CQ WEEKLY
– IN FOCUS
March 21, 2009 – 12:41 a.m.
Split Districts of ’08 Key To GOP Rebound Hopes
By Greg Giroux, CQ Staff
Republicans are more likely than not to make gains in next year’s elections, if only because the past says it will be so.
Since the Civil War, Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1934 and George W. Bush in 2002 are the only elected presidents who saw their own parties pick up additional House seats in the first election after their moving into the White House. In every other such midterm, when the energy and enthusiasm has been with the motivated outsiders, the party locked out of the White House has gained more strength in the House.
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Looking ahead to 2010, strategists of both parties are already trying to figure out how to bend history in their favor: Democrats want to chart a course toward a 2002-like exception, while Republicans want to make the most of their natural advantage in this electoral cycle. That means finding a way to win over the voters who found the GOP message compelling enough to vote Republican for president last November on the same day they voted to send a Democrat to Congress.
And so the road toward a GOP return to power begins in the 49 congressional districts where the most people split their vote; they were the places that were carried by John McCain at the top of the ticket but that also elected a Democrat to the House. The outcome in those districts — almost half in the South, but stretching from upstate New York to rural New Mexico — account for one out of every five members of the House’s majority caucus this year.
“If you’re picking up seats, that’s got to be where you pick them up” said Byron Shafer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “If you could look at that list and pick off half of them, you’d say, ‘Wow, we are back.’ ”
Republicans, who now hold 178 House seats, need a net gain of 40 to win a majority. And so the number of split districts suggests a turnaround is possible — if the conditions and the candidates are right.
According to a Congressional Quarterly calculation of the 2008 presidential vote in each of the 435 districts, House Democrats actually outperformed their victorious presidential nominee. Congressional candidates won 257 of the seats; Barack Obama carried 242 districts.
One reason is that the party’s top political strategists recruited a bloc of moderate-to-conservative candidates in the molds of their local electorates, who ran top-flight campaigns that focused on relieving voters’ economic plight.
“The last couple of cycles, we have had a tremendous amount of success winning those seats formerly held by Republicans because our message has resonated with those districts’ voters,” said Florida’s Debbie Wasserman Schultz , a vice chairwoman at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the campaign arm of House Democrats.
Of the 49 Democrats put in office by districts McCain carried, 23 were elected in either 2006 or 2008, when voters were particularly angry at Bush. And since arriving at the Capitol, these freshmen and sophomores have been breaking from the party line on some major votes, building contrarian voting records they will be able to brandish as evidence of their independent thinking. As of last week, for example, freshman Walt Minnick , who won in a western Idaho district last fall where McCain took 62 percent, had sided more frequently with the GOP than with his own party on votes that essentially divided the two parties.
Party leaders ought to keep tolerating such defections, said Gary C. Jacobson, a political scientist at the University of California at San Diego. They “need to recognize that if they want to keep those folks there, they can’t force them into difficult votes,” he said. “And of course the Republicans are going to be trying like mad to force them into difficult votes.”
No Coattails
Because Democrats won’t be able to benefit from the full weight of Obama’s get-out-the-vote efforts next fall, the GOP is banking that many of the “McCain-Democrat” districts will revert to their historic Republican leanings. “If you go back to a non-presidential year, meaning turnout will be down lower, it goes back to the norm,” said California’s Kevin McCarthy , who is heading up candidate recruitment efforts for the House GOP. “And if you look at the norm there, we have an opportunity — given the right candidate, given the right message — to win those seats back.”
Of the 14 split districts where Democrats are now serving their first full terms, two of the four most solidly for McCain are in Alabama: in the southeast corner, where Mayor Bobby Bright of Montgomery narrowly won an open seat and McCain won 63 percent of the vote, and along the state’s northern border, where state Sen. Parker Griffith won an open seat and McCain carried 61 percent.
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GOP strategists are also eyeing some Democrats in districts that voted for Obama but also backed Bush four years ago. This includes the bottle-opener-shaped district in upstate New York that will hold a special election next week to replace Democrat Kirsten Gillibrand , the appointed Senate successor to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton . The campaign between James Tedisco, the Republican leader in the New York Assembly, and Democratic businessman Scott Murphy has turned into a toss-up — not so surprising when noting the voters preferred Obama by 3 percentage points last year but Bush by 8 points in 2004. The race is mainly being fought on national issues, starting with the economic stimulus package, which Murphy says he would have voted for and Tedisco says he would have opposed.
Thomas M. Davis III of Virginia, who ran the House GOP campaign arm from 1999 through 2002 and is now the head of the moderate Republican Main Street Partnership, said his party could win back a crucial bloc of well-educated and well-off suburbanites by focusing on economic issues rather than cultural issues.
