Mellman: Party brand vs personal brand

In the wake of a great victory for the American Rescue Plan, predicated on Democratic unity, I hate to reopen old wounds, but I hope I can be excused as my purpose is pedagogical, not polemical.

In the election aftermath, Reps. Abigail Spanberger (D-Va.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) famously sparred over the party’s direction.

Note that Spanberger outperformed Joe Biden in her District by just 1 percentage point, while Ocasio-Cortez ran 1.7 points behind the president. (Thanks to Daily Kos for crunching all the data to provide the important presidential vote by congressional district numbers.)

This is neither to praise, nor condemn, either congresswoman, nor to suggest Biden determined the number of votes each got.

It is to argue that, despite all the effort and expense to which each went, attempting to cultivate their own, quite different, personal brands, the underlying partisan disposition of voters led Biden and Ocasio-Cortez to do about equally well in New York’s 14th District, while Biden and Spanberger also matched each other closely in Virginia’s 7th.

In other words, the party brand proved far more important than the personal brand each worked so diligently to develop. Returning to the theme of an earlier piece on the presidential race, none escaped the gravitational pull of partisanship.

Few do, anymore:

·      On average, Democratic congressional candidates across the country ran just 8-tenths-of-a-percentage-point ahead of President Biden in their districts. Meanwhile GOPers ran 1.2-points behind Donald Trump.

·      The House Democrats who ran farthest ahead of Biden were Hawaii’s Ed Case and Maine’s Jared Golden (full disclosure: Mellman Group client), who bested the presidential candidate by just 8 points. Two others ran 7 points ahead and it was down from there. Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar ran farthest behind Biden (an extreme outlier at minus 16 points), while another candidate garnered 10 points less than the president.

·      It wasn’t always so. In 1984, I worked for then-Rep. Tom Daschle who ran 21 points ahead of presidential candidate Walter Mondale in South Dakota. He was not alone. His North Dakota neighbor, then-Rep. Byron Dorgan, ran a vast 45 points ahead of Mondale, while the Hawaii members bested their presidential candidate by 38 points — feats impossible to imagine today.

·      As computed by professor Charles Franklin, the relationship between presidential and House vote rose dramatically from 2000 to 2020, jumping from 0.53 to 0.63 to 0.73, to a near perfect 0.93 in 2020. Understand this not as causation — Biden’s support didn’t cause congressional support — but rather as association. The same underlying factor — partisanship — determined both.

·      This is not just a function of presidential years. In the 2018 midterm, the average Democratic House candidate ran just two-tenths of a point ahead of Hillary Clinton’s performance two years before, with GOPers 3 points behind Trump’s earlier showing.

·      No election between 1956 and 1996 produced fewer than 109 House districts where different parties won the presidential and congressional balloting. In 2008 there were 83, and today there are just 16 such districts, the lowest number in 100 years.

These facts suggest we have moved from an era of candidate centered campaigns to one of party centered campaigns. Building a personal brand more potent than the party’s brand is nearly impossible.

Nearly, but not completely, impossible. The House Republican who ran furthest ahead of Trump in 2020 was Pennsylvania Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick, who, to Democrats’ continual consternation, has managed to fashion a personal brand that keeps him winning in a Biden-Clinton-Obama district.

Doing so required him to become a veritable heretic — opposing GOP positions on a host of key issues from health care to immigration, guns, and climate change.

No one (at least no Democrat), should take this as a call to abandon campaigning, and merely drift on the partisan wave. But even assuming best efforts, candidates can no longer expect to fare much better than does the party’s brand — an important reason to burnish it. 

Mellman is president of The Mellman Group and has helped elect 30 U.S. senators, 12 governors and dozens of House members. Mellman served as pollster to Senate Democratic leaders for over 20 years, as president of the American Association of Political Consultants, and is president of Democratic Majority for Israel.