waiting periods in certain parts of the country that veterans have to experience. that is what i would make on this. it has been a tough year of the v.a.. a of criticism and a lot of it justified. it is completely unacceptable. not tolerable that anyone would dr. the books and we have to do with those people. at the end of the day, what i hope every veteran in america understands, what i know that the vast majority of my state of vermont understands, is once you get into the v.a., the quality of care is quite good. that is what all the veterans organizations say and it is true. >> you can see that entire interview with vermont senator bernie sanders at 6:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. next, journalists discuss the midterm elections by looking at the results and how they were covered by the media. us was part of a form hosted by cq roll call. it is an hour. >> i'm the politics editor at rollcall. this panel is entitled "what happened?" joining me today is nathan gonzales, the deputy editor of the rothenberg political report, contributing writer and founder of politics in stereo.com. to my right nbc news political , reporter and previously reporter for time and the "washington post" and he covers domestic policy and politics and you can follow him on twitter. to my left is mark blumenthal the editor at the huffington post and founding editor. if you would like you can sign up for the newsletter simply add pollster.com and then on my left abby livingston, who focuses on the house create you can follow her at rollcall addie and she's also been a producer at cnn and nbc and very importantly, she is one of the star players of the bad news softball team on the press side. every year, the female members of the press take on the members of congress and it's a great fundraiser for cancer research as well. abby is agreat pitcher. i have a couple of questions for the panel and then for about 30 or 40 minutes and we will go to the queue and day so start thinking of your questions now. the key thing i keep looking after tuesday night is about the democrats and the president was largely held responsible the blame that's been put is for the congressional democrats could have done to avoid this political slaughtering. nathan why don't we start with you? >> i feel like every cycle we come to the same conclusion about the campaign committee that when things go right the the campaign committee's gets more credit than they deserve it when they go wrong they get more blame than they deserve. but to me that doesn't mean they have no over what's happening. and i think that this was a fascinating election because we have an answer to the question of how much does local politics matter and can a well-known politician with a family name and family brand in the state cannot overcome the national trajectory of an election. we have an answer. it is a clear answer and the answer is no that the national trend in the states arkansas louisiana -- i know it is not quite done yet but the family brands that were supposed to save these democratic members are not enough to get them reelected. in terms of what can democrats control, i don't buy into the never ability of the sixth year of the presidency being terrible . i think that there are choices and decisions the administration makes up to that point and a good example is president bill clinton's term. that was not a disaster for his party. when you look at the members they made a choice with their votes and republicans did a good job of highlighting those votes with $100 million of advertising and highlighting the democratic members took in favor of the president's agenda. one ad i remember in the 2010 cycle was congressman joe donnelly in the indiana second district and he was running against the problems and the washington crowd as those -- as the narrator was saying that , there was one picture and the picture had john boehner president obama, and nancy pelosi so a democratic member of congress running against the washington crowd with the two leaders of the party and even though i thought i was stunning but joe donnelly made the , decision that in his competitive district and in a competitive environment training against his party, he wasn't always going to distance himself from the president that run against the president and he survived that wave and ended up catching a couple breaks in 2012 and being elected to the senate . but democrats could have made a strategic decision to run more adamantly against the president and say that would hurt the turnout but look at where they ended up in the current strategies. that is something where we don't know the answer to, but could have affected a few of these races. >> i really think the fundamental thing to make a big difference here in the six-year of how unpopular the president was -- you had the place where someone like mark warner in virginia wrote a bill of the political brand where he is the guide goes to the communities and does really well. not this time. his voting was similar to terry mccullough, tim kaine and for , that matter president obama. , his personal brand that made no difference in the environment. alison grimes in kentucky, who wouldn't say if she voted for the president, her numbers for the same. she won by three more points than he did. the democrats didn't pick her. she was young, she was a woman. she was like the perfect candidate. the results were almost word for word and vote for vote they ran a few points ahead of him but not very much in both of those states. none of those numbers were the same as obama in georgia. grimes ran three points ahead and they don't know what they could have done in this environment. i am not sure that a strategy of being so