Two New Hampshire races will be a kind of referendum on Boehner's reign so far. Boehner agenda put to test

LACONIA, N.H. — The dash for control of the House this year is muddled by massive population shifts, redrawn districts and a spate of retirements.

But in a pair of House races here in New Hampshire, those variables are all stripped away. What’s left is one of the purest barometers in the nation of the agenda of John Boehner’s rightward shifting, tea-party fueled House Republican majority.


Here’s the question: Can lawmakers from middle-of-the-road districts survive in a non-tea party year, and after two years of governing that’s dragged congressional approval ratings to record lows?

( See also: POLITICO’s swing-state map)

Granite State voters — a rightward-leaning but pragmatic bunch — have a chance for a do-over. Returning Republicans Charlie Bass and Frank Guinta to Congress would be a vote of confidence in Boehner’s House. If Democrats Carol Shea-Porter and Ann McLane Kuster prevail — they’re both waging comebacks after losing two years ago — it would be a show of buyer’s remorse and cast doubts on Boehner’s ability to forge a lasting, and robust GOP majority.

It’s a stark test, in two truly swing districts, of the Democratic attacks — and Republican retorts — to changes to Medicare, Medicaid and federal spending.

Democrats want to make this a referendum on the past two years. Kuster is labeling Bass as a big-spending, radical minion of the tea party, and Shea-Porter is trying to paint Guinta as a candidate eager to yank poor infirmed people out of their beds, and swipe meals from their hands.

“I think it’s quite clear for the viewers that if you are part of the 9 percent who think that Congress is working well, then I think Congressman Bass is your candidate,” Kuster said in a debate last week sponsored by WBIN television in Derry. “I’m talking to the 90 percent of people who believe that Congress is dysfunctional right now.”

Shea-Porter has a far more succinct explanation.

“It’s a true swing district,” she said during an interview in a high school cafeteria here. “So this is a referendum on the 112th Congress.”

It’s the ultimate check on Boehner (R-Ohio), Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy’s (R-Calif.) reign so far in D.C. Guinta and Bass, two well-known figures here running against similarly popular politicians, were swept into Washington on the 2010 wave.

As of now, the races are far too close for predictions — but Republicans have the upper hand.

University of New Hampshire and WMUR, the main television station based in Manchester, has Guinta leading Shea-Porter by seven points. Shea-Porter was leading in that same poll by 11 points last week, however.

Kuster has failed to get the race to budge, as she’s beating Bass by three points — well within the margin of error.

In 2010, Guinta trounced Shea-Porter by more than 10 points, while Bass won by a mere 3,000 votes. The districts, though, are almost evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. Bass’s district is ranked as slightly Democrat by the Cook Partisan Voting Index, while Guinta’s is rated as even.

Both the National Republican Congressional Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee have spent or reserved hundreds of thousands of dollars in television advertising in the state.

But POLITICO has learned that the American Action Network, a right-leaning outside group, is going to spend more than $2 million on media in Boston and Manchester to boost Guinta in the final weeks of the race. The $1.9 million in TV — the rest is online — began Monday.

In other years, two House races wouldn’t mean much. But Democrats are predicted to win as many as 15 seats — two pickups here would go a long way in helping Democrats cut down on Boehner’s massive advantage on Capitol Hill. In a fundraising email this week, the DCCC said “the race for the House couldn’t be much tighter. On Election Night, it could come down to one or two seats.”

Onlookers realize that the race that’s playing out here is a mirror image of 2010.

“It’s a replay of last time,” Republican strategist Rich Killion said. “It’s hanging in the background.”

Former GOP Attorney General Tom Rath said “there’s not a lot new they’re going to tell the voters about themselves.”

Plus, the top-of-the-ballot races are also close. President Barack Obama holds a slim six-point lead over Romney here, and Republican candidate for Gov. Ovide Lamontagne leads Democrat Maggie Hassan by four points.

By and large, Democrats are running campaigns torn out of poll-tested playbooks: hitting Republicans on Medicare and the Ryan budget. And Republicans are reminding voters of what life was like under Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.).

Republicans say that Kuster and Shea-Porter are out of touch with the moderate leanings of the state. Even Democrats concede that it’s a tough state for their party.

“We’re still structurally a Republican state, and I’m a Democrat so I can say that,” said Terry Shumaker, who chaired Bill Clinton’s campaign and is a member of the Democratic National Committee.

Guinta is emphasizing his constituent services, and how he is a better “reflection of the district” than Shea-Porter is. He’s running a Mitt Romney-esque campaign, reminding voters that, as mayor of Manchester, he cut taxes, reshaped government and got a “better bang for the buck” with a “Democrat super majority” in the city council.

