WASHINGTON, Sept. 17 (UPI) -- Out of the 34 U.S. Senate seats being contested in the fall election, 14 are in the northeastern and midwestern United States. These two regions were for many years the Republican Party's political base.
The last 30 years have not been kind to the Republicans in the northeast. The 1974 elections, tainted by the corruption of the Nixon White House, did considerable damage to the GOP in New England -- which has a long tradition of "good government" outside the urban centers of New York City, Boston, Philadelphia and the like. The Watergate scandal tarred the GOP from top-to-bottom in many traditionally Republican areas in New England and they have still not recovered.
The other principal reasons that the northeast has becoming more hospitable to Democrats in the last 30 years has been the change in demographics. Many typically Republican voters have relocated out of the region to the Sunbelt, leaving behind traditional white urban Democrats and their new political partners, mostly black, who now run the political machinery in most of the region's population centers.
Together with the new suburban middle class, who tend towards parsimony where their tax dollars are concerned but are much more liberal on social issues than their forebearers, this electoral combination has been able to wallop the GOP at the ballot box many times over the last three decades.
There are six Senate races on the ballot in November in the northeast. In Delaware Democrat Joseph Biden is seeking re-election to a 6th term in the Senate. He is matched once again against businessman Ray Clatworthy, whom he defeated decisively in 1996. The outcome is not likely to be different this time.
In Massachusetts, where potential presidential candidate John F. Kerry is seeking re-election, and Rhode Island, where first-term Democrat Jack Reed is seeking re-election, the GOP has failed to field a credible opponent.
The Democrats are excited about the possibilities for a pick-up in the state of Maine. Sen. Susan Collins, a Republican, is running for a second term. A former staffer to Republican senator Bill Cohen, Collins was first elected in 1994, defeating former Gov. Joe Brennan, 40 percent to 44 percent. Collins faces Chellie Pingree, the former state Senate majority leader.
A senator who was last elected with less than 50 percent of the vote in a state her party lost for president by 5 points should naturally top the target lists. However, polling data has repeatedly shown Collins to have an overwhelming lead. A RKM Research poll from mid-September had Collins up 59 to 28. Lightening may strike for the Democrats, but they have better aces on the table.
One of those better races may be in the traditional Republican stronghold of New Hampshire, where Rep. John Sununu just defeated two-term incumbent GOP Sen. Bob Smith in a party primary. Sununu now faces Gov. Jeanne Shaheen in the general election.
Pre-primary polls typically showed Sununu running ahead of Shaheen, though the margin varied. Sununu has a reputation as a serious legislator, somewhat less conservative than Smith. Shaheen, who represents the best chance the Democrats have had to win a senate seat in New Hampshire, has seen her approval ratings tumble over the course of the year. For the moment Shaheen has more cash on hand and is attempting to redefine herself as being above partisan politics. For now, Sununu must be considered the front-runner given his strong showing in the primary. The unknown factor in the race is how much support Sununu can get from the 45 percent of GOP primary voters who supported Smith. If he can bring most or all of them on board, and Smith has committed his support for the general election, then he should have no trouble winning.
New Jersey has long sung its seductive siren song to the GOP. Though the party has won the governorship four times in the last 20 years, the Republicans have not won a Senate race in the Garden State since 1972, when Clifford Case was last elected. The list of illustrious and losing Republican candidates is long: former U.S. Rep. Millicent Fenwick, West Point football great Pete Dawkins, and former U.S. Rep. Dick Zimmer, to name but three.
For 2002, the Republicans are fielding businessman Douglas Forrester, a moderate in the mold of former governors Tom Kean and Christine Todd Whitman against first term incumbent Democrat Bob Torricelli. This should not have been a race, but it is -- thanks to Torricelli's casual ethics, which caused him to be reprimanded by his Senate colleagues. Though Al Gore and Joe Lieberman carried New Jersey by 16 points in 2002, the polling data has shown the race to be, for Torricelli at least, uncomfortably close. "The Torch" as friends and enemies alike know him, may be the next legislator to fall victim to the ethically charged climate that appears to be hovering over the fall election. But no one should forget how strong a campaigner he is. Moreover, for good or bad, Torricelli is, stylistically as well as in the way he establishes his political priorities, a good fit for the state.
The economic downturns of the 70s and early 1980s produced political gold for the Democrats in the Midwest. They were able to gain sizable majorities in traditionally Republican areas of states like Michigan, Indiana and Illinois. The Reagan and Clinton booms helped the GOP regain some of that footing in the late 80s and 90s but the recent economic upsets may once again tilt the scales in the other direction.
One trend worth noting is that the Reaganite Republicans who were elected to office in the region were a dramatic departure from the green-eye shade isolationists who preceded them. That trend has continued, with Republicans with new, limited government approaches rising within the party ranks as potential replacements for defeated or retiring GOP lions like former Wisconsin Gov. Tommy Thompson, Michigan Gov. John Engler, former Indianapolis Mayor Stephen Goldsmith and former Wisconsin Sen. Bob Kasten, a leading light of the supply-side movement.
