The early November statewide elections in Kentucky and West Virginia were something of a yawn compared to the excitement of 2009 where big Republican wins in Virginia and New Jersey presaged the 2010 wave that swept Republicans into a dominant position in the House and in states nationwide.

In Kentucky, Republican nominee David Williams was never really a threat to Steve Beshear.

In West Virginia the race was at least closer with Bill Maloney (and some timely help from the RGA) giving Earl Ray Tomblin a real race.  But here too, Republicans not could get over the “Appalachian effect” that keeps conservative Democrats in office even as their national party heads further left and other conservative Democrats throughout the South and elsewhere have become endangered species.

One strong indicator of how uninteresting these two Appalachian races were is that most of the coverage after Election Day focused on Ohio and Virginia—for initiatives and control of the state legislature—rather than the two states with Governor’s races.

But it’s important to go deeper than just two Governor’s races.  Aaron Blake of the Washington Post has coined the term “Appalachian Bubble” to describe the fact that in both statewide races and in selecting their Congressmen, the Appalachian states and districts seem to be a pocket of resistance against the Republican takeover of the South and rural places across the country.

So what’s going on?  Let’s start by looking at two Governor’s races:  Last week’s election in West Virginia and the election two years ago in neighboring Virginia.  Some of the differences between the support that Maloney received in West Virginia and the support that McDonnell won in Virginia can be attributed to the political environment—while Obama and Democrats haven’t really regained much popularity, some of the anger at them has ebbed since 2009.  But there are also some fundamental differences between the two races worth examining.

As you can see, Maloney did significantly worse with McCain voters than did McDonnell and slightly worse with Republicans.  He also lost middle-aged and senior voters at higher rates than he did younger voters and actually out-performed McDonnell among Democrats.  Finally, Maloney underperformed McDonnell with both conservatives and moderates at about the same rate.

In isolation, these numbers don’t tell the whole story.  But for someone whose career in politics and polling has seen the shift of states like Oklahoma and Texas from Democrat-dominated to Republican-dominated and who has recently polled for numerous Republican winners as Louisiana has made the same shift, they are hauntingly familiar.

Here then are three diagnoses and prescriptions to burst the “Appalachian Bubble”:

• Republicans still have not overcome “cultural Democrats.”
  

While some in the media and national Democrat wish-casting about 2012 will argue that the poor performance by Maloney among voters aged 45-64 and 65+ was about a successful strategy of attacking him on Republican plans related to Medicare and Social Security, those of us with memories of earlier transitions in the South see this as part of a pattern where lifetime Democratic voters are just slower to shift their allegiances.

This is also part of the reason why the only group among whom Maloney outperformed McDonnell was Democratic voters—in Virginia the conservative Democrats of ten or 20 years ago are now Republicans; in Appalachia they’re still Democrats and while they can be won, they must be won in each race again and again.

In places like Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and throughout the South, we have slowly converted these cultural Democrats using a variety of issues (don’t let anyone tell you it was only social issues, though they were important).

Some of those issues, such as social issues, still matter greatly while others, like anti-communism and U.S.-Soviet relations, will have to be replaced with new issues like environmental and other regulations.

The biggest factor in overcoming these “cultural Democrats” though was years of focused outreach, advocacy, and education.  Moving voters from national/state ticket splitters to reliable Republicans takes time and patience, and it takes infrastructure and ongoing effort.  If Republicans want to burst the “Appalachian Bubble,” we’ll need to make the investments of time and treasure on the ground to do so.

• We aren’t the populists/reformers.
  

Another big reason Republicans were so successful at converting many historically Democratic states over the past several decades is that we took advantage of the corruption that is endemic to a state with a long history of one-party rule and campaigned as populists and reformers.

