So how good could 2010 be for Republicans running for the House of Representatives?
A phenomenal year is now in the cards, which is obviously not the same as saying that it will be a phenomenal year. In any off-year, discussion of the following year’s House races usually frames the battle for control of the chamber as a reflection of national mood. But even after elections that brought dramatic swings in the two parties’ fortunes — 1994, 2006 — the ascending party wonders if it let winnable seats slip through its fingers. In the end, control of the House comes down to 435 unique races taking place in a national climate favoring one party or the other.
“Environment matters, but you have to have all your ships in the sea, with their sails up, and pointed in the right direction,” says Brian Walsh, political director of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC).
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In other words, if you want to have victories driven by the national mood, you have to have good candidates; you can’t have lazy campaigners or guys from the wrong part of their district, and your candidates have to talk about the right issues. One Capitol Hill Republican mused that the party hopes to have 60 good, competitive races next fall in districts currently held by Democrats, and to face the delightful dilemma of where to spend limited resources; another argued that the number really ought to be 80. This is not to say that either of these Republicans thinks the party will win that many seats, but they do believe that each of these is a potentially winnable race under the right circumstances.
It all starts with the candidates. “We have a goal for how many candidates we recruit each quarter, and each quarter we’ve blown past that goal,” Walsh says.
As of now, Republicans are high on former congressman Steve Pearce’s bid to regain his New Mexico seat, and on Ohio state senator Steve Stivers’s rematch against Democrat Mary Jo Kilroy, whom he came within 2,312 votes of beating in 2008. Other strong prospects are Montgomery city councilwoman Martha Roby in Alabama’s 2nd District, Assemblyman Van Tran in California’s 47th, and former congressman Steve Chabot in Ohio’s 1st.
One of the Republicans’ favorites, based just on biography, is Adam Kinzinger in Illinois’s 11th District. Two years ago, Kinzinger, a captain in the Air National Guard, had just left a Milwaukee nightclub with some friends. Suddenly he heard a woman screaming, “He cut my throat!” Her knife-wielding attacker lunged for her again, and Kinzinger managed to grab his wrist, wrestle him to the ground, and hold him while one of his friends called the police. Kinzinger was named Hero of the Year by the Milwaukee Red Cross. He has also been awarded the Valley Forge Cross for Heroism for his service in Iraq.
Sometimes luck is on your side. In most elections, even a grade-A candidate like two-term Honolulu city councilman Charles Djou would have a tough time in heavily Democratic Hawaii. But he’ll be running against an unknown Democrat who is likely to be waging a tough primary campaign until September 18.
There is a logjam in Colorado’s 4th District, where three strong Republicans have declared their interest in the seat: the popular and respected state representative Cory Gardner; Tom Lucero, a University of Colorado regent who led the fight against Ward Churchill; and Diggs Brown, a Green Beret major in the U.S. Army National Guard (Brown has not yet formally filed his candidacy because he’s currently deployed with the U.S. Army Special Forces). The good news for Republicans is that unless the primary gets nasty, they’ll have a strong candidate against the incumbent, Betsy Markey, who seemed strangely hesitant about town-hall meetings with constituents during the summer recess.
You can’t help wishing one of those guys could run in a neighboring district — which is precisely what entrepreneur Steve Welch is doing in Pennsylvania. Welch had intended to run in the 7th District, where he lives. However, former Delaware County district attorney Pat Meehan announced his candidacy first. Instead of facing a contested primary, Welch decided to run in the 6th district, where he was born and where his business is based. A Republican source also noted that the expected Senate candidate, Pat Toomey, is so far polling well in all of the key House districts.
Colorado’s Betsy Markey, who was elected for the first time last year, is representative of a phenomenon bedeviling quite a few Democrats these days. In 2006, Democratic challengers could run against the Abramoff scandal and the “culture of corruption.” In 2008, they could be carried along by the tide of Obama enthusiasm, the exhaustion with President Bush, and the sudden onset of severe economic troubles. This year, these Democrats are the issue — and specifically, how they’ve responded to rising unemployment, a stimulus that doesn’t seem to stimulate, a massive health-care overhaul full of ominous details, a cap-and-trade bill that won’t sell in energy-producing districts, and a world that may or may not seem safer than it was when George W. Bush sat in the Oval Office.