“My argument is that the voter made a change in 2010 for a reason,” Guinta said during an interview at a water boiler manufacturer in Rochester. “And 2012 is going to complete that change they started to make in 2010 … If you made a change in 2010 because you were frustrated with what was going on at the time with that Congress, you’re going to stick to the person you elected in 2010.”

It’s no secret up here that Shea-Porter and Guinta are virtually sworn enemies. Shea-Porter calls Guinta extreme, to which he ticks off Democrats he works with, like Vermont Rep. Peter Welch and Maine Rep. Michael Michaud. Shea-Porter concedes that she and Guinta “don’t hang out together, that’s for sure.”

Guinta is banking on the conservative leanings of the state, and his strong name recognition in places like here, Manchester and Rochester. During a visit to Thurston’s Marine in Laconia — a stone’s throw from Romney’s summer house in Wolfeboro — Guinta conceded that there’s “virtually 100 percent name recognition” in his race, saying that most voters have made up their minds.

“She can say what she wants about me, but people know me,” he said in an interview. “And when people know you, just because when someone else is lodging an accusation, doesn’t make it true. And I think this is the fundamental challenge she has. She wants to believe I’m an extremist, because that’s what she believes. But it’s not what the district believes.”

Shea-Porter, for her part, is talking about the Ryan budget, and specifically automatic defense cuts that went into place as part of a deal to raise the debt ceiling — she blames Guinta. When asked, she declined to say whether she would’ve voted for the agreement, which got 95 Democratic votes.

“My feeling and my message to everybody is to start dreaming big again,” Shea-Porter said in an interview with POLITICO. “Big dreams about being able to move America forward. My message is it’s in our DNA to succeed. That to hear all the time, we can’t do this, we have to stop that, we have to shut this down, we simply cant grow, can’t achieve big things again, is a bad message and it discourages people.”

Democrats have also cut an ad portraying Guinta as bad for women, by using men to criticize his positions on female issues.

The race between Bass and Kuster is also nasty.

Bass beat Kuster in 2010 to regain a seat he lost in 2008. The NRCC cut an advertisement of Kuster saying “f—- him” to a tracker who put a camera in her face — the ad intones that Kuster has “lost it.” He has also depicted her as a radical by hiring a lookalike to dance around a stage with President Barack Obama’s policies flashing next to her.

“This is not for the faint of heart right now,” said Rath, who has employed Kuster at his law firm.

Bass and Kuster have a long history. Bass worked with Kuster’s mother Susan McLane, a former Republican legislator, while he served in the state house in Concord. McLane also ran in a primary against Bass, a seat which neither of them won. In public, Bass seems to go to pains to call Kuster “my friend Annie.”

In a debate in Derry, and later during a meeting with seniors in Bass’s hometown of Peterborough, Kuster accused Bass of failing to enact the bipartisan solutions he’s touting on the trail. In aging New Hampshire, Medicare is a major plank of her campaign.

Her campaign message was neatly summed in her closing at the debate.

“You have two candidates that you’ve heard tonight: One voted with the tea party on a reliable basis and will eliminate the guarantee of Medicare and will raise taxes on the middle class and lower taxes on millionaires,” Kuster said. “The other, and I ask for your vote on Nov. 6, will lower taxes on the middle class, and will bring your voice to Washington.”

Later, during a senior’s event at the Obama for America office in Peterborough, Kuster tried to chip away at the central thesis of Bass’s campaign: bipartsanship.

“[H]e’s waging his campaign on the notion of bipartisanship, but the truth of the matter is that embraced the tea party in 2010 and he’s spent the last two years voting with the tea party,” she said to eight seniors, in a room scattered with telephones and Obama swag. “In fact, it’s fair to say he’s become one of the more reliable votes on the key issues that matter, and you don’t have to take my word for it, John Boehner came all the way up here to do a fundraiser for him the other night.”

Bass called her attacks on Medicare “silly season election rhetoric,” and said the race will turn on “good voters going to the polls on Nov. 6 and voting for good government.”

Bass even calls the economy the “Obama-Kuster” economy, even though she has not yet served in federal office. When asked if the election was a referendum on the last two years of Republican leadership in Washington, Bass seemed taken aback.

“The agenda is the president’s agenda that we’re talking about here,” he said.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misspelled Ann McLane Kuster's name.

CORRECTION: Corrected by: David Cohen @ 10/15/2012 09:56 PM CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misspelled Ann McLane Kuster's name.