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."
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.
With California's 11th District race now in the "competitive" column, Democrats are facing tough decisions about where to spend their money. "There's not an unlimited amount," Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean tells U.S. News. "And instead of focusing money on fewer races, you're focusing more money on more races." Much of the $630,000 of TV ad time the DCCC had reserved for Democratic challenger Angie Paccione in Colorado's Fourth District was canceled last week, even though the DCCC recently enrolled Paccione in its "Red to Blue" program for the most competitive candidates; a Denver Post poll last week showed a 10-point lead for incumbent Rep. Marilyn Musgrave.
At the same time, more competitive races have forced Republicans to pull money from districts where they hoped to unseat Democratic incumbents. "Because we've looked beyond the races in play to say 'What's the next layer?' ... we are in a position ... to handle the risk of the increasing number of seats," Republican National Committee Chairman Ken Mehlman tells U.S. News, "and also ... to say, "Now this seat's safe-we don't have to worry about it.'" Asked to name a Republican-held seat that has gone from competitive to safe, Mehlman declined. But the RNC chair warned incumbents of the difficult political environment early in the election cycle, and many, including Lewis, amassed $1 million-plus war chests.
Indeed, marginal districts like Kentucky's Second are still uphill fights for Democrats, even as they have tightened. "Weaver looks good on paper, but Lewis hasn't done anything particularly wrong," says the Rothenberg Report's Nathan Gonzales. "That's what Democrats are wrestling with nationwide." After Lewis fielded the initial call about Iraq last week in his phone-in town hall meeting, none of the other callers asked him about the war-or about Foley. Most urged him to crack down on illegal immigration, to support the constitutional amendment banning gay marriage, and thanked him for helping them secure disability or veteran benefits. They were asking, in other words, for more of the same.
With Danielle Knight and Will Sullivan
This story appears in the October 23, 2006 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.