to try harder.
Money may help get the word out but it is actually voting(and having someone to vote for!) that works.
Steeplejack
@eric:
This. As long as (most) Democrats turn out every four years to vote for president and then go home and pat themselves on the back for a job well done, nothing will get better. It doesn’t matter how much of a rump party the GOP becomes if 200 of them are the only ones to turn out to vote some right-wing idiot onto your school board. Or Jodie Laubenberg into your state legislature. (Video has to be seen to be believed.) She ran unopposed in 2012. And, by the way, she is the Texas chairman of ALEC.
negative 1
Believing in some kind of natural ground game advantage is foolhardy. There is no such thing. The national attitude on most issues favors democrats, but it won’t always be that way. Money and organization help win in the long term.
Our only true political funding advantage is unions. I work for one in the northeast, here we enjoy a major spending advantage and here we win. Other places that is not the way it goes, and they lose. But look at democratic spending and look at how much comes from unions. Remember that when labor is always the back burner issue that everyone would like to do something to help, but golly there’s something else in the way…
Another Halocene Human
@mdblanche: Nice.
fcc
All this analysis is crap. Scott Browns first win was Chappaquiddick payback and a shitty Democratic candidate; nothing else.
The ground game won both this and Warrens race. The campaign calls for instance: Democratic calls to this registered as Independent household were made by real people, willing to take a few minutes to talk to me.
Republican calls came in as robo calls labeled “private caller”. The chicken shits couldn’t even summon the courage to engage the very people they were trying to solicit.
Local polls had Markey all the way, and I wasn’t the only one who didn’t even bother to put the ballot on the table. Most folk just grabbed a pencil and marked the ballet while moving towards the exit.
Not to mention Gomez’s militaristic signs and war hero bombast. That bullshit just doesn’t play here.