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.
Open Thread: Gabriel Gomez Died for Romney’s SinsPost + Comments (39)