Down to the Wire
Don't look now, but suddenly a new batch of GOP seats in the House is up for grabs
ELIZABETHTOWN, KY.-The first caller into Rep. Ron Lewis's "tele-town hall meeting" last week neatly captured the grim public mood. "When are you going to bring some of our boys home?" the caller demanded. "That process is not too far into the future," Lewis replied. "The last time I checked there were 250,000 [Iraqi] defense force personnel being trained."
The woman on the line from Owensboro wasn't about to let the six-term Republican congressman off so easy. "We were starting to turn things around, then the Iraqis start killing each other," she said. Lewis agreed, suggesting it was up to Sunnis and Shiites to end the growing sectarian violence. The exchange was nearly as scratchy as the one between Lewis and a caller in the previous week's town hall meeting, who asked what the congressman was doing about the Mark Foley congressional page mess.
Those are the kinds of questions that appear to have turned Lewis's re-election bid in Kentucky's Second District-the most pro-George W. Bush district in this red state in 2004-into a real footrace in just the past couple of weeks. That's partly because Lewis is facing his first well-funded challenger, a retired Army officer who calls himself "The Colonel" and whose campaign slogan is "Faith. Family. Freedom." But with the ongoing investigation into the Foley scandal, continued bloodshed in Iraq, and Bush's approval numbers tumbling back to their basement levels, this central Kentucky race is just one in which a bunch of Republican-held seats have suddenly become competitive less than a month before Election Day. "Normally, as the election moves closer, you have a declining number of battleground districts," says election analyst Rhodes Cook. "To have the field of play expanding is unusual." Whether Democrats wind up winning in these districts will determine whether they can go beyond picking up the 15 seats they need to claim just a bare majority in the House to a landslide victory.
In the past 10 days, the authoritative Cook Political Report has moved six GOP-held House seats into the "competitive" column, bringing the number of vulnerable Republican seats to 43, compared with just nine competitive races in districts held by Democrats. The Rothenberg Political Report, another respected elections newsletter, last week raised the projected number of seats the Democrats will pick up next month from the 15-to-20 range to 18 to 25, its first such recalibration since August.
"Arrogance." In many of the newly competitive House races, and in more than half a dozen already competitive races that have tightened further in recent days, Democratic challengers say the Foley scandal was a turning point. Mike Weaver, challenging Lewis, says the scandal played into his main campaign themes: that Democrats can be just as strong on "values" issues as Republicans-Weaver says he opposes abortion rights and is anti-gay marriage-and that the GOP monopoly in Washington has the party putting its interest ahead of the nation's, demanding a "restoration of balance" that a Democratic-controlled House would provide. In a conversation with farmer Steve Wooden, who has seen crop prices fall as costs for seed, fuel, and health insurance have risen, Weaver says the scandal shows how Republicans have fallen out of touch with ordinary Americans-just as he says they have by getting too cozy with the agricultural, oil, and health insurance companies that Wooden blames for his economic woes. Standing beside his John Deere combine, Wooden, 51, nods in agreement. "To have a congressman send those E-mails illustrates their arrogance," he says. "There's too much of that in Washington."
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