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Midterm Election Countdown: The Northeast Regional Review

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October 1, 2014

By Daniel Anderson

Voters in the Northeast will have the opportunity to overhaul their governments this November due to tight races across the ballot. Although four marquee gubernatorial races have garnered the lion's share of headlines thus far, there are a total of eight governor's mansions, 23 other state executive offices, 78 U.S. House seats, five U.S. Senate seats, 1,731 state legislative seats, 24 statewide ballot measures, three local ballot measures, 147 judicial offices and 63 school board seats in the nation's largest school districts up for grabs.

Ballotpedia and Judgepedia are providing comprehensive coverage of all these elections from now to November. Click the links below for more detailed information on each race.

The highlights

Trouble at the top

Gubernatorial candidates in every state but New Jersey are making their case for a stay at the governor's mansion, but only the contests in Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania are widely considered close. In September 2014, POLITICO labeled the incumbents in Connecticut, Maine and Pennsylvania as the three governors who faced the most risk of being tossed from office.[1]

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett (R)

Pennsylvania Governor Tom Corbett (R) has trailed business executive Tom Wolf (D) in every public poll since 2013, including a Franklin & Marshall poll from mid-September that put Corbett a full 20 percentage points behind Wolf.[2]

By way of contrast, Connecticut Governor Dan Malloy (D) is locked in another tight race with business executive and former U.S. Ambassador to Ireland Tom Foley (R), whom he narrowly defeated in 2010 by fewer than 50,000 votes. Recent polling indicates that Foley has taken a small lead in the race, despite the state's Democratic lean. Malloy has struggled to leverage his party's advantage in the state, although a late September endorsement from the Connecticut Education Association teachers union may prove beneficial in that respect.[3]

Maine Governor Paul LePage (R) squeaked into office in 2010 with just a 37.6 percent plurality of the vote, but he may be positioned to win a second term due to another crowded field of opponents. The independent runner-up in 2010, Eliot Cutler, is back on the ballot and making life difficult for U.S. Rep. Mike Michaud's (D) campaign. Polling of a hypothetical one-to-one contest indicates that Michaud holds a large edge over LePage, but Cutler's presence on the ballot puts the race within the margin of error in all three September polls. If Michaud is elected, he would be the first openly gay person to be elected as governor in U.S. history.

State Attorney General Martha Coakley (D)

The battle to determine Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick's (D) successor has also grown closer in recent weeks. Democratic candidate and state Attorney General Martha Coakley's narrow victory in the party primary drew concerns from pundits who suggested that she won on the basis of name recognition instead of popularity.[4] Following the primary, some Democratic strategists also indicated concern that her campaign may collapse as it did in her 2010 campaign for U.S. Senate against Scott Brown (R), who ultimately pulled off an upset win.[5] Republican challenger and venture capitalist Charles D. Baker surpassed Coakley in two September polls, although all four of the most recent polls have placed the race well within the margin of error.



The road to Washington

Former U.S. Sen. Scott Brown (R)

Although Governor Andrew Cuomo (D) is a lock to win re-election, New York will host the largest number of congressional battleground campaigns in the region with five such races. Neighboring New Jersey is the only other Northeast state to feature truly competitive U.S. House elections with just two battleground races, and New Hampshire will host the only marquee U.S. Senate campaign in the region between incumbent U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D) and her Republican challenger, former U.S. Sen. Scott Brown.

Only one of the U.S. House battleground seats, New Jersey's 2nd Congressional District, leans Democratic according to The Cook Political Report's Partisan Voter Index. The other six battleground seats are either even or lean Republican.[6] Four of the seven seats are held by Republicans, three of whom were first elected in 2010. The fourth, Frank LoBiondo (R), has served in Congress since 1995. Neither New Jersey's 3rd Congressional District Rep. Jon Runyan (R) nor New York's 21st Congressional District Rep. Bill Owens (D) are running for re-election.

