Inside Washington for May 9, 2008
Panic comes to town………..
The GOP loss of Louisiana’s 6th Congressional District in last Saturday’s special election has sent shock waves that have rocked both the GOP House delegation and (in a much more subtle way) the Democratic presidential nomination race.
As to the former, the victory by Democrat Don Cazayoux is the second of what could be a triple disaster for House Republicans. Earlier this year they lost the special election to fill the seat of retired House Speaker Denny Hastert in Illinois. That was a strong GOP district that is now in the Democratic column. Now, with Cazayoux, they’ve lost the seat of retired Rep. Richard Baker, a seat held by the GOP for 34 years. Next up is the special run-off election in Mississippi’s 1st Congressional District on Tuesday to fill the seat held by the GOP since 1994. The fact that the seat is in play says much about the current political landscape.
With the November elections just six months away, it’s fair to say that a degree of panic has set into the current GOP House delegation. While independent analysts have always foreseen a really tough atmosphere for the GOP this election year, the loss of two solid GOP districts has suddenly driven home the point that the party could experience another substantial loss of House seats this fall, coming on the heals of their disastrous 2006 record. Further, the National Republican Congressional Committee has informed its members this week that the committee will not have enough campaign cash to “bail them out” if they find themselves in tough races in the fall.
The bottom line is that if the GOP loses the Mississippi seat on Tuesday, it could solidify a perception about the party’s chances that could in turn suppress not only its activist base but its fundraising base as well.
Now, as to the effect of the Louisiana race on the Democratic presidential race, it’s all in the fine print. The NRCC spent a lot of money running two television spots trying to brand Democrat Cazayoux as a liberal and linking him to Sen. Barack Obama. While the NRCC claims that the message shrunk the Democrat’s victory margin, Democrats took solace in the fact that the linkage to the Democratic frontrunner was not a decisive factor in this very conservative region. The fact that NRCC efforts to “nationalize” a House race were unsuccessful was not lost among the Democratic “Superdelegate” stronghold that is Capitol Hill.
If Cazayoux had lost, you can be sure that Democrats would have taken a collective pause in the ongoing Clinton-Obama contest. Instead, the Louisiana race, taken together with Democratic performance in North Carolina on Tuesday (where the state GOP ran several ineffective ads linking state candidates to Obama and even the Rev. Wright controversy) left party strategists thinking that this year the “change” message trumps even the old “liberal/conservative” paradigm. The bottom line: looking to the fall, this week’s election results did nothing to shake “Superdelegate” confidence in an Obama candidacy.
McCain still not cracking 80%
Democratic wags and several political analysts have pointed to the fact that Sen. John McCain, the all-but-official GOP presidential nominee, is still falling below the 80% mark in recent primary contests. Although he is now the only Republican candidate still running for his party’s nomination, he continues to lose votes to candidates whose names are still on the ballot. In the Pennsylvania primary last month he took just 73% of the vote. This week, he garnered 74% in North Carolina and 78% in Indiana.
While an annoyance at best and a protest vote at worst, the results are still being read by some as evidence that there remains a core conservative vote on the GOP side that has yet to warm to the inevitability of McCain as the party nominee. Far more troublesome for the campaign remains the fact that only a small percentage of sitting GOP members of Congress has so far contributed to his campaign coffers.
Political Observations of the Week:
“Right now Hillary Clinton may not be able to do the math, but Republicans have been for the last couple of weeks.”
GOP consultant Kevin Madden, on the GOP preparing to run against Sen. Obama.
“I don’t see [Hillary Clinton] winning West Virginia 93 to 5.”
Political reporter Joe Klein, on the Democratic presidential nomination race being essentially over at this point.
“Illinois was really bad, Louisiana was worse, if that’s possible, but if we don’t win in Mississippi, I think you are going to see a lot of people running around here looking for windows to jump out of.”
Anonymous GOP House Leadership aide, on the special election losses for the GOP.
“The NRCC approach [linking the Democratic candidate to Barack Obama] is probably the best available tactic for the GOP in this Democratic year. Nevertheless, if it didn’t work in this conservative Deep South district, it is unlikely to bear fruit in very many other areas of the country.”
Hastings Wyman, veteran Southern political analyst, on the Louisiana race.
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John J. Kohut is an independent political analyst in Washington, D.C. He has been writing about national politics for more than a decade, including stints as an editor at the Cook Political Report and as senior editor at the Rothenberg Political Report.
Topics: Inside Washington