US midterms: candidate quality mattered

That’s one of the main factors behind the Democrats getting much better results than many pundits predicted (though the polls, of course, were better than the pundits). As Nate Silver writes:

[My] question, about whether candidate quality would matter, is the easiest to answer: It’s a resounding yes.

For one thing, just look at the large difference between Senate and gubernatorial results in states with both types of races on the ballot. In the nine states with battleground Senate races in states that also had a gubernatorial race on the ballot, there were significant discrepancies between the performance of the candidates…

We could wind up with as many as five of the nine states where one party wins the governorship and the other wins the Senate race…

[A] feature of modern American politics is exceptionally close races. So a candidate who underperforms by even 2 or 3 percentage points — let alone 5, 10 or more points — will often cost their party the election. Sometimes, quality has a big effect on quantity.

The context of British politics is somewhat different, but this is one lesson that is very much applicable here, and especially to the Liberal Democrats.

It’s why one of the consistent themes in recovering from the 2019 setbacks has been improving how we* approve and select candidates, such as the new social media checks that have come in following earlier problems. There’s more to do on that, but we’re in a much better place now than only a few years ago.

* Lib Dem governance experts will rightly spot that candidate approval and selection is a state party responsibility, rather than a federal party one. However, the federal party does have a role to play in coordinating and supporting such work, and it’s been great to see how mutually supportive the approach has been between state and federal elements of our structures.

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