Monday, November 10, 2008
Politics / Woods Democrats: 'It's Amazing' We Were Close in Legislative Races
Posted by Jeff Woods on Mon, Nov 10, 2008 at 10:59 AM
Tennessee Democrats, feeling the heat for losing the legislature, are furiously crunching numbers and compiling post-mortem reports in an attempt to deflect blame. Their basic argument? Not surprisingly, they say the state party and its legislative candidates were hapless victims of the overwhelming wave of votes for John McCain in the Tennessee hinterlands.
This Associated Press story sums it up nicely. McCain clobbered Obama by 40 points or more in some counties. His margins obviously poured down the ballot to give Republicans their new majorities in the legislature.
In an email to Pith in the Wind, Senate Democratic Caucus spokesman Mark Brown says the party did all it could. Democrats spent $3 million on their Senate campaigns, sending more than 2 million pieces of mail, producing TV and radio spots and putting full-time field staff on the ground to organize get-out-the-vote drives.
Brown adds, “Approximately 191,000 votes were cast in state Senate races won by Republicans. Their combined margin of victory was 9,890. If we could have flipped 4,946 of those votes, we would have won these three races.”
Given McCain’s margins, he says, “it’s amazing that we got this close.” More from his email:
In the two cycles in which Democrats have been competitive at the top of the ticket (2002 and 2006), we have a net gain of one seat. In the two cycles we have not been competitive at the top of the ticket (2004 and 2008), Democrats have dropped four seats. The executive races (governor and president) are the real vote drivers. Don’t get me wrong, it helps to have a strong U.S. Senate candidate too, but governor and president are the two big races. The real difference in these four cycles is that we had a strong candidate for governor in 2002 and 2006 and we have weak candidates for president in 2004 and 2008.The above analysis makes it all the more imperative for the party to field a strong candidate for governor in 2010 against Bill Frist, the likely GOP nominee. The good news for Democrats is that Lincoln Davis is probably now more likely to run. Before the election, he was said to be leaning toward staying in Congress. Now, he might as well run for governor since Republicans in the legislature are about to gerrymander him out of his job in Washington.
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