SPECIAL CONGRESSIONAL ELECTIONS MATTER. In 1981, political strategist Lee Atwater left the White House staff to manage a Republican campaign for a House seat in east Texas. Atwater’s candidate lost, signifying that despite Ronald Reagan’s capture of the presidency the GOP wasn’t on the verge of taking over Congress. In early 1994, Republicans won special elections in Democrat-held seats in Oklahoma and Kentucky—a precursor to the coming of a Republican majority in Congress. On June 19, the GOP is seeking to capture a Democratic seat in southeast Virginia. Once again, it may be a bellwether election. The race is more important to Republicans than Democrats. Republicans need a win. So far, 2001 doesn’t look like a great year for them. The Republican candidate didn’t make the runoff in the Los Angeles mayor’s race. The GOP nominee in the Virginia governor’s race, Mark Earley, trails his lavishly financed Democratic foe, Mark Warner. Republican chances in the New Jersey governor’s contest are iffy, and the prospects for holding the New York City mayor’s office are poor. The House seat in Virginia, which became vacant when 18-year incumbent Democrat Norman Sisisky died in March, is the GOP’s best shot, but it’s not much better than 50-50. Republicans in Washington have made the race a top priority. Calls from Karl Rove, President Bush’s chief political adviser, and from nearly every senior Republican in Virginia persuaded state senator Randy Forbes to abandon his bid for lieutenant governor and run for the House. “The president asked me to call,” Rove told Forbes. “We feel this is a crucial seat.” In recent weeks, Vice President Dick Cheney and House speaker Dennis Hastert have been dispatched to stump for Forbes in the district, which sits between Richmond and Norfolk. GOP representative Tom Davis, chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, has flooded the district with operatives. In special elections, Republicans are skilled at maximizing their resources. But there’s a problem this time: President Bush. No, the president isn’t a dominant issue. Forbes and his Democratic opponent, Louise Lucas, rarely mention him. And Bush hasn’t been in office long enough for the race to be a referendum on his presidency. What worries Republicans is history. “The party out of power in the White House has a history of doing well in special elections,” notes Davis. That’s the Democrats. The GOP victories in 1994 came while Bill Clinton was in the White House. Davis says voters in the out party are more likely to go to the polls in special elections. “Surveys show their voters are more motivated than our voters.” Especially black voters, who make up 37 percent of those registered in the district. Blacks have a further incentive: Lucas is a black Democrat with an inspiring personal story. She grew up in Portsmouth, had a child at 14, and dropped out of high school. By the time she was 20, she had three kids. Then she got into an apprenticeship program at the Norfolk Naval Shipyard and worked there for 18 years. “I learned the value of hard work, dedication, commitment, and stick-to-it-iveness,” she said at a debate with Forbes last week. Along the way, she got high school, college, and master’s degrees. She was elected to the state senate when a black district was created in Portsmouth in 1991. Davis says he expects black voters to turn out in “great numbers.” Forbes has sought black support and won the endorsement of a former Virginia NAACP president, but is getting only 3 percent of the black vote in GOP polls. Since the same polls show Forbes with a slight lead, he’s obviously attracting a large majority of the white vote. So race is a factor. Indeed, the Forbes campaign has accused Lucas of playing the race card. How? By saying in a mail piece that the Bush budget will hurt “6 million minority families”—not much of a race card. Lucas said she’d never seen the mailer, which was sent by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. On the other hand, some Democrats worry that white voters won’t vote for a black candidate who hasn’t run for Congress before. Lucas, 57, is running on conventional Democratic issues. She’s for Democratic versions of a patients’ bill of rights, a Medicare prescription drug benefit, and long-term health care. She’s called for a probe of oil and gas companies. She opposes any privatization of Social Security. She’s for tax cuts for “working families,” once other priorities are met. Forbes has ridiculed her on this. “I had a good friend who had a girlfriend [and] for years he told her he was going to marry her,” he said in last week’s debate. “He went 15 years and never did because he said he just couldn’t find the right ring to give her. Now we hear people say ‘I’m for cutting taxes,’ ‘I’m for lowering taxes.’ It’s just they never can find the tax they want to cut.” The Forbes campaign is cookie-cutter Republican. He touts tax cuts and funding for faith-based social services. Lucas calls such funding “a big shell game.” Forbes, 49, suggests Lucas is soft on crime (she opposes the death penalty) and zings her for voting in the state senate against requiring schools to recite the Pledge of Allegiance daily. Otherwise, he’s for GOP versions of health care proposals, much like Bush. “Randy Forbes knows seniors need help,” a Forbes TV ad insists. The most intriguing issue is Social Security. Forbes favors allowing workers to use a portion of their payroll taxes for private investment accounts, as does Bush. But he says he’s against full privatization of Social Security. Lucas says she’s “staunchly opposed to any scheme to privatize Social Security,” even small investment accounts. More important, Social Security is the issue she’s stressing in the final weeks of the campaign. A Democratic television ad claims Forbes would “let Wall Street gamble with seniors’ hard-earned retirement money in today’s unpredictable stock market.” Worse, “experts say Forbes’s plan would force deep cuts in monthly Social Security benefits and take nearly a trillion dollars out of the Social Security trust fund.” Should the anti-privatization argument catch on, it could have far-reaching implications. Forbes would be harmed. So might Bush’s plan to reform Social Security. And Democrats would surely be encouraged to make Social Security the centerpiece of their campaign in 2002 congressional elections, though they probably don’t need much encouragement. Howard Wolfson, the DCCC’s executive director, says partial privatization is already unpopular “in Virginia and all over the U.S.” This Virginia district is not a perfect testing ground for the Social Security issue, but it’s good enough. It’s a swing district. Bush won it last year, but only by a few hundred votes. If Forbes wins, maybe Social Security isn’t all that dangerous. If he loses, maybe it is. Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
