Michael Steinberger wrote an interesting item for The New Republic about the plight of a Republican House member who may lose re-election because he, like the president, has an “R” after his name.
[Connecticut Congressman Christopher] Shays seems to be giving a lot of thought to other jobs these days. Ask him about his relationship with the Bush administration, and he will tell you that the White House considered nominating him to be director of the CIA. In an interview earlier this month with the Connecticut Post, Shays said that were he to lose his reelection bid, he might run for mayor of Bridgeport, a comment that raised more than a few eyebrows. But if Shays is beginning to contemplate life after Congress, it’s for a good reason: The eight-term incumbent, who has typically been returned to office with over 60 percent of the vote, may well find himself out of work come November 3.
Shays has been targeted for defeat by the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, and partly as a consequence, his opponent, Westport First Selectman Diane Farrell, has been able to match him nearly dollar-for-dollar in fundraising. Although Connecticut’s fourth Congressional District is one of the most affluent in the country and has not sent a Democrat to the House in 36 years, its politics is militantly middle-of-the-road, and Farrell is tapping into widespread antipathy for George W. Bush. Until now, Shays, a textbook New England moderate Republican, has been able to accommodate himself to the rightward march of the national GOP without alienating the voters at home. But thanks to Bush, this may be the year he finally falls off the balance beam.
[…]
President Bush is pulling Shays down. “This is not so much a race about Chris Shays now as it is about George Bush,” says Amy Walter of The Cook Political Report.
Shays isn’t alone — and it’s a point that the national media tends to miss. In several instances, reporters will note that southern Democrats in competitive races (Bowles in N.C., Tenenbaum in S.C., etc.) have little interest in being associated with John Kerry on the campaign trail. The point of these reports is to reinforce the notion that Kerry — a left-of-center senator from Massachusetts — has limited appeal in the Bible Belt.
But these same reporters often miss the fact that similar GOP candidates in the north are equally anxious to keep their distance from their incumbent Republican president. For candidates like Shays, sharing a party ID with Bush is literally putting his career at risk.
The articles about Dem presidential candidates having trouble in the South are so common, they’re cliché. Gore didn’t win any states south of the Mason-Dixon line, we’re told repeatedly. Kerry’s only hope in the South is Florida, which isn’t particularly southern, the conventional wisdom insists.
But the once-solid Republican North has been completely reversed. Kerry will likely win every state in the northeast next week, and in most instances, Bush will not have even tried to compete in the region. The effects, as Chris Shays can tell you, are being felt down-ballot.
In Vermont, for example, incumbent Gov. Jim Douglas (R) is in a tough fight for re-election because, as his Dem rival keeps reminding voters, Douglas is the honorary chairman of the Bush-Cheney ’04 campaign. Indeed, it’s literally the only thing mentioned in anti-Douglas advertising because Dems know Bush’s approval rating in Vermont is about 30 percent.
It’s also not limited to this campaign cycle. Two years ago, Rep. Connie Morella, a liberal Republican from Maryland, lost re-election because voters in her Dem district simply couldn’t stand the idea of having a representative who backed Tom DeLay as the House Majority Leader. Morella, like Shays, was well-liked by her constituents, but voters found her choice of political parties too much to bear.
Just as southerners often complain that the national Dem party is outside their comfort zone, northerners have watched with dismay as the national GOP shifts further and further to the right. It’s reached the point in which Republicans openly mock the entire northeastern region as if it were a foreign country, instead of the one-time GOP base.
This is likely to have long-term consequences — which benefit the Dems. The GOP continues to solidify its support, at least at the presidential level, throughout most of the South, and continues to draw most of its leaders from the region. This seems noteworthy to the press because Dems used to dominate in this part of the country.
In the meantime, the Dems’ map is getting bigger and broader. As The American Prospect’s Nick Confessore recently put it:
Where the South is concerned, the GOP is simply strengthening its margins in a region they already had in the bag, a consequence of trends that began more than three decades ago and have gone about as far as they can. Meanwhile, in the Southwest, the demographic shifts that are turning those states towards the Democrats have only just begun.
And as for Shays, Douglas, and Morella, there’s always the option of switching parties.