The Stakeholder
Wash Post: “Democratic Victory May Be a Bellwether”
From the front page of today's Washington Post:
Democratic Victory May Be a Bellwether
A Democrat won the race for a GOP-held congressional seat in northern Mississippi yesterday, leaving the once-dominant House Republicans reeling from their third special-election defeat of the spring.
Travis Childers, a conservative Democrat who serves as Prentiss County chancery clerk, defeated Southaven Mayor Greg Davis by 54 percent to 46 percent in the race to represent Mississippi's 1st Congressional District, which both parties considered a potential bellwether for the fall elections.
Democrats said the results prove that they are poised for another round of big gains in the November general elections, and they attacked the Republican strategy of tying Democrats to Sen. Barack Obama, the front-runner for the party's presidential nomination, saying it had failed for a second time in 10 days in the Deep South. Democrat Don Cazayoux won the special election for a GOP-held House seat in Louisiana on May 3.
"No one could have imagined the tsunami that just crashed on Republicans in Mississippi," Rep. Chris Van Hollen (Md.), chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said in an interview after the victory. "There is no district that is safe for Republican candidates."
House Democrats now hold a 236 to 199 majority, up from 203 seats they controlled two years ago.
Rep. Tom Cole (R-Okla.), chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, sounded an alarm for all GOP candidates "to take stock of their campaigns and position themselves for challenging campaigns this fall" while lashing themselves to the presidential candidacy of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.).
"The political environment is such that voters remain pessimistic about the direction of the country and the Republican Party in general. . . . Time is short," Cole said in a statement.
Democrats begin the march into the fall elections with an enormous cash advantage: $44 million for the DCCC to $7 million for its GOP counterpart as of March 31. And 25 other Republican incumbents have decided against running for reelection, providing Democrats with more opportunities to make gains. Seven Democratic incumbents are not seeking reelection.
The Childers victory was the latest setback suffered by Republicans, who began the string of defeats in special elections when Democrat Bill Foster claimed the seat of former House speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) in March.
President Bush won Mississippi's 1st District by 25 percentage points four years ago, and Roger Wicker (R) won reelection with 66 percent of the vote in 2006. Wicker was appointed earlier this year to the Senate seat vacated by Trent Lott, who quit just one year into his six-year term to become a corporate lobbyist.
Childers ran a campaign that focused on his support of gun rights and opposition to abortion. One of his first campaign ads talked about his mother's recent battle with breast cancer. "Travis Childers still takes care of his mother," the narrator said, as images of the candidate hugging his mother ran across the screen.
Faced with ads from Davis and the NRCC pointing out that he had endorsed Obama, Childers countered with his own ad that proclaimed he had never even met the senator from Illinois.
As they did in Louisiana, House Democrats demonstrated their willingness to back a candidate whose ideological positions on key social issues would put him out of the mainstream of their caucus. The DCCC poured more than $1.8 million into northern Mississippi in an ad campaign that included accusations that Davis raised taxes as mayor.
In Louisiana and Mississippi, the NRCC spent $1.8 million on ads focused largely on pinning Cazayoux and Childers to Obama.
Van Hollen suggested the ads were "desperate tactics" and "did not gain traction."
Independent analysts said that the anti-Obama campaign put Childers on the defensive but that it is too early to tell whether such a strategy will work in the fall.
Nathan Gonzalez, political editor of the Rothenberg Political Report, said polling data in key eastern portions of the district before the race showed that Childers's numbers "aren't getting any worse" because of the ads.
Wicker, who in the fall faces his own election for the remainder of Lott's term, said that the race turned on "voter fatigue" from the heated presidential campaigns as well as a complicated ballot system that has produced four different races for the seat in the past two months, including primary contests for the general election to be held in November. "It's just very difficult to get people excited," he said.
Republicans will now shift into a period of internal review and possible recriminations.
Some Republicans are clamoring for their leadership and the NRCC to craft a new strategy, fearing a repeat of the 2006 elections, when Republicans lost 30 seats that they previously held and Democrats did not lose a single seat of their own.
"Some people in the conference, to some extent, have been complacent to waking up to how badly the brand was damaged in 2006," Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.), a leader of a conservative coalition, said in a recent interview.
This week, House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) unveiled a new campaign theme that directly embraced Obama's "change" message by establishing "change you deserve" as the new mantra for the House Republican Conference.
The Mississippi result "should serve as a wake-up call to Republican candidates nationwide," Boehner said in a statement last night. "As I've said before, this is a change election, and if we want Americans to vote for us, we have to convince them that we can fix Washington."
I’ve been a registered Democrat for years, not because I’m against Replublican theology, but because it’s either one or the other. As I read this story and others like it, there’s a common thread (that is not just identifiable with Democrats, but Replubicans as well) and that is the word “contol’ of this or that house. The Governing of people should not revolve around ‘controlling’ others who have opposing views, but in listening to them and blending thought provoking ideas that better serve the American Electorate. In my humble opinion, those who vote along party lines do not vote in the best interests of this country. That kind of voting is blind and ignorant, yet that is what both parties advocate. In this country, it should not be Reblican against Democrat or vice versa, but both parties striving to come to common grounds and listening to each other for the better of the people they serve. Frankly, I’m sick and tired of this running battle between the parties that, I may add, are so out of touch with the will of most Americans it isn’t even funny. If the Democratic Party really wants to make a difference for Americans then the party ought to start trying to bridge the philosophic differences between the parties and start creating policies that reflect the interests of the people and not the interests of the party.
Just my two cents
Ronald Bagliere
Why do we want to elect a democrat that supports gun rights and is against abortion? Why not just call him a republican? Is winning the majority more important than our values? I am a democrat because I believe in Abortion rights and gun control. It seems the Democratic party is turning into the Republican party. For example, they are stealing Florida’s votes from the people by refusing to assign the delegates. Did they learn that from Karl Rove or George Bush? I guess neither party cares about the people any more.
Re: response
The parties are out of touch and will continue to be as long as we allow them to keep reading the drivel printed about them in the paper. I suggest people starting reading about the candidates, Republican and Democrat alike, and I don’t mean the newspapers, which are full of bias and inaccuracies. When you vote, when anyone votes, they should vote for the individual who most closely represents the values that are important to them and identify with regardless of what party the candidate hails from and the only way to understand the values of a candidate is to read what they thought prior to entering the race for president or any office for that matter. That information, along with their voting records and positions on bills and proposals is all readily available in libraries and on the web. Unfortunately, the American electorate depends chiefly on what is fed to them by the media and are thus, politically illiterate.
Check out the column, “Can this Election be Lost?” on my website http://www.democratsfor2008.com