Especially in an area like Appalachia, where distrust of everything from big businesses to the federal government (and often the state government, too) is less of a cyclical pattern and more of an enduring cultural fact, being the populist candidate in a race is critical.  And yet Republicans have too often nominated big-businessman-politicians or the next guy on the leadership rolls and ceded the archetypical good-old-boy populist role to the Democrat in the race.

One of the keys to GOP success in other places that have re-aligned from Democratic to Republican in the last 30-plus years was finding candidates who looked and sounded like they were more comfortable shouting up at the seat of power than they were lecturing down from it.  We don’t seem to have done this yet in many of the races we lose in Appalachia.

• We try too hard to “nationalize” these races.
  

One of the great piece of inherited wisdom among D.C. political consultants is that when the political winds are at your back, you want to make every race about national issues, while when they’re in your face, you want to make every race as local as possible.

This turns out to be true most of the time, but it hurt us for years in the more rural (and slower to convert to Republican candidates) places in states like Oklahoma, Texas, and Louisiana; and I believe it is still hurting us in Appalachia.

The problem is that while the voters in these places agree with us on the issues, they have an inherent cultural resistance to being told by “outsiders” how to think and what to do.

When those “outsiders” are from Washington, DC, the problem is compounded many times.

It damages any ability GOP candidates have to run as populists and make meaningful connections as part of the community of voters they want to represent—in trying to support Republican candidates on national issues, we make them national candidates among voters whose entire worldview is rooted in a much narrower and closer sense of community.

When we look at the recent history of successful Appalachian Democrats, from Joe Manchin, to Earl Ray Tomblin, to incumbent Democratic Congressmen from Pennsylvania to North Carolina, perhaps the most important key to their success is that they have portrayed themselves as “one of us” to their constituents and take every opportunity to make arguments that are “us versus other,” frequently at the expense of their own party’s national leadership.

While making these Democrats “own” the failures and policies of their party seems like the right strategy, they have survived because they are able to turn this line of attack into another example of how rooted they are in the Appalachian communities and culture that they represent and turn their Republican opponents into creatures of “outsiders” and “Washington.”

For those who missed it last week, Doug Schoen released a fascinating poll consisting of in-person interviews of n=200 Occupy Wall Street protesters.  The topline report can be found here and is worth reading in its entirety.  It provides a glimpse into some of the real lunatic fringe elements that are part of (but not the whole of) the Occupy Wall Street protests.

That “part of” bit is important, because Schoen took a little beating over imprecise language in his discussion of the poll and because of one of those silly errors that are the bane of running a real-world polling operation.  He took a beating mostly for disagreeing with liberals, but he didn’t help his own cause.

You see, Schoen made the all-too-rational argument that the Occupy Wall Street protesters might not be the kind of gang that Democratic leaders want to get too close to.  To a conservative, that’s about as controversial as saying that you don’t want to go throw trashcans through windows at an anti-IMF protest.  But the left wing of the Democratic Party is so desperate to anoint Occupy Wall Street as its own version of the Tea Party movement that they treated Schoen as an apostate.

For a summary of the anti-Schoen position, take a look at Andrew Gelman’s very subtly titled piece, “Hack pollster Doug Schoen illustrates a general point: The #1 way to lie with statistics is…to just lie!”  Gelman is a smart guy and his blog is a regular read in our firm, so I’m not singling him out here—the same arguments and rancor appeared elsewhere across the progressive blog universe.

The complaints about Schoen are basically three:

1) Schoen says that the Occupy Wall Street protest “believes in radical redistribution of wealth, civil disobedience and, in some instances, violence…”

To “debunk” this, the liberals go to an open-ended question about what protesters want to achieve.  They point out that influencing the Democratic Party the way that the Tea Party has the GOP (35%) is the number one objective of the protesters and only one other objective (breaking the two-party duopoly, 11%) even scores in double digits.  They further point out that only 4% want to dissolve the American system of government or the capitalist economic system and only another 4% want “radical re-distribution of wealth.”

