CQ TODAY ONLINE NEWS
Updated Sept. 8, 2008 – 2:06 a.m.
Battles for Control of Congress Heat Up After Conventions
By Bob Benenson and Greg Giroux, CQ Staff
The back-to-back Democratic and Republican convention extragavanzas gave both parties a chance to put their best foot forward as the general election campaign gets under way. If their competing efforts are a wash — and the earliest post-convention polling suggests that — the advantage remains with the Democrats as far as their push to expand their congressional majorities.
The Democrats used their convention in Denver to define their presidential ticket of Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr, with Obama responding to calls for him to make more specific what he envisions when he talks about the change he says the nation needs.
The Republicans — struggling in public opinion polls since the 2006 election cycle — responded last week’s convention in St. Paul with sometimes fierce rhetoric to create a campaign narrative for John McCain and Sarah Palin , the surprise vice presidential pick who made a strong debut on the national political stage with her speech Wednesday night.
The Gallup Poll daily tracking report released Sunday, which provided a three-day rolling average for national polling completed a day earlier, showed McCain leading Obama by 48 percent to 45 percent. It will not be until the middle of this week before the tracking poll will indicate whether McCain established a stable edge or if his convention “bounce” will recede — as Obama’s did after he peaked at a 50 percent to 42 percent lead in polling completed just five days earlier.
While all this suggests a closely contested White House race may well be in the offing, it appears very unlikely that the messages each party tried to hammer home have had any effect on the political battlegrounds where this year’s congressional elections will take place.
And a status quo ante would mean a big advantage to the Democratic Party in its down-ticket races because it went into the conventions favored to expand the majorities it won in the Senate and House with its big gains in the midterm elections two years ago.
The difference in the party’s outlooks in the battle to control Congress were evident during the convention weeks.
The Democrats missed no opportunities to showcase the point men for their congressional push. The chairmen of the party’s congressional campaign committees, New York’s Charles E. Schumer of New York from the Senate and Maryland’s Chris Van Hollen on the House side, held heavily promoted news conferences and were spotlighted at convention sessions as they promoted some of the candidates with the potential to capture seats now held by the Republicans.
Singled out for attention on the Senate side were convention keynote speaker Mark Warner of Virginia, who is favored over Republican James M. Gilmore III in a race of former governors to succeed retiring five-term Republican Sen. John W. Warner ; Rep. Mark Udall , who has at least a slight edge over Republican former Rep. Bob Schaffer in the race to succeed retiring two-term Republican Sen. Wayne Allard ; his cousin, New Mexico Rep. Tom Udall , whose edge over Republican Rep. Steve Pearce in the race to succeed six-term Republican Sen. Pete V. Domenici was accented the next week when the National Republican Senatorial Committee quietly pulled $2.3 million in TV ad time it had booked to try to influence the contest; New Hampshire Democrat Jeanne Shaheen, a former governor who is in a rematch of her close 2002 loss to Republican John E. Sununu ; Rep. Tom Allen , who is challenging two-term Maine Republican Sen. Susan Collins ; and Jeff Merkley, the Oregon House Speaker who is opposing two-term Republican incumbent Gordon Smith.
Van Hollen was accompanied on the convention stage by eight Democratic House contenders who were chosen to represent what Van Hollen described as 50 Democrats engaged in highly competitive House races. The group was dominated by challengers and open-seat candidates seeking to take over Republican seats.
The Republicans’ approach to the congressional elections was far more low-key. Nevada Sen. John Ensign and Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole , the counterparts of Schumer and Van Hollen, were on Thursday’s convention schedule that led up to McCain’s acceptance speech.
But only two Republican Senate candidates had speaking slots at their convention, and both are incumbents facing competitive Democratic challenges: Norm Coleman of Minnesota, the state hosting the convention, and Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, who appeared in his role as Senate minority leader.
Of the five House candidates featured on the program for the final night of the Republican convention, three are trying to keep open seats of retiring Republican incumbents in their party’s column: Jay Love of Alabama’s 2nd District, who is running to succeed Terry Everett ; Aaron Schock, the nominee to succeed Ray LaHood in Illinois’ 18th District; and Erik Paulsen, who is seeking to replace Jim Ramstad in Minnesota’s 3rd District located in suburbs near the Twin Cities.
Battles for Control of Congress Heat Up After Conventions
The other two, who hope to capture Democratic seats, are David Cappiello, the GOP challenger to freshman Democrat Christopher S. Murphy in Connecticut’s 5th District, and Charlie Summers, an underdog candidate for the Maine 1st District seat that Democrat Tom Allen (a featured speaker at the Democratic convention) left open this year to challenge Republican Sen. Susan Collins (who skipped the Republican convention).
The fact that the Republicans, keeping with tradition, got to hold their convention after the Democrats gives them, to some extent, the last word in the fortnight of political rhetoric spun by the two parties.