anti-obama was helping. the notion that at the end of the day, you can step away from the president and i'm not sure if i voted for him or not and it's not believable it could have been useful. if you are kentucky or arkansas the data shows that they dropped tremendously because the health care while walking back may be prior and grimes should have said the health care law is working as opposed to try to run away from it because they lost so many planes anyway. >> mark, what do you think? >> i agree with everything i've heard so far and i want to atco what perry said. the political environment in any given election for national candidate, for a senator member of congress is largely defined by not just the president is that their policy. the policy sets the policy agenda and drives everything politics are about. particularly in the race for u.s. senate, these tend to be elected officials you pay the least attention to that go away for six years and depending on where you live they might get more attention or not. the mayor or the governor gets a lot of attention and the senator pops up and they engage once every six years for a couple months so it is very hard and next to impossible to disengage make those races local. you saw that really vividly. my colleagues on the numbers illustrated this in the last 24 hours. scott clement had a piece yesterday we where he took the exit poll and looked at the vote for the democratic senator and obama's approval rating. at almost every instance they ran a little bit ahead of obama's approval rating, but not much. two or three points. the furthest ahead was warner, which ended up eating just enough. "the new york times" took the county-level vote, i think where there were six southern states where there were senate races and five included democratic incumbents and lost all that warner and he crowded that against every one in a perfect diagonal line with the dots a little bit above it. they were successful and it is very hard. i think it should be hard for anyone to sit up here and say they could have done this or that. they clearly saw the reality facing them which is if they embraced president obama in their state, they were going to go down. they tried things that were in retrospect more workable are laughable than others. it didn't make a lot of difference either way. >> anything to add? >> this summer, i moderated a debate at the greenbrier. that is a huge, great estate in west virginia and it's the treasurer of the state state that has a lot of economic struggles. this is the wealthy bastion and they take a lot of pride in it. i was talking to someone i that worked there and there was a strange thing going on. there are a lot of new orleans saints fans there. >> a lot fewer fans in west virginia as well. >> the reason there are saints fans is because the saints do their summer workout at the greenbrier. a lot of west virginians have adopted them because they've acknowledged that the greenbrier is there and it is a forgotten state. as i continued to walk around they had a video that you could watch in your hotel room and it's like all these luminaries , presidents they have , photographs of movie stars everywhere you go. it donned on me i think the last president that stated there was eisenhower. a few days later i thought what if president obama had come here to play golf? it's his favorite activity and he could have gone to play golf . and i don't think anything would make west virginia like president obama. he is reviled there. nick rahall held on to the very end of the race, but i heard on both sides that president obama's approval rating in his district was 22%. i just thought if president obama had come and play golf it might have made it a little easier to be there but instead -- i'm not saying that he had a mandate to do that but if there , had been some kind of outreach just to say if he had been the first president in 60 years to say, hey this is a great golf , course i think it would have , brought a little pride. that was just my observation. it would had made it a little bit easier. i don't think that race was ever when it will. shelley moore capito was like the michael jordan of west virginia. it could have been less hard. the other anecdotes i feel ok saying now that when i a while we saw what was happening with bruce braley it wasn't that he wasn't doing well but the seats below him were going down. i talked to the democrats when i was like, oh my gosh, it is like bruce braley is like the most this -- disliked person in politics right now and he said no, it is president obama. i think he created an environment that made it that much harder and harder and so people made a tactical mistakes and i think that they probably made some mistakes along the way but at the end of the day that's what it came down to. >> it has been five years since the supreme court ruled on the citizens united case. what can we say now about the expanded role of the money and the politics? >> see on the news about $4 million spent on the midterm, the most ever. if you think about the reality 300 leave people live in america, so that is only $12 a person. $44 a person. it doesn't seem like a lot for one person. in reality, of course most , people are not getting the money at all. we saw this like a big change we hadn't seen before according to the responsive politics. the amount of the donors went down, so in 2010 there were about 800,000 individual donors to campaigns. in 200 -- in 2014, it was about 700,000 individuals. a big drop in people giving money even though the actual money went up. how did that happen question mark you hear about the 501(c) fours, or people like them. we are getting the picture of what the campaign finance looks