The first point is fair enough, slightly more than one-third of the protesters may be fairly reasonable people who just want to pull the Democratic Party to the left.  If you add in the 9% who say they want to engage and mobilize progressives, it’s fair to grant that a plurality of the protesters are just run-of-the-mine activists who want to influence their Party and get more liberal Democrats elected.

But what about those couple of “only 4%” groups in there?  Here are the actual numbers:

Seven percent (7%) of protesters want “direct democracy,” which probably is fine if you’re sitting around your freshman seminar daydreaming about the tempeh burger you’re going to eat later and the game of hacky sack you’ve got on for the afternoon.  But in the really real world that means…oh I don’t know…something like overthrowing the American system of government.

Then there’s that 4% who just outright say they want to dissolve representative democracy and the capitalist system.  To translate that from progressive-speak to English, that’s Marxist revolution or something quite like it.

And there’s that other 4% who want to radically redistribute wealth.  I’m not sure if that’s Marxism or just looting, but it doesn’t sound good.

Plus, as anyone who has worked with re-coded open ended data before knows, there are probably a handful of responses that couldn’t be coded together with anything else but were likely just as crazy.

So one in six (15%) protesters want to overthrow the American system of government, the American economy, or the notion of private property.  Plus there are an unknown number of other kooks hiding in the un-coded data.  That’s not exactly a mainstream movement anywhere other than perhaps Berkeley or Amherst.

Then there’s that violence point.

According to Schoen’s data, almost one in three (31%) protesters said they would engage in violence to achieve their goals.  I don’t have the crosstabs, but I’m guessing the ones who want to influence the Democratic Party, promote a national conversation, or energize Progressives aren’t the ones who said they would use violence.

So what we’re talking about here is a not-insignificant number of these protesters (somewhere between one-sixth and one-third) who are advocating the violent overthrow of the United States Government, the violent disruption of the economic system, or the violent theft of private property.  There are words we usually use for all of those things and none of them are good and none of them are at all mainstream.

And does anyone else think this might have received a bit more attention from the  Mainstream Media if between one-sixth and one-third of Tea Party activists wanted to overthrow the government?

2) Schoen said in writing and on TV that “Sixty-five percent {of protesters} say that government has a moral responsibility to guarantee all citizens access to affordable health care, a college education, and a secure retirement—no matter the cost.”

A liberal blogger with access to the data posted the topline report showing that the question that was actually asked doesn’t include the “no matter the cost” clause and so Schoen was misleading people.  The liberal claim is that Schoen was lying about his data here and making the sentiment seem more extreme than it was.

Here’s the problem—if you look at the topline report posted on Schoen’s own website (and linked to above), it has the “no matter the cost” language.  So we’re faced with a he-said/he-said situation.  Either the liberal blogger altered the report to embarrass someone he disagrees with, Schoen altered his own report to align with his analysis, or something else happened.

We probably will never know the truth. But rather than someone outright lying here, I suspect what really happened is that the version of the topline report leaked to the blogs had an error.  Quality control in a polling firm that is “putting up big numbers” (running a lot of projects at the same time) is a constant effort.

From time to time things will get put into pre-production that are based on an earlier version of a much-edited survey instrument or that have a silly typo in them and get caught before final release.  From time-to-time one even gets sent out with an error in it—I recall a humorous CBS News poll from 2008 that repeatedly referred to Hillary Clinton with male pronouns.

If the leaked version of the poll wasn’t the final release, it wouldn’t shock me if it had question wording that wasn’t the final wording.  The fact that Schoen’s written analysis, TV analysis, and actual topline use precisely identical language suggests to me that the version actually fielded included the “no matter the cost” language and that the liberal blogosphere is pouncing on what amounts to a mid-stream quality control hiccup as evidence of malfeasance.

3) Schoen says that the protesters support raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans.

Here the liberal bloggers simply point out that so do a large number of Americans in some surveys.

