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November, 2014

www.NorthSuburbanRepublicanForum.org

Join the NSRF on Saturday, November 8th as Kelly Maher of Revealing Politics
discusses the November 4th election results and provides analysis. Who won?
Who lost? How does it affect Colorado? What's next and how will it change the
local, state, and federal landscape. Bring your questions to add to the
dialogue. Kelly is the Executive Director of RealingPolitics.com. She attended
UCCS and currently lives in Denver.
We meet at Horan & McConatys Community Room, 9998 Grant St in
Thornton from 9:00am-11:00am. Doors open at 8:30am.
Admission is $3 for members and $5 per person for non-members. Coffee,
orange juice, donuts, bottled water, fruit & pastries are included with your
admission.
NSRF upcoming calendar in 2014/2015:
December 13 End of the year Christmas party with former CD-4 candidate Steve Laffey talking about the
rising federal debt and the hard choices well soon have to make about it
January 10 Jimmy Sengenberger talks about when & what Liberty Day is and how you can volunteer
February 14 -- Hadley Heath Manning, the Health Policy Director at the Independent Women's Forum
discusses how all issues are women's issues.
March 14 Steve House will discuss how technology is changing the world. Are you ready for the change?
April 9 -- Local Board of Education members update us on what's happening in their districts
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This newsletter has a conservative Republican viewpoint. It may or may not reflect the
views of the NSRF Board of Directors. It is intended for the thoughtful consideration of
our members, to inform, educate, and as potential discussion starters.
"One of the penalties of not participating in politics is that you will be governed by your inferiors." - Plato

How Republicans turned Democrats' voter turnout

tactics against them
Republicans won eight out of nine key Senate races, regained control of the upper chamber of Congress and
triumphed in crucial gubernatorial contests
One Republican nerve-centre was located in a small, detached house in a tree-lined area of southeast Denver.
Behind the closed curtains, election operatives had for months been shaping the GOPs political messaging
in Colorado, applying the kind of sophisticated data analysis typically associated with their Democratic
opponents.
The people working there utilised a database into which they could plug in the name of any Colorado voter and
ascertain not just their political leanings but their personality traits, enabling them to micro-target advertising.
The Republican operatives, who were parachuted into the state and did not want to be identified because of the
confidential nature of their work, explain part of the GOPs success in Tuesdays elections.
From Colorado through to Iowa and North Carolina, strategists involved in successful Republican campaigns
claimed the party had finally cracked the data-driven science behind contemporary elections, a realm of
political warfare in which Democrats have reigned supreme since Barack Obamas election in 2008.
The consultants working in Colorado had overseen the messaging for local Republican candidates in the state
legislature. Some were considered long-shots, but with votes still being counted on Wednesday, all but one of
them appeared on course to victory, compounding Republican Cory Gardners successful unseating of the
Democratic incumbent senator, Mark Udall.
Cory Gardner wriggled free from Democratic attempts to paint him as
an extremist, to unseat Mark Udall in Colorado. Photograph: Rick
Wilking/Reuters
Those Republican victories were rooted in turnout as much as
voter persuasion. In the lead-up to the election, Democrats had
bragged about what they anticipated would be a superior get-outthe-vote effort, modelled on the campaign that secured the
election of Colorado senator Michael Bennet in 2010.
But on Tuesday, from the Rocky Mountains to the Atlantic coast, it was Republicans who appeared to have
mastered the process of turning out base voters.