like in this environment. and we saw in 2004 about 96% of the money was by the groups that disclosed how much they spent. this year about 65% for which , meant one third of the money was spent that was called dark money meaning of the money where , you can actually track the donation. in campaign commercials, about 23% of the commercials that were the democrats were funded in some ways by undisclosed donors . about half about 48% of the republican ads in the millions of dollars was spent on the ad where the donor isn't required to say where the money came from. i spent a lot of time in kentucky with the cycle. i went up to the voters and asked about mitch mcconnell and people kept telling me he is really caring. i thought that's interesting. i've heard he's a strategic. he is ambitious, but i have never heard this before. but then i watch tv and mcconnell because he had one of these independent groups running these ads the independent groups , spent a lot of money saying grimes, obama. mcconnell had been able to run all sorts of positive ads that show him bringing money back to the state and how nice he was and is smiling in the way that you can rarely see. >> he was surrounded by cute dogs. >> the spending amount -- we had the campaign financing a few years ago and the goal is if you had a negative ad you would have say that so-and-so is a terrible person. i am -- and i approve this ad. it's a big change. >> one of the things we cover is the house races. i'm a house girl and art i know you love covering house races. house republicans recently saw the number of women in the conference of dwindle. what do they do in terms of diversifying the republican caucus and do we believe that will will that affect the course of speaker boehner's leadership? >> this question is all about what new opponent she's going to have in the softball game next year. one of the things because of the women's issues and their dealings, it is the hot topic -- i looked before the election to see what races and will there be more republican women in this congress. the republicans started from a little bit of a deficit of emerson at the beginning of two years ago. shelley moore capito is switching to the other side of the hill. in order for republicans to gain more women in the caucus, they have to get three. it looks like there will be new four women added to the congress. barbara here in northern virginia and mimi walters in california. so that would be gaining one. right now in arizona's second district, martha mcsally is added by about 30 votes, i believe. there's a chance there's a lot to be accountable in the democratic and republican counties. we will see of martha mcsally comes as well. so for some of those women even though the number of women are so low in the caucus, those women will be getting a lot of attention. she is 30-years-old and the youngest woman elected. she's going to get a lot of attention. mia love is going to have a fairly high profile in the party , just a guess. they will get a disproportionate amount of attention. in terms of other diversity, there was another african-american, will heard elected in texas's 23rd district. it's pretty remarkable because democrat pete gallego in a majority that is primarily hispanic. carla's core bellow in florida's 26th sixth district will be district will be coming to congress and then we will see carl demaio who is an openly gay , congressmen but that race is still close to call. so republicans, there is an opportunity to promote diverse members outside of the typical fold -- old, white male stereotype that they have. >> we should point out we are talking about a house republican conference that is maybe 10% female. >> the republican caucus and democratic caucus -- actually my , colleague and friend and competitor had a great breakdowns on the deterioration -- or the deterioration of white men in the democratic caucus and the increase of minorities and women in the democratic caucus compared to republicans, and i encourage you to check out his thing. >> i thought we could go around and talk about the biggest surprise from tuesday night. why don't we start with you? >> i would say the we slaughter, the fact we don't know what she is coming back to -- louise slaughter, the fact we don't know if she is coming back to congress. her name wasn't mentioned to me in this entire cycle by democrats or republicans. i was trying to catch these sleeper surprises and that came out of nowhere. i called a couple of the republicans and this is the kind of thing you were keeping under the radar and you didn't want me to report it and give it away. they were like, no. we do not see this coming either. i covered a race closely closely in the post-redistricting race . it was a reflection in the maryland gubernatorial race and there was a point that there was a point tuesday night where anything seemed possible. it seemed feasible what these crazy numbers, but i would say louise slaughter and john delaney. >> i think my panelists may have the same answer, but show of hands, how many of us live in the d.c.