GOING RED THE TWO MILLION VOTERS WHO WILL ELECT THE NEXT PRESIDENT-AND HOW CONSERVATIVES CAN WIN THEM ED MORRISSEY Published April 12th, 2016
Democrats (and other Americans who fear the kind of politics that Trump has marshalled to his cause) have spent nearly 7 weeks trying to decipher what went wrong with what they thought was a grand coalition effort to maintain sanity in government. The reading of the tea leaves started before the election even, as the unexpected (by some) success of candidate Trump boggled the minds of those who thought they knew American voters.
Democrats were more likely to listen to what the “smartest” among them were saying early in the election cycle, which is natural when you have a favored primary candidate and are pushing the electability line. In a national party that aims to win, though, there ought to be paid professionals that listen to what the “smartest” folks on the other side(s) are saying and telegraphing. Are there crafty head fakes and copious noise? Sure, but the job of those professionals is to sift through the information and see what the actual intel and plans of the opponent are. Judging by the elections results, one such “smartest” among conservatives either fell in the same prognostic predicament as Team Clinton, or was part of some kind of organized head fake when he picked out 7 counties to watch. I’ll leave you to decide which it was. Kos and others here have revisited their predictions, but I think it’s valuable to go back and see how conservative predictions fared and why.
Ed Morrissey is a former radio-show host, longtime political blogger, and now columnist for The Week and The Fiscal Times. On April 12th, 2016 he published a book of on-the-ground interviews and some basic numbers from 7 key counties that he thought would be responsible for electing the next President. This approach is common, especially for those result watchers and number crunchers who want to know early on election night how the cookie will finally crumble. Often those folks rely on bellwether or battleground counties that tend to mirror the statewide winners in contests. Wall Street Journal picked 14 bellwether counties in swing states to watch, 2 of which overlapped Morrissey’s 7, and only 1 failed to predict the statewide winner (Hillsborough County, NH). Politico’s 25 battleground counties include 6 of Morrissey’s 7 but represented counties where candidates need to run up the score or lower the margin as opposed to merely winning election day. Or so I thought when I first saw them. Surely Morrissey wasn’t suggesting actual wins for Republicans in these counties.
So how did Mr. Morrissey do? I would argue quite poorly.
In 2012, the targeted counties gave President Obama an advantage of 163,523 votes, en route to winning all but one of the states. In 2016, these counties gave Secretary Clinton an even greater advantage of 239,453, but she lost 4 of the 7 states. 5 of the counties saw increases in the Democratic vote advantage. The two that didn’t (Brown County, WI and Hillsborough County, NH) can certainly be seen as indicative of the unexpected loss in Wisconsin and the uncomfortably close win in New Hampshire. I will share a few county specific thoughts from this book.
Hillsborough County, Florida: Morrissey was actually suggesting a WIN was necessary for a statewide win. The appeal of the fabled I-4 proved too tempting to this author. In hindsight I would argue that other I-4 or I-4 adjacent counties mattered more (Pasco, Imperial Polk).
Hamilton County, Ohio: Interesting note about RNC having a paid, full-time African American outreach staffer on the ground for several years in Cincinnati. Ohio was clearly not lost due to performance in this county.
Wake County, North Carolina: ‘Carolina Journal’s John Hood calls Wake County “a microcosm,” nothing that it is “full of people who are from somewhere else.”’ I point this out because it is important to understand that even great messaging or a great ground campaign cannot magically overcome existing party allegiances in migrants to quickly growing county. Lee County, Florida is a great example of this, where wealthy retirees have been flocking to the past few years. It was an absolute blood bath in 2016, both in turnout in a red county and voter preference.
Prince William County, Virginia: I guess this is where exurbs are really meeting The South. In 2011 PWC had the 7th highest median household income in the nation. Here the author dares to say that eventually POLICY will matter to these types of voters. We can fairly scoff at this idea nationally and during the Republican primary, but Hillary did increase her vote lead here.
