Down to the Wire
Don't look now, but suddenly a new batch of GOP seats in the House is up for grabs
The scandal is taking its biggest toll on GOP incumbents by denying them the chance they'd ordinarily have, with control of the White House, to set the terms of the political debate. "Republicans can't break through to change the conversation," says the Cook Political Report's Amy Walter. "The debate now is over who knew what when about the page scandal, rather than, 'What are the Democrats going to do about immigration, security, taxes?'"
Even for some Republicans, Washington has become toxic. Last week, Lewis canceled an event here with House Speaker Dennis Hastert because of questions concerning what he knew about Foley's behavior. "I'm not accusing the speaker of anything," Lewis says. "But I wanted to ... not be in contact with the speaker until I found out what's going on." Lewis trusts voters to distinguish between the actions of Foley, the GOP leadership, and himself: "To bring every Republican ... into this and allow them to be tainted would be like saying the pope had been tainted by some priests within the Catholic Church."
The National Republican Campaign Committee, meanwhile, notes that most voters continue to express approval of their own representative. A Washington Post/ABC News poll last week found that 64 percent of Americans think Republican leaders tried to cover up the Foley scandal but just 23 percent trusted the Democrats to handle it any better. The NRCC says it is unconvinced that races beyond those involving members of the leadership, like NRCC Chair Tom Reynolds, who according to one poll has fallen behind in his re-election race, will be affected by Foley. Of the race in Kentucky's Second, NRCC spokesman Carl Forti says, "It's not even on our radar screen."
For most of the newly competitive races, the Foley scandal laid bare Republican vulnerabilities that had been there before. Even in seemingly marginal districts, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recruited candidates early on who had strong fundraising ability and compelling personal stories that made it difficult to peg them as liberal Democrats, including military vets like Weaver and Charlie Brown, whose race against California Rep. John Doolittle was recently declared competitive by the Cook Report.
"The next layer." In other places, demographic changes have made Republicans vulnerable. In California's 11th District, which encompasses the Central Valley, a stream of independent and moderate voters from the Bay Area and the Silicon Valley have diluted Republican Rep. Richard Pombo's conservative agricultural base. University of California-Berkeley political science Prof. Bruce Cain says that Pombo's fate might be in the hands of those newcomers, concerned about Pombo's conservative environmental policies and his ties to disgraced former lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Pombo got roughly $43,000 in donations from Abramoff and his associates. Recent press reports have also focused on an oil firm called VECO Corp., which has contributed about $18,000 to Pombo's re-election campaign. The company is named in an FBI investigation into political corruption in Alaska. Pombo challenger Jerry McNerney is concentrating his grass-roots campaign on the district's new housing developments.
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