-marilyn-virginia area? basically everyone. how many of us would have predicted that we would be talking about the potential recount in virginia and the six or seven point win for hogan in maryland? the two biggest surprises were right in our backyards and most of us -- certainly, i did not see them coming and i probably should have. since we were misled by the pulling and that is what i cover, let's talk about them. maryland is a classic case, like hearkening back to harry truman. the trustworthy independent media poll stopped at the beginning of the month. the "washington post" poll was in early october and i think "the baltimore sun" did one even earlier than that. there wasn't a lot of polling. there were some roble polls. now the internal polls were released by the hogan campaign had their candidate down two a week out and ahead by five in the final week. they looked at with a grain of salt. i remember staring at that and thinking, we should look at this work closely. but wait, i have eight senate races and 23 other pieces to write. so that's one is kind of classic. virginia, similar. virginia is tougher because there were a fair number of late polls and i think this gets into the more systematic issues involving polling we may get to later. there is a situation where it shouldn't have been a surprise to anybody and it was not to me that gillespie would finish closer to the end and polls had him. a classic incumbent situation where an incumbent with a whole lot of money would dominate the election in virginia which is always crucial wasn't going to be able to start spending money towards the end with the voters that engage at the end would see him and he would consolidate republicans. it surprised everyone for how close a got. for me the surprise was how well , warner seems to be doing in weeks three and two and one. i was expecting to see it closed down to three or four points . it was surprising that it didn't. >> we will come back to polling in a little bit, but i want to give these gentlemen opportunity to respond. >> those two are the biggest surprises. the margin of polling in arkansas, louisiana, kentucky, iowa, the margins were surprising to me. all most of the point of, why did we cover the arkansas race when prior lost by so much? >> the margins were stunning and when you look at the house races in new york's first district the long island district with congressman tim bishop that is , normally a district that is very tight. bishop has been squeaking them out for the last decade but a very tight race and he won by ten points. when you go up further than the 24th district and the republican there is a race that we knew was breaking late. the republicans for spending and they had the advantage and we thought things were tightening created the republican won by 20 points. just a complete collapse that gets down to the states where the turnout operation just wasn't there but the margins were stunning. another thing i was surprised by on the house side is some of the incumbents that survive like dan kirkpatrick of arizona. if you would have told me that republicans were going to gain 13 seats and that and kirkpatrick survived i think that is stunning. on the flipside, someone like john barrow of georgia. someone who has been republicans have been targeting since he was first elected. i think that he's amazing as a politician because you have a harvard educated lawyer and when you look at that it is a terrible southern southern accent but it starts getting deeper and deeper and he has been a survivor and for him to lose by a considerable margin, i think it is telling. the only white white males of the democratic left is good to be david price of north carolina nick rayhaul lost. those were surprising to me. >> you mentioned arkansas. to see mark pryor lose by 18 points, west lincoln lost by 21 points and we covered her race completely different than mark pryor. >> we were told that mark pryor is no blanche lincoln >> that is a perfect segue to the next question. sue rothenberg wrote a column about the results and what happened and i'm going to read a small portion and you can read the whole call on rollcall.com. the pollsters and operatives intentionally misled reporters and handicappers about what was going on during the cycle. republicans had a tough cycle in 2012 of course and went through process of public reflection and self-criticism. it will be interesting to see whether democrats will do the same thing. i think that i should ask the pollster the question first. do you think democrats will have a reflection after this moment or do you think the problem is more widespread? >> i think it is more widespread and the democratic and media pollsters -- we have been having moments of reflection for the last ten years. we used to do what we do by calling land line phones and now we are in a situation where more than half of americans either don't have a landline phone or they don't answer when it rings. so in this moment of incredible challenge to the polling industry -- on the one hand if , you took all of the senate polls as we did at 5:38 and so on and you aggregate them or average them, you look at who was ahead and behind, you would have had all of them in north carolina, it did not miss by much. on the other hand there was a , consistent understatement of the republican vote in most states and the senate on the governor's side and that meant if you repeated the same exercise for the governors -- the good news is we had four races at the end that were half a percentage point separated the top candidates and less than two points separated eight. that situation -- you are going to miss a lot. a half point does not mean much. three or four of those were missed. overall, there was an overstatement of democrats and understatement of republicans and that meant more to mrs. led to republicans winning. we talked about maryland and virginia. to put it in context, four years ago the polling was often in nevada. harry reid one by six. there was roughly a six-point error on the margin. we thought, that is incredible. is this the beginning of the end? well, the error in arkansas was 11 points on the margin. the difference between the final polling average and the results was 11 points in arizona and in arkansas, 10 in virginia, nine in kansas, and 17 in the maryland governor's race. what is that about? a polling error is