Abstract
The 2014 Midterm Elections saw Republicans sweep the House of Representatives and retake the United States Senate. This paper examines how select Democrats survived this wave election by analyzing the case of Florida's 18th Congressional District, Patrick Murphy (D-Incumbent) vs Carl Domino (R). The analysis uses descriptive statistics of the district as well as precinct and county election results from 2012 and 2014 in order to show change in the political success of the Democrat Murphy. It then uses advertisement data and campaign finances, as well as personal interviews to find a reason for the change. The author concludes that a focus on the localization of district issues created a variety of effects that both aided Murphy and harmed the challenger Domino in 2014. This chain reaction, including the interaction between local and national politics and parties, would come to define the success of Democrats in the 2014 Midterms.Copyright for articles published in this journal is retained by the authors, with first publication rights granted to Vanderbilt Undergraduate Research Journal under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (linked here). By virtue of their appearance in this open access journal, articles are available for wide dissemination at no cost to readers, with proper attribution (acknowledgment of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal), in educational and other non-commercial settings. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process.
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