Televised Attack Advertising on the Rise

It seems like every election people complain that attack advertising is increasing.  I'm always skeptical of these claims. After all, in 1964 we saw about the nastiest ad imaginable. 

So what's the answer?  Fortunately, the folks at the Wesleyan Media Project can help us answer this question--at least from 2000-2010.  They combined their 2010 data with previous data from the Wisconsin Advertising Project and compare the frequency of televised attack ads to promote ads to contrast ads.  Contrast ads "mention both a favored candidate and his or her opponent" while attack ads "mention only the candidate being attacked."  Promote ads just mention the candidate sponsoring the ad.

They conclude that "the 2010 House and Senate advertising is the most negative in the past decade." Further, although the Republicans sponsor slightly more attack ads than the Democrats, attack ads are on the rise in both parties.  Below, I've graphed the Wesleyan/Wisconsin data and separated it out by party.  The message here is pretty clear.

Here are the data for the Democratic sponsored ads:

And the Republicans:

 

Brace yourself for more negativity in 2012.

Couple of quick links

Despite the fact that they quote me, both of these articles are worth checking out:

• Article by John Boyle in the AC-T about the most recent iteration of Charles Taylor's annual fundraiser:

• Good analysis of the rise of Heath Shuler by Quintin Ellison in the Smoky Mountain News:

New Senate Leadership in North Carolina

Now that the election is over (or, at least mostly over) it's a good time to examine how the political landscape is likely to shift.  A good place to begin is in the North Carolina Senate where we will soon have a Republican controlled legislature with Republican-controlled leadership.  So--how different will this leadership be? 

Thanks to the hard work of Phillip Ardoin at Appalachian State University, we can get a good sense of how liberal or conservative various members of the state legislature are.  Below, I've plotted the 2007 NC Senate by their "Nominate scores."  Phillip has borrowed this concept from work done at the Congressional level and, using a bunch of fancy statistics, estimates the ideology of every NC Senator based on their voting record on non-unanimous votes during that session.  He's got a terrific explanation here, but all you really need to know to understand this graph is that a lower Nominate score means a more liberal senator, a score of 0 indicates a moderate voting pattern and a higher scores means that senator has generally voted in a more conservative direction.  The higher peaks in this graph mean that there are more legislators in that particular range and you can see that in 2007*, we had far more liberal than conservative legislators.  If you're curious, the mean score was -.27.

That is interesting (well, at least to me) by itself, but perhaps even more interesting is the relative position of the two names on the chart.  As most readers know, Marc Basnight is the outgoing President Pro-Tempore of the Senate and Phil Berger is the incoming leader.  According to their Nominate scores, Basnight was the 12th most liberal Senator in 2007 with a score of -.785.  Berger, on the other hand was the 4th most conservative with a score of .688. 

The bottom line here is that we will not not seeing a more moderate leadership in the next legislative session and if anything, the leadership will be slightly more ideologically extreme than it was before.
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*Obviously some things might have changed since 2007, but compiling these votes and computing the Nominate scores is a tremendous amount of work, so Ardoin understandably doesn't have newer scores up yet.   When he does, however, we'll be sure to link to them here.

More on the 11th Congressional District

As we noted before, there's been a lot written lately about the 11th Congressional District and why it went for Shuler.  I think Shuler's victory isn't too surprising when you consider the nature of his district. 

Despite the influence of Asheville, the 11th Congressional District is not overwhelmingly Democratic--at least compared to the rest of the state.  As you can see below, Shuler's district has the 9th highest percentage of registered Democrats in the state.  Given this, I doubt a liberal Democrat would do very well.

If we don't have that many Democrats, then why did Shuler do so well?  I believe the answer may lie in the independents.  We have the second most independents of any district in the state (see below).  If we assume that independents are moderates, then a candidate like Shuler should do fairly well among the independent vote.

So what else stands out about the 11th Congressional District?  The obvious answer is race.  The 11th is the whitest district in the state--over 90% of registered voters in NC-11 are white.

A lot of things could eventually lead to a Shuler defeat, but the demographics of this district look fairly well matched to Shuler winning for the foreseeable future.

What do the results of the midterms mean for Obama's chances in 2012?

What do the results of the midterms mean for Obama's chances in 2012? According to Larry Sabato and Alan Abramowitz: not much. In particular, they find that "there is no statistical relationship between a midterm result and the outcome of the next presidential election." In other words, we don't know any more about Obama's chances in 2012 now than we did before the election. For more, read their analysis here (Warning: people who do not understand sarcasm may get the wrong impression if they read this quickly).

Brief update

The Asheville Citizen-Times were kind enough to print a slightly extended version of this post  late last week.  You can find it here

The Decline of Democrats in NC County Commissions

A lot was written after 2008 about why North Carolina went blue.  This election, national journalists have already focused on the Heath Shuler race as an example of how North Carolina is more Democratic than other states.  The story that has been virtually ignored, however, is what's happening at the local level.

Thanks to the folks at the North Carolina Association of County Commissioners we can track the proportion of Commissioners who are Democrats from 1974-present.  I've plotted the results below and he evidence here is fairly dramatic (and fairly encouraging if you're a Republican).  The blue line is the actual proportion of seats held by Democrats per year.  The red line is just a trend line to make it easier to interpret.  If you find that one confusing, just ignore it.

Democrats are losing on average about 1 percentage point of the commission seats per year. Democrats held 90% of commission seats in 1978 and now the number hovers barely above 50%.  This year the Democratic share of Commission seats dropped by about 10 percentage points.  If this trend continues, we should see the Republicans holding onto the majority of the County Commission seats very soon.

We'll have more to say about this story in the next few days, but suffice it to say, I think these trends tell us more about North Carolina than the elections at upper-levels that are more influenced by national trends and individual personalities.  The conventional wisdom is that North Carolina has moved from light red to purple.  I think these data suggest that the story may be the opposite: we're becoming redder by the year.