Brendan Nyhan

With a few inexperienced Republican Senate candidates struggling, some analysts are suggesting that the Tea Party damaged the party’s chances in November by helping weak candidates win primary elections. That may be true in the Senate, but the GOP has always been more likely to regain its majority in the House. Despite the influence of the Tea Party, Republicans actually have more candidates who have previously held elected office than the Democrats in competitive House races. On candidate quality, Democrats are still at a disadvantage.

Last week, the New York Times’s Kate Zernike examined all the Republican candidates running nationwide and identified 129 House candidates and 9 Senate candidates who are closely affiliated with the Tea Party movement. She notes that “the Tea Party has … handed opportunities to the Democrats by nominating candidates who have struggled” — particularly Senate nominees Christine O’Donnell (Delaware), Sharron Angle (Nevada), and Rand Paul (Kentucky). However, in terms of candidates, the movement’s impact may be overstated. As Zernike notes, “the bulk of the Tea Party candidates are running in districts that are solidly Democratic.”

To make this findings more concrete, I combine Zernike’s coding of 2010 House candidates with historical data on House elections compiled by UCSD’s Gary Jacobson and 2008 and 2010 data generously shared by Dave Rohde, one of my mentors in graduate school at Duke.* (Comparable data for the Senate are not available.)

To assess the strength of the GOP candidates, I consider one of the key indicators from the political science literature on Congressional elections — previously holding elected office, which Jacobson has identified as a key proxy for candidate quality. While there are exceptions to the rule, experienced politicians tend to be better vetted and less likely to make race-changing mistakes (as O’Donnell and Paul have demonstrated).

When we examine the data, it’s clear that the favorable electoral environment has attracted a strong group of Republican candidates. Despite the influence of the Tea Party movement, the GOP actually has more House candidates who have previously held elected office running for open seats than the Democrats do:

Similarly, there are significantly more Republicans who have previously held electoral office challenging incumbents in potentially competitive districts than Democrats (defined as districts in which the presidential nominee of the incumbent’s party received less than 60% of the two-party vote in the most recent election):

The quality of the Republican candidates running with Tea Party backing also differ substantially depending on the type of race they are in:

Given the odds that they face, it’s not surprising that very few of the challengers in non-competitive districts (where the incumbent party’s presidential nominee received more than 60% of the two-party vote) have previously held elected office regardless of whether they are affiliated with the Tea Party movement. The large number of amateur Tea Party candidates in this group (56 out of 58 total TP candidates) are therefore unlikely to significantly hurt the GOP.

More importantly, while it’s true that Tea Party candidates are less likely to have previously held elected office in more contested races, the differences are smaller than one might think — 48% of non-TP challengers in competitive districts (25 of 52) versus 33% of TP challengers in competitive districts (18 of 54) and 53% of non-TP open seat candidates (15 of 28) versus 43% of TP open seat candidates (6 of 14).

In short, the Tea Party movement has affiliated itself with a surprising number of non-amateur politicians in competitive and open-seat races. As a result, the GOP still has a candidate quality advantage in the House races that matter most.

Update 10/22 10:22 AM: More from Slate’s Dave Weigel:

If this is surprising, a lot of that has to do with 1) a weird occasional media focus on noncompetitive races and 2) the ability of some smart politicians to brand themselves as “Tea Party” candidates. Marco Rubio, for example, could have run in a previous year as a savvy politician mentored by Jeb Bush. Instead, he introduced himself as the Tea Party in one man. Same happened with Ken Buck, a seasoned local politician who simply defined himself against a politician who’d held a higher office.

As to that first issue, I’m continually surprised that fringe candidates like Ohio’s Richard Iott get so much attention; his penchant for dressing up as a Nazi is, of course, weird and stupid, but he never had a chance of winning. I’d add a bit to Nyhan’s model, because the Tea Party has swung behind some first-time candidates in House races, mostly businessmen, who are going to win where token candidates used to lose.

Update 10/25 9:45 AM — More from John Sides:

There is a tendency for some observers to assume that an ideologically driven movement — especially if it appears to contain some “fringe elements” or whatever — isn’t going to be politically strategic. The emergence of a few high-profile oddball candidates that have the support of the movement — your Christine O’Donnells — only seems to further this perception of movements like the Tea Party as somehow lacking the savvy to get behind good candidates. But clearly that’s not true, especially in a cycle when every other political dynamic — a weak economy, a less-than-popular president — gives qualified Republican candidates an incentive to come forward anyway.

Jonathan Bernstein:

The only caveat I’d add is that Nyhan is only looking at experience, not ideological extremism. For the most part, political scientists have found that the former is very important, while the latter matters more around the margins in most cases. However, it is certainly possible for those with previous electoral experience to be weak candidates (see Sharron Angle, who may well win but only after overcoming an unusual number of gaffes), and it’s possible that ideological extremism could be a problem for some of those experienced candidates. Possible, but again, on that we don’t have any evidence yet.

