Differences Among House Republicans

David Byler writes at RealClearPolitics:

Last November, Republicans made impressive gains in the House, winning their largest majority since the 1920s. The GOP wave added 43 freshmen, more than 40 percent of whom are “Obama Republicans” – Republicans from districts that Mitt Romney either won by less than five points or lost to President Obama.

How do these freshmen “Obama Republicans” differ from the rest of the GOP?

The Brookings Institution recently released data that helps answer this question. The researchers at Brookings scoured nearly every 2014 congressional candidate’s press releases, websites and endorsements to create a dataset describing their positions on a variety of issues. By using this data instead of voting records or third party sites,

Brookings measured how these candidates advertise themselves to their constituents.
Brookings Senior Fellow Elaine Kamarck already used this data to analyze how Obama Republicans – both freshmen and non-freshmen – differ from the rest of their party on gun control, climate change, immigration and same-sex marriage. We took a somewhat different approach. We looked at how freshmen Obama Republicans differed from other GOP freshmen on abortion, the Affordable Care Act and taxes, along with the issues Kamarck examined. This approach not only drives home the divide between the Obama Republicans and the rest of the party, but also shows how the freshmen Republicans differ from the more senior members of their caucus.

Specifically, Obama Republicans and the rest of the party are deeply divided in their approach to hot-button social issues, but they are united on taxes and Obamacare. More complex generational patterns emerge on immigration and climate change.

Federalism and State Attorneys General

In the 2014 midterm elections, Adam J. White writes at The Weekly Standard, Republican candidates for attorney general (AG) won 19 of 31 elections, giving them a 27-23 majority overall.  There are implications for federalism:

In suits against the federal government, the states have a technical advantage over private litigants: According to the Supreme Court, state plaintiffs are “entitled to special solicitude” from courts on the question of whether they have “standing” to bring their lawsuits. This may seem like a legalistic point, but at a time when the administration has been very aggressive in disputing challengers’ legal standing to bring lawsuits, even this marginal difference could prove significant. (And ironically so, given that the Supreme Court announced this “solicitude” in Massachusetts v. EPA, the 2007 case in which Democratic AGs from a variety of states persuaded the Court to require the Bush administration to move forward on greenhouse gas regulation.)

But the states’ most important advantage is more practical: Unlike private parties, sovereign states and independently elected AGs are much less susceptible to political pressure by the administration to sign on to controversial regulatory programs. Such an approach was central to the administration’s initial formulation of climate-change regulations for auto companies, according to a House Oversight Committee report detailing the White House’s pressure on auto companies not to challenge those regulations in court.

In the long run, the Senate’s power to conduct oversight of the administration, in conjunction (finally) with the House, and to exert other gravitational pressure on the executive branch is the most powerful means for checking and balancing the administration. But in the short run, states may provide the most immediate means for restoring constitutional balance, in the courts of law and the courts of public opinion. Together, Congress and the states can provide, as Madison famously offered in Federalist 51, “a double security” for “the rights of the people”: the separation of powers at the federal level, and the division of power, politically and legally, among the federal government and the states.

America Rising

Many posts have discussed opposition research. Nicholas Conferssore writes at The New York Times:

The 2014 cycle contained the emergence of a more sophisticated Republican operation for tracking Democratic candidates and scrubbing their public and personal lives for damaging information. During the 2012 campaign, Republican super PACs and outside groups were largely limited to their own in-house research, news reports and footage lifted from television broadcasts or candidates’ own video.

This time, Republicans set up a new research hub called America Rising. Created as a limited liability corporation, it could sell footage and research to anyone willing to pay. Republican candidates and super PACs, which otherwise might not coordinate with each other, could buy the same research and tracking footage, allowing their advertising to be more cohesive.

The business employed a legion of trackers to follow Democratic candidates, logging close to a half-million miles of travel and recording more than 3,000 campaign events. The group scored an early hit in Iowa, when it obtained footage of Representative Bruce Braley, the Democrats’ anointed Senate contender, disparaging Charles E. Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, as “a farmer from Iowa, who never went to law school.”

The footage was provided to Iowa newspapers in March, putting Mr. Braley on the defensive at time when Republicans had not yet settled on a candidate. Within two days, the video was picked up by a new Republican political nonprofit, Priorities for Iowa, and aired in statewide ads. Ultimately, footage from America Rising was used in more than a hundred Republican ads during the 2014 cycle, according to a spokesman.

At Time, Alex Altman and Zeke Miller offer more detail on America Rising:

Launched by three top party operatives after 2012, the group had a mandate to erase the opposition research edge Democrats enjoyed in past cycles. The investment paid dividends early on a cold, dark March morning. Tim Miller, the group’s executive director, was reviewing the latest clips compiled by his team of twenty-something research junkies when he came across something so juicy it might just alter the balance of the Senate. “Holy s—!” he shouted. It was a video of Braley, standing before a half-dozen bottles of liquor at a Texas fundraiser, disparaging Sen. Chuck Grassley as a farmer who “never went to law school.”

Miller’s group leaked the video to an Iowa television reporter, hoping to assure at least a single airplay on local television, which would allow it to be aired in future ads. Instead it spread like wildfire. The clip cast Braley as out of touch with his agricultural state and proved a body blow to Braley’s Iowa hopes. In the final Des Moines Register poll, 39 percent of Braley’s own supporters said his comments about Grassley were a crucial mistake.

Guns and Politics

An earlier post explained why background-check legislation failed in the Senate, despite seemingly overwhelming public support.  At RealClearPolitics, Sean Trende explains why the issue probably will not hurt the GOP:

• "It was commonplace at the beginning of the year to claim that Newtown changed everything on gun control. But the evidence for that is pretty thin. Overall, the long-term trend lines seemingly (and surprisingly) either favor opponents of gun control or show minor movement above the long-term trend, depending on how the questions are asked."
• "On Election Day, opponents of gun control are likely to go to the polls and vote on gun control. The other side is not. This is exactly why the assault weapons ban -- which passed the Senate in 1994 -- got only 40 votes this time around."
• "Because of the geographic concentration of Democratic voters, 250 House districts have a Republican-leaning or even partisan voting index (in other words, tend to vote more Republican than the nation as a whole)...In the Senate, the picture is even worse. Only one Republican, Susan Collins of Maine, is running in a state the president carried."
• Voters take mental shortcuts. "While most voters are unlikely to punish a senator who supports, say, background checks, such support paints a broader picture of that senator as someone who possibly backs broader gun control, or who is liberal, or who supports an administration with mediocre national approval ratings. This is a real problem for proponents, and it isn’t likely to change anytime soon."