Dem
47
GOP
53
Democrats lost four Senate seats in November: Montana, Ohio, West Virginia and Pennsylvania. The first three of these are in red states. What is surprising is how long the Democrats held on, staving off the inevitable. There is no dishonor in losing a Senate race in a state that went for Donald Trump by 12 points, as did Montana. In fact, Sen. Jon Tester (D-MT) did pretty well, losing by only 7 points.
But Pennsylvania is an elephant of a different color. Sen.-elect Dave McCormick—a hedge fund CEO who lives in Connecticut—eked out a victory in the ultimate swing state. How did he do it, Republicans are asking, and can his magic formula be used in other states? Maybe, but not everyone will be able to pull it off.
As late as October, McCormick's team realized that there was a large group of young men who were not engaged politically. In fact, they had never even heard of him and were not planning to vote at all. They believed that all politicians are the same and they are all corrupt, so why bother voting? McCormick's team felt that if they could get to this group, they could win them over.
How could a man whose father was a college president, whose mother was a college professor, who grew up in wealth, who earned a Ph.D. in international relations from Princeton, and who was CEO of one of the largest hedge funds in the world ever convince disaffected young men he was their guy?
Well, he had one special thing going for him that not everyone has. He attended and graduated from West Point. His degree was in mechanical engineering, so after graduating, the Army sent him to Iraq during the Gulf War to supervise 130 soldiers who were assigned the task of clearing minefields. On Oct. 20, his campaign manager put him on a predawn flight to West Point. Normally, Senate candidates never leave the state that late, so it was a big gamble. He made an ad there that simply talks about the West Point code: "duty, honor, country." Nothing about politics or his positions on anything or his exceptionally privileged background. They ran the ad, it got unengaged young men engaged, and he won by 16,000 votes.
Not all Republican Senate candidates went to West Point, so cloning the ad won't work. But the larger messages are: (1) unengaged voters can be activated if you go after them and (2) the strategy is not to talk about politics or plans or anything like that. Just show that you are patriotic.
Democrats are not so sure about that. They point out that Trump won Pennsylvania by a much larger margin than he did any of the other swing states, so it could have been Trump's coattails that did the job, not McCormick's last-minute ad. Also, McCormick performed worse than other Republicans on the state ballot, including candidates for attorney general and treasurer. Finally, many Democrats think that it was McCormick's money and the $55 million his friends gave him that did the job. They used the money to buy ads on college and pro football games, even obscure ones like Boise State vs. University of Hawaii. It's hard to tell, but maybe getting through to unengaged voters is the magic bullet... or maybe that's just a red herring. (V)