Defying the Odds

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Defying the Odds Page 22

by James W. Ceaser


  Arkansas is a vivid example. When Bill Clinton left the governorship to become president, his Democratic lieutenant governor succeeded him. Democrats controlled both chambers of the state legislature by big margins, as well as both of the state’s U.S. Senate seats and two of its four House seats. Democrats held onto most of this strength through the first decade of the new century, but the state’s blue wall crumbled during the 2010, 2012, and 2014 elections. By 2015, Arkansas Republicans held every constitutional office, every House seat, and both Senate seats. They also had large majorities in both chambers of the legislature.16

  Race is one obvious explanation for the change, and some white Southerners turned away from the Democratic Party because it brought forth the nation’s first African American president. It is possible to make too much of the racial angle, however. Whereas Gore and Kerry carried no Southern states at all, Obama won Virginia and Florida twice, and North Carolina once.

  Broader changes were at work. During the first two years of the Clinton administration, Southern conservatives could look at Democratic elected officials and see people that they could like. Obviously, the president and vice president both spoke with drawls and often took centrist positions on issues such as welfare reform. The party’s Senate leadership included moderates Wendell Ford of Kentucky and David Pryor of Arkansas. Pro-military Sam Nunn of Georgia chaired the Senate Armed Services Committee and pro-petroleum J. Bennett Johnston of Louisiana chaired the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. On the House side, moderate William Natcher of Kentucky chaired the powerful Appropriations Committee. As discussed in the chapter on the Democratic nomination process, the party then underwent a self-reinforcing cycle that made it much less appealing to Southern conservatives. As Republicans started to replace Democrats in elected office, the party became less Southern and more liberal. The Blue Dog Coalition, a group of moderate-to-conservative House Democrats, mostly from the South, went from a peak of fifty-four members after the 2008 election to just fourteen members after the 2014 midterm. Meanwhile, the very liberal Progressive Caucus grew to sixty-seven members.17

  The public face of the congressional party consisted of House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi, a San Francisco liberal, and Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid of Nevada, a former moderate who moved leftward as he climbed the party ladder.18 Neither had much of a fan club in Dixie. In the 114th Congress, one event symbolized the party’s problems with the South. House Democrats staged a sit-in on the chamber floor to protest the GOP majority’s refusal to schedule a vote on gun control. The demonstration got considerable publicity and rallied the party’s liberal core, but did nothing to reach out to voters that had moved to the GOP. In 2015, Gallup found that Republicans, conservatives, gun owners, and opponents of strict gun control laws were the most likely to say that a candidate had to share their views on gun control. A smaller fraction of gun-control supporters said that they would vote only for a candidate who agreed with them.19 The political problem was especially intense in the South, where whites were much more likely to have a gun at home than in other regions.20 Democrats would have been better off if they had made a flamboyant stand on behalf of job creation or aid to senior citizens, positions that might have rallied the Southern voters whom they had lost. Instead, they picked an issue that was sure to alienate them even more.

  The same was true of cultural issues such as abortion. The South was the most anti-abortion region, in large part because of the presence of so many conservative evangelical Christians.21 At the national level, the Democratic Party seemed to dismiss their concerns. Michael Wear, who headed faith outreach in President Obama’s 2012 campaign, noted that more and more secular young operatives and politicians were taking key roles in the party: “They grew up in parts of the country where navigating religion was not important socially and not important to their political careers. This is very different from, like, James Carville in Louisiana in the ’80s. James Carville is not the most religious guy, but he gets religious people—if you didn’t get religious people running Democratic campaigns in the South in the ’80s, you wouldn’t win.”22

  The party’s difficulties extended beyond the region. In recent decades, highly educated white liberals have made up a growing portion of the Democratic vote, and they have increasingly clustered in large urban areas. Together with African American and Hispanic voters, they have turned these areas into blue islands where Democratic candidates win by rubble-bouncing margins. The result is “unintentional gerrymandering,” in which the Democratic vote clusters in a relatively small number of constituencies while the GOP vote has a more efficient distribution.23 Journalist Alec MacGillis offers an example:

  That hyper-concentration of Democratic votes has long hurt the party in the House and state legislatures. In Ohio, for instance, Republicans won 75 percent of the United States House seats in 2012 despite winning only 51 percent of the total votes. That imbalance can be explained partly by Republican gerrymandering. But even if district lines were drawn in rational, nonpartisan ways, a disproportionate share of Democratic votes would still be clustered in urban districts, giving Republicans a larger share of seats than their share of the overall vote. Winning back control of state legislatures in Pennsylvania and Michigan could help Democrats in redistricting after 2020. But it would help more if their voters were not so concentrated in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, Detroit and Ann Arbor.24

