There is some evidence to suggest Mark Udall's defeat can be chalked up, in part, to a far bigger dip in midterm turnout for Colorado Democrats when compared with the GOP.
As the holiday season moved along, election officials nationwide completed the process of declaring official the results of the 2014 midterm election cycle. On the whole, of course, said cycle was a tremendous disappointment for Democrats, who saw control of the United States Senate wrested from their grasp, as well as reduced numbers in the U.S. House.
At the state level, a disappointing evening in the battle over the three dozen governorships (Democrats had long been favored to hold serve, if not pick off one to three seats) culminated in the fewest number of Democratic governors in over a decade. Meanwhile, the blue team also took a substantial hit at the state legislative level, where several chambers were flipped in the direction of the GOP and the GOP made at least nominal gains in all but a handful of legislatures.
In the postmortem, one of the articles of faith among those trying to divine what went wrong for the Democrats was that flagging base turnout bore at least some of the blame for the outcome. As we now have more data to peruse (with, surely, more to come), the numbers provide some fairly compelling evidence for that thesis.
Even in states with comparably decent turnout, Democratic turnout seems to have tanked in comparison to their GOP foes. In states where turnout flagged, that characteristic was positively glaring. Head beyond the fold to look at two representative states (Colorado and Nevada), and a look at the D/R voting chasm that took place two short months ago.
Rather than look at county data, we will instead take a look at the voter turnout in each of the "lower chamber" legislative districts in the western states of Colorado and Nevada.
The logic is that using the House/Assembly districts allows for a bit more precision in the analysis. Noticing that Clark County, Nevada, had disappointing turnout in 2014 (which it did, on an immense level) is one thing. But two-thirds of the state's Assembly districts are in the county, and some of them are deep blue and others are pink (if not red). Therefore, it helps to look at the individual districts, since not all Clark County districts are created equal. The same is true in Colorado. While no single county in the state dominates the legislature the way that Clark County does in Nevada, the Denver metro area is the clear population center of the state, and just looking at ... say ... Jefferson County turnout will not tell us the whole story.
Before we get much further, though, a couple of caveats:
1. Not all districts can be measured, due to uncontested races: Alas, this is the one pitfall of using state legislative elections to measure turnout. Typically, a lot of incumbents are left with no major party opposition. Given the probability of huge undervotes in those uncontested races, it is not right or fair to cite those races. This does rob us of some key points in the analysis, if only because this tendency is far more common, as one would expect, in races where the partisan lean of the district is pronounced. For example, in Nevada this year, five of the six most anti-Obama Assembly districts were unopposed in either 2012 or 2014, making turnout comparisons a bit more difficult. On the other end of the ideological spectrum, the same thing was true in five of the seven most pro-Obama Assembly districts. Having said all that, however, there are enough districts left to analyze (over 50 districts in Colorado, and over 30 in Nevada) to allow for some fair conclusions to be drawn.
2. This data simply reveals what smart election observers already know: The main theme of the data is that the highest-performing districts in terms of turnout (measured as the 2014 turnout as a percentage of 2012 turnout) were far more conservative than the ones where turnout tanked. Some of you might be mumbling, "no shit," as it has long been a given in electoral analysis that the midterm electorate is typically more Republican than the presidential electorate. When you shed 40-50 million voters, it should not come as a shock that the nonvoters might have some common characteristics. However, what was striking here is how big the gap was, especially in Nevada, where overall turnout was a huge disappointment. The gap between the turnout ratio in the most anti-Obama contested district (72 percent of 2012 turnout) and the most pro-Obama contested district (a woeful 45 percent of 2012 turnout) was massive. The gap was a bit more modest in Colorado, for reasons we will delve into down the line, but still present.
Having dispensed with those caveats, let's look at each state individually.
NEVADA
Nevada's unique (and, if you are a Democrat, utterly terrifying) 2014 election cycle was such a phenomenon that I already felt compelled to write about it shortly after the election. Democrats lost their asses in the Silver State, losing every statewide race, one of their two seats in the U.S. House, and both chambers of the state legislature.
Looking at the disparities between the number of votes cast at the legislative level between 2012 and 2014, however, the Democratic collapse looks a bit more understandable.
President Obama won a total of 26 of the state's 42 Assembly districts with 50 percent or more of the vote. In those districts on Election Day 2012, nearly 492,000 voters showed up and voted in the races for state Assembly. In 2014, that number cratered all the way down to just under 237,000.
In percentage terms, that means that the pro-Obama seats in the state Assembly participated at just 48 percent of their 2012 turnout.
Meanwhile, in the 16 districts where Obama scored less than 50 percent of the vote in 2012, the turnout in this election cycle was 65 percent of its 2012 total.
Let's translate these percentage to raw voters, as this might help to explain the statewide sweep for the GOP.
In 2012, the Obama over-50 districts accounted for nearly 75,000 more votes than the Obama under-50 districts. In 2014, the Obama over-50 districts accounted for about 35,000 less votes than the Obama under-50 districts.
And that, friends, is how Democratic rising star Ross Miller lost his bid for state attorney general to Adam Laxalt, an outcome virtually no one expected.
