WHO WON THE HOUSE FOR THE DEMS REDUX (HINT: IT WASN'T RAHM EMANUEL)

-by Dan Drasin

Back in November, after recovering from the heady celebration of the Dems storming the House and getting over the top in the Senate, I sat down to crunch some numbers in an attempt to gain some understanding about what worked and what didn't. At the time, the theme of the day in the MSM was that the Dems dominance of the House was due in large part to Rahm Emanuel's carefully crafted strategy. However, by looking through the FEC campagn contributions information, the data showed that it was in fact Howard Dean's "50 state strategy" that was the key in the 2006 house elections.
Of course that analysis was based on the information that was available at the time and since then more campaign spending information has come in. So I thought it was time to compile the new data, mix it with the old data, and see what came out. In this process not only did I update my data with the latest and greatest from the FEC (an additional 10% more data in the latest data and more importantly lots of stuff from October) but I also was able to fix up a lot of "data errors" in the raw FEC data.  ( Yeah, it surprised me how much data scrubbing was needed to make everything match up-- as a silly example, one of the candidates from MN [Bachmann I think] had her district listed as '0A'. And there were hundreds of errors like this. If a person is looking at any of these individual issues, they'll be able to correct them, but if you're doing a large analysis, they'll fall through the cracks-- this is the kind of thing that the FEC-- or someone-- should keep their eye on.  After all, accountability is only as good as the information on which it relies... ). So with that said, below is what i found relative to my original analysis.

Findings:
    1. up until 9/1/06, the DCCC spent a total of $2.1M on House races and $1.2 of it went to races that were eventually winning districts.
    update: DCCC actually spent a total of $4.7 million before 9/1/06 (only 1.2 of it went to districts that were pickups)

    2. up until 9/1/06, the DCCC spent less than $5,000 on only 15 districts that were eventual winners. (FL-16 can be forgiven as this was before the Mark Foley scandal...) C'mon, 5K is nothing...
    update: no change

    3. in 3 (maybe 4-- i'm not clear on CT2), the DCCC actively supported a different ("centrist," non-grassroots) candidate than the eventual winner and then refused to provide support to eventual winner. Note: these were all pickups.
    update: CA11, KY3, NH1, and OH2 all showed the DCCC supporting an alternate candidate during the primaries and then having their contributions drop to nothing after their candidate lost.  The DCCC did in fact pour a lot of money into CT2 (even after their candidate lost)-- over a million.

    4. In September, the DCCC investment pattern was roughly the same: of $7.3M spent, $5.3 went to only 15 districts that were eventual winners.
    update: DCCC spent $8.7 million between 9/1 and 10/1 and $6.2 million went to districts that were pickups

    5. In September, the DCCC spent crazy money in some expensive markets that didn't fall (600K in KY4, 500K in OH15, 350K in PA6, 300K in VA2) and still NO money in a number of races that were eventual pickups or close recount situations (or had polls showing them as competitive-- CA-11, CT-02, IA-02, KS-02, KY-03, NC-08, NH-01, NH-02, NY-19, OH-02, PA-07, and WY-AL). They underspent in some additional races that were pickups (like PA-08) or very close (like WA-08) as well.
    update: Not much change, however updated analysis did show significant spending by the DCCC in CT-02 and PA-07, and trivial spending in NH-02.

    6. At the same time, the races where the DCCC didn't spend, were kept alive by different groups (like MoveOn, The Netroots, Blue America, etc working through ActBlue) following different investment strategies (like the 50-state strategy.) The ALL Contributions in PICKUPS tab shows all investment (by all parties) in each of the districts by time-period. This gives an idea of the total amount of money effecting these races and hence the impact that DCCC participation (both in dollars and publicity) would have had.
    update: As true as ever

    7. After October 1, the DCCC investment pattern improved as they finally jumped into some of the winning races that that they had previously ignored (like IN-02, MN-01, PA-04, PA-08) in a significant way. But even so, their record was only $8.2M out of $14.1M going to winning races and significant support in only 18 winning races.
    update: Still true although the total spending after 10/1 came to $20 million and of that $11.3 was spent in pickup races

    8. In October they spent large sums of money on some key "swing races" that didn't break ($2.5M in PA-06, $800K in KY-04, $500K in OH-01, $450K in OH-15, $300K in VA-02, $250K in CT-04, and $100K in CO-04.)
    update: Add to that $800k in IL-06, $750k in WA-08, $400K in NM-01, and $325K in MN-06

Summary:
So with all of the data in, the conclusion of the original analysis still hold - had the DCCC "swing state" strategy been the dominant strategy in operation during the 2006 election cycle, then the Dems might not have taken the house. And in particular, this update shows that a lot of the late spending by the DCCC in expensive media markets was wasted. At the same time, analysis of DNC spending on infrastructure as part of the "50-state strategy" has been shown to have been quite effective in the 2006 house election cycle (Elaine Kamarck has an article in The Forum on "Assessing Howard Dean's Fifty State Strategy and the 2006 Midterm Elections" where she shows through statistical analysis that the impact of DNC infrastructure spending doubled the overall Democratic shift in votes.) With that said, the questions I posed in the original post are still out there-- in particular, why did some of these "swing states" fail to fall under intense spending by the DCCC while other "2nd tier" races were picked-up with minimal or no DCCC support.