Washington – It’s a good thing, if you are a Republican, that your annus horribili arrived in 2005.
“If this were October 2006 … yes, the Republicans would lose their House majority,” says GOP pollster Frank Luntz.
The Republican Party’s troubles have left next year’s mid-term election looking like a donnybrook, with perhaps double the expected number of fiercely contested House races.
And while it might take the political equivalent of drawing an inside straight for Democrats to seize control of the Senate, the outside party is raising money by the bucket and beating its foe at candidate recruitment.
In state after state, GOP governors, popular state officials and House stars are declining to run for the Senate in 2006, wary of a Democratic wave.
Republicans “are really struggling finding candidates,” said Chuck Todd, editor of the political tout sheet The Hotline, after North Dakota Gov. John Hoeven passed up the opportunity to tackle Democratic Sen. Kent Conrad in the latest GOP recruiting disappointment.
The blossoming Republican scandals in Washington and lethargic government response to Hurricane Katrina are fueling the mood of the general electorate, which is angry and ready for change, says Luntz.
The Harriet Miers debacle won’t help.
Nowhere, maybe, is the anti-incumbent, anti-Washington mood as notable as in Pennsylvania, where Sen. Rick Santorum, conservative poster boy and member of the Senate Republican leadership, has a double-digit deficit to make up against his Democratic opponent.
“This is their revenge. This is their Tom Daschle,” says Todd, explaining how Democrats, having lost their Senate leader in 2004, are hoping to hang Santorum’s scalp in the Senate cloakroom next fall.
Elsewhere, the GOP is stuck with Rep. Katherine Harris – yes, that Katherine Harris – in what otherwise might have been a strong Republican challenge to a Democratic incumbent in Florida. Moderate GOP Sen. Lincoln Chafee is facing a primary challenge from a vigorous conservative in Rhode Island.
Two appealing Democrats are in the race to remove Sen. Mike DeWine in Ohio, where the voters are fuming about political scandals and economic woes. Montana Sen. Conrad Burns has been tainted by his association with indicted GOP lobbyist Jack Abramoff.
Even the Republican Party’s conservative base has soured, and is griping about judicial nominations, immigration reform, taxes and excess government spending. In this highly partisan era, when passion, intensity and turnout can mean the difference between winning and losing elections, Republicans are in particular trouble because “right now their base doesn’t see a reason to vote for them,” Luntz says.
According to last week’s Battleground Poll, majorities of Southern voters (63 percent), Catholics (67 percent), conservatives (51 percent), independents (74 percent), Hispanics (82 percent), married women (60 percent), rural residents (65 percent) and even evangelical voters (60 percent) now say the country is on the wrong track.
“What is the Republican message right now? I don’t see a message. I don’t see a line. … I don’t see an agenda,” says Luntz.
Here in Washington, Republicans take comfort in conventional wisdom, which holds that the redistricting after the 2000 Census will insulate their incumbents from challenges. Perhaps, Luntz says, but he recalls how that kind of complacency was a contributing factor when the Democrats lost a gerrymandered House in 1994.
The emergence of economic issues as a top concern for voters has GOP pollsters worried as well. The U.S. economy is a productive marvel, but each day’s news and mail brings tidings of stagnant wages, bankruptcies, layoffs, lost pensions, rising gasoline prices, the inaccessibility of health care and anticipated hikes in the cost of heating fuel.
Fewer than one in five Americans – a “stunning” statistic, according to the Battleground Poll – now think their children will do better economically than they have.
And then there is the war.
“The day-to-day coverage talks about the Supreme Court or Katrina or gas prices, but underlying the mood of American politics right now is the enduring story of Iraq,” says GOP pollster Bill McInturff. His polling shows a new high – 56 percent – of Americans have lost confidence in the U.S. intervention there.
Republican strategist Ed Rollins predicts that GOP incumbents will get an earful from their constituents and advisers over the holiday recess and return here in January “totally panicked” after “all of a sudden realizing they are 10 or 15 points below what they were when they got elected a year ago.”
The Republicans can take solace in but one fact, Rollins notes: The Democrats are not yet offering promising alternatives.
In their latest Democracy Corps survey, Democratic strategists Stan Greenberg and James Carville concede that despite the long list of Republican woes, “Democrats are not yet the answer,” especially for white rural and blue collar voters. “The party’s image has not improved through the whole course of the Republican slide,” they say.
Luntz agrees, but he also notes that “the purpose of off-year elections is to cast a protest vote.” Democrats may not need detailed alternatives if 2006 brings, as he fears, “the perfect political storm.”
John Aloysius Farrell’s column appears each Sunday in Perspective. Comment at the Washington and the West blog () or contact him at jfarrell@denverpost.com.
