The Next GOP Battleground
How long has it been since the Northeastern United States really mattered from an electoral standpoint? In 1960, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller could dictate the terms of Richard Nixon’s presidential nomination but there’s been a lot of economic and political down-hill since then. For decades, the story of American politics has been written in the high-growth Sunbelt and the burgeoning exurban metropolises of California, Texas, Florida and Georgia. The Northeast, with its high taxes, decrepit industrial base and shrinking share of the national population, became something of a Hollywood-East, reduced to the status of piggybank for candidates from other parts of the country and the leading exporter of losing Democratic Party nominees for president.
The next reapportionment is poised to take another bite out the Northeastern delegations to the U.S. House of Representatives. The region will probably lose another 4 seats while states in the South and Southwest will gain 8. Yet, like a scene out of The Last Hurrah, the I-95 corridor is about to take center stage just before it receives another demotion.
From New Hampshire to the North Carolina line, there will be at least 24 strongly contested House races and four knock-down-drag-out, last-man (or -woman) -standing races for the Senate. These figures represent almost a third of all the House races that currently meet the threshold of “competitive” and just under half the toss-up campaigns for the Senate. Voters with a low tolerance for negative campaign ads living in the Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore media markets ought to consider suspending their cable service for September and October, 2010. It is going to get very ugly.
Start in New Hampshire and work your way south to Richmond. For all intents and purposes, the Granite State will be subject to three state-wide campaigns for federal office simultaneously. Senator Judd Gregg’s retirement has drawn first-tier contenders from both parties: New Hampshire Republican Attorney General Kelly Ayotte and Democratic Congressman Paul Hodes, each of whom will raise and spend money prodigiously – and have it raised and spent for and against them by outside entities. Hodes’ Senate bid creates a vacancy in one of the state’s two House seats for which several Democrats and Republicans have already filed, potentially including former Congressman Charlie Bass. In the other slightly more Republican seat, the National Republican Congressional Committee has declared Congresswoman Carol Shea-Porter one of its top targets in this cycle and recruited the Republican Mayor of Manchester, Frank Guinta , to run against her.
New York and Connecticut are similarly thick with campaigns. Christopher Dodd, long-time Democratic senator, has been seriously hampered by being simultaneously chair of the Senate Banking Committee and in receipt of a below-market mortgage from a now-disgraced bank president. Freshman Connecticut Democrat Jim Himes has drawn a challenge from Republican state Senator Dan Debicella and several other Republicans. Across the Sound in New York, Long Island Democrat Tim Bishop will face businessman Randy Altschuler. Bishop had a rough summer with his town hall meetings including one that got so rowdy he had to be escorted to his car by five state police officers. Rounding out the suburban/exurban New York races is the contest between incumbent Democrat John Hall and Republican state Representative Greg Ball. Both of these seats are historically Republican and tilt slightly to the right at the presidential level.
Further upstate, there are six more seats in play including the special election held in November to fill the seat of President Obama’s new Army Secretary, former Republican Congressman John McHugh (more on that below). To the west, incumbent Democrat Eric Massa, elected in 2008 with just 51 percent in a district that hasn’t elected a Democrat since 1913, faces a strong challenge from Corning's Republican Mayor Tom Reed and a number of other GOP challengers. Two other newly elected upstate New York Democrats, Tom Arcuri and Scott Murphy, who won their previous races with 52 and 50 percent, are also GOP target.
Without a doubt, the epicenter of the I-95 fracas is the Pennsylvania-New Jersey-Delaware suburbs around Philadelphia. In one media market, there will be no fewer than nine House seats (five Democratic and four Republican) strongly in play. Adding to that toxic brew are two highly charged Senate races. In Pennsylvania, party switcher Arlen Specter (should he survive his primary) is headed for a shootout with former congressman and Club for Growth president Pat Toomey. Meanwhile, in Delaware, Democratic crown prince Beau Biden’s coronation has been interrupted by uber-popular Republican Congressman Mike Castle’s decision to enter the Senate race. This World Wrestling Federation-like free-for-all of House and Senate races will be a confusing orgy of every sort of campaign media under the sun, most of it negative. My advice: put your money in Philadelphia television stations and get some galoshes.