like an engineering thing. usually it is not just one thing. usually it is multiple things that are all going wrong in this same direction. maryland would have had help polling late and there was a trend. arkansas, you can look at the chart and see the almost degree line. clearly there was a trend there. there may have been more of a trend and kentucky. i think if you look at the polling in september, the averages around labor day and newsletter monday morning you can see republicans increased their margins and almost everyone of the states where democrats lost. it usually is the republican number going up every two points for the democrat went up as the undecided went down. there was evidence in play that is democrats were cast in the races to a greater degree and republicans who were lesser-known challengers and gaining recognition or going up so there was an effect going disproportionally to republicans although that didn't explain it , all. i think the same phenomena was at work in the whole voter mechanism. no pollsters say this the same way. there is no one lever that they should have pulled that they did not. i think it was probably a pattern where there was an assumption that the 2010 turnout was the worst it could get. particularly outside of the five or six top statewide races to be the wrong one. >> something we noticed over the last cycle or two is the newfound use of the polls. this partisan warfare. we will get internal polls and independent partisan outlets releasing polls. they do this as a way to drive a narrative a certain way. talking about the role of partisan polls and some of the things we cover, some of the way our competitors cover, and it's -- >> i am probably the person who enjoys talking about the polls the least. no one is going to give you a poll out of the goodness of their heart. they are either trying to raise money off of it, change a narrative. on the flipside, they could be wrong. they could be enormously helpful. i started to get some tremors in july. covering mike coffman in colorado, a republican incumbent in trouble. you should shift your focus to steve sutherland in florida. he is in more trouble. i did not quite believe it. then an independent poll put out that sutherland was in trouble. it fit what i was hearing and seeing so i wrote it up. steve southerland ended up losing and the other survive. what is the value to the reader? there are so many scientific angles that go into it. the quality of how it was conducted, did it include english, spanish, does the district need that. so there is a balance. my loyalty is to the reader and i'm not going to write it up just to write it up. i get a lot of pressure from people -- you're not being fair. you wrote there a campaign why aren't you going to write my? because i don't trust yours, and that is a hard thing to say sometimes. it is a really difficult balance as a reporter. it is a hard piece of evidence to show but you also have to use , a little instinct and i usually go with nathan and say what do you all think? that is usually my final verdict. >> do you have anything to add? >> one thing that has not been talked about a lot is is we will call it the republican polling debacle of 2012. a lot of the top-tier republican pollsters made a concerted effort to change making sure they had 25 to 30% cell phones in their samples. something we saw this cycle is went republican pollsters were going into the field that would -- field and getting hot numbers, that means numbers that seemed almost seemed too good to be true i think sometimes , there's a tendency to wage goes back to somewhere between the 2010 and 2012 electorate because there was a fear of being wrong again. we can't afford to be wrong again. even some of the republican polls that were public added to and made it difficult to identify the margins that we saw on election day. 2010, i think the republican pollsters did a better job of identifying what type of cycle what type of electorate was going to show up and 2012 i think democrats did a better job. 2014, republicans did a better job of identifying. so they will go into 2016 saying well which pollsters are going , to be the most accurate in identifying the trend? i think that will be an open question. >> underlying the polls is not something i understand. in 2012, 20 5% of the voters are over 60. only 12% of them are under 30. this time, 37% of the voters are over only 12% of them are under 60. 30. i don't want to blame the millennial's for the election but i'm curious about why is the , voter turnout. we know that younger people do not trend in midterms, but the gap is growing in a very large way. the democrats are trying to make sure that the quote unquote presidential voters were at the midterm and it doesn't appear that worked at all. i'm curious why there were a lot of them on tv talking about how important they are. there were a lot of groups focused on the youth vote. it doesn't seem to have happened at all. >> i want to ask a couple questions you returned to about the demographics versus the turnout question for the democratic party but i want to ask about new hampshire. new england in general. the poll seem to be right in the new hampshire senate race. how do people get it right in new england question mark >> i can't leave it hanging because that is a good question. we were talking before the panel about it being cautious about making too much of the exit poll estimates of tomography because it is a poll. we will have other ways of looking at this coming from the senses and from voter files and whatnot. but i think that there is a gap growing it has more to do with , the fact there's been a higher turnout among the younger people than the last two presidential