Republicans successfully tied Democrats who lost Tuesday in energy-producing states to an unpopular Obama administration that Republicans blame for handcuffing their states’ economies through environmental regulations.
Democratic incumbents fell in Alaska, Arkansas and Colorado. West Virginia elected its first Republican senator since the 1950s. Louisiana will head to a Dec. 6 runoff, but Democratic Sen. Mary Landrieu faces stiff odds against GOP Rep. Bill Cassidy. And Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., swatted away his toughest challenger yet.
Energy itself did not rise as a major difference-maker in those races — that would have indicated there was a divide between candidates when, often, there was not. But Democratic candidates, try as they might to distance themselves from the national party, couldn’t escape the perceptions that they would act as stooges for liberal policies touted by President Obama.
“I don’t think that energy issues necessarily played a key role in any of these states, but there is no denying that many of them were under attack from energy companies — at least via through super PACs and other dark money funds,” said Jim Manley, a former aide to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., who now directs the communications practice at Quinn Gillespie and Associates.
“Their goal was to tie those members as tightly as they could to the administration,” Manley added.
Part of the problem centrist Democrats in energy-producing states ran into is that they weren’t able to cast votes to tout their independence from the national brand, said Scott Segal, an energy lobbyist with Bracewell & Giuliani. Segal blamed Majority Leader Harry Reid’s control of the Senate, as he often blocked votes that would have put his members in a tight spot.
“What this really did was deprive those marginal senators … of the ability to be relevant,” Segal said during a media call.
And that’s really how one-time Democratic voters in more conservative, fossil fuel-abundant states feel — marginalized. The party has steadily drifted toward embracing policies that voters in those energy-producing counties don’t feel comfortable with, such as gay marriage and changing gun laws.
Votes in energy-producing counties tell the story.
In West Virginia, many politicians believe they must run as Democrats to win, owing partly to a strong union history. But now the state is trending more conservative in part because they feel Democrats have moved too far left on social issues. Many voters there still identify as Democrats, but are increasingly voting Republican in federal elections.
Coal-heavy Logan County, W.Va., favored Sen. Joe Manchin, D-W. Va., by a 3-to-1 margin over his GOP opponent in the 2010 race after he had won a special election to replace the late Democratic Sen. Robert Byrd. And in 2002, Logan County went for Democrat Jay Rockefeller 81 percent to Republican Jay Wolfe’s 19 percent.
But unofficial tallies this year have the Sen.-elect Shelley Moore Capito, a GOP congresswoman, netting 61 percent of the county, compared with Democratic opponent Secretary of State Natalie Tennant’s 36 percent.
Capito and Tennant both railed against the Obama administration’s environmental regulations that they said have contributed to West Virginia’s economic woes. But Obama is deeply unpopular there, which was an albatross for Tennant.
Or look to Perry County, Ky. In 2002, Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell won 53 percent of the vote compared with Democrat Lois Combs Weinberg’s 47 percent. But McConnell grabbed a greater share of the county on Tuesday, netting 64 percent of the vote to Democratic Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes’ 32 percent.
Even Landrieu, the longtime senator from one of the nation’s most energy-dependent states, is struggling to separate herself from Obama and the Democratic brand.
She’s a stalwart for the oil and gas industry, and would have remained chairwoman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee if Democrats hadn’t lost the Senate. The industry respects her, too — she has netted the third-most contributions from that sector this cycle, trailing only House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Senate Minority Whip John Cornyn, R-Texas.
But she is having difficulty overcoming voters’ antagonistic feelings toward Obama in her state — her support of the Affordable Care Act being potentially one of her biggest handicaps.
The oil and gas industry has taken a backseat during crunch time — many who had saddled up with Landrieu in the past calculated their political fortunes would improve with a GOP-led upper chamber. The industry isn’t putting its money in Cassidy’s camp, but it isn’t working to turn out voters who Landrieu needs to win, either.
“What the industry is now starting to tumble to is the fact that, ‘Well, wait a minute here. We might be able to have a Republican-controlled Senate if Sen. Landrieu loses her race in December, and what will that mean for us as an industry?” Jim Noe, executive vice president with drilling company Hercules Offshore Inc., said in a recent interview.
Similar stories arose in coal-heavy states like Kentucky — where Grimes flatly refused to answer whether she even voted for Obama — and West Virginia, which resoundingly elected Capito to become the state’s first Republican senator since 1959.
Sen. Mark Begich, D-Alaska, tried to untangle his candidacy from Obama by tying it to Sen. Lisa Murkowski, the state’s Republican senator who is now in line to chair the Energy and Natural Resources Committee. But Murkowski was furious when Begich’s campaign ran a TV advertisement that touted the pair’s relationship — she said it was an “implied endorsement” for Begich when she, in fact, supported Republican Lt. Gov. Dan Sullivan.
“I think I made very clear that I had objections, serious objections, to how that ad portrayed our relationship,” Murkowski said in an October speech, adding, “I think Begich knows where I stand in this race. Again, no means no.”
