Republicans absolutely cleaned up on Election Day a month ago. But, the swing from one election to the next is never uniform. Some Republicans did even better than could have been anticipated and "beat the point spread." And, a few Democrats successfully swam against a powerful GOP tide. All of which begs the question, isn't there a way to quantify the most and least impressive campaigns of 2014?
There's no perfect way to measure it, but here's our best crack at it: first, take the presidential performance in each district (PVI) to gauge what a "generic" Democrat or Republican should expect in each congressional district. Then, measure each House candidate's actual share of the two-party vote to determine whether a candidate over or under-performed what the "generic" candidate of his or her party should receive.
According to this metric, the most impressive performances of Democratic incumbents were by Reps. Patrick Murphy (FL-18) and Collin Peterson (MN-07), while the most impressive campaigns by non-incumbent Democrats were those of Brad Ashford (NE-02) and Gwen Graham (FL-02), all of whom won despite the
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