elections than the change in the midterms have gone. but anyway, so new england -- new hampshire was one of the handful of states where the polling understated shaheen. not by a lot. but what was interesting to me , and this might be one of those coincidences that happens when you look at a not of numbers, to the extent that there was -- you didn't see the understatement of republicans. it happened to be less or even in the democrats' direction in new hampshire and massachusetts to a lesser extent in connecticut in the northeast which is interesting. not in maine, not in vermont although that is there own weird thing. i don't know. one theory that a smart pollster friend throughout is that massachusetts and new hampshire has a lot of homegrown polling -- that is locally-based outfits that only poll massachusetts and new hampshire. it's interesting. it is always dangerous to judge a pollster by one survey and its nearly irresponsible because it has a lot to do with mailing that result. the folks who came out pretty good, "the des moines register" poll in iowa that is a homegrown locally-focus operation who got it right. my former partner charles franklin who runs the law school : wisconsin and has the governor's race right there. we can pick others. there are a lot of those in new england and new hampshire. that may be part of it. >> as a house race-lover house , democrats took an unexpected in some ways to the extent. the drubbing on tuesday night. going forward for house democrats there is a lot of , younger members of the caucus , we have heard indirectly that , they are worried about the future of the house democratic party. would you see as what could possibly happen as a result from that nervous energy and what direction are they going in this cycle? >> it was clearly not in contention in this cycle, but the cycle didn't matter because the hope was that the democrats could make a few gains or when it became clear this was a bad cycle maybe just mitigate the , losses. then in 2016 they could make up the difference. they were down they could make 17. up the difference and back the gavel which likely hillary clinton is at the top. i talked to one member yesterday and the person just kept saying we lost 70 seats. in six years. that is a pretty staggering number. so i think the reality is hitting that it's going to be without the unforeseen waves and major changes in the political dynamic democrats are , going to have a hard time getting the gavel back before the next redistricting map in 2021. i'm sensing restlessness when i talk to people on the hill. leaders sent a letter yesterday saying she's running again. i don't foresee any sort of challenge to her, but there is definitely a younger generation that is getting restless. the group and leadership have been there for a really long time. the class of 2012 is very ambitious. then you have already coming up on another group and so we have these three generations impacting each other and how -- you don't see a dysfunction coming out publicly and how they execute elections. it will be interesting to see in the next few years how these forces collide. >> we are going to go to the q-and-a in just two or three minutes. very quickly i thought that we , should go around and talk about what this election was about. what is the big story? what was this about? was it about the economy candidates? nathan i will start with you. , >> i think it was about president obama. i feel like so many stories before the election, is the election about nothing? i feel like president obama was the shadow that was cast over the entire election. underneath that umbrella there , was the economy or how people , felt about the economy. there was foreign crisis, domestically, ebola. it also under the umbrella of president obama. >> i think that is true. i am still grappling with the fact not many people in america has ebola. isis has been delayed a little bit. 10 million people have health insurance. i kept reading stories saying that those three things kill the -- kill the president obama. --i cap reading stories that say that killed president obama. it's occasionally the reality in the other thing that was striking if i was in louisville yesterday with senator mcconnell asking what his agenda was on the party going forward and he talked about tax reform and trade agreements as being the big deal and i don't think i heard a lot of this during the campaign. it's a little disconcerting that in some ways the campaign was not about issues to the point we already know the platform to run on is. we should not be guessing and speculating about what you're going to do. the third thing i wanted to add is a lot of the big issues didn't come up, and that is a little disappointing. you want the campaign to be about the ideas. they are defended here by saying barack obama said climate change is one of the biggest problems in the world and aand urgent challenge and i think that is a big challenge in the world. the republicans say the government spending is huge and that's a problem. medicare is a part of that. missouri republican plan on medicare that they are going to do today? these are important issues and election was supposed to be -- the nation was transfixed about what happen in ferguson, missouri, in did you hear august. anything about that on the campaign trail? i did not hear a lot of proposals to deal with that. it felt like it was about who was going to win and what it was about. i get that. it did feel like an election in which the big issues were going to be delayed until later and i don't feel like it should have been that way. >> i think it is also anger. i just think that the american public since 9/11 has been disappointed by the government time and time again, like 9/11 and the financial crisis. ebola was a tiny thing but it's one more thing that went wrong. cable news blew it up to the -- cable news blew it up. the internet blew it up. i don't know if it is possible to leave the public. the public isn't feeling good about president obama right now. >> the president's agenda defines what we talk about an washington and what politics is about for most people, so so my answer is not ebola or benghazi but the bigger picture. we had six years since the coming crash, and although the economic indicators are coming back, it still feels like things are not good. are things headed in our things headed in the right direction or the wrong track? 