Opinion
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Good numbers mean good recruiting for Republicans
By: Michael Barone
Senior Political Analyst
07/09/09 4:08 PM EDT
Politico’s Ben Smith has followed up my Wednesday Examiner column and Beltway Confidential blogpost with a story providing more detail about how Independent voters have been trending away from Barack Obama and the Democrats and provides some interesting reporting on how this is affecting this year’s gubernatorial races in Virginia and New Jersey. This shift in opinion is happening at a very inconvenient time for Democrats, not only because their congressional leaders are grappling with the difficult task of putting together health care legislation but also because this is recruiting season for the 2010 congressional elections.
And the Republicans suddenly seem to be doing very well in recruiting, according to the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, National Review Online’s Jim Geraghty and The Hill’s Aaron Blake.
Most notably North Shore Republican Congressman Mark Kirk is running for the Senate seat currently held by Roland Burris, while Democratic state Attorney General Lisa Madigan (who at one point was reportedly assured she’d have the support of the Obama White House) is not. Some conservatives are carping about the fact that Kirk was one of eight House Republicans to vote for the Waxman-Markey cap-and-trade bill, but that’s not likely to be a political liability in a state which gets much of its electricity from nuclear power rather than coal. He’s probably the only Republican who can win in Obama’s home state, which has elected a Republican senator only once since 1978, when Peter Fitzgerald beat scandal-tarred Carol Moseley-Braun in 1998.
Other Obama states where Republican Senate prospects look better than t hey did on the day after the 2008 election: New Hampshire, where Kelly Ayotte has stepped down as attorney general (appointed by the Democratic governor) to run as a Republican against Democratic Congressman Paul Hodes; Connecticut, where Democratic incumbent
Christopher Dodd is in deep trouble; New York, where appointed Democratic incumbent Upstater Kirsten Gillibrand faces a primary challenge from Manhattan Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney; Pennsylvania, where party-switcher Arlen Specter faces a primary challenge from Democratic Congressman Joseph Sestak; Delaware, where Congressman-at-Large Mike Castle has led Attorney General Beau Biden in public polls; North Carolina, where Obama was unable to persuade widely respected Attorney General Roy Moore to run against Republican incumbent Richard Burr; Florida, where Governor Charlie Crist is far ahead in general election polls, though he has primary opposition from the more conservative former Speaker Marco Rubio; Ohio, where the recent Quinnipiac poll showed Republican former Congressman and OMB Director Rob Portman in a statistical tie with Lieutenant Governor Lee Fisher and Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner; Colorado, where appointed Democratic Senator Michael Bennet is not well known and the governor who appointed him has surprisingly low poll ratings. There don’t appear to be strong Republican candidates in some of these states, but the recruiting season is still on.
Among the House seat recruits or possible cited by Cillizza, Geraghty and Blake are former Congressmen Steve Chabot (OH 1) and Steve Pearce (NM 2), 2008 near-winner Steve Stivers (OH 15), state legislators Cory Gardner (CO 4) and Van Tran (CA 47), Montgomery Councilwoman Martha Roby (AL 2), Manchester Mayor Frank Guinta (NH 1), Corning Mayor Tom Reed (NY 29) and Virginia businessman Scott Rigell (VA 2). Cook Report analyst Jennifer Duffy, who has a clear and unsentimental eye for candidate recruitment, is quoted by Blake as saying that the Republican party has had a “really good couple of weeks and probably its first good couple weeks in four years.”
Candidate recruitment is crucial these days because in general you can’t beat somebody with nobody. If you look at the freshman Senate and House classes for the last several cycles, Democratic or Republican, you don’t see a lot of obvious duds who got swept in with a party tide. The political numbers may or may not be favorable for Republicans in fall 2010. But they are proving favorable enough in summer 2009 to give them a better recruiting season than I for one expected.
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