Tsunami!
What a Democratic Wave Election will Look Like in CD4, or,
How we get to 51%
This week’s national tracking polls show the generic Democratic candidate for Congress besting the generic Republican by between 4% and 11%, depending on the poll. A month ago when we published By the Numbers: How Ken Buck Will Lose the difference was as high as 13%.
Based on the generic polls, and some analysis of the work the Trump administration is doing on our behalf this year, that article concluded that the votes we actually had to go out and work for amounted to about 10%. Maybe that number’s a bit bigger if the election were to be held today. This article takes a different approach. We’re going to dig into who voted in the last two Congressional elections, and what kind of assumptions we can make about each of those voting blocs. Pay attention; this moves fast.
Observations on Elections Past
Here are vote totals from the three elections that bear most directly on what’s likely to happen in the 2018 Congressional Election. We note that Trump got fewer votes than Buck did in 2016, while Clinton got more votes than Bob Seay. So some Clinton voters must have voted for Buck or Griffith. The reason for this is likely to be name recognition: Seay simply lacked the funds to make himself known to the electorate.
In 2014, we have no presidential contest to use as a basis for comparison, but we can observe that Vic Meyers received an even smaller percentage of the total votes cast than Seay. Furthermore, the total of votes cast in 2014 was much smaller than the Presidential year total for both parties — though interestingly, the number of votes cast for third-party Congressional candidates was almost the same in both years.
Favorable Assumptions
Now we begin to apply some assumptions about the mood of the electorate to the numbers above. They are assumptions favorable to a Democratic win, for two reasons. First, so far, conditions are tending to favor Democrats nationally. Second, if conditions aren’t favorable, CD4 remains safely red.
- Democratic and left-leaning voters will be energized and likely to turn out
- Republicans and other 2016 Trump supporters will be less motivated
- Because of the authoritarian bent of the Trump administration, and Buck’s willy-nilly alignment with it, Libertarian and Libertarian-leaning voters will be less likely to support Buck than previously. They will stay home or even vote Democratic.
What do these assumptions give us as a first estimate of the 2018 vote? We use the 2014 Buck vote total for Buck, but the 2016 Clinton total for Mystery Dem, because we anticipate better name recognition and funding for the Democrat than ever before. Then we optimistically (but logically) assign the Libertarian vote to Mystery Dem, too, given that no third party candidate has emerged yet.
Interestingly, this analysis takes us to the same 55/45 breakdown of Buck:Democrat that the previous article, How Ken Buck Will Lose, reached, though the methodology is slightly different. Again, this is our baseline: what we’d expect to achieve in prevailing conditions, without working especially hard or being especially clever. We intend to work hard and be clever. So let’s go a-hunting for votes.
Win Numbers
Mystery Dem wins by getting one more than 50% of the vote. There are two ways to calculate this, one giving a low-end win number, the other giving a high number. There are many more registered voters in CD4 than cast votes in 2014 and 2016, so both assumptions are reasonably valid.
Assuming that no more voters than our baseline total return their ballots in 2018, then Mystery Dem must win by taking votes away from Buck. The Win Number is 336,767/2 + 1 = 168,385. This means only 16,910 voters must be persuaded to switch from Buck to Mystery Dem. Not too bad! Except the ideological gulf between Buck voters and Democrats is pretty wide.
The other way to think about the win number is that Buck gets to keep his 185,292 votes, and Mystery Dem must entice at least (185,292–151,475)+1=33,818 people who did not vote in the baseline scenario to return their ballots for the Democratic candidate. That’s twice as many additional votes to win, but they are voters who probably would have voted Democratic if they had bothered to vote at all. Or at worst they are undecided voters who are persuadable.
Counting Voters Instead of Votes
Here is some basic voter registration data for CD4. When it is viewed without considering the voting history, it looks pretty daunting. Dems are outnumbered nearly 2:1 by Republicans, and there are almost as many unaffiliated voters as Republicans. But comparing these data with the voting history makes things look better.
Observe that Hillary Clinton, who got the most votes of any Democrat we know of, got more votes than there are Democrats registered in CD4, let alone the number who actually bothered to vote. (It’s pretty easy to vote in Colorado. All you have to do is walk as far as the mailbox…) But that’s good news in two ways. First, it proves that a significant number of unaffiliated voters have voted for a Democrat before. Second, it shows that there are still a number of Democratic voters who are not turning out, but who should be the easiest for Mystery Dem to persuade.
To shorten this analysis, we have: (using 2016 patterns for Dems, remember)
Democratic voters who didn’t vote: 24,145
Unaffiliated voters who didn’t vote: 64,505
Suppose that we can energize 50% of the nonvoting Dems (12,072) and 35% of the nonvoting U’s (22,577) to vote for Mystery Dem. That is 34,648 votes, or just enough to put us over our Win Number.
Strategies
OK, a solution exists. In a wave year, even the ruby-red acres of the Fourth Congressional District can, theoretically, be painted blue. Look at Alabama. Ken Buck is not as infamous as Roy Moore — but he’s not as famous, either. He hasn’t done much for even his most loyal voters, and he’s said and done a lot of things that will alienate voters who are going to be touchy this year anyway.
So stay tuned, Dear Readers. Watch this space for evidence-based analysis of where to find our (roughly) 35,000 new voters, and how to persuade them. It’s time for us to get to work making sure we hang on to every single Clinton voter, and rouse out the new voters we need. We’ve got this.
Wave bye-bye, Representative Buck. Get out your water wings.