At the southern end of the I-95 corridor are House contests in Virginia and Maryland. Virginia’s Democratic incumbent Tom Perriello, having won his seat by just 727 votes in 2008, is in perilous condition after a yes vote on the coal-unfriendly “cap-and-trade” bill. Four Republicans have jumped into the race so far including State Senator Robert Hurt. Democratic Representative Glenn Nye is also being challenged in the Tidewater with at least 7 Republicans eyeing the race. Finally, across the Chesapeake, the Salisbury, Maryland-centered district of Democratic freshman Frank Kratovil, who squeaked through with 49 percent of the vote after a brutal Republican primary unseated the incumbent, may face a rematch with State Senator Andy Harris.
There are other regions of the country with clusters of interesting races. Ohio has six contests cutting a northeast-to-southwest diagonal across the state, including two races that are already too close to call and a high-profile Senate campaign in which former Congressman and OMB chief Rob Portman is seeking to replace the retiring Senator George Voinovich. There are three first - and second-term incumbent Democrats in heavily Republican Mississippi and Alabama districts who should follow the old Washington adage of “rent, don’t buy.” Four of Arizona’s eight seats could be seriously contested. And in Southern California, previously safe Republican incumbents like David Drier and Dana Rohrabacher did not win convincingly enough in 2008 to take the question marks away for 2010. How the Republican position in those “safe” California districts has eroded to this degree is an interesting question all by itself. But each of these clusters pale in size, intensity and stakes next to the I-95 campaigns.
As much fun as the I-95 horse race is, it is not just a horse race. A serious issue is on the table, namely the GOP’s ability to reach beyond its bases in the South and the interior and reassert its national party status. Much of the talk about Republicans recapturing the House next year will remain just that – talk – if they are unable to coalesce around candidates who can occupy the political center of evenly divided districts. The need to capture these seats on the way to a majority is an emerging political fact of life. For instance, even if Republicans were, say, to hold all their incumbents next year and win every other currently competitive Democratic seat – two good sized “ifs” – they would still be about 10 seats short of the 218 they need to choose a Speaker much less form a stable, governing majority. This electoral math helps make the point that as hard as it is to govern with Northeastern moderates and liberals in the coalition it may be impossible to govern without them.
The McHugh open seat race is an important case in point. As the night wound down on Tuesday, the victor in the race for New York’s 23rd District was Democrat Bill Owens. In other words, straining every political tendon, in a low-turnout, off-year contest with a favorable political climate, the pro-life, anti-tax conservative still lost, thereby ceding yet another historically Republican northeastern district to the opposition. Like other similarly situated districts, this one will be very difficult to reclaim.
In the aftermath of this disappointment, Republicans might stop to consider the model Democrats adopted in the 2006 and 2008 cycles: swallow hard and accept that electing the Speaker of the House and the Senate Majority Leader is more important to governing than unanimity on social and economic policy. The result of this strategy was to capture enough marginal, Republican-held seats to help undo the Republican majority and install Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid along with a host of liberal committee chairs. One of the hallmarks of conservatism is a practical, as opposed to utopian, social and political outlook. An acceptance of moderate Northeastern Republicans as part of a governing coalition may be the only practical way for the GOP to regain a majority in the foreseeable future.
At the presidential level, the GOP is and will remain a conservative party, and conservatives should take some comfort from their dominant position in national leadership and policies. To insist, however, that all Republican candidates for the House and Senate adhere to economic and social conservative orthodoxy is a pathway to long-term minority status. If conservatives at the national and local level give moderates in the I-95 swing districts room to maneuver, the House majority and a substantially strengthened Senate minority is within their grasp. If they don’t, they may have to settle for the more limited satisfactions of having been right.