“Our top priority at the DCCC is to fight for incumbents, win seats and put the majority in play for House Democrats in 2016, and we are proudly delivering on those responsibilities in innovative and smart ways. Beyond that, House Democrats need a fresh look and approach that allows us to plan for the future. We must establish a long-term political infrastructure, using data, targeted voter outreach, tailored messaging, and a proactive redistricting effort to continue House Democrats’ success beyond 2016. The Majority Project will achieve all of those goals,” said DCCC Chairman Ben Ray Luján.
How can Democrats win back the House? Relying on a midnight data ride from “Revere”, their new data system
By Paul Kane
November 19, 2015
House Democrats, facing a potentially lengthy period in the political wilderness, are embarking on a long-term strategy to overhaul their data analysis with a dual goal of winning some seats in the short-term while also asserting control of the next redistricting process.
After three straight elections left them in the minority, Democrats are trying to build a sweeping database that will cull past and present polling, voter files, media advertising history and population trends for every competitive district, into one sweeping archive housed in the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s headquarters on Capitol Hill.
Rather than promising a short-term goal of winning the majority, the ultimate goal is to win as many seats as possible at the House level and also to help their state legislative allies gain control of their chambers to assure Democrats have a stronger hand in the decennial redistricting that will occur before the 2022 midterm elections.
“Between now and 2020, we also need to win as many Democratic seats in local state houses to put Democrats in the best possible place for redistricting,” Rep. Ben Ray Lujan (D-N.M.), chairman of the DCCC, said in an interview previewing “Revere” with The Washington Post.
Dubbed “The Majority Project”, the overall effort is a recognition that for too long House Democrats have looked to the top of their ticket in individual states — campaigns for president, senator, governor — to generate voter turnout.
House Democrats increasingly recognize that their statewide counterparts have built razor-sharp operations for turning out their most reliable voters in large urban centers such as Philadelphia, Cleveland, Denver and Las Vegas — places where the districts are already represented overwhelmingly by Democrats in the House. The result has been that President Obama has won Pennsylvania, Ohio, Colorado and Nevada in 2008 and 2012, while Senate and gubernatorial candidates have held their own, but House Democrats have suffered steep losses in those states even when the top of the ticket won statewide.
Colorado’s 6th Congressional District, currently held by Rep. Mike Coffman (R), is an example Lujan often cites. Situated east of Denver, it’s considered the most competitive of the state’s seven House districts. In 2012 Obama won Colorado by almost 5 percentage points, as Coffman won reelection by almost 4 percentage points.
In 2014, a less favorable year, Democrats got a split verdict in Colorado’s governor and Senate races, both very close, while Coffman won his race by more than 9 percentage points.
“To win Colorado, the presidential campaigns are going to target Denver, they’re going to go after where the most populated, densely populated, easy-to-register folks are. Probably not going to go to Aurora,” Lujan said of the suburban town in Coffman’s district.
Now the DCCC is trying to develop more detailed data and voter-registration efforts specific to those regions, recognizing that just complaining about the current drawing of the districts will not change the reality of the map.
The key new portion of the effort is the technology hub called “Revere”, after Paul Revere, the Revolutionary War hero who was, in his own way, a turnout expert by alerting his allies to the danger coming toward them. The DCCC has long had voter files and polling and other information at their call in previous races, but officials there say that they’ve never housed it together in a way so that they could examine past trends in polling and election results to make decisions going forward.
One example is that Democrats now understand that over the last several elections in Arizona’s 2nd District, around Tucson, early polling tended to mask the actual Republican vote because thousands of retirees would not arrive until mid-October to spend winters in the warm region.
The DCCC has doubled the size of its analytics department in the last 10 months, with an eye toward using “Revere” during voter contacts by phone or in person, so that volunteers can plug in information about what they hear so that if certain neighborhoods have a shared concern, their candidates can more quickly adapt. Additionally, the analysts are trying to study long-term migration of voters, particularly millennials who tend to move between jobs and regions more often and whose views on social issues tilts toward Democrats.
Lujan said that this will give Democrats opportunities in districts in years to come, and that the DCCC needs to keep a long view on those places, much in the same way that Fairfax County, little more than 20 miles west of the Capitol, morphed from a rock-rib Republican territory to solid blue now safely represented by Rep. Gerry Connolly (D-Va.).
It’s left Democrats in a delicate dance of trying to say that winning the majority next year is possible — at 188 seats now, they need a 30-seat gain to reach the bare majority of 218 — without over promising on the expectations.
“Will we get the 30 seats that we need? You know, I’m not going to predict that at this point in time, but I do believe that is possible,” House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters in a political roundtable discussion Thursday.
Hoyer singled out Lujan’s effort at coordinating a strategy with other Democratic committees that work on state and local races, because Republicans will control 32 governors’ mansions next year and Democrats in recent election have lost the most state legislative seats in almost 60 years. Without turning that around, any gains House Democrats make in the next few elections could be wiped out in 2022 after the districts are redrawn.
“Redistricting has made our hill a steeper climb, because Republicans took so many states,” Hoyer said.
Specifically, the DCCC is now doing deep-dive analyses into those state legislature districts that are the underbrush to House seats. In the near term, Democrats have identified more than 100 competitive state House and state Senate seats that fall within 12 of the most competitive U.S. House districts, and their gameplan going forward is to share their “Revere” data and to better sync their campaign messages with their state counterparts.
By 2020, the last set of races before redistricting begins, the DCCC hopes to have its analysis of local elections so detailed that party officials will know which state races could tilt legislatures — so that popular, politically safe House Democrats can be instructed to put their energy and resources into winning those down-ballot races.
“We also have to have a long look so that when we pick up seats in 2016, it’s not two steps forward, one step back,” Lujan said.