Volume 12, Issue 4

Comparisons across even the longest time-span cannot foretell the future. What they can do is generate the available analogies to what has just happened, isolate the patterned outcomes that have preceded it over time, and locate the current outcome in the most recent sequence of results. Accordingly, this article begins with the contests that received the most attention in 2014 – and were consensually regarded as the most consequential – namely those in the Senate. It moves to corresponding contests in the House, considering Senate and House together, as Congress. And it finishes with the composite picture for the elective institutions of American national government, namely Senate, House, and Presidency. Some automatic future does not thereby appear, but various analogies become untenable, various alleged patterns can be dismissed as irrelevant, and the new political world can be much more richly described. Still, what ultimately results is an insistent puzzle about a modern world beginning around 1980 and differing consequentially from everything that went before.

This article examines the influences on the 2014 midterm congressional elections. The election was a decisive victory for the Republican Party. Republicans picked up nine Senate seats and with them control of the Senate. They also gained thirteen House seats, extending their House majority to its largest size in over 80 years. Although Republican seat gains can be explained at one level by the normal processes of surge and decline plus the midterm as a referendum on the performance of the presidential party, this does not explain why the midterm referendum was so lopsidedly against the Democrats that it created a Republican wave in the election. This analysis traces the reasons for the Democrats’ “shellacking” to the 2012 presidential election. The reason for President Obama’s reelection in 2012 has been misinterpreted as an ideological triumph or as a positive referendum on the president’s job performance. Neither was the case. As a first party-term incumbent, President Obama was given additional time to revive the weak economy that he inherited from President Bush. The 2012 referendum on the president’s performance was a suspended referendum, not a vote of confidence. The analysis shows that the economy was weak by historical standards in 2012 and remained so in 2014 and that voters realized that the economy was weak in 2012 and continued to believe so in 2014. The crucial political difference was that voters blamed former President Bush in 2012, but held the Democrats responsible in 2014.

In the instant analysis that followed, pundits dubbed the 2014 midterms an election “wave” for the Republican Party. Our article argues that “wave” is one of the most abused terms in American political discourse. Although political waves do exist, our article argues that they come in a variety of shapes, are created by a constellation of factors beyond anti-incumbency, and can have a number of different effects on the next national election cycle. Our analysis shows that the 2014 wave (if there was a wave in the ocean) was neither as large as pundits suggested nor as politically impactful as some spinners have claimed. Elections are determined by terrain and climate, both of which favored Republicans in 2014. Republicans captured or defended Senate seats where they should have in nine deep-red states. Focusing on gubernatorial and Senate campaigns in seven purple states, we see that Republicans won eight out of the 12 contests and five out of the nine most competitive contests. Although there has been an immense amount of attention to turnout, our analysis demonstrates that Republican victories were sometimes due to turnout, sometimes due to performance among independents, and sometimes due to a combination of these factors. This mixed picture complicates the analysis of the Republican victories, suggesting that the Rising American Electorate (youth, minorities, women) will not simply carry the Democrats to victory in 2016, and that anti-Obama public opinion alone will not be enough to deliver the White House to Republicans. It also provides yet more evidence that there is not a one-size-fits-all strategy when it comes to campaign focus and targeting.

Partisan success in House districts is significantly influenced by the composition of districts and the resulting partisan voting inclinations. Districts that are largely White and have lower population density vote Republican and those that are highly urban and dominated by non-Whites vote Democratic. That continued to play out in 2014. Although the 2014 House elections produced the highest number of Republican seats since 1928, the changes from 2012 to 2014 look less dramatic when assessed by district composition and partisan voting tendencies.

A common observation about the 2014 Senate elections is that one advantage the Republicans had was that the set of states holding elections tilted Republican in partisanship. In this article, we quantify that advantage and demonstrate that the constitutional requirements of equality for state representation in the Senate plus the division of seats into three classes were critical elements in the Republicans’ pickup of nine seats and retaking partisan control. Markedly less important was the national Republican partisan tide.

The volume of televised political advertising plateaued in 2014, as did levels of negativity. Yet the most interesting story about this advertising was the extensive involvement of outside groups, many of which did not disclose their donors. In many of the most competitive Senate races, groups surpassed the parties – and sometimes even the candidates – as the primary sponsors of political advertising. We speculate on what these patterns from 2014 are likely to mean for advertising in 2016.

Interest groups now play a prominent role in the air war. Their collective investment in election campaigns has skyrocketed in the aftermath of Citizens United . Yet questions remain about whether interest group advertising affects the content of the specific issues being discussed. Do groups enter campaigns and engage voters on the same issues as their candidate allies? Or does the presence of more advertisers introduce competitive issue streams? This paper examines ad buys in Senate elections between 2008 and 2014 and the presidential elections of 2008 and 2012. A primary goal of the paper is to uncover the effect of high and low levels of “issue convergence” on election outcomes. Strategists often express concern that too many voices on behalf of a candidate can weaken the impact of ads. One might expect that as convergence between a candidate and his or her allies goes up (meaning the issue content of the ad buys overlaps across advertisers), the impact of ads on votes will increase. Ad effects should be weaker when a candidate’s ads discuss different issues from allied groups and party committees. The results, however, suggest that high rates of issue convergence are only weakly related to election outcomes (and not always in consistent ways).

The campaign finance system has fragmented campaign activity in response to rules that are unworkable in a strong party system. The 2014 congressional elections illustrate how party coalitions have adapted to practices that enable them to raise and spend money outside this formal regulatory framework. For several election cycles, partisan interest groups have used outside campaign organizations to circumvent rules that constrain candidate and party committees. The 2014 elections illustrate how party leaders in Congress and these candidates have now embraced the outside campaign strategy to wrest some control from other elements of the party. Recent changes to campaign finance rules may shift additional money toward traditional committees, but outside groups like Super PACs are now established features of US political campaigns.

The vote intentions of Americans experienced meaningful change over the course of the 2014 campaign, largely to the detriment of Democrats and in favor of the GOP. Vote intention trajectories generally followed sensible and predictable patterns, reflecting forces and developments that unfolded over the course of the campaign cycle. Specifically, changes in voter sentiments were fueled primarily by assessments about the president and, relatedly, about the condition of the national economy. Higher levels of Obama approval helped Democratic contenders over the course of the 2014 midterm cycle, while Republicans appeared to benefit from improvements in the economy. Political events and assessments of congressional performance were unrelated to vote intentions in 2014.

This article examines the Roberts Court and its relationship to the Obama administration following the 2014 midterm election. We begin by analyzing how the Court has been structured by electoral politics during the past 40 years, arguing that the Court’s more conservative, divided, and polarized decision-making reflects the politics of the post-1968 electoral regime. We then consider the impact of the 2014 midterm election. Republican control of the Senate will constrain the president’s ability to shape the federal courts going forward. It will most likely leave the composition of the current Supreme Court intact, leave Justice Kennedy as the pivotal swing vote, while elevating the Court as a campaign issue in the 2016 presidential election.