Free Fall? What Free Fall?
With November 7 on the horizon and polls showing GOP control of the House and Senate in serious jeopardy, Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman is racking up the frequent-flier miles. This week alone, the former Bush campaign manager will be in Florida, Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, preparing candidates for the sprint to the finish. Coming from Michigan and on his way to Ohio last week, Mehlman sat down with U.S. News to discuss why he's not as pessimistic about Election Day as the latest poll numbers might suggest, as well as his thoughts on North Korea's nuclear test, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential prospects, and his own plans for the future. Excerpts:
After a number of polls this week showed very bad results for Republicans, some analysts said the party is in free fall. Is that accurate?
Let me first say I do think that we are in a very challenging environment. I think that the situation with [Rep. Mark] Foley has made it even more challenging, but ... I have not seen a significant impact in most of the races around the country, and I certainly haven't seen a free fall. In the last 25 years, the electorate has ranged from plus-4 Democrat to plus-2 Republican in '02. Every one of these [new] polls has an electorate that looks more Democratic than any electorate has looked in 25 years. If the American electorate is twice as Democratic as it's been in 25 years, it's going to be a bad day for us, but that's a huge assumption.
What has been the political impact of North Korea's nuclear tests?
It seems to me people who have consistently been on the record against missile defense and whose secretary of state tried to ply the North Korean dictator with a signed basketball by Michael Jordan are not necessarily the best people to be critical of what's happening in North Korea. I think one thing we know was the attempt to appeal to the better side of Kim Jong Il did not work, and so it seems to me that the party ... that said there is an axis of evil, that said we need missile defense, and that said we need to be tough in dealing with this threat is the one that is likely, if you're looking at the issues and looking at the facts, to benefit in terms of the public's focus on this.
Has the Republican push for stricter immigration alienated Hispanic voters?
Do I believe that being for border security is inherently anti-Hispanic? No, I think that's ridiculous. If you lived in America for five generations or for five months and you were in the World Trade Center, your life was at risk, and the key is to control the border because of the need of protecting our national security. Whether you're Hispanic, whether you're Asian-American, Jewish-American, Anglo-American, you name it, that's in your interest.
How is this election like or unlike 1994, when Democrats lost control of the House?
First of all, in '94 the Democrats were particularly [vulnerable] to a terrible year because they had a lot of open seats and a lot of those open seats were in Republican presidential districts. There are 20 Republican open seats this year; 17 of the 20 Republican seats this year are Bush-leaning seats, meaning Bush won those districts with an average of 61 percent. The second difference from '94 is the people who are in the toughest races; people like [Connecticut Rep.] Nancy Johnson and [New Mexico Rep.] Heather Wilson and others are very battle tested. Important difference No. 3 that I think is going to be relevant this year is that Republicans had a positive agenda they could be for, and voters in '94 embraced many of the concepts behind that positive agenda. You don't see that at all this year.
After Hurricane Katrina, how successful can you be at winning over black voters?
Our ability to target voters differently means there are conversations going on in the black community that maybe didn't go on as aggressively before. In a world where you have a limited budget, if you're targeting entirely by geography, to target a neighborhood where you're able to get 1 in 10 votes or 1 in 5 votes may not have been cost effective. On the other hand, if you're targeting based on lifestyle, which is what we do today, you can be much more effective at reaching out to people.
Do Sen. John McCain and former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani have a chance of winning the 2008 presidential nomination?
As the referee, I don't think it's appropriate to speculate on the quality of the teams, but I will say that I think that we have a lot of potentially very strong candidates running.
What about Sen. Hillary Clinton?
I think that the asset and the liability that Mrs. Clinton brings to the table is the passion she arouses in voters. And she arouses passion in their side; she arouses passion in our side.
Will you run again for chairman?
I'm going to decide in the next few weeks. I'm not going to decide with regard to the election. It'll be as much as anything a personal decision. I mean, I've now traveled over 300,000 miles.
This story appears in the October 23, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.