What the Special Elections in IL-14 and LA-06 Say About Electoral Politics

Right now, I am working a long post (or perhaps series of posts) on Alaska politics and the two big Federal races there coming up in November. In the meantime, I wanted to write a short follow-up piece to our Childers discussion. Specifically, I wanted to focus on the Democrats' two congressional special election victories in Illinois' Fourteenth District and Louisiana's Sixth District. While Democrats were rightly ecstatic at winning two districts that had long been held by the Republicans, like with Childers victory, I think it is important to properly evaluate why the Democratic candidates won and what precisely the two special races meant in the greater scheme of political happenings this year. While there is no question that the anti-GOP environment played a significant role in both special elections, there are other, perhaps more important reasons why the races ended up as they did.

IL-14. Let's first look at the IL-14 race. On November 15, 2007, after a torrent of speculation over much of 2007, former House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert announced that he would retire from Congress effective immediately. After the Republicans lost the majority in the House of Representatives, Hastert, who had been the longest serving GOP Speaker in history and one of the longest serving Speakers ever, experienced a fall from grace, and dropped out of his caucus's leadership entirely. Given the unusually circumstances of going from Speaker to just a regular Member (the last Speaker before Hastert, Tom Foley, did not have to suffer the same indignity; rather, he faced a worse one when he was defeated in November 1994 on the same night that the Republicans took back the House for the first time in 40 years), there was plenty of talk that Hastert would resign fairly quickly into his term. Nevertheless, Hastert hung on through most of 2007 before announcing his resignation. It is probable that Hastert timed his leaving to ensure that the special election would not fall on February 5, the date of the Democratic presidential primary when it was probable that there would be massive statewide turnout for Ilinois' junior senator, Barack Obama. Hastert argued that this would save the state a good deal of money by avoiding holding both the primaries and the general on special, individual dates. Ultimately, while Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojavich had the authority to move the special election to coincide with the presidential primary, he scheduled the primaries for February 5, and the special election for Saturday, March 8.

To run on the Republican ticket, Hastert recruited wealthy dairy magnate Jim Oberweis, who looked to face State Senator Chris Lauzen in the GOP primary. On the Democratic side, pickings appeared to be slim, with the only names being bandied about being wealthy physicist Bill Foster, attorney Jon Stein, and the Democratic nominee for IL-14 in 2006, John Laesch. Early polling, at least internally from Oberweis, showed the Hastert choice easily beating the three Democrats, but in a tight battle with Lauzen. As the race began to take shape, key Democrats began to coalesce around Foster for the same reason that Hastert pushed Oberweis to get in: he was rich, with ability to self-fund a fairly quick special election campaign. Oberweis and Foster became the clear frontrunners, though each faced difficult primary challenges from their foes, and ultimately while Oberweis prevailed fairly easily, Foster squeaked by Laesch (who had higher name recognition in the district from his spirited 2006 run) by a margin of just over 300 votes, delighting national Democrats who viewed Laesch as a sure loser against the deep-pocketed Oberweis. Immediately afterward, Democrats and the national media played up the results, contending that Foster's victory in Hastert's longtime seat was both a harsh rejection of the Bush administration and the GOP and a sign of worse things to come for congressional Republicans come November.

After the primaries, things began to fall apart for the Republicans, as polling immediately began to expose problems with Oberweis' candidacy. Foster released an internal poll on 2/14 showing him down just 45-43 to the well-known Oberweis, and another poll two weeks later showing him with a 45-41 lead. The ultra popular Sen. Obama then cut an ad for Foster in the closing days of the race, and a final poll showed Foster with a strong seven-point lead. On the rare Saturday night election night, Foster scored a 53-47 victory in the Republican district.