Brown County, Wisconsin: This is probably where Morrissey was most prescient. Trump’s increased vote margin in this county most certainly reflected the statewide loss for Hillary. Here, consultant Mark Graul lauded the ground effort of Obama 2012 in making the county competitive through shear shoe leather. Congressman Reid Ribble opined that the county’s residents want pragmatism: ”just solve the problem.” Well, Hillary certainly is pragmatic, but I would argue that pragmatism and “just solve the problem” are not the same things, and clearly Trump had an advantage when he could just say “I will just solve the problem” and the media let him get away with it. Ribble also was of the opinion that the county’s voters would have responded better in 2012 if Romney’s compassion and thoughtfulness had been allowed to shine rather than national messaging. See, even Republican Congressmen overestimate voter’s interest in decency.
Jefferson County, Colorado: Morrissey describes Mike Coffman’s successful effort to win Hispanic voters, including by actually learning Spanish, in his narrow re-election in 2012. Perhaps Trump’s anti-immigrant stance really did build a wall...FOR Hillary in Colorado. And we can still be darn proud and excited about Arizona progress, folks. Former ED of the Colorado Republican Party Alan Philp offered a bit of foreshadowing of what certainly seemed like the disingenuous messaging plan of Trump: ‘Point out the “corporate welfare and these tax carve-outs, and so forth,” he says. “Come out in opposition to some of the more egregious examples, and talk about a fairer and flatter tax code.”’ The supposed internecine war between business Republicans and Christian conservatives might have happened in this county, but nationwide Trump seems to have married these warring factions, at least on election day.
Hillsborough County, New Hampshire: This section will just about make you drink. But it also shows you that perhaps voters don’t actually have committed ideology. For one activist, David Basiliere, to say that Romney was too much of a flip-flopper but that he was now only leaning towards Democrat….ugh. Another, Jeanine Soffran, “shrugs off Clinton’s experience as secretary of state.” Folks, in a county with above average income we still suffer from people unwilling to let go of their ignorance of facts.
Maybe Ed Morrissey is just an amateur pundit/hack with the right friends in the right wing media, but his book ended up in my main library in bright blue Gainesville, Florida (county increased margin for Hillary by 8.084). What he did get right was that the RNC under Reince Priebus had intentionally built a national and swing state turnout operation that was independent of the presidential candidate. This was built well ahead of time, not in the last 6 months of the campaign. Year round and perpetual commitment to paying local staff is not cheap, and it requires a whole lot of balancing the rewarding of committed activists and allies, and investing in competent organizers.
No one can say that Florida didn’t have a huge field campaign for Hillary Clinton and other Democrats, especially in key State Senate districts. To say otherwise would probably reveal more about the observer’s utter lack of participation in helping defeat Trump. The Florida Democratic Party turned in nearly 600,000 voter registration forms during 2016, and even allowing for a huge number of blank, duplicate, or incomplete forms they broke what was then an unheard of amount during the 2012 Obama re-election campaign. We can still identify weaknesses of the campaign in Florida without swinging wildly like outraged drunks. The doubling down on voter registration didn’t allow for as much early persuasion and candidate preference (ID) canvassing that would have identified problems and pushed back on growing doubt among soft Democrats and unenthusiastic base Democrats. The expansive electoral map approach means that the candidate and surrogates were wasting time in Ohio and North Carolina when we could have used them in the medium sized counties of Florida. Of course we would have traded the entire Florida campaign for wins in Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania, but Hillary was playing to win a mandate, including in the Senate.
Disclosure: I worked for President Obama’s campaign in 2008 in Florida and in 2012 as Regional Field Director for Imperial Polk County, Florida, one of the vaunted I-4 mid-size counties that truly helped deliver Florida to Trump this go around. I have semi-retired from organizing and found myself a DEC member in Alachua County, but as one of the youngest (yes, even at 34) I was still committed to doing actual field work for Hillary. I saw the voter registration and canvassing operations in 2016 from the inside. The field staff was always willing to fill me in on the progress and the structure of the campaign, as I was seen as both a dedicated volunteer but also a trusted veteran of Florida field campaigns. I will forever defend good field operations from people who didn’t help and don’t actually know what happened.