60% or 70% say not good in one version or another. that is what shapes the their perceptions of how the president is doing and that's what is driving it. >> it is time to open it up to all of you for questions. do we have a microphone? excellent. >> i am also a former policy director on a couple of statewide campaigns. i want to ask u.s. reporters why is it someone like me that writes these things what we should do on this issue or that issue finds find the press release you cover is the one about the polls? the number of horserace stories versus the number of issues stories is kind of surprising to us that work on the issues. what is that the drives that as being the thing that becomes more covert and talked about and given that we find problems code -- problems with polling, could or or should that change in the future? >> i think that candidates there , is an incentive and i don't know what policy papers you are writing on which campaigns but i , think the candidates are generally very generic in their policy proposals. there is very little that is outside the box because the more specific you get, the more likely to be attacked by the other side. to read a democratic proposal saying we are for working families and better wages, ok. what does that tell you? for reporters, it is tough to make news out of that sort of thing. >> [inaudible] >> the reality for me as a business story is about in-depth policy details and does not get the same amount of attention. let's be honest about that. that is one of the core challenges. the candidates talk about what they think the media is going to cover. most of the time when i cover elections, the first thing it they asked me is not what is most important for america, it is is hillary running and are the democrats going to win the senate? i would like to write more stories about the details but the interest is -- i don't think there is something about the horserace. should the balance be better? i would like the balance to be better myself i don't think that there's anything wrong with the coverage of the race. >> the candidate will come into roll call and we will interview them and we will talk to them for now are. we will asked them all sorts of questions. every time i ask if a question, but what do you think about foreign affairs? all i talk about is their issues. they seem to not always want to talk about the facts that they will authorize force. we often very in depth. sometimes we do a video interview. if something catches my ear, we will put it on video. videos get watched sometimes sometimes not. we will write it up. we had a candidate come in during the shutdown and wouldn't directly and what she would do. we wrote a column that has been quoted frequently about it. i would say it is sometimes a press release is sometimes hard for reporters to make interesting because it can be vague. but often we ask direct questions, what do you think and tried to nail them down. we do the best we can. >> i wanted to chime in last because i have the cheap answer, which is covering polls and polling is my beat, that's what i'm paid for. but the reason that i have this job is that for people who read the "huffington post" and who read everything else we write that's what they want to click , on. given we're in the internet age we have a good idea of what , stories people click on and read and share, and they like to read about the horserace. which they? it's people like all of you in this room. is the 10% or 50% or 20%, or whatever the number is maybe 3% , who really like reading about politics. those people usual are partisan and they want to know how their team is doing. it is sports for them. they want to know if their team is going to win. it doesn't address your question, which is the really hard question, how do you get disengaged -- people who decide elections and a lot of people who don't vote, all of the people who don't vote are not engaged in politics. they are not clicking on policy stories, they are not clicking on polling stories, they are not following this. and how you get americans who don't engage in politics to engage in it? that is a hard question given , that we are all chasing our audiences who are engaged in it. >> i also should just -- we cover a lot of policy at cq roll call, and a few of my favorite stories was the role of education in the north carolina senate race and also we teamed up with the cq reporter to look at the role of health care in minnesota which is especially interesting given franken worked on the medical loss ratio in obamacare. next question. >> you had mentioned -- you mentioned democrats lost 70 seats over over six years. if the sec conference lost 70 games over six years every coach would be fired in that conference. why did the democrats keep their current leadership? >> that's a tough question. >> you have to vote, that's what it comes down to. there's no challenger i've seen evidence of anyone willing to launch a challenge. different caucuses. she has the california delegation behind her. at the