LA-06. Going into the start of 2008, this fairly red PVI R+7 district had been in safe Republican hands for over two decades, and was represented by popular GOP Rep. Richard Baker. In a bit of a surprise, on January 15, Baker announced that he would leave the House on February 6 to take a lucrative position in the lobbying industry. While the DCCC had made rumblings at the start of the year that Rep. Baker was vulnerable, it was never thought that he would leave Congress in the middle of his term, creating an open seat. The Democrats pounced and were able to recruit Don Cazayouz, a conservative Democratic State Representative, into the race. Despite facing a primary challenge from a black State Rep., the DCCC put its weight behind Cazayoux, and he won the special primary in a run-off. On the Republican side, past candidate Woody Jenkins came within a hair of winning the GOP nomination outright in the first round, but he did so in the run-off a couple weeks later over Laurinda Calonge.

Like with IL-14, alarm bells began to sound for the GOP quickly, this time even before the special election campaign began. Word leaked that a GOP internal poll showed Jenkins actually down to Cazayoux, and with awful approval numbers himself. Before the special, a Democratic internal poll gave Cazayoux a five-point lead even though Jenkins had near-universal name recognition. Future polls showed similar results. Given the closeness of the race, and the rare southern opportunity for the blue team, the DCCC began to dump in considerable money, eventually spending $600,000 in the last two weeks of the race, and the NRCC and Freedom's Watch followed suit. This GOP ad blanketed the district. The final poll before the contest showed Cazayoux with a nine-point advantage, an astonishing number given Jeninks' high name recognition and the redness of the district. In the days leading up to the race, I can tell you that the GOP had all but conceded the seat. On Saturday, May 3, Cazayoux scored an impressive, albeit fairly narrow 49-46 victory over Jenkins. Again, many played up the win as a major sea change in the nation's politics.

Forgive me for taking so long to get to my overall point (I guess I just like to talk about these races too much). My basic argument is that while Democrats are and were rightly delighted at snatching two formally long-held Republican districts, the outcomes of the races themselves spoke more to the unique circumstances in each race than any national mood. While I did not reflect on it above, both Jim Oberweis and Woody Jenkins entered their races with an enormous amount of baggage. Oberweis had been a failed candidate for office in Illinois several times, losing in bids for the U.S. Senate in 2002 and 2004, and for governor in 2006. He had high personal negatives, particularly for a candidate who had such high name recognition in his district. Similarly, Jenkins had been a candidate for office before, having lost a squeaker Senate race to Mary Landrieu in 1996 to take the retiring J. Bennett Johnston's seat. While Jenkins had been a State Rep. and a successful publisher, his ties to David Duke and his extremely conservative views were tailor-made for commercials and did not gibe well with many Louisianans in the district, particularly blacks and women.

If Oberweis and Jenkins were so weak, you may ask, why were they pushed into their respective races by influential Republicans?(Though I admit, the NRCC was a bit queasy with Jenkins' candidacy.) The answer is simple: money. Facing a gigantic imbalance versus the DCCC's war chest, the NRCC needed (and continues to need) candidates who can self-fund in whole or in part their campaign. This saves the national party money to spend its meager resources elsewhere. Furthermore, despite their warts, both Oberweis and Jenkins had universal name recognition in their districts, putting them, at least on paper, on solid ground from the start of their runs in that respect.

The problem of course was that both of them had such high negatives from their previous electoral losses and other problems. Oberweis was simply not liked in his district. This column from the Chicago Tribune makes a great argument to this point, though I should point out that I do not agree with the author's contention that the national environment played no role at all in the IL-14 results. Jenkins had a strong base of conservative supporters which delivered for him in the primaries, but in the general he turned off too many blacks and women to put together a winning coalition. The fact that both of them lost to decent, but not superstar Democratic recruits is also telling of these issues. Bill Foster was greatly unknown in his district. In some regards that was helpful, as he had no record which his opponent could latch on to. Foster was also wealthy, and was able to boast his campaign early on to gain the credibility he needed to get endorsements from power players like Sen. Durbin and ultimately, attention and support from the national party. Still, he was an unknown with virtually no electoral experience. Similarly, while Cazayoux was a strong recruit, and his own social views fit very well with the district, he was not a superstar by any means, just a pretty solid nominee. (He was much like Childers in that regard, and his recruitment speaks well to the DCCC's growing wisdom in recruiting candidates for their districts first.( These races were, therefore, more referendums on the Republican nominees than their challengers. The result was then mostly predictable in each.