This is a fair point.  In the current environment, with concerns about an exploding budget deficit and major stresses on their own pocket books most Americans are willing to support the notion of “tax the other guys” when asked what solutions they do or do not support.  That’s a little different than just wanting to tax the rich more on general principle, but it’s a fair argument that the context would change the interpretation of the Schoen poll somewhat.

But, it’s also a quibble over interpretation.

Without the first two complaints to support it, a failure to put this question in context with other data hardly amounts to being a “hack pollster” or “just lie!”ing.

It seems to me that after looking at the evidence, the worst that Doug Schoen is guilty of in this case is running a slightly leaky ship with some mid-stream quality control issues and failure to contextualize and caveat every single piece of data in the way a professional academic would (but which also takes weeks longer to produce—time Schoen didn’t have here).

Hardly seems worth the war chant of “lies, lies, lies” rising up from the liberal blogosphere.  But then again, it’s not my fantasy of a grass-roots progressive movement to equal the authentic wave that was the Tea Party that he’s debunking.

John Sides had an interesting piece in the New York Times’ FiveThirtyEight blog earlier this month.  The full piece is well worth a read for anyone serious about understanding the latest political science research on campaign advertising.  Here are links to part one and part two.

Sides is a widely published political scientist and the co-founder of one of my daily must-read blogs, The Monkey Cage, so I was excited to see his extended take on campaign advertising.

Covering a wide swath of the political science literature on the topic, I’m not going to try to cover everything Sides said in this piece.  Instead I want to re-focus the discussion a bit on his original metaphor.

Sides carries the “Moneyball” metaphor only far enough to make fun of the “grizzled advisors” before launching into a fairly mundane re-capitulation of the state of the political science literature on campaign advertising.

There’s nothing wrong with a lit review, and having all of the information in one place is certainly valuable.  But, it would have been more interesting to me as a practitioner of campaign research and analysis to see a direct assessment of the “Moneyball” nuggets hiding in the information he presented.  I think there are a few such tidbits in his article.

First though it’s probably worth talking about “Moneyball” for those who aren’t familiar with the concept.  “Moneyball” is the book, and later movie, about Billy Beane’s use of the findings of a branch of baseball research generally referred to as “sabermetrics” (SABR being the Society for American Baseball Research) as general manager of the Oakland Athletics.

Being a book, and movie, “Moneyball” almost has to tell the story as one about the conflict between Beane and the traditional baseball scouts and “grizzled advisors.”  Sides chooses in his articles to mostly mirror that structure and talks a lot about how political science has proven typical political analysis wrong.  That’s fair enough and he certainly has lots of opportunity to point out the failings of both pundits and campaign professionals.

But there’s another story in “Moneyball” that I think exists in the literature Sides reviews and in other science out there.  What “Moneyball” is really about is the benefit of being an early-adopter of new information in your field.  Billy Beane benefited from knowing that there was an undervalued resource out there—high on-base percentage power hitters who weren’t particularly athletic or good contact hitters—and taking advantage of it.

Interestingly, the story doesn’t stay the same forever.  Players who combine high on-base percentage with the ability to hit for power are now hot commodities.  Teams that are taking the same approach of using analysis to find undervalued resources are now focusing on defense.

The “Moneyball” approach isn’t just about baseball either, Daryl Morey of the Houston Rockets has used analytic tools to identify players who benefit their team by being on the floor despite not recording any real success in traditional statistical categories.  And businesses of all types and sizes are increasingly using data and analytics to gain additional advantages and increase profits.

So what is the “Moneyball” of politics?  Some of it is present in Sides’ article, but I also think he misses the point a little.

You see, “Moneyball” isn’t the macro effect that political scientists are usually, rightly, interested in.  Billy Beane didn’t change the big picture of baseball.  As a sage observer once said, “This is a very simple game. You throw the ball, you catch the ball, you hit the ball.”  That’s as true for Billy Beane’s Oakland teams as it is for all of the others.

