Year of the [Republican?] Woman
How Karen McCormick can beat Ken Buck in 2018
The primary is over and we have our candidate. In the [so-called] Year of the Woman, the Democrats and Unaffiliated voters of Colorado’s 4th Congressional District have chosen a woman as their champion to defeat Ken Buck this November. Now it’s time to get serious.
Just how serious do we have to get? Well. The national Democratic Party has never invested in CD4, and it’s not likely that they’ll do it this year. The Washington Post lists our Karen among the Blue Wave of 91 non-incumbent Democratic women battling to take House seats this November. But Dr. McCormick is listed among the majority who are “not favored to win” by WaPo, and local e-news Coloradopols.com gives her a 30% chance of beating Buck. Long odds, they say, but trending upward. Not impossible.
So, let’s look at what constellation of fortunate circumstances and blisteringly hard work could combine to give the good doctor a win.
About the Numbers
These “baseline” vote totals were extracted from the Fourth Congressional District Central Committee’s Votebuilder database. They represent the number of Republican and Democratic voters who voted in 2014 and 2016, respectively. The numbers are raw, copied directly from list totals. Their apparent precision does not, therefore, reflect their accuracy as predictors. A data scientist would more properly report them rounded to the nearest thousand. Minor party votes are not considered.
Here’s a check on the plausibility of these numbers. The Colorado Secretary of State reports that as of June 2018, the total number of registered voters in Colorado CD4 is 479,892. Our win scenario assumes that 354,260 votes will be cast. That’s a turnout rate of 74%. It’s high for a midterm election, but not outrageous for Colorado, where some counties report turnout rates in the vicinity of 90% in presidential elections.
About Voter Behavior
The 2016 presidential election was strange in many ways. There was a lot of energy on the right, but only among the hard-core base. There was a lot of energy on the left, but the candidate of the left did not win. So high energy did not always translate to high turnout.
The 2014 midterm, on the other hand, was probably a typical one. It’s reasonable to presume that if voters are not energized by events, they will vote in similar numbers this year.
Here in July 2018, a year and a half after the 2016 election, it is fair to say that the momentum is with Democrats. Unless we count a ridiculously unnecessary and unpopular tax cut and a stolen Supreme Court appointment, the Republican party has accomplished nothing this year. Its foreign policy has been one destructive PR stunt after another. Through it all, the Resistance, led by women and children, has maintained the ability to produce massive demonstrations on short notice. The two most recent examples, of course, have been what followed the Parkland shooting and the separation of children from parents who came to our southern border seeking asylum.
Baseline Assumptions
So far, we can say that the Democratic base is at least as as energized as in 2016 — and perhaps as divided, with clear fissures showing between the “progressive” and “establishment” wings of the party. [We use the scare quotes because we advocate declaring detente for a while, but that’s another story.] Because of the similarity, we feel justified in beginning with the assumption that the Democratic Clinton voters of 2016 will turn out in force for Karen McCormick, while Buck will inspire no more than the roughly 129,000 Republican voters Buck got running against Vic Meyers in 2014.
The primary results this year are cause for moderate optimism when it comes to the Unaffiliated vote. Statewide, they broke Democratic by better than 3:2, and while the rural parts of CD4 are still deep red, the populous urban areas mirrored the state pattern well enough that we’ve used that figure.
These “baseline assumptions” still have Karen losing to Buck by more than 35,000 votes, but look! This would be by far the best showing by any Democrat since Fort Collins was gerrymandered out of the district in 2011. And Seay’s total suggests that more Unaffiliated voters are available to McCormick than assumed!
Finding 36,000 Votes
The first, and easiest step on the road to 51% for Karen is reaching into the reservoir of registered Democrats who did not vote in 2016. Referring back to Chart 1 above, we see that if 75% of the over 25,000 registered Democrats who didn’t vote in 2016 vote this fall, that amounts to nearly 20,000 extra votes for Karen. Some of that work may already be done, as early polling of the under-35 voting segment shows increased awareness of the midterm elections as well as a strong leftward lean, according to the Washington Post:
This same reasoning applies to the much larger bloc of unaffiliated voters who sat out 2014, but voted in 2016. They have not been counted in our totals yet! (Sneaky, aren’t we?) If they break 3:2 in favor of the Democrat, as happened in the Primary, then their participation brings Karen McCormick to within 5000 votes!
WTF believes that this group will need to be handled with care. It will take some outreach to motivate them to vote in a midterm election, and the Democratic Party’s data is thin on which members of the group lean Democratic and which will tend to support Buck. The party’s Votebuilder database has no information at all on the likely party sympathies of fully one-fifth of these unaffiliated voters. However, more self-report leaning Democratic than Republican. So overall, activating them appears to advantage Karen.
Turning out these groups brings us to an expected 5,000-vote narrow loss, at Subtotal 2 of Chart 1 above. Where do we go from here?
Republican Women to the Rescue!!
Growing evidence suggests that aversion to Trump’s misogyny kept many college-educated Republican women away from the polls in 2016. If only a small number of them vote for the woman, Karen McCormick, in 2018, then the deal is sealed. Chart 1 shows the impact of 3000 Republican women who did vote in 2016 actually switching sides, but a 6000-vote swing can be accomplished in many ways once Republican women are in play. It’s just as easy to imagine 6000 women who stayed home in 2016 (another group we have not considered yet) coming out to vote for Karen.
Think what an appealing figure Dr. McCormick is to educated Republican women. She, too, holds an advanced degree. She owned and managed a successful small business. She belonged to the Republican party for years — changing her affiliation, we believe, when the party left her behind in its rush to extremism. As a Democrat, she’s definitely a Moderate.
We didn’t assume, for this analysis, that Dr. McCormick would need to reach into every county in CD4 to recruit Republican votes. We have no expectation that persuasion on the issues is a way to gain votes in this election. But in places like Greeley, Parker, Castle Rock, and Longmont, there are professional women, many Republican, who will identify with Karen. It is these women, who certainly are already persuaded that #TimesUp for men who are dismissive and condescending to women — as Ken Buck certainly is — who we expect to vote Dr. Karen McCormick into Congress.