  President Obama was popular in those cities, but in much of the country, he was a drag on his party’s candidates. “What’s happened on the ground is that voters have been punishing Democrats for eight solid years—it’s been exhausting,” said South Carolina state senator Vincent Sheheen, who twice ran against Republican governor Nikki Haley. “If I was talking about a local or state issue, voters would always lapse back into a national topic: Barack Obama.”25 Congressional Democrats complained that he focused more on his own standing than his party’s health down the ballot. He did not help matters when he installed Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Florida) as chair of the Democratic National Committee. She proved ineffective at both articulating party positions and building its organization at the grassroots.26 “We built this beautiful house, but the foundation is rotten,” said South Carolina Democratic Chairman Jaime Harrison. “In hindsight, we should have looked at this and said, ‘Maybe the state parties should be strong.’ ”27 At the last press conference of his administration, President Obama acknowledged as much, though with an undertone of defensiveness:

  And I think that that the thing we have to spend the most time on—because it’s the thing we have the most control over—is how do we make sure that we are showing up in places where I think Democratic policies are needed, where they are helping, where they are making a difference, but where people feel as if they’re not being heard and where Democrats are characterized as coastal, liberal, latte-sipping, politically-correct, out-of-touch folks. We have to be in those communities. And I’ve seen that when we are in those communities, it makes a difference.

  But that requires a lot of work. It’s been something that I’ve been able to do successfully in my own campaigns. It is not something I’ve been able to transfer to candidates in midterms and sort of build a sustaining organization around. That’s something that I would have liked to have done more of, but it’s kind of hard to do when you’re also dealing with a whole bunch of issues here in the White House.28

  The GOP’s organizational status was a reverse image. As the Democrats grew stronger in the cities, the GOP retreated. As of late 2016, only three of the nation’s twenty-five largest cities had Republican mayors, and few other GOP elected officials represented densely populated urban areas.29 With an assist from outside groups, Republicans did a much better job in organizing in suburbs and rural areas between the Pacific coast and the Northeast corridor.

  At one time, organized labor would have enabled the Democrats to counter these Republican advantages. At the high point of their influence many years ago, the
y supplied the people who worked the phones, stuffed the envelopes, and walked the precincts on behalf of the Democrats. In some states, they still were a significant force, but, overall, they were on the wane. Between 1983 and 2015, union membership as a share of employed workers plunged by almost half, from 20.1 percent to 11.1 percent.30 Not coincidentally, the drop-off was steepest in five industrial states that voted Republican in the 2016 presidential race (see table 5.1).

  In a couple of these states, Republicans gave unions a hard shove down the cliff. Wisconsin governor Scott Walker signed controversial legislation in 2011 that denied collective bargaining rights to most public employee unions. The following year, the law stuck when Walker survived a labor-backed recall effort. In Michigan, once the home of mighty auto worker unions, Governor Rick Snyder signed a “right to work” bill forbidding employers from requiring union membership and payment of dues as a condition of employment. “When you chip away at one of the power sources that also does a lot of get-out-the-vote,” says Tracie Sharpe, president of the conservative State Policy Network, “I think that helps—for sure.”31

  SENATE ELECTIONS

  Notwithstanding all the GOP advantages, most of the smart money was on the Democrats to take control of the Senate in 2016. The reason was the peculiar cycle of U.S. Senate elections. Whenever a party wins a large haul of seats, it must defend them six years later under different political conditions. The winnings of a midterm election come up again during a presidential election, and vice versa. This phenomenon has often resulted in reversals in party fortunes. In the 1974 Watergate midterm, Senate Democrats won a smashing victory, but during the Reagan landslide six years later, they lost so many of these seats that the GOP took control of the chamber. In 1986, the GOP tide flowed out again, and the Democrats regained the majority. Similarly, the big Democratic victory of 2008 set the party up for defeat in 2014. In 2016, the Democrats saw a chance to avenge themselves. Thanks to GOP gains in 2010, they were defending just ten seats, whereas Republicans had two dozen. Seven of those twenty-four Republican seats were in states that President Obama had carried twice: Florida, Illinois, Iowa, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.32

  Even better from the Democratic perspective, Republicans had earlier shown a knack for throwing away opportunities. In 2010, inept candidates cost them Senate races in Colorado, Delaware, and Nevada. Two years later, Republicans went down in Indiana and Missouri because they made offensive comments about rape, pregnancy, and abortion. Also in 2012, Montana Republicans failed to counter an obvious Democratic effort to siphon GOP votes to a Libertarian spoiler. Had Republicans taken all the winnable races in 2010 and 2012, they would have ended 2014 with a supermajority of sixty seats.

  Unfortunately for Democrats, the Republican establishment noticed this problem and had commenced action during the 2014 cycle.33 Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell said of Tea Party primary candidates who could put seats in jeopardy: “I think we are going to crush them everywhere.”34 His own reelection campaign cut off challenger Matt Bevin by telling GOP vendors and operatives that if they worked for Bevin, “it will be the last job you ever have in this business.”35 (The rivals reconciled in 2015, when McConnell supported Bevin’s successful campaign for governor.) In Kansas, opposition researchers for the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) learned that Dr. Milton Wolf, who was challenging incumbent Pat Roberts, had posted photos of gunshot victims on Facebook, along with odd jokes. After the committee leaked the information to the media, Wolf faded. NRSC executive director Rob Collins defended the committee’s involvement in the Kansas race and other primaries: “We’re not anti-conservative. We’re just anti-people-who-can’t-win.”36

  The effort continued during the 2016 cycle. Representative Mike Pompeo, a hardline conservative, considered a primary race against Senator Jerry Moran of Kansas. NRSC discouraged conservative groups from even considering financial support to Pompeo, and it sent opposition researchers to Wichita. Reid Wilson reported at The Hill, “And the retired FBI agents didn’t bother to cover their tracks; it would help the NRSC’s cause if Pompeo knew the campaign arm was preparing a thick binder of opposition research.”37 In April, Pompeo declined to run against Moran, complaining of “legacy Republican leaders” whose aim was the “retention of office.”38 (The legacy leaders might have responded, “Well, duh.”) After the general election, Pompeo got a consolation prize when Trump said he would nominate him to head the CIA.