end of the day i don't, there's no challenge. >> i suppose we will argue the president drives the results. poulos he became speaker because george w. bush was unpopular. they lost seats because president obama's agenda has been unpopular. i don't think we should say she has a whole lot to control. >> i would add from a few phone calls the past 36 hours, my sense is most of the democratic caucus is angry at president obama. they are not so much angry at pelosi. >> next question. >> edward roder, sunshine press. the spending this year was huge, and yet turnout wasn't that great. are campaigns finding it harder to reach voters because the media is so segmented? has either party done much to increase participation from get out the vote and voter id? or are they still missing half the voters in off years? >> i want to speak to it just a little bit. there was enormous, i think you heard before we came on, at least the democrats, they spent an unprecedented amount of money on get out the vote internet and technology aimed at enhancing both of those things. the question, implicit in your question, that didn't work because turnout was down nationwide. one, and the states where they spent all that money, it was up. and i'm looking at a map that was produced off the data for my friend michael mcdonald at the university of florida, up two points in colorado, it was up a point in iowa, a point and a half in north carolina, up five points in wisconsin. where there were big races and a lot of money being spent on all sorts of things, advertising get out the vote, there was higher turnout. it wasn't presidential level but i don't think anybody who had the money to spend on them was claiming that they could replicate presidential level turnout. i think the most, you know, the people that sell this, the salespeople are perfectly willing to say that at best they might lose a point or two their way. coming back to the last question getting people engaged in , politics who are not outside of the presidential election where it's about two personalities is a very tough thing. >> so campaigns are about two things. mobilization of the base, and persuasion of the middle. in the midterms, a lot of the tv efforts efforts and money was spent, a lot spent on the mobilization of the base, and i think there's only so much you can do when people are excited. you can contact them and send them as many e-mails and you can call them, you can text them. if people aren't excited, i think money isn't the issue. in another way, spending begets more spending. and when one party goes into a district or goes into race and starts spending, the other party comes into response and the television race keeps getting higher and higher. i believe at the end, i bet it was more expensive to air an ad in cedar rapids, iowa, that was in las vegas, nevada, because those were where the races were. iowa, the iowa senate race in iowa house races. so the spending just kind of keeps going. there's a much larger question about how -- that the campaigns and the parties are struggling with with television advertising being less efficient, how do you conduct people online? and i know the parties are focusing more money on digital. i know the dccc was proud in the final couple of days that they owned the local webpages of the local media because with banner ads and everything. it's just i think both parties, the voter files are becoming more sophisticated and everything, but it still -- i don't think anyone has the key or the right answer as to how to reach people and motivate them 100% of the time. >> i think we have time for one more question. >> undecided voter. joel packer. you mentioned the kay hagan race where education was one of the issues. education is something president obama mention yesterday. maybe on higher ed working with republicans. there's been polling that shows it's a high priority for the public. was it your sense that it played in any of the races as a decided -- as a deciding factor or any level of importance? >> are you asking me? well, in that particular race it played because thom tillis was the speaker and they were passing education bill over the course of the summer and affected his candidacy. i would be hard-pressed to think of many other races where it took a leading role, although i think house democrats might have used it to help drive out the male voters a couple times. can you guys think of any other examples? >> the only other example is in the pennsylvania governor's race with tom corbett. he was definitely tied to changes. that was the only federal race for education comes to mind. >> i can't think of a single ad. i probably saw a few ads, but there were not very many dominating issues like that in these campaigns. it was very scattered. >> well i think -- can we give our panelists around of applause [applause] ? thank you, everyone. >> the 20 15th c-span student cam competition is underway. create a documentary film on the topic the three branches and you. show how the branches of the government have affected you and your community. there are 200 cash prizes for students and teachers totaling $100,000. next, a discussion on internet regulation internet privacy and then ann arbor talks about security and government surveillance. >> the fcc is considering a plan that would allow the agency to regulate how internet flows between content providers and service are fighters. a final ruling is expected by the end of the year. net neutrality refers to a system where providers get equal access to all providers. columbia university professor tim wu is credited with creating the term net neutrality and he took part in every discussion in new york city.

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