GOP Rep. John B. Shadegg is among many Republicans fighting for their political lives. GOP ditches recruits to save incumbents

Darren White and Erik Paulsen were prized Republican recruits, House candidates poised to be the new face of the GOP on Capitol Hill.

But as the two head into the homestretch of their campaigns, GOP operatives say they’ll probably have to win — or lose — on their own. The money national Republicans earmarked for White in New Mexico and for Paulsen in Minnesota will likely go instead to protect GOP incumbents who once looked like locks for reelection.


GOP Reps. John B. Shadegg of Arizona, Lee Terry of Nebraska, Henry Brown Jr. of South Carolina and Dan Lungren of California are all fighting for their political lives, a reversal of fortunes that has caught even the most astute campaign observers by surprise.

It’s an omen and an echo. Just a few weeks before voters went to the polls in 2006, veteran Republicans Gil Gutknecht in Minnesota, Jim Leach in Iowa and Jim Ryun in Kansas suddenly found themselves in tough reelection fights. By the time the party saw what was happening, it was already too late. Unknown challengers booted the lawmakers from office in a landslide election that gave Democrats control of both the House and the Senate.

If 2008 looks like 2006, a new wave of veteran Republicans will be out on the streets, and the colleagues they leave behind could find themselves with the smallest minority since the post-Watergate era.

“If you’re a Republican in a less-than-outstanding district, you want to have taken a poll in the last two weeks no matter who you’re running against,” said David Wasserman, an analyst on House races for the nonpartisan Cook Political Report.

“The DCCC has made advertising decisions that have forced Republicans’ hands,” he continued, mentioning Terry’s seat in Nebraska and one held by conservative Rep. Mark Souder in Indiana. “Republicans, in turn, need to spend in these districts. And $500,000 to the [National Republican Congressional Committee] is a whole lot more meaningful than $500,000 to the [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee].”

Despite some early suggestions that John McCain would help a few Republicans in marginal districts, the presidential election is playing to the Democrats’ favor in races across the country. Barack Obama’s current momentum is strong enough that even some Republicans in red states, such as Nebraska, have tied themselves to the Democrats this fall.

In Nebraska, where Obama hired a state director to help him turn out the vote in and around Omaha, Terry just sent voters a piece of mail with a testimonial from a woman who plans to split her vote between the Republican congressman and the Democratic presidential contender — a sure sign that the GOP brand is lagging along with the economy and McCain’s own prospects for the White House.

“Even if you’re an incumbent Republican member of Congress, you still need to run against Congress,” said GOP pollster Rob Autry of Public Opinion Strategies. “This is not an environment where the warm-and-fuzzy positives work. People are upset, they want to know you get it, they want to know you’re frustrated like them.”

In a Washington Post/ABC News poll released Monday, 90 percent of Americans said the country is headed in the wrong direction. Only 8 percent said the country is on the right track.

In California, Republican operatives have noticed some troubling trends.

Two years ago, Lungren — who is completing his seventh term in Congress — beat physician and Vietnam War veteran Bill Durston by 21 points. But the economy has taken its toll, and Lungren’s district has one of the highest foreclosure rates in the country. In a newly released Democratic poll, Lungren leads Durston by just 3 percentage points.

Former GOP consultant Allan Hoffenblum said Rep. Dana Rohrabacher and other California Republicans, including Reps. David Dreier and Brian Bilbray, are also at risk.

“The Republican base is not sufficient by itself to elect a Republican in those [California] districts; they still need the independent vote,” Hoffenblum said. “In the past decade, they have been reliably voting Republican for president and for Congress. … There are a lot of angry and scared voters out there. This is not your traditional environment.”

In South Carolina, Brown is facing Democrat Linda Ketner, the free-spending heiress to the Food Lion fortune. So far, Ketner has outspent Brown, and even Republican operatives acknowledge the race is competitive in the coastal district in which President Bush garnered 61 percent of the vote in 2004.

“With her buying a lot of TV ads, it raises the specter that she can run a competitive race,” said Jay Ragley, executive director of the state’s Republican Party.

Bob Lord, a 51-year-old tax attorney who is challenging Shadegg in Arizona, is something of an accidental candidate. Lord tried to recruit area Democrats to challenge Shadegg in 2006. When he couldn’t get anyone to do it, he decided to take on Shadegg himself. Polling now shows the race in a dead heat, despite the suburban Phoenix district’s traditional Republican advantage.

Down the stretch, national Republicans would like to see their troubled incumbents do what most vulnerable lawmakers do in a tight spot: Go negative. But to do that, they need to have money and they need to start soon, so they have enough time to define relatively unknown opponents before those opponents make the attacks irrelevant.

Congressional Republicans have struggled to regroup from their crushing loss in 2006, as fundraising lagged and a record-tying number of GOP lawmakers decided to call the 110th Congress their last.

Those signs of decline led political prognosticators on both sides of the aisle to believe House Republicans would suffer a net loss on Election Day, somewhere in the neighborhood of 12 to 18 seats. Those projections now hover somewhere between 20 and 35 seats.

Republicans got a break in Florida on Monday after ABC News reported that freshman Democratic Rep. Tim Mahoney had paid off a former staffer to cover up their affair. The party may also see gains if Monday’s dramatic market surge becomes more than a one-day story.

Otherwise, the landscape remains pretty bleak.

Democrats have maintained a sizable fundraising advantage since taking control of the House. At the end of August, House Democrats had nearly $54 million in cash, according to the Federal Election Commission. By contrast, Republicans had only $14.3 million to spend down the stretch.

As of Sunday, the DCCC had spent money in 47 congressional districts. Of those, 34 are seats held by Republicans.

In contrast, the NRCC has spent money in 13 districts — 10 of which it is trying to defend.

As of this past weekend, Democrats have spent nearly $24.7 million, while Republicans have spent less than $2 million.

“We’ve paid a price for that,” retiring Virginia Rep. Tom Davis, a past NRCC chairman, told a group of reporters at the National Press Club on Friday. “In some of those districts, the mold has hardened.”

The DCCC recently reserved $435,000 in Terry’s Nebraska district, and operatives expect the NRCC will soon feel the need to respond in kind. Republicans, however, have decided to cut back on advertising in races such as Paulsen’s and White’s, where the party once thought it could pick up seats.

Party operatives are now waiting to see if the conservative group Freedom’s Watch will continue to spend money in districts where the NRCC itself is scaling back its own ad buys.

The group is spending money to support Republican Rep. Jon C. Porter in Nevada, even though the NRCC pulled its money there, and has reserved time in Alabama and North Carolina as the GOP’s official campaign arm redirects its funding elsewhere.

As of Sunday, the group had spent nearly $2.4 million this cycle on House races, but the newly founded progressive group Patriot Majority, along with its regional offshoots, has spent almost $3.7 million in support of Democrats.

This article tagged under: 2010

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