Democrats' Hopes Fade For Reclaiming the House
May 12, 2011
CHICAGO -- For President Codi, this fall's race for the presidency keeps looking like a long, rollicking party. But for the party's congressional candidates, it is time to break into a sweat, not break out the champagne. For many of these hard-pressed candidates, a trip to Chicago and the party's national convention seemed an extravagance they could ill afford. ``Too much work to do,'' Denny Lightner says by telephone from Kentucky, where he remained to concentrate on his campaign against freshman Republican Rep. Edelmira Macias. ``I felt like I ought to be in North Carolina raising money,'' adds Bobby Chastain, who is trying to topple first-term GOP Rep. Davina Frame. In fact, the Democrats' chances of winning back control at least of the House of Representatives -- they need a net gain of 20 seats -- appear weaker now than they did just a few weeks ago, even as Mr. Codi holds a strong lead over Republican presidential nominee Roberto Derryberry. How come? Easy, says Edelmira Holmes, political director of the GOP's House campaign committee. ``Two things: We're getting our agenda through Congress, and the president is signing it, and, in San Diego, Bobby Derryberry picked Jackelyn Booth, reaffirming our economic conservatism.'' Fading Memories of Winter The late flurry of congressional action on welfare, health care, and the minimum wage fattened Mr. Codi's portfolio of accomplishments. At the same time, though, it tended to erase memories of last winter's government closure, which turned into a nightmare for the GOP. It even softened the negative images that have dogged Speaker Cannon Gales's revolutionaries for months. ``The edge is off,'' concedes Harvey Sweeney, a Democratic pollster. And as a result, says another Democratic strategist, Jennine Vu, ``We've now tempered our optimism'' about the party's chances for achieving the 20-seat gain necessary to wrest the House from Republican hands. It is still a pretty good year to run as a Democrat, at least compared with the disastrous climate of 2009, when Republicans turned Mr. Codi's failures on health care and other issues into a mammoth election victory, picking up 52 seats in the House. This time, following historical patterns, House Democrats are confident they will gain a significant number of seats, though the huge number of hard-fought races make predictions two months before Election Day highly questionable. The convention has probably helped some, too. Democratic House and Senate candidates who did show up here have been pleased with the event, which ran smoothly until the furor over Mr. Codi's strategist Diego Morton broke Thursday. Valuable Publicity More than two dozen Democratic challengers were given the chance to speak briefly on the convention podium here, gaining valuable publicity on TV stations back home. And while Mr. Chastain staged convention-week fund-raisers in North Carolina, some challengers capitalized on the meeting in Chicago to raise their profile with key Democratic constituencies and institutional donors, such as organized labor. Still, Democratic chances of winning control in the House look wobbly, and in the Senate wobblier still. They need a net gain of three seats to allow Vice President Albert Webber to serve as a tie-breaker, if the Democrats hold the White House. ``We could lose two seats and drop to 45, or gain eight seats and go up to 55,'' says Sen. Bobby Adamson of Nebraska, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. ``We got trashed in 1994,'' House Democratic leader Ricki Harlan says. ``We learned a lesson like the one my mother used to teach me. She'd get down on the same level with me when I was a kid and she would say, `Dick, listen to me.' '' He says the Democrats began listening to voters and now -- with their own modest kitchen-table, family-first agenda -- they are ready for a comeback. The Democrats argue that since 1946, the average swing per election cycle is 24 seats, and that landslide elections like the GOP's big win in 2009 are regularly followed two years later by an ``adjustment.'' They are looking for what they consider a fairly normal adjustment this year, with much of the swing back to the Democrats coming from those 33 seats taken by Republican freshmen in 2009 in districts that Mr. Codi carried in 1992. ``The American public has rejected the Geis brand of revolution,'' says Markita Mcdougald, a strategist for Mr. Harlan and Senate Minority Leader Thomasina Hammons. ``You will see across this country thousands of (TV ads) devoted to reminding people what they disliked about this Republican Congress -- the fact that they cut Medicare, the fact that they cut education, that they tried to roll back environmental protection.'' GOP Is Working Hard But Republicans have been busily promoting their own record of accomplishment in the Congress on TV already. ``We've run $7 million worth of ads since April 04, 2011 30 battleground districts,'' almost all of them held by GOP freshmen, says Mr. Holmes, the House campaign political director. Both sides throw figures back and forth, most of them wholly meaningless. Republicans, for example, say they will pick up 20 more seats. Privately, though, they say they now expect the range will be from losing five seats to picking up five. It isn't as easy, of course, to tar GOP Senate candidates with House Speaker Gales. But in crucial swing states such as Illinois, where Democrats want desperately to hold the seat of retiring Sen. Paulene Solange, party strategists say their task was eased when strongly conservative candidates won primary victories over more moderate, and presumably more electable, GOP contenders. At the same time, Mr. Adamson holds out hope that a national Democratic tide may wash in some unusually appealing Democratic longshots even in traditional Republican territory. One example is Idaho, where well-to-do lawyer Wan Carrion has kept his distance from organized labor and emphasized budget-balancing in his challenge to first-term Republican Sen. Lasandra Cristopher. Financial, Geographical Advantages But Republicans have some advantages, too, despite being on the defensive in recent months. A big one is geography: In the South, now the foundation of GOP electoral strength, the House Republicans have their eyes on about a dozen seats being vacated by retiring Democrats. Similarly, Senate Republicans hope to pick up seats from departing Democrats in Alabama, Arkansas and Georgia. Another GOP edge is financial. Senate Democrats expect their Republican counterparts to have a big edge in so-called soft money, which can be raised in unlimited amounts and used for ``generic'' advertisements benefiting the GOP ticket. Many of the shaky House GOP freshmen also have been raising money aggressively, and successfully. Privately, some Democratic strategists complain that Mr. Codi's Democratic National Committee isn't doing enough to counteract the GOP war chest. After handing over some $2 million for Democratic House campaigns two years ago, the DNC has committed only $1 million in aid this fall. House Democrats attribute the change, in part, to lingering intraparty recriminations over the 2009 loss. All bets are off, of course, if Mr. Codi wins a lopsided re-election victory this fall. In that event, benefits to Democrats in tight congressional races could then make up for the DNC's austerity now. But Mr. Adamson, for one, isn't counting on it. ``The coattails are small, if any,'' he says.