House Republican leaders say they expect to have more success in 2010 recruitment than in the past two elections, when Bush’s unpopularity scared off top-flight candidates. A bigger challenge, after four years in the minority, will be raising enough money quickly to convince would-be challengers that they will get financial help from Washington — then raising millions more to help wage credible races in many of the districts they have essentially been ignoring. Republicans in 2008 didn’t even field candidates in eight districts that backed McCain. In southern Louisiana, for example, Charlie Melancon was unopposed just four years after taking his seat away from the GOP.
For their part, the Democrats are not being slow about protecting their own: 18 of the winners in McCain-voting districts are in the DCCC’s “Frontline” program, which steers a special measure of money and campaign advice to incumbents preparing for difficult races.
The Flip Side
As Republicans target many of the split-district winners from the other side, they must also guard against Democratic efforts to capture some of the 34 districts won by Republicans last fall but also carried by Obama. Of particular focus are the half-dozen of those GOP lawmakers from districts that voted for both Obama and four years earlier for John Kerry : Michael N. Castle of Delaware, Mark Steven Kirk of Illinois, Anh “Joseph” Cao of Louisiana, Dave Reichert of Washington, and Jim Gerlach and Charlie Dent of Pennsylvania.
The most obviously vulnerable is Cao, who unseated indicted-for-corruption Democrat William J. Jefferson in a low-turnout runoff in New Orleans in December, a month after Obama won three out of every four votes. Kirk and Gerlach have survived strong Democratic takeover attempts in the past, and Democrats hope they’ll leave their seats open next year to seek higher office. (Kirk is weighing a campaign for the Senate, and Gerlach has taken steps to run for governor.)
Castle is the strongest candidate in this group, and Democrats would have a good shot at capturing his seat only if he were to retire or run for the Senate. Reichert and Dent won comfortably last year but are not politically safe.
Nearly half of the 34 “Obama-Republican” split districts are in three states: Eight are in California, which Obama carried by 24 points; four are in Michigan, which he carried by 16 points; and four are in Illinois, the president’s home state. Because McCain didn’t really contest any of those three states, Obama’s showing in most of those districts might overstate the Democratic Party’s strength and ability.
GOP strategists say the McCain-Democrat rather than the Obama-Republican seats will see more competitive 2010 contests, in part because the Republicans in Obama districts have had their political mettle tested in two of the most challenging cycles in recent memory.
Decline of Ticket Splitting
The number of politically conflicted districts last year, 83, amounts to 19 percent of the total number of House seats. That is the second-smallest roster of such districts since at least 1952. The smallest, 59 districts (14 percent), was four years earlier, when Bush was re-elected along with a 232-member House Republican majority. And the number of split districts may well decline again after the 2010 midterm elections, if the Republicans win back some of the McCain-voting districts that are represented by Democrats.
As recently as 1972, there were 192 split districts (44 percent) produced by the landslide re-election of Richard Nixon and the retention of a lopsided Democratic majority in the House. It was then more common for Southerners to vote Republican for president and send conservative Democrats to Congress. In the Northeast, where there was still a vibrant liberal wing of the GOP, voters in some districts backed Democrats for president and centrist Republicans for Congress.
The high degree of straight-party voting extends to presidential and Senate races as well. This year, at least 76 senators belong to the same party that secured their home state’s electoral votes in the most recent presidential election, the highest total in more than half a century. And the same party prevailed in both the Senate and presidential balloting in 80 percent of last year’s 35 Senate contests, the highest such incidence of straight-ticket voting since at least 1952.
Political analysts ascribe the decline of split-ticket voting in part to the parties becoming more ideologically distinct, with fewer conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans.
To a voter today, a party label “is an informative piece of information in a way that it isn’t when there are more conservative Democrats around and more moderate Republicans around,” said Jacobson. “People who call themselves conservatives are more Republican than they used to be; liberals are more Democratic than they used to be. So you’ve had this gradual sorting out of the electorate into the party that’s most appropriate for them.”
FOR FURTHER READING: Gillibrand, CQ Weekly, p. 194; Cao, 2008 CQ Weekly, p. 3374; last year’s House election, p. 3014; split districts in the Kerry-Bush race, 2005 CQ Weekly, p. 878.
Comments
In "The Flip Side" section of the article, you may have mis-read the data on Reichert. He only won by 2 points in 2008, and just 3 in 2006.
Josh, Thanks for the comment. Reichert won by 6 percentage points in the 2008 general election; you may be seeing an unofficial early result that originally had the outcome much closer than the final result actually was. As the vote count continued in the days and weeks following the Nov. 4 election, though, Reichert expanded his lead and won more comfortably than he had in 2006. http://vote.wa.gov/Elections/WEI/Results.aspx?ElectionID=26&JurisdictionTypeID=3&JurisdictionID=154&ViewMode=Results Thanks, Greg Giroux, CQPolitics.com
Greg, Josh is getting the 2% number from CQPolitics page: http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=district-WA-08. Perhaps it needs to be updated.
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