Spot the Missing Voters

Although some of the (provisional) ballots are still being counted, it appears that incumbent Democrat Jerry McNerney has coasted to reelection this year against his Republican challenger Tony Amador in our local congressional district. Without even debating Amador (there’s some question about why that happened) and essentially running as low key a campaign as possible (though not nearly as low key as Gov. Brown’s), McNerney will be going back to Washington, DC, in 2015 for at least another two years.

If all you look at is the top line number, though, this year’s election seems a lot closer than 2012’s. This year, McNerney won with 51.5% of the vote. In 2012, against Ricky Gill, McNerney won with 55.6% of the vote.

Does this mean that Amador, despite raising just $62,000 compared to Gill’s $3,000,000, was a better candidate than Gill? I don’t think that’s the conclusion to be drawn here. Instead, I think the larger story is the disappearance of a large number of (Democratic) voters, especially in San Joaquin and Contra Costa counties.

The following graph shows the number of votes received by each candidate by county. (The numbers will go up ever so slightly for both Amador and McNerney this cycle as the provisional and late arriving mail ballots are processed, but the overall differences won’t change significantly.)

In every county, Gill out-polled Amador. In every county, McNerney’s 2012 campaign out-polled his 2014 campaign. McNerney’s losses in 2014, however, were ever so larger than Amador’s, thus the closer contest. Overall, McNerney’s vote total fell by 66% in 2014 compared to 2012. Amador’s vote total in 2014 was 60% lower than Gill’s was in 2012.

Does this mean that a better candidate could have defeated McNerney this cycle? Given the strong showing of Republicans nationally I’ll admit that it’s a possibility, but I don’t think it would have been very likely. I think the 2012 results still show how hard it will be for a Republican to win in this district. Gill had the disadvantage of running as someone who had never held elected office (just like Amador) and in a presidential election year when the Democrats did well. (Amador, having run for office several times, was perhaps more familiar to Republican voters.) Gill, however, was able to raise and spend $3 million, with outside groups kicking in another $3 million on his behalf. And he still lost by over 11 points.