LA and NC 2014 Congressional Races

[RogueBeaver]

Cool NYT video on the race.

[Miles]

The early vote over the past few days has held pretty steady at 70% white 28% black. Still better than 2010, Landrieu is on track to get around 44% if this holds.

[Tender Branson]

The early vote over the past few days has held pretty steady at 70% white 28% black. Still better than 2010, Landrieu is on track to get around 44% if this holds.

More like 40%.

The Black share in early voting is 27.5%, but because the election day vote will be whiter - the overall black share will be more like 26%. So 70% White, 26% Black and 4% Others.

[Miles]

Ugh.

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[Miles]

The early vote over the past few days has held pretty steady at 70% white 28% black. Still better than 2010, Landrieu is on track to get around 44% if this holds.

More like 40%.

I said if this electorate holds, Tender. Geez.

[KCDem]

Landrieu is losing by 20+ points. Let's move on.

[Attorney General, LGC Speaker, and Former PPT Dwarven Dragon]

Sabato moves the runoff to Safe R. I'm leaving my rating at Likely(Strong Lean) R, given the fact that there is no definitively reliable polling and Landrieu's past history of pulling off close victories against the odds, but my prediction of the margin remains a 14-18 point Cassidy win. (Let's see how right-wing pollsters do in 2016 before considering ruling them reliable)

[IceSpear]

Ugh.

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Landrieu losing by a Corbett-like margin would actually be a good result for her at this point.

[ElectionsGuy]

This might seem like a stupid question, but are there separate exit polls for the runoff?

[Miles]

This seemed to be a bad year for 'bellwhether' counties: going in to this year, Sabato singled out Wake County as the 'most important county' in the county. Despite Hagan losing, Democrats got just about everything they could have asked for in Wake County.

Its sort of like in CO, where lots of pundits were writing about Jefferson County, though it went for Udall in the end.

[Miles]

LA-05/06: Graves and Abraham reportedly already have committee assignments:

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Good picks for both, IMO.

[Miles]

Well, if Cassidy wins, we can certainly appreciate his tireless efforts during the campaign:

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[RogueBeaver]

Landrieu had a very contentious interview on NOLA radio.

[Miles]

^ Of course it was going to be contentious; the host is a tea party member and opened with a really arrogant tone. Good for her.

[Miles]

Republicans swept the NC popular vote:

Congress: 55.6/44.1
State Senate: 53.8/45/3
State House: 54.1/43.9

One sliver of good news was that while Holding improved over his 2012 margin, he did slightly worse in Wake County. If the seat is open by the end of the decade, it could be competitive, as Wake County is growing quickly.

[Miles]

It doesn't look like Landrieu will run for anything else:

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This pretty much sums her up:

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[Miles]

I need to double-check some rural parishes to make sure they're precincts stayed the same, but here's Landrieu (red) vs Edwards (blue) in LA-06.

Landrieu did the best in southern Baton Rouge; that area skews younger and is more transient-heavy (voters being less likely to remember Edwards as Governor). The Greatest University in the SEC is also located there. Cassidy may have underperformed Graves there because of his LSU payroll controversy.

[Sol]

Good news that got neglected on election day: The Democrats now control all seats on the Wake County Commission. Which probably means light rail.

[Miles]

NC-Sen: The Upshot has a decent post-mortem; it concludes that the dropoff in young voters hurt Hagan more than anything else.

[Miles]

Runoff turnout statistics finally are out.

The electorate was 66.7% white, 30.3% black, 3.0% other. Thats actually friendlier to Landrieu than I would have expected. The problem was that, assuming Landrieu took 95% of blacks and 60% of 'other', that leaves her at just 20% (!) of the white vote.

I've talked a lot about my 30/30 rule for Landrieu: get blacks to make up 30% of the electorate and get 30% of the white vote. I always had a feeling the second proposition would be more challenging, but its hard to understate how little white voters distinguished Landrieu from Obama this time. Going into this year, I was expecting her to get 23-24% of whites, at worst.

[smoltchanov]

Absolutely the same situation, that existed for moderate and even "somewhat liberal" (Chafee) Republicans during "great Democratic waves of 2006 and 2008": you could stress as much as possible your differences with national party and Bush Jr., but you were "Bush enabler" just the same. Now even relatively conservative Democrats in Romney districts and states are exactly in the same position - Landrieu is very good example of that.... Whites in many regions simply hate Obama too much... May be even irrationaly, but he is a personification of all "alien" to them.

[Miles]

^ In one the of the exit polls I saw on election night, Pryor was getting 30-33% of whites in AR. That kinda gave me hope Landrieu could at least get into the mid-20% range for the runoff.

Still even on primary election night, I was pretty shocked at how much whites, especially in LA-03, voted against Landrieu. In the exit polls, she actually came in behind Maness (!) with whites. Not by much (19% vs 18%) but still pretty brutal.

[smoltchanov]

We already talked about that. The heaviest Landrieu fall in Louisiana was exactly in LA-03))))

[Miles]

^ Well, LA-03 is the best example, but I was talking more about whites generally.

Here's the white % share of electorate vs. Landrieu's share of the vote by parish:



Very few outliers.

[smoltchanov]

In short - whites hate Obama. At least - in Louisiana (and many other siuthern states)...