Their candidates down-ballot could benefit if the energetic and often hard-hitting speeches delivered by Republican’s A-list speakers works to energize and boost turnout among a Republican base that has been notably demoralized by the party’s national slippage in the years since Bush’s 2004 re-election.
But the fact that the convention was mainly oriented to bolstering the images of McCain and Palin as mavericks who have at times battled with their own parties may make their “coattails” rather short for fellow Republican candidates.
McCain’s image as a GOP contrarian is based largely on his stands on issues such as immigration, global climate change and campaign finance regulation that differ from the positions held by many staunchly conservative Republican congressional candidates.
And when party leaders touted Palin, little known nationally before McCain announced her Aug. 29 as his vice presidential pick, as a reformer who was cleaning up politics in Alaska, they for the most part eluded mentions that it is her state’s Republican Party establishment that has been tarnished by a sweeping corruption scandal.
There have been no signs so far that McCain’s hopes of rehabilitating the party’s fortunes have taken hold, after the nosedive in public opinion polls that it and President Bush have suffered because of issues such as the prolonged Iraq war, the stumbling economy and the aftermath of public outrage over the slow governmental response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
A USA Today/Gallup poll taken Aug. 30-31 showed that while respondents’ opinions of the Democratic Party were 54 percent favorable to 37 percent unfavorable, the ratings for the Republican Party were 39 percent favorable to 51 percent unfavorable.
But the biggest part of the problem facing Republican strategists over the final two months of the campaign season is that the Democrats, long before the convention, built up big advantages in national organization (including registration and voter turnout operations), candidate recruiting, fundraising and other campaign logistics.
At the moment, CQ Politics’ ratings favor the Democrats in 236 House districts and the Republicans in 183 districts, with 16 in which there is no apparent favorite — including 11 in which the Republicans are the defending party.
With the Democrats controlling the House by 235-199 (there is one vacancy in a strongly Democratic-leaning district), the projections mean that the Republicans would need a clean sweep of the “No Clear Favorite” races just to break even, a best-case scenario that is unlikely to happen. Should the Democrats win at least half of the “No Clear Favorite races,” their gains would be in the high single digits to the low double digits.
Also heavily in play are competitive races for 22 Republican seats rated “Leans Republicans” and 19 Democratic seats rated “Leans Democratic.” And looking at longer-shot upset bids, the Democrats are going after 21 GOP seats rated Republican Favored while 13 GOP challenges for Democratic seats are rated Democrat Favored.
In the Senate — which includes 49 Democrats and 49 Republicans and two independents who align organizationally with the Democrats to give them a majority — CQ Politics currently projects an operational 56-43 Democratic majority coming out of these elections, with one seat too close to call.
Battles for Control of Congress Heat Up After Conventions
Taking cues from presidential contenders Obama and McCain, congressional candidates in both parties will run as agents of “change” — Democrats from the Bush administration and Republicans from the Democratic-led Congress.
But Republican candidates also will put distance between themselves and the Bush administration. They will embrace McCain and his maverick image more than the Republican Party generally.
Oklahoma Republican Cole, who heads the House GOP’s campaign efforts as chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), has frequently noted that House Democrats represent more than five dozen districts where Bush finished first in 2004, and predicts that McCain is likely to do the same in most of them.
A good showing by a Republican presidential candidate doesn’t necessarily bring about down-ballot success, though. In 2006, more than two-thirds of the 30 House districts that Democrats captured had backed Bush two years earlier. This spring, the Democrats won three special elections in districts, vacated by Republican House incumbents, that gave Bush strong majorities of the vote.
“Last time, the Republican brand name was so bad that even in Republican areas, people were willing to give the Democrats a look . . . because people were disgusted with Republicans generically and the way they had run Congress,” said retiring Virginia Rep. Thomas M. Davis III , a former NRCC chairman, in a recent interview with CQ Politics.
Davis said a House Republican candidate this year needs to “make sure that you fit your district” and “hope that the Republican brand doesn’t hurt you so bad.”
Democratic campaign officials, though, don’t think that McCain will aid House Republicans down-ballot.
“I know they’re hoping that’s the case,” Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen , chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told CQ Politics in St. Paul on Wednesday. “I don’t see it — I just don’t see any evidence of it so far.”
Van Hollen said that Obama is generating “a lot of energy and excitement” and that “we don’t see that yet on the McCain side.”
As the chief strategist overseeing House Democratic campaigns, Van Hollen wants to parlay the enthusiasm for Obama among new voters into support for House Democratic candidates. “Our challenge is to cut through the clutter and make sure when they go out and vote in the presidential race, they stick around long enough to vote for our candidate,” Van Hollen said.
First posted Sept. 4, 2008 9:03 p.m.
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