Why we don’t know how the Republican establishment is doing down ballot

Other data journalists have recently conveyed the sense that Donald Trump as a phenomenon is not at all replicable. We aren’t taking that on yet because too little is known. But we will take issue with the idea that Nate Silver put forward that the Republican Establishment is mostly healthy but for Trump because its down ballot candidate have done well so far. https://twitter.com/NateSilver538/status/737728008233029632

This misses two key things. The first is the effect a presidential race is likely to have on contests between the establishment and challengers. A presidential contests brings in voters and a lot of them. For example, in 2014 the biggest upset occurred when House Majority Leader Eric Cantor was beaten in his primary. In that primary, 65,201 votes were cast. In the 2016 Presidential primary, 137,052 votes were cast in the same Virginia Congressional district, easily doubling the number of votes cast. All those additional votes make life much harder for challenging candidates because the key thing a challenger needs to win is to get some name recognition. The more people in the electorate the harder that is. All those new voters that Trump drew into the primary electorate (not as many into the overall electorate of people who don’t normally vote at all.) were much more likely to know the name of the incumbent and thus more likely to support the incumbent. Trump’s flood helped rather than hurt incumbent Republicans because it brought in more people who didn’t know anything but the name of the Incumbent.  We don’t know whether the pro-incumbent sentiment will continue in later primaries that don’t boast a presidential contest on the same day and thus will inevitably have smaller electorates. The jury is still out. How Senator John McCain fares in his race in Arizona this summer will tell us more.

The second important thing to note is that simply winning does not mean a party’s establishment is healthy. In 2012, minor rightwing challengers pushed Mitt Romney to the brink. Because there were two such challengers and both of them were pretty flawed, Romney won but that does not mean the establishment was in good shape. In 2014, the Republican establishment ran the table, with the exception of the Cantor race, but Texas Senator John Cornyn got 59% against an incredibly weak field. In 2016, Alabama Senator Richard Shelby got 65% against an only slightly better field. Given the possibility of multi-candidate field dynamics, a primary electorate that is even 25% angry might be enough to cause serious problems. Because Incumbents, who might need just 40% to win, pull off some victories, does not mean the anger is not real or that it won’t matter in the future. Winning does not make the losers disappear.