The “Moneyball” approach is about finding marginal advantages by using data, research, and analytics to understand the problem you’re facing better than the next guy.  That’s how a Billy Beane uncovers the Giambi’s of the world and how Daryl Morey realizes the value of a Shane Battier.

So let’s look at some nuggets from the Sides article that might inform an actual “Moneyball” approach to politics.

Here are four findings that I thought were particularly relevant to someone, like me, whose job it is to inject a little “Moneyball” into the campaigns we work with at WPA.

• Campaign ads matter more when the candidates are unfamiliar.

 While most political science research is about big races with well-known candidates (an overwhelming amount is about Presidential politics), this one finding is probably most important to those of us who work with candidates for Congress, down ballot statewide (e.g., Lieutenant Governor, etc.) and even state legislature.

This finding may suggest an increased value for early advertising in races where the candidates aren’t familiar because the marginal value of those dollars is higher during that initial introduction phase.

• Campaign ads matter more when a candidate can outspend the opponent.

While this is fairly obvious, the underlying information and analysis suggests some tantalizing things about optimizing campaign spending across different media markets and at different times.

• Campaign ads can matter, but not for long.

The “priming effect” of campaign advertising is something we’ve written about in the past, but it’s worth pointing out again.  Thinking about the topic again does lead to some interesting questions about the value of hoarding resources for a late ad push.  It makes one wonder whether the traditional aversion to “going dark” once advertising has started is really that important.

I also wonder how this finding would play out in the context of a campaign where the candidate was unfamiliar at the start—maybe it suggests two peaks in the campaign advertising cycle and less concern about what happens in the middle.

• Negative ads work, except when they don’t./There is no secret sauce. Really.

There’s a risk in taking these last two points together to arrive at some kind of “know-nothing” philosophy of actual campaign activity.  Sides unfortunately edges toward this position to end his article.

The same information could also suggest that context matters a lot more than we typically think.  There’s no “secret sauce” because you can’t always do the same thing in race after race and expect it to be successful.  Negative messaging works in the right context and when you have the right message.  Sometimes there’s nothing negative that will work.

Our own research using field experiments and random assignment of messages has demonstrated pretty clearly that, race-by-race, there are messages that work better than others (while this may seem basic, it’s amazing how often a message du jour will become the standard cookie cutter approach in races across the country.

But it’s not always the same message.  And sometimes it’s a positive message while others it’s a negative one.  And we often see different messages have very different impact by media market.

To us, not surprisingly, this all illustrates the importance of a good campaign researcher.  A researcher who does more than just measure the race with antiquated more likely/less likely message testing.  A researcher with the right message tools comes in: helping the candidate find the right message for each specific race, by market, by electorate, and be each specific moment in time.

And maybe that’s the “Moneyball” of politics.

President Obama is on the road again.

Never missing an opportunity to waste taxpayer dollars in an increasingly desperate effort to get a second term, Obama will take his “pass this bill/it’s not my fault” tour to Virginia and North Carolina this week.

That certainly makes sense as both are traditional swing states that Obama won in 2008 and where he is polling well below 50% against most of the Republican contenders (on average Obama is at 46% in North Carolina against the Republican top-tier and 42% in Virginia in recent polling).

The problem for Obama is that while he is re-running 2008’s campaign (at least geographically), the 2012 race is shaping up very differently.

Here are some other states in which Obama is well below 50% on the ballot against most potential Republican challengers:

Those are six states that have been reliably Democratic over the past four Presidential cycles.  In each, Obama is well below 50% on the ballot against, at this point, much less well-known Republican opposition.

For voters who are not hard-core base partisans, most incumbent re-election votes become choices about whether the incumbent has earned another term in office.  Presidential elections follow this pattern even more strongly because of the ease with which voters can make judgments about the direction the President has taken the country.

For Obama to be well below 50% in swing states should be chilling; for him to be well below 50% in territory that should form part of his base support should be the stuff of electoral nightmares.