The Democrats have likewise been forced to transform the party in the Midwest in order to remain politically viable over the last 20 years. It is no longer enough in states like Illinois, Iowa and Minnesota to be the endorsed candidate of organized labor in order to win election, let alone a party nomination. The new economy has caused both parties to reshape themselves in a more appealing fashion.
Eight of the 34 Senate races on the ballot in November are in states in the Midwest -- generously defined. Of those, four are likely not going to be competitive contests. The incumbents in Kansas, Illinois, Michigan and Nebraska are in little to no danger of losing their seats.
One race of increasing interest to observers is the Iowa contest between three-term Sen. Tom Harkin, a Democrat, and Republican Rep. Greg Ganske. Harkin is a political power in the state like that which has not been seen in a generation or more. A former House member, Harking won his first term in the Senate by knocking off the scandal-tainted GOP incumbent, one-termer Roger Jepsen. In his two successive bids, Harkin beat two Republican House members, both of whom were believed to have been first-tier candidates against Harkin at the campaign's outset.
Republicans are nevertheless encouraged by the fact that, in each of his re-election campaigns, Harkin's winning margin has dropped. In 1990, he defeated U.S. Rep. Tom Tauke by a margin of 54 percent to 46 percent. Six years later, he beat Rep. Jim Ross Lightfoot by only 52 percent to 47 percent in spite of outspending Lightfoot 2 1/2 to 1.
Ganske comes from a part of the state where Harkin is typically strong. However, he also hails from the more moderate wing of the national GOP, making him more liberal than the grassroots party activists he needs to win. Harkin should be safe -- he is just over 50 percent in most statewide polls and leads Ganske by almost 10 points -- but the GOP intends to put a lot of money into Iowa in an effort to make it a race.
The most important three races in the Midwest are in Minnesota, where two-term Democrat Paul Wellstone is facing off against former St. Paul mayor Norm Coleman; in South Dakota, where Sen. Tim Johnson is in a tough race against Rep. John Thune; and in Missouri, where appointed Sen. Jean Carnahan is being challenged by former U.S Rep. Jim Talent.
Wellstone, a Democrat who was first elected in 1990, may be in the race of his life. First elected as an outsider and reformer, he has reliably hewed to the left in his 12 years in the Senate. One of his principal stumbling blocks to election this fall is that in his original campaign he swore to the voters that he would only serve two terms. That broken pledge has not gone over well with Minnesota voters who are used to so-called good government senators like Gene McCarthy and former vice presidents Hubert Humphrey and Walter Mondale.
The state has been trending right in recent years, most noticeably in the election of the right-leaning populist Jesse Ventura as governor in a three-way race that saw the Democrat candidate finish third. Bill Clinton only got 51 percent of the vote in Minnesota in 1996 and George Bush lost it narrowly in 2000, winning 47 percent of the vote. Wellstone has won election to the senate each time with 50 percent of the vote and no more.
Running against Wellstone is former St. Paul Mayor Norm Coleman, a former Democrat heavily recruited into the race by the White House. Coleman finished second in the 1998 race for governor, winning 34 percent of the vote to Ventura's 37 percent.
Polls have shown this race close from the outset. A Republican POS poll on Sept. 8-9 shows Coleman leading Wellstone 44 percent to 40 percent, a trend evident in earlier polls. The biggest danger to Wellstone's aspirations for a third term is the presence of a Green Party candidate in the race. If Wellstone's ceiling is 50 percent, as his two previous campaigns and the current polling data suggest, having the Green Party candidate get even 2 percent at the pools could be fatal.
Democrat Sen. Tim Johnson and GOP Rep. John Thune are almost an after thought in this South Dakota Senate race. To most observers, they are merely surrogates for President George W. Bush and Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle, South Dakota's senior senator and the man who has blocked much of the Bush agenda from becoming law. If the race turns on state issues, then Johnson should be considered the favorite. Daschle has been doing a lot of arm-twisting to save his junior colleague.
If the race turns on national issues, as the Republicans hope it will, then Thune has to be considered the frontrunner. Bush carried the state with 60 percent of the vote. Thune was re-elected to his House seat in 2000 with 73 percent of the vote, winning 65,000 more votes than Johnson did winning his first senate term in 1996.
In the final midwestern race, Missouri Sen. Jean Carnahan and former U.S. Rep. Jim Talent face off in a special election to determine who will finish out the term to which Carnahan's late husband, former Gov. Mel Carnahan, was elected posthumously in 2000.
The polling data has found the race close with the lead seesawing back and forth between the two. After a rocky start, Talent seems to have found his footing while Carnahan sacrificed her widow's halo when she voted against the confirmation of former Sen. John Ashcroft to be attorney general. A Research 2000 poll from early September found Carnahan ahead by 1 point, well within the margin of error. While Talent narrowly lost the 2000 governor's race, he is expected to run better this time out. Talent represented a congressional district in the St. Louis suburbs, where he over-performed, while under-performing in the typically more Republican rural parts of Missouri that was the political base of the Democrat who won.
The polls will likely continue to move back and forth as the campaign moves ahead. It is unlikely that a clear winner will be seen much before the election, which could be bad news for the GOP.
Between the northeast and the Midwest there are five competitive races out of a total of 14 in the region -- or just under 15 percent of the total of all Senate races for the cycle.
--
(Thursday: The South and The West)
