WORKING FAMILIES PARTY EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR DAN CANTOR: Tom DiNapoli: Margin of Victory on WFP line…Candidates who disdained our line… paid for it. (Citing Aubertine, Kaplowitz, Johnson, Wilmot, Arcuri & MICHAEL MCMAHON)…We haven’t seen the numbers, but margin for Bishop, Owens and Maffei (sic) most likely came in on WFP line.
Actually, as has been demonstrated time and again, it was the candidates who took the WFP line and the Campaign Committees which supported those candidates who paid for the WFP line, sometimes through the nose, usually with cash on the barrelhead and often laundered through middlemen.
To be fair, one should note that it has been documented that those payment were often at bargain, below-market rates, and that the GOP does the same kind of legal but still reprehensible actions a lot more effectively.
Anyway, we return to my series where actual election statistics are used to puncture well circulated post-election spin.
And, once again, we return to the topic of Michael McMahon, who will likely have gotten more attention from me over the last two days then he will for the rest of his life.
The question is, did Michael McMahon’s refusal to take the WFP line cost him his seat in Congress?
The races’ final numbers were Michael Grimm 65,024 and Michael McMahon 60,773.
There are several theories how the WFP line would have saved McMahon. One is that it would have increased the turnout, bringing out voters who stayed home.
We can dismiss that one for several reasons.
The first is that it is unlikely any voters stayed home because the Democratic candidate for Congress lacked the Working Families line, leaving no one to vote for. In fact, the election offered the chance to vote in the Governor‘s race and two US Senate races, all of which featured candidates running on the WFP line, as well as a candidate for State Comptroller for whom the WFP claims it left no stone unturned.
Anyone who stayed home stayed home because the WFP (and everyone else) had themselves failed to motivate them.
As noted, by the WFP’s own admission, it had already pulled out every stop to drag voters to the polls to vote for Tom DiNapoli. So, if McMahon did lose voters for his lack of the line, they were voters who had already shown up at the polls and failed to vote for him.
Who could these voters be? And how many of them were there?
The WFP might argue that the number is 6,579, the number of WFP votes that McMahon got in 2006. Such a number of extra votes would have won him this race.
But there are a number of problems with that argument.
The first is one that anyone who’s done a paper count will tell you.
There are a few voters who do cast votes straight down minor party lines. But the overwhelming majority of straight WFP voters on paper, when confronted with an empty space on their line for a particular office, tend to jump over to vote for the Democrat. While there is some small attrition, the absence of the WFP line would be unlikely to lose McMahon virtually all 6,000 of those votes, which, if one believed that theory, is what he would need to do to lose.
It should also be noted that much of the WFP’s ground operation consists of palm carding at polling places in the most heavily Democratic areas to convince voters already voting for the Democrats to do so on their line instead. I witnessed this is Carroll Gardens this year; it is an incredibly wasteful operation that conveys absolutely no benefit to any candidate.
More importantly, this year’s number of WFP votes in the 13th wouldn’t have been 6,000 any way, but more likely around 3,700. The WFP vote for Governor on Staten Island this year was 2,874. In 2008, the WFP vote for McMahon in Brooklyn’s portion of the 13th was 28.75% of what he attained on the Island, so extrapolating, it is likely that something around an additional 826 votes were cast on the WFP line this year in the District’s Brooklyn potion. That add up to exactly 3,700. The number of votes this year in the 13th dropped to 2/3rds of its 2008 level.
In fact, the votes on most every party line every year dropped. It was a midterm election.
3,700 more votes would not have won McMahon the election.
But there is another way to test McMahon’s vote attrition from refusing to take the WFP line.
In calculating the maximum possible votes lost, we can eliminate the possibility that McMahon’s refusal to take the line resulted in any votes going to Republican/Conservative Michael Grimm. Since the WFP spin concerning McMahon implicitly and sometimes explicitly involves the point that McMahon’s record was insufficiently “Progressive,” by the terms of their own narrative, the WFP is certainly not making such an allegation.
Nor can we say that McMahon’s failure to take the line cost him any votes to the Libertarian candidate, since it is unlikely that anyone protesting McMahon’s vote against Health Care Reform would instead vote for someone pledged to abolish Medicare and Social Security.
We are then left with two pools of votes McMahon could have picked up had he taken the WFP line. There were 4,628 unrecorded votes (voter who cast votes in other races, but not for Congress), and 72 write-in ballots. Of those 72, two were cast for Grimm’s primary opponent, Michael Allegretti, and thus are unlikely WFP votes. Therefore, the maximum number of votes McMahan could have lost by not taking the WFP line was 4,698.
I don’t believe this is the real number, because the number of unrecorded votes in this race is actually quite a normal one, even in races where the Democrat has taken the WFP line. For instance, in the 8th CD, represented by Jerry Nadler, who took the WFP line, there were 12,198 unrecorded votes for Congress.
More to the point, even with the McMahon having the WFP line in 2008, the District managed to cast an astonishing 37,218 unrecorded votes for Congress that year.
But let us suspend disbelief for a minute.
Adding every one of those 4,698 votes to McMahon’s total would bring him to 65,471, to Grimm’s 65,024 narrowly wining the Congressional race by 447 votes.
Clearly, Dan Cantor is a genius.
ADDENDUM:
Comments from the Readers have convinced me my focus was to narrow.
The focus of this piece should have gone beyond the support og the WFP to the question of whether McMahon lost his seat because he forsook “Progressive Principles” (though he’d really never embraced them), and more specifically, because he, like almost every Democrat representing a District carried by John McCain, voted against Health Care Reform.
I don't think do.
Which votes was McMahon cost?
Are you saying they saying voters stayed home, boycotting the entire Democratic ticket, including Governor and two US Senators, to punish McMahon? I don't think that's credible. Those voters were staying home anyway.
I will acknowledge that some voters may have stayed home out of progressive nihilism, but that phenomena punished even Democrats who voted for HCR.
Or are they saying that they voted Republican because he wasn't liberal enough? That's not credible for the reasons articulated above.
Or is it that every one of the 4000+ unrecorded votes were liberals punishing McMahon?
If they are saying that many voters skipped the race entirely, or wrote someone in, I agree.
For instance, the voter who wrote in "Anti-McMahon B/C He voted Against H.C. Bill" definitely falls into this category, and I'm sure many others did as well.
But, as I’ve noted, Jerry Nadler's district had 12,000 unrecorded votes for Congress and the 13th had 37,000 unrecorded votes in 2008, when McMahon won?
As illustrated above, the numbers do not support the proposition that there were enough of these voters to cost McMahon the election. He would have lost anyway.