It’s not just six generally Democratic states that Obama is losing; it’s 71 electoral votes.  While both Virginia and North Carolina are growing states, neither would make up for the loss of Pennsylvania and only North Carolina would make up for the loss of either Michigan or New Jersey.

It seems wrong to offer the other side free advice, but the Obama team might look at re-directing some of their taxpayer-funded campaigning to big, recently reliable Democratic states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and even New Jersey rather than wasting money in states like Virginia and North Carolina that may not matter if they don’t literally cover their bases first.  But then again, I hope they don’t.

Of course, if there’s one thing we’ve learned over the last four years it’s that this Administration is really bad at doing anything with taxpayer money other than squandering it on bad ideas that don’t accomplish much.  So maybe what they’re doing this week shouldn’t come as that big of a surprise after all.

Gallup’s latest data paints a potentially dire picture for Barak Obama, but not one so dire that it prevents Democrats from whistling past the graveyard.

To recap: Obama’s job approval is down to a miserable 38% in the latest Gallup Poll. But Democrats will point to the fact that his personal favorable ratings are still above 50% according to the latest Real Clear Politics average.

And, of course, Democrats will also point to low ratings for Republicans and argue that we’re headed to another Truman vs. “Do Nothing Congress” election.

So what is the truth?

Is Obama in deep trouble facing an electorate where fewer than two-in-five voters think he’s doing a good job?

Or is in relatively good shape facing an electorate where most voters still like him personally?

Fortunately, data analysis allows us to answer these questions without the need of guesswork or speculation. I asked the outstanding analysts at our company, Wilson Perkins Allen Opinion Research, to dissect both the relationship between approval ratings and electoral success and the relationship between personal favorables and electoral success.

Some notes before I detail these data:

• We’re looking at approval and favorables in the last poll before the election.

• o One thing we know is that standing in the summer of the off-year doesn’t necessarily determine standing by Election Day.
  • § For example, in the summer of 1991 almost seven in ten (69%) Americans approved of George H.W. Bush’s performance. By Election Day that number dropped to just 34%.
  • § In contrast, Ronald Reagan had a job approval of only 43% in August of 1983. By Election Day 1984, 58% of Americans approved of his performance.
• o We could compare to popular vote, but in the American system (at present) Electoral votes are what counts.
• o Data for this question only really goes back to the 1970s.
• o In comparison, we have Presidential polling data dating back to the 1940s.

• We are comparing approval or favorables to the percentage of the Electoral College vote a candidate captured.

• The now standard “favorable or unfavorable opinion” question is a relatively recent innovation in polling.

Now, the data:

First, a plot of Presidential Approval against Electoral College percentage.

While concepts like the trend line and the predictive power of job approval are interesting, sometimes the simplest analysis is the most valuable.

In this case, the result is simple and clear: exactly one President in the past ten who faced Election Day with a job approval below 50% was re-elected—Harry S. Truman in 1948.

Next: personal favorable ratings.

Two things stand out from this analysis:

1. Personal Approval ratings aren’t as clearly correlated with electoral success as are job approval ratings.
2. The President with the single highest personal approval ratings in our data set—Gerald Ford—failed to win on Election Day.

So what does all of this tell us? Three important findings:

1. We don’t know the answer yet.

a. Presidential approval can change substantially over the course of a year and we have more than a year between now and Election Day.

b. While President Obama’s is in deep trouble now, it is too early to make a prediction about his standing next November.

1. For most Presidents job approval and personal favorables are similar and a poorly regarded President loses while a well-regarded President wins.
2. While Democrats like to paint the picture that Obama can repeat Truman’s miraculous win of 1948, his ratings of the moment have more in common with Gerald Ford in 1946—a personally well-regarded President whose administration voters have judged a failure and who lost his bid for re-election.