Seth Masket:

All this suggests that the Tea Party, to the extent we can define it as a unified entity, is much more pragmatic than the media usually portray it to be. Remember that Tea Party members enthusiastically backed Scott Brown for the Massachusetts Senate seat despite his very moderate credentials. That is, he stood for basically nothing that they stood for, but they recognized the importance of depriving Democrats of their filibuster-proof majority, so they sucked it up.

* Thanks also to Aaron King and Frank Orlando, my former grad student colleagues at Duke, for doing the hard work of compiling these data. Neither Rohde nor King or Orlando bears any responsibility for this analysis.

[Cross-posted to HuffPost Pollster]

Interestingly, in the New York Times Magazine profile that came out over the weekend, President Obama knocks down what I’ve called the zombie myth of presidents “not connecting”:

“I was looking over some chronicles of the Clinton years,” Obama told me, “and was reminded that in ’94 — when President Clinton’s poll numbers were lower than mine, and obviously the election ended up being bad for Democrats — unemployment was only 6.6 percent. And I don’t think anybody would suggest that Bill Clinton wasn’t a good communicator or was somebody who couldn’t connect with the American people or didn’t show empathy.”

(Salon’s Steve Kornacki made a similar point about 1994 and Clinton’s communication skills.)

The author of the profile, Peter Baker, also suggests he understands the influence of the underlying economic conditions in this passage, particularly the sentence I’ve highlighted in bold:

In the fall of 1994, things were even better than Obama recalls: unemployment was in fact 5.6 percent. If the feel-your-pain president had trouble when the economy was not nearly as bad as it is now, with 9.6 percent unemployment, then maybe the issue for Obama is not that he is too cool or detached, as some pundits say. When the economy is bad, even the most talented of presidents suffer at the polls. “There is an anti-establishment mood,” Rahm Emanuel, the former Clinton aide who served as Obama’s first White House chief of staff, told me before he stepped down this month. “We just happen to be here when the music is stopping.”

However, after this throat-clearing, both Obama and Baker yield to the predictable temptation to place much of the blame for the administration’s political situation on tactical failures — a misattribution I call the tactical fallacy:

During our hour together, Obama told me he had no regrets about the broad direction of his presidency. But he did identify what he called “tactical lessons.” He let himself look too much like “the same old tax-and-spend liberal Democrat.” He realized too late that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects” when it comes to public works. Perhaps he should not have proposed tax breaks as part of his stimulus and instead “let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts” so it could be seen as a bipartisan compromise.

Most of all, he has learned that, for all his anti-Washington rhetoric, he has to play by Washington rules if he wants to win in Washington. It is not enough to be supremely sure that he is right if no one else agrees with him. “Given how much stuff was coming at us,” Obama told me, “we probably spent much more time trying to get the policy right than trying to get the politics right. There is probably a perverse pride in my administration — and I take responsibility for this; this was blowing from the top — that we were going to do the right thing, even if short-term it was unpopular. And I think anybody who’s occupied this office has to remember that success is determined by an intersection in policy and politics and that you can’t be neglecting of marketing and P.R. and public opinion.”

In particular, Baker attributes Clinton’s revival to his shift toward the center and does not mention the improving economy, which made it very likely he would be re-elected:

As Obama looks to the experiences of Clinton and Reagan, who both rebounded from midterm debacles to win re-election, the lessons differ… Clinton likewise changed course after the 1994 elections, emphasizing more incremental, piece-by-piece change rather than sweeping proposals and pursuing goals like welfare reform and balanced budgets when he could agree with Newt Gingrich’s new majority.

Clinton, though, was more instinctively centrist than Obama is, and his revival owed much to other factors, particularly his leadership after the Oklahoma City bombing and his budget standoff with Gingrich during the partial government shutdown.

Tactics play a role, but they are a second-order concern at best. Obama’s fortunes will largely be determined by the state of the economy, not “marketing and P.R. and public opinion.” In that sense, Obama was correct when he spent his time trying to “get the policy right” and is wrong now to be shifting his concerns toward “marketing and P.R.” However, the irony is that even while he was working so hard on policy, Obama allowed his Federal Reserve nominees to languish for months — a blunder that may end up costing him re-election.

[Cross-posted to Huffington Post]

My friend and co-author Hans Noel has a new article (PDF) in The Forum with the provocative title “Ten Things Political Scientists Know that You Don’t.” If you read this blog, you may be familiar with some of the points that he makes, but it’s a useful and provocative take on what political science has to contribute to the national debate. Here are the ten points he discusses:

1. It’s The Fundamentals, Stupid
2. The Will of the People is Incredibly Hard to Put Your Finger on
3. The Will of The People May Not Even Exist
4. There Is No Such Thing As A Mandate
5. Duverger: It’s The Law
6. Party On
7. Most Independents Are Closet Partisans
8. Special Interests Are A Political Fiction
9. The Grass Does Not Grow By Itself
10. We Do Not Know What You Think You Know

The rest of the issue on Political Science and Practical Politics may also be of interest, especially Henry Farrell and John Sides of The Monkey Cage on political science blogs and Seth Masket of Enik Rising on academics outside the academy (all articles are freely available but require registration).

[Disclosure: I read and commented on a version of the article in draft form.]