Capitol Hill Calculus
By Charlie Cook
© NationalJournal.com
November 29, 2005
Lord knows that Republicans have plenty to worry about these days. President Bush now has the lowest approval ratings for an elected, second-term president in history -- the numbers are so low he is beginning to look more like a crippled than a lame duck.
Then there are the generic congressional ballot test numbers that suggest at least a moderate, perhaps big, wave for Democrats. Add to that a depressing off-year election for Republicans, with the only major victor being a New York City mayor who is the very definition of a R-I-N-O (Republican In Name Only). Finally, toss in a scandal that has already implicated four GOP members, and some say could hit a dozen.
Another House member, Randy "Duke" Cunningham, R-Calif., resigned after a felony conspiracy and tax evasion conviction. And yet another member, Jim Kolbe, R-Ariz., announced his retirement this past weekend, which is bad for the GOP because he represents a very competitive, moderate district, and the likelihood of the party nominating a very conservative candidate is high. The list of problems could go on.
But at the same time, the structural obstacles to Democrats taking sufficient advantage of these problems and capturing a majority in the House and Senate are very real. It would take one heck of a wave to overcome these problems.
In the House, there are 14 open GOP seats, just one short of the number of seats Democrats need to net in order to secure a majority. But four of those seats are in extremely difficult districts for Democrats, three are in tough, uphill districts that still have a strong bias favoring Republican candidates, and five more have GOP tilts, but not so much as to thwart the chances of Democrats picking some off. Only two GOP-held open seats are in districts that one could characterize as charitable toward Democrats. The bottom line is that if Democrats are to win a majority, they will have to have an enormous wave and knock off a bunch of incumbents, which statistically speaking is awfully difficult. My guess: Democrats have a one-in-five (20 percent) chance at best of taking a majority in the House.
Then you get to the Senate, where Democrats have to hold onto their own states, knock off the three most vulnerable GOP incumbents -- Lincoln Chafee in Rhode Island, Mike DeWine in Ohio and Rick Santorum in Pennsylvania -- then win Bill Frist's open seat in Tennessee. That gets them four seats, but they need six for a majority. So the next most vulnerable is probably incumbent Conrad Burns in Montana. If they beat him, that's five, and finally they need to beat either Jon Kyl in Arizona or Jim Talent in Missouri. This all assumes that they hold onto all their own seats. The most problematic Democratic seats are an open seat in Minnesota where Mark Dayton is retiring, and incumbent Maria Cantwell in Washington state. That's a very tall order, but certainly possible with an enormous wave, perhaps a one-in-six chance.
The occupational hazard for people in my business is that after having watched these kinds of races for so long, 29 years in my case, it's easy to think of 100 reasons why something might not happen based on past experience. In fact it seems that the closer one is to watching races on an individual, race-by-race basis, the more "in the weeds" you are, the greater the bias is against seeing a wave. But those who don't see things on a race-by-race basis at all, looking more at the forest, are more free to bet on the trend, the national polls, the daily newspaper headlines, the gut. Three-quarters of the time, the former technique is superior, but in perhaps one-in-four, maybe one-in-five, all bets are off and the "lick your finger and stick it in the wind" method works better, with 1994 being a classic example.
The most recent national polling suggests that the president's free-fall has stopped and his approval numbers have leveled off in the 38 percent to 42 percent range. A recent Democracy Corps poll from Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg found a 42-percent approval rating (56-percent disapproval) and the Cook Political Report/RT Strategies survey showed a 41-percent approval rating (52 percent disapproval). A Diageo/Hotline survey taken a week earlier showed a 40-percent approval (58-percent disapproval). This is relevant because weeks earlier, there were a number of national surveys that showed the president's approval rating in the 35 percent to 37 percent range. Greenberg's Democracy Corps poll is showing a 42 percent approval for the fourth consecutive survey, the political equivalent of watching same-store sales in the retail field. It's a good sign of stabilization, albeit at a dreadful level for the president.
But stabilization and recovery are two different things, and what has to concern Republican strategists is the intensity of opposition. In the Cook Political Report/RT Strategies poll, while Bush had a 41/52 approval-disapproval split, 43 percent of all those sampled "strongly disapproved" of the president's performance, compared to only 26 percent that "strongly approved." Among independents, 48 percent strongly disapproved and 14 percent strongly approved. While people who are undecided, and those who only somewhat approve or disapprove, are very malleable, it's difficult to move people who strongly disapprove of a candidate or elected official. They get to a point where they are no longer open-minded to change.
At a certain point, elected officials faced with this situation have to stop and decide, based on the nature of their own state or district, their own circumstances and their own conscience, do they want to be a loyal party soldier or become a free agent, creating whatever distance necessary to survive. Like Democrats faced in the first two years of Bill Clinton's presidency and the congressional scandals of 1993 and 1994, and again during Monica Lewinsky and the impeachment process, Republicans now have to do that soul-searching and political calculation. In 1993-94, Democrats tended to do too little, too late to distance themselves; during the Lewinsky affair, Democrats who quickly scampered to distance themselves from Clinton found themselves slinking back into the fold when the scandal turned out to be something of a bust. The impeachment itself became an issue and the GOP lost seats instead.
Correction To Last Week's Column
In the 15th paragraph of last week's column, the first sentence should have included the qualifier "who agreed with the anti-McCain statements..." The corrected paragraph with two additional sentences to amplify should read as follows: Among Republican primary voters who agreed with the anti-McCain statements, 44 percent objected that McCain "doesn't reflect Republican views," 27 percent said he was "too old", and 22 percent picked "stubborn."
The bottom line is that McCain's strength is also his weakness: independence. Independent and Democratic voters love his maverick style, but Republicans see him as a renegade, someone whose ideology and issue positions can't be depended upon. But, if you look at the Republican primary voters who picked the positive McCain statement, 45 percent picked his "independence/not always agreeing with Republicans" -- this amounts to 22 percent of the entire Republican primary electorate. Thus, the same attribute that is his biggest liability among Republican primary voters is also his biggest asset, and actually a small net positive.
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