Why the Democrats Lost

Obama proved that six years of low economic growth is a total political loser.
Fifty years from now, no one will remember the names of the one-term Democratic senators or candidates who were
washed out in the 2014 midterm electionsHagan, Udall, Braley and the others. What they will remember is that the
Democrats in 2014 became the party of a modern Herbert Hoover. In Barack Obama , they were led by a detached
president whose name history will attach to a prolonged, six-year economic catastrophe. They became the party of
economic despair. The party of economic despair will always lose.
That is the one certain thing we learned in the 2014 midterms: Low economic growth in the modern U.S. economy is a
total, across-the-board, top-to-bottom political loser.
In Wisconsin, where Gov. Scott Walker represented everything progressive Democrats abhor, exit polls said eight in 10
voters were worried about the economy in the coming year. Pre-election polls in Gov. Pat Quinn s Illinois said the same
thing. He lost. In truly blue Maryland, its new Republican Governor Larry Hogan built his come-from-behind campaign
around the states stumbling economy.
Normally economic growth is an economists term of measurement. But during these six lost years, that bad data was
physically felt. Barack Obama kept calling it the Great Recession. He got that right. Even the governments statisticians
felt it. Read between the lines of this paragraph in the federal governments October employment report, on the eve of the
election:
In September, 2.2 million persons were marginally attached to the labor force, essentially unchanged from a year earlier.
(The data are not seasonally adjusted.) These individuals were not in the labor force, wanted and were available for work,
and had looked for a job sometime in the prior 12 months.
That reality killed the Democrats. If theres one economists term of art the average person learned in the Obama era, it
islabor force participation rate. Its not good.
For decades after World War II, the U.S. economy had an annual average growth rate of 3.3%. Here are the growth rates
for each year of the Obama presidency (World Bank data):
2009: -2.8%; 2010: 2.5%; 2011: 1.8%; 2012: 2.8%; 2013: 1.9%
You preside over that performance, you lose. The 2014 growth uptick arrived too late to save the Democrats. The
economy was a spent political force for them.

The Obama economic policy has had essentially two prongs: 1) the 2009 stimulus bills Keynesian Multiplier (the
government spends, and new jobs appear); and 2) let the Federal Reserve figure out the rest. Democratic economists and
pundits will still argue for their spend-and-hire theory. Feel free. But after this weeks political blowout, John Maynards
magic multiplier goes back on the ash heap of history. The Obama Fed, meanwhile, continues its mysterious, five-year
strategy of suffocating the interest-bearing savings of middle-class voters.
As to the Feds record-breaking Roman candle called the stock market, it didnt do a thing for turnout. At his news
conference Wednesday, Mr. Obama restated his pre-election prescription: Put people to work building roads, bridges and
air-traffic control systems.
If allowing economic growth to persist below the U.S.s historic achievement is a political death trap for the party in
power, the future looks bleak for the Democrats. The election eliminated the senators who passed for the partys political
center. Whats left is . . . the left. Operating from behind the Blue moats of California, New York, New Jersey and
Connecticutthe left is fine with 2% growth. Progressive Democratic policies on Keystone, power-plant closures and oil
exports crushed younger, unionized job seekers. For them, a politics of sustainable but low growth amounts to, Let them
eat sunshine.
The partys heroine is the New England progressive, Sen. Elizabeth Warren. She initiated a key Obama legacy, the
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, whose arcane reporting rules are strangling small businesses and gagging
community banksthe economy along Main Street. Sen. Warrens appeal with the partys progressive base has its
presumptive presidential nominee, Hillary Clinton , sounding like an American Evita. The Democratic path back to a level
of economic growth that will protect its vulnerable members does not exist now.
Will the majority Republicans escape the growth trap? It might. The GOP Senate class of 2014 is a victory for the serious
right. They are a big step up in quality. Ben Sasse, Tom Cotton, Cory Gardner and the others are not the second coming
of the 2010 elections seething young men, but they are not establishment Republicans.
They didnt seek the Senate as a trampoline to the presidency in 2016. They look like seven new allies for the Senates
caucus of serious Republicans: Ron Johnson , John Barrasso, Marco Rubio , Pat Toomey, Kelly Ayotte , Rob Portman ,
Lindsey Graham, Tim Scott and Mark Kirk.
The ascendant GOP congressional majority needs to do one thing: Liberate the locked-in U.S. economy. Start opening
every valve the Obama Democrats turned shut. Thats the real gridlock. Voters didnt do this just so Washington could
work. Voters did this in the expectation that Washington will now enable them to work. Theres a difference. This is a bet
that the class of 2014 gets it.
Write to henninger@wsj.com

The North Suburban Republican Forum

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