I am not trying to say of course that the large anti-GOP mood in the country played no role in the races. Of course it did. Bush's huge unpopularity, even in Republican-leaning districts posed a big problem for Oberweis, Jenkins, Greg Davis in MS-01 and for GOP candidates running across the country right now. For anyone to argue otherwise is misguided. My point is simply that these races should all be judged on their individual merits. In some ways it really is a science: the quality of the nominee, or lack thereof, wins or loses a race more than anything else. Jim Foster won because he did not offend anyone, his prickly opponent did, and while the district was around R+5, it was not red enough to carry Oberweis over the finish line. Don Cazayoux won because his conservative social views inoculated him from the traditional lines of Republican attack against generally overly-liberal candidates in red districts, and he did not offend anyone as his opponent did.

Naturally, sometimes, when all things are equal or there is no incumbent running, the better nominee will often lose. However, this does not really repudiate my theory of electoral politics because in nearly all of these races, the district or the state in question just leans too far to the right or the left to be competitive even where the other party's nominee is particularly strong. Examples abound of this phenomenon, but I will use just one. In the 2002 Texas Senate race, Texas Attorney General John Cornyn faced off against black Dallas mayor Ron Kirk. Even though I am a Democrat, and perhaps biased, I do not think anyone within the bounds of fairness could argue that Kirk was not the more impressive of the two, at least from the standpoint of being a better speaker and smarter advocate. In the end, though, that did not matter as Kirk was trounced. Texas was (and still is) too conservative to elect just about any living Democrat statewide. So, there will always be races where a quality opponent will lose simply because of the letter after his name on the ballot.

Where the national environment will play a role can come in other, albeit equally important areas on or inside the margins. The anti-GOP, anti-Bush national mood certainly impacts candidate recruitment, as the GOP has had a much tougher time getting top nominees to run for Congress or Senate. The mood has also hurt GOP fundraising immensely at the NRCC and NRSC, with many people unwilling to donate big dollars on races they feel will be uphill battles. Finally, the reverse effect will exist, as stronger Democratic nominee -- such as Don Cazayoux or Travis Childers -- who may not have run in a tougher environment, will decide to go for it where the national mood favors the Democratic Party. So, the national environment certainly has a key impact on other aspects of a race besides the ultimate vote count on election day, and it plays a role well before ballots are cast, as it can attract nominees and money, thereby setting the table for a possible victory at the end. But the key distinction being that there is a difference between this and expecting ultimate victory solely because of the environment.

In the aftermath of the LA-06 loss, the NRCC sent out a posturing press release which argued that Cazayoux's win was a "warning shot" to Democrats, as their nominee had won by a much closer margin than anticipated. While it is the campaign body's job to posture and never admit fault or defeat, even this statement came off as silly following a loss in a strongly conservative district. I myself laughed when I read it. Still, upon reflection, there is a kernel of truth to the posturing. The fact that Cazayoux only by three points over an incredibly flawed nominee should say something to the Democrats. And that Jenkins is not running in November (to say nothing of an independent candidacy of the sore loser state Rep. who lost to Cazayoux in the special primary), and will be replaced by a less flawed candidate, makes Cazayoux very endangered. I guess time will tell on that race.

But Democrats should not be over-confident on these outcomes. Like in MS-01, the individual circumstances of each district make every race unique. Yes, it is the DCCC's to recruit, posture, and raise money, and yes, the national environment plays a big role in these outcomes early on. It is just important to have proper perspective in these things.