Whether Barak Obama is the next Gerald Ford or if he’s just another President whose failures in office cost him re-election, this analysis suggests that without a substantial achievement to shift public opinion, from a polling perspective Obama looks much more like Gerald Ford than Harry Truman.

It’s no surprise that the dominant story these days is Presidential politics.  Between the Ames straw poll and Obama’s full-campaign-mode bus tour, the race for the White House in 2012 has been fully joined on both sides.

With all eyes on the Presidential race, the question of what happens to the House and Senate is almost an afterthought despite being just as important in terms of what happens with spending, the debt, and the economy.

Where there has been coverage of Congressional campaigns over the past few weeks, an interesting theme is developing: predictions that an “anti-incumbent wave” will cost members of both parties their seats.  The narrative goes something like this:

Voters are fed up with what’s going on in Washington.  They see brinksmanship on a government shutdown and then brinksmanship on the debt ceiling as signs that their elected representatives are no longer doing their jobs and want change.  The classic paradigm of voters wanting incumbents voted out, but no their incumbent, has broken down and now voters are ready to send their own Member packing.

The implication of this idea is that, regardless of the outcome of the Presidential race, Democrats may do better than expected in the House because there are more Republican incumbents to suffer voters’ wrath.  The immediate question that occurred to us is whether there is any evidence that this sort of thing might happen, or is it just a case of Democratic-aligned journalists whistling past the graveyard?

First let’s look at the evidence:

• Congress’s job approval ratings are at their lowest point in the last six years with 13% approving and 84% disapproving according to the most recent Gallup poll.
• In a recent CNN poll only 45% of Americans said that their Congressman deserved re-election compared to 48% who said they did not.
  • As is often the case, a much lower number (23%) said most members of Congress deserved re-election while almost three in four (72%) said they did not.

Those numbers are bad for Congress.  In fact, they are worse than numbers seen before any of the last three “wave” elections or those seen before 1994’s massive turnover in the House.  But they’re not such outliers that we can’t give them some context.

The table below shows Congressional job, approval-own incumbent re-elect, and the percentage of incumbents of each party who lost general elections for the elections in 2010, 2008, 2006, and 1994.

As you look at this table, it is important to understand what we’re showing and what we’re not.  We’re purposefully ignoring primary election losses—they matter to incumbents but it won’t help Democrats much if 2012 is like 2010 where a number of Republican incumbents lost primaries to candidates who went on to win the General Election.  We’re also purposefully ignoring races for open seats since there was no incumbent to be influenced by an anti-incumbent mood.

What we see in this table is that despite Congress getting poor marks from the American people before each election, there’s just not a case where that anger was taken out on incumbents of both parties equally:

• In the earliest two “wave” elections in the table, exactly zero incumbents from the party that gained power lost General Elections.
• In 2008 a few Democrats did lose seats but two of those were cases where Republicans regained seats lost due to scandal in 2006, one was a reversal of a special election result from just months earlier, and one was lost by a Democratic incumbent under federal indictment.
• In 2010, the only two Republican incumbents to lose in the General Election were the winner of a “scandal seat” from 2008 and another winner of a special election months earlier.

So to return to our initial question, should Democrats take solace in an anti-incumbent mood and the hope that voters will vote out incumbents of bother parties in large numbers to the benefit of the Democratic minority?  The evidence suggests that they shouldn’t.

While the Congressional approval and own-incumbent re-elect numbers are indeed “historic lows” as much of the reporting emphasizes, they are not substantially lower than previous “wave” elections.  Congressional approval is within ten points of where it stood before the last two elections and exactly ten points lower than the 1994 mark.  The own-incumbent re-elect score has dipped below 50%, but it is still within ten points of where it stood in 1994, 2006, and 2008.

Just because something hasn’t happened before doesn’t mean it can’t happen.  But in trying to predict what might happen in 2012, we’re better served by looking at the data from previous elections than we are imagining some kind of outlier electoral event that might benefit Democrats.