At the State Level, Candidates Matter A Lot

Here’s the thing: Republicans were slaughtered in 2006. Reagan’s Republicans lost 8 Senate seats in 1986. LBJ’s Democrats lost 3 Senate seats (with a more than 8% negative vote swing) and lost 47 seats in the House. FDR’s Democrats lost 72 House seats and 7 Senate seats, in 1938 — which understates matters, given that FDR’s attempt to get anti-New Deal Democrats defeated in primaries came up a cropper. (Bill Clinton, I will grant, broke even in the Senate and gained slightly in the House, but in addition to the frivolous impeachment that was in motion the deal-making he used to maintain popularity 1)is no longer possible, and 2)was dubiously desirable.)

You get the idea. The in-party — even in cases where presidents are transformative and/or have bold agendas that deliver plenty to their constituents — rarely fares well in the midterms of term 2. Combined with a very unfavorable map, the fact that midterms massively favor the Republican electorate, and Republicans at both the state and federal level figuring out that the damage you inflict on constituents will actually be held against the party controlling the White House, the Democrats were going to get clobbered, and the “this proves Obama should have led with leadership by (proposing the most politically efficacious policy which by pure coincidence happens to be the policy I prefer on the merits)” genre is mostly a waste of time. Messaging and position-taking might matter a little at the margins, but there wasn’t any magic formula that was going to prevent the 2014 midterms from being a bloodbath at the federal level.

As Alec MacGillis argues, though, it’s crucial not to lump the inevitable Republican wave at the federal level with the state races. Some of the factors pertain, especially with respect to turnout, but fundamentals become less important and cadidates moreso, which was bad news for Democrats in some blue states:

I’m skeptical of that claim. No doubt, disaffection and low turnout among core Democratic voters hurt the party’s gubernatorial candidates in blue states as it did Senate candidates in red and purple ones. And anti-Washington, anti-Obama sentiment certainly played a role in the GOP’s Senate takeover. But to explain why some Democratic gubernatorial candidates lost in blue states while others (such as Gina Raimondo in Rhode Island, Dannel Malloy in Connecticut, and John Hickenlooper in Colorado) managed to hang on, one really needs to take into account the state and local context of the races.

[…]

But why would Coakley and Brown go down, while Hickenlooper and Malloy survived? Here one has to consider the ultimate local context, the quality of the candidates. Hickenlooper and Malloy provoked plenty opposition in their states, not least with their signing of sweeping gun control legislation after the Newtown, Connecticut, massacre. But voters also had a clear sense of where these men stood. The same could not be said for the lackluster Coakley and, especially, for Brown, who ran one of the worst campaigns I’ve ever observed up close. The son of a Jamaican father and Swiss mother, a colonel in the Army Reserve and former JAG officer whom O’Malley plucked out of relative obscurity in the Maryland House of Delegates to be his running mate in 2006, Brown is an amiable enough fellow but gives off the distinct vibe of a second-stringer. His big chance to show his stuff, the launch of the Maryland insurance exchange under Obamacare, was a total fiasco.

This is a real problem. Massachusetts was the worst example, with a candidate who had already failed disastrously once winning the primary fairly easily, but the weak bench created in part by the 2010 wave might continue to have reverberations.