  In Arizona, John McCain had often irritated the right wing. Conservative representative Matt Salmon thought about running, but he later told National Review that NRSC “reached out to my chief of staff and said, ‘You know if Matt runs, we’ll be fully supporting McCain.’ ”39 Salmon opted out of the race and decided to retire from the House as well. McCain did face a challenge from state legislator Kelli Ward, who got little support from conservative outside organizations. “They were worried she might be a little kooky,” said a Republican involved with the groups.40 A pro-McCain super PAC reinforced these concerns with an online video pointing out her strange positions on chemtrails and vaccines.41 McCain, who had gotten an early start on fund-raising and organization, easily won the primary. In the fall, he beat Representative Ann Kirkpatrick by double digits.

  As in 2014, not a single Republican incumbent senator lost a fight for renomination. The successful counterattacks by McConnell and the GOP establishment demoralized conservative outside groups that had scored primary victories in 2010 and 2012.42 More important, Tea Party PACs had ruined the movement’s reputation by spending much of their money on fees and prospecting instead of candidate support.43 Paul Jossey, a campaign finance lawyer who had done work for such groups, wrote in Politico :

  What began as an organic, policy-driven grass-roots movement was drained of its vitality and resources by national political action committees that dunned the movement’s true believers endlessly for money to support its candidates and causes. The PACs used that money first to enrich themselves and their vendors and then deployed most of the rest to search for more “prospects.” In Tea Party world, that meant mostly older, technologically unsavvy people willing to divulge personal information through “petitions”—which only made them prey to further attempts to lighten their wallets for what they believed was a good cause. While the solicitations continue, the audience has greatly diminished because of a lack of policy results and changing political winds.44

  The grassroots conservative marks eventually caught on and stopped sending money. The only real Senate primary victory for the Tea Party movement came in Colorado, where Darryl Glenn emerged from a scattered GOP field to take on incumbent Michael Bennet. His campaign never got sufficient momentum, and Bennet won.

  In addition to a Senate GOP that had recovered from Tea Party fever, Democrats faced an even greater hurdle to exploiting a favorable map: candidate recruitment. Historically, the House of Representatives has been the main hatchery for Senate contenders. It is easy to see why: House members have political experience, established fundraising networks, familiarity with national issues, and geographical bases of support. During the 114th Congress, in fact, fifty-three senators had served in the House.45 Before the 1990s, there were plenty of ambitious House Democrats to run for Senate seats. By 2016, however, the party’s downballot losses had depopulated the spawning ground. Democrats had a minority of seats, and, to make matters worse, their remaining constituencies were highly concentrated in a few places. Just six states—California, New York, Massachusetts, Illinois, Florida, and Texas— accounted for more than half of the House Democratic Caucus, with California alone contributing one-fifth. Of those six, only Illinois and Florida had GOP seats up for election in 2016. Accordingly, it would be hard to find good Democratic candidates in other states.

  Pennsylvania Senator Pat Toomey had won a close 2010 election during a Republican wave year and looked vulnerable. Democrats had retaken the governorship in 2014, so they appeared to be on the upswing. Because of a
Republican gerrymander, however, only five of the state’s eighteen House members were Democrats, and one of them faced a 2016 felony conviction for corruption. The party settled for Katie McGinty, a former Clinton administration official who had never run for office. She ran a lackluster campaign and, despite spending large sums and leading in many polls, narrowly lost to Toomey.

  Like Toomey, Rob Portman of Ohio was another Republican running for reelection in a potentially competitive industrial state. As a former member of George W. Bush’s cabinet, he was also open to the charge that he belonged to the old guard of political insiders. Portman turned his status to his advantage, as he built an early fundraising advantage. “The flip side of being a longtime D.C. insider is a mountain of money,” a top Democratic strategist said.46 His political experience also showed in his deft positioning on the issues. His advocacy of Ohio infrastructure projects and his opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (despite his earlier service as U.S. trade representative) earned him the support of several labor unions—unusual for a Republican. With strong support from McConnell, he and New Hampshire’s Kelly Ayotte coauthored successful legislation to fight opioid abuse, a growing issue in working-class areas. As in Pennsylvania, a GOP gerrymander had resulted in a small Democratic House delegation (four of sixteen), so the party was hard up for a good challenger. Their final choice was Ted Strickland, a seventy-five-year-old former governor who could hardly run on youth and outsiderism. In the fall, the national Democrats wrote off what was once a potential pickup, and Portman won by more than twenty-one points.

 

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