It also goes a long way to explaining how the GOP also took control of the state assembly in an equally improbable outcome. Some of the districts where Democrats lost seats were districts where turnout tanked the worst. Case in point: Assembly District 8, a rectangular district just west of the Strip and Interstate 15. It is, by any measure, a left-leaning district, having not only been won solidly by Barack Obama in 2012 (59-39), but also by Democratic Senate hopeful Shelley Berkeley (51-39), even as she was narrowly losing statewide. However, on Election Day 2014, incumbent Democratic Assemblyman Jason Frierson fell to Republican John Moore by less than 1 percentage point. Why? Well, in part, it was because just 44 percent of the electorate that sent Frierson to a landslide victory in 2012 (when he won 61-39) bothered to come back in 2014.
A similar phenomenon occurred in the neighboring 10th AD, a district that covers most of the Las Vegas Strip and was carried by Obama in 2012 with 63 percent of the vote. Left open in 2014 by the retirement of Democrat Joe Hogan, this seat also saw a massive dropoff (2014 turnout was 48 percent of 2012 turnout) and saw Republican Shelly Shelton score a victory by less than 100 votes over Democrat Jake Holder. Holder did himself no favors, having lost a residency challenge shortly before the election, but it was a stunning outcome, nevertheless.
COLORADO
Unlike Nevada, Colorado did not suffer a huge turnout dip across the board between 2010 and 2014. As noted here, Nevada saw roughly 180,000 fewer voters show up at the polls in 2014, compared to the midterm elections just four years earlier. In Colorado, meanwhile, turnout actually surged between 2010 and 2014. In 2010, about 1.79 million voters turned out for the gubernatorial contest (the race in that cycle with the highest turnout). In 2014, about 2.04 million voters turned out.
Part of that turnout surge, without a doubt, could be attributed to the newly implemented all-mail balloting in the state. Prior to the election, when the electoral fortunes of both Democratic Sen. Mark Udall and Democratic Gov. John Hickenlooper seemed very much at risk, a number of Democrats pinned their hopes on that all-mail electoral structure as a saving grace for the Democrats.
There was some justification for Democratic hopes in that vein. If one accepts two common assumptions about politics (that the voters that drop off in midterms are more typically Democratic, and that all-mail elections reduces the amount of drop-off by increasing turnout), then it is logical to assume an all-mail election would favor the Democrats. Indeed, one of the only states where Democrats pointedly did not have a crappy night was Oregon, another vote-by-mail state.
However, while the voter turnout gap was greatly diminished by Colorado's enhanced turnout (and vote-by-mail status), it was not eliminated entirely.
In Colorado, the partisan nature of the legislative districts is split slightly more evenly. There were 37 districts where President Obama won 50 percent or more in 2012 versus 28 districts where he scored under 50 percent. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the legislature headed into the 2014 elections was split 37-28 Democratic.
In the over-50 Obama districts, the turnout this election was 76 percent of the presidential turnout of 2012. In the under-50 Obama districts, the turnout was ... 78 percent.
On the surface, that doesn't seem like a big deal. But it does hold some significance, when you look at the raw vote. In 2012, the "pro-Obama" HDs cast 248,000 more votes that the "anti-Obama" districts. This time around, the "pro-Obama" districts still held a net advantage, but it was down to just 165,000 votes.
What's more, the true margin was likely even less than that, since state legislative turnout on the GOP side was muted by the fact that 10 Republicans had no major party opposition (compared to only three Democrats). If you just look at the Romney districts that had contested races in 2012 and 2014, the average turnout was 84 percent of presidential turnout. If you look at the Obama districts that had contested races in 2012 and 2014, the average turnout was 77 percent of presidential turnout. It's not a Nevada-esque chasm, but it still is a palpable difference.
So, that "turnout edge" for the Democrats, if you will, dropped by at least 83,000 votes. As it happens, that is more than double the amount of Republican Cory Gardner's margin of victory over former Sen. Udall (the final margin was 39,688 votes). Which is not to say that Udall would've necessarily won if the Obama 50-plus districts had kept pace with their redder counterparts. After all, the pro-Obama districts from 2012 still cast significantly more votes than the GOP-leaning seats, and Udall still was defeated (along with most of the other statewide Democrats—Gov. Hickenlooper being a notable exception). This implies, to some extent, that Gardner had to have done better in the bluish districts than Udall did in the red ones.
But in elections that are decided by margins that narrow, every little bit counts.
CONCLUSIONS
Though both states saw the GOP better able to hold onto their 2012 electorate, there does seem to be a significant difference. Typically, midterm turnout is in the neighborhood of 60-70 percent of the preceding election's presidential turnout (2014 was on the low end, at 60.6 percent).
Therefore, the Nevada story is pretty clearly not the work of a super-enthused Republican turnout, since the GOP districts came in right around an "as expected" turnout. The Nevada story is that the blue districts had a total turnout collapse. If, nationally, midterm turnout was less than half of presidential turnout (as happened in the Obama plus-50 districts), you'd be looking at around 65 million voters nationally. For the record, 2014 U.S. House turnout nationally was far less than recent midterms, at 78.2 million.
In Colorado, meanwhile, turnout was nearly 77 percent of 2012, and both the GOP-leaning and Democratic-leaning districts overperformed the national average by a healthy margin. That is likely owed to two factors: the high-profile statewide races for governor and Senate (which drew national attention ... and national money), as well as the all-mail balloting. The latter factor might've saved Democrats from a more bleak outcome by muting the gap we saw in Nevada. Republican Bob Beauprez narrowly failed to seize the governorship from Democratic incumbent Hickenlooper (49-46 percent), and the Democrats held onto the state House of Representatives by the slightest of margins (34 seats to 31 seats). In a down year, these small victories are not insignificant.