In New Hampshire, U.S. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D) has maintained a consistent lead over her opponent, former U.S. Sen. Scott Brown. Brown has kept the race competitive, however, winning or pulling even in several recent polls and frequently working to tie the incumbent to President Barack Obama's policies. Shaheen has responded by criticizing Brown's short residency in New Hampshire, where he moved his primary residence in 2013.[7]

State chamber showdowns

Six state legislative chambers are at risk of a takeover from the minority party, including both chambers in New Hampshire and Pennsylvania and the state senates of Maine and New York.

The New Hampshire House of Representatives is the largest state parliamentary body in the country with 400 members.[8] Democrats hold a 217 to 173 majority in the chamber now with another 17 seats vacant, but the partisan majority of the legislative body shifted in both 2006 and 2010, and it could shift again in the event of another wave election. In the New Hampshire State Senate, Republicans will need to maintain their slight 12 to 11-seat majority in order to take full control of the state legislature.

New York State Sen. Jeffrey Klein (D-34)

Republicans are at risk of losing control over the Pennsylvania General Assembly since competitive races in both chambers threaten their current majorities. Democrats will have an easier time winning a majority in the Pennsylvania State Senate than in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, where Republicans hold a 20-seat edge heading into November.

In both Maine and New York, Republicans do have an opportunity to win majorities in the states' upper chambers. The Maine State Senate, which Republicans have only controlled for four of the last 32 years, has a 19 to 15-seat Democratic majority. The battle is even closer in New York, where the Democrats maintain an edge of just 32 to 29 seats in the New York State Senate. State observers have noted that due to the Independent Democratic Conference (IDC), a group of five Democratic state senators who frequently crossed the aisle, the Republican minority effectively controlled the state senate during this term anyway.[9] However, IDC leader and State Sen. Jeffrey Klein (D-34) announced in June 2014 that the faction would reunite with Democrats in the chamber, thereby raising the stakes for Republicans in this state battleground.[10]

Where are the judges?

Judicial elections in the Northeast are unusual for several reasons. First and foremost, four of the seven states in the country that do not elect judges in the first place are located in the Northeast: Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Rhode Island. For their part, Connecticut and Maine only hold elections for lower-level, probate court judgeships. Vermont elects both probate court judges and assistant judges for its superior courts. A majority of the judicial candidates campaigning in Connecticut, Maine and Vermont are running unopposed this year.

Although Pennsylvania does hold significant judicial elections, it only holds those elections during odd-numbered years. New York is therefore the primary regional battleground for judicial elections in 2014. New York has 26 of its supreme court seats on the ballot, along with numerous other county, district and family court seats. New York also has a unique system for selecting candidates for the supreme court races. In the primary, judicial delegates are chosen by voters, rather than candidates. These delegates then participate in party conventions to select each party's candidates for the general election. Voters choose between these candidates in November. Though this system has been criticized for limiting judicial candidates' access to the ballot, it was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 2008 case, NY Board of Elections v. Lopez-Torres.

Regional overview

Connecticut

Maine

Massachusetts

New Hampshire

New Jersey

New York

Pennsylvania

Rhode Island

Vermont

See also

Footnotes

  1. ↑ POLITICO, "Incumbent governors fear wipeout," September 29, 2014
  2. ↑ Franklin & Marshall, "Franklin & Marshall College Poll," September 25, 2014
  3. ↑ Hartford Courant, "State's Largest Teachers Union Endorses Malloy," September 29, 2014
  4. ↑ The New York Times, "Massachusetts Democrat Wins Over Voters; Her Party Is a Different Story," June 13, 2014
  5. ↑ POLITICO, "2014 primary election: Martha Coakley survives Massachusetts Democratic primary," September 9, 2014
  6. ↑ The Cook Political Report, "Introducing the 2014 Cook Political Report Partisan Voter Index," April 4, 2013
  7. ↑ The Boston Globe, "Scott Brown riding an anti-Obama wave in N.H.," September 18, 2014
  8. ↑ State of New Hampshire - House of Representatives, "House Roster," accessed September 30, 2014
  9. ↑ Crain's New York Business, "Failed bills in Legislature to frame Dems' election strategy," June 1, 2014
  10. ↑ The Wall Street Journal, "New York State Senate Coalition Ends," June 25, 2014
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