Tuesday’s Results Don’t Change the Political Trajectories

By Stuart Rothenberg

If Tuesday’s results demonstrate anything, it is that both parties remain deeply divided in their races for president.

The only difference is that the GOP’s winner-take-all system and three-way race is allowing Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) to open up a clear, and probably decisive, lead over his opponents, while Democratic Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.) are locked in the tightest race in recent history.

If you are looking for one state that epitomizes the competitiveness and direction of the two contests, you need look no further than the exit polls from Missouri’s open primary (which allowed registered voters to participate in the primary of their choice), the bellwether state that was tighter than a drum on Tuesday.

In the GOP contest, McCain won all 58 of the delegates at stake by finishing third among self-identified Republican voters but winning a clear plurality of self-identified independents.

McCain once again easily won self- described moderate Republicans, who constituted just a quarter of primary voters, while drawing just under one-quarter of conservatives. Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee (38 percent) and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (33 percent) divided conservatives.

As he has elsewhere, McCain did particularly well among critics of the Bush administration, those who disapprove of the war in Iraq and GOP primary voters who said that abortion should remain legal.

Geography also tells a story.

While Huckabee ran very credibly statewide in Missouri and throughout the South, his showing in and around the Show Me State’s metropolitan areas was unimpressive at best.

He ran a weak third in two important St. Louis suburban areas, St. Charles County and St. Louis County (by far the most populous county in the state). He also fared poorly in the two big Kansas City-area counties, Jackson and Clay, once again running a distant third.

Romney nosed out McCain in the two Kansas City-area counties and beat the Arizonan by 3 points in St. Charles, while McCain beat Romney in St. Louis County by 4 points.

Those county results confirm what exit polls through the country showed: Huckabee is a Southern candidate with considerable appeal to evangelical Christians, but relatively little strength beyond that group. It is, of course, a group of considerable importance to Republicans in some parts of the country, but it doesn’t establish the former Arkansas governor as a contender for the nomination in a three-way contest that includes Romney.

On the Democratic side, the divisions in the Show Me State reflected similar lines of fracture in the Democratic contest that we have all seen in earlier contests and that we saw throughout Tuesday.

Clinton did well among older voters (winning voters 65 and older by almost 2-1), while Obama had clear and convincing victories among Democratic primary voters age 18-39.

She also won self-identified Democrats (though only by 3 points), while Obama won independents by more than 2-1 and Republicans by more than 3-1. Independents made up 22 percent of Democratic primary voters, while 6 percent of those voters identified themselves as Republicans.

The New York Senator easily won voters from union households, who constituted more than one-quarter of all Democratic primary voters, while Obama won non-union households by 10 points, according to the exit poll.

Looking nationally, Hispanics (the exit poll refers to them as Latinos) are a crucial part of the Democratic coalition, and Obama has a problem with them. They accounted for almost 30 percent of Democratic primary voters in California, and Clinton won them by 40 points according to the exit poll. She also won them overwhelmingly in her home state, New York, and in neighboring New Jersey. She won them more narrowly, but still by a healthy dozen points, in Arizona.

Obama won Hispanics in Connecticut (where he lost white voters by only a single point to Clinton) and very narrowly in Illinois.

However, the Illinois result should be of considerable concern to the Obama campaign, for while he carried 57 percent of white Democratic primary voters in his home state, according to the Illinois exit poll, he barely nosed out Clinton among Illinois Democratic Hispanics by only a single percentage point.

With Texas coming up on March 4, Hispanics could give the former first lady a leg up for that important Democratic contest.

In state after state, Obama now racks up huge majorities among black voters, but he has carried a plurality of white voters in only one primary state, Illinois. (His caucus victories in states such as Alaska, Kansas and Idaho suggest, of course, that he is winning white Democrats in those states as well.)

The contest for the Democratic nomination shows no signs of being resolved anytime in the near future. Wisconsin on Feb. 19 and both Ohio and Texas on March 4 surely will be major skirmishes, with the Clinton and Obama campaigns each hoping to establish itself as the clear favorite for the party’s nomination.

This column first appeared in Roll Call on February 7, 2008. Copyright 2008 © Roll Call Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Ohio 2: A Nightmare of a Congressional Race

By Stuart Rothenberg

Every so often, I come across a great House race, such as the 2000 Michigan open-seat race where voters were lucky enough to be able to choose between Mike Rogers (R) and Diane Byrum (D). Those voters couldn’t lose, since both candidates clearly deserved to be in Congress. (Rogers won that race by 111 votes out of almost 300,000 cast.)

This year, I stumbled across the opposite of that Michigan race. The contest in Ohio’s 2nd district may well be the worst Congressional contest I’ve ever witnessed.

The southern Ohio district gave George W. Bush 64 percent of the vote in 2004 and 63 percent four years earlier. It’s a conservative bastion.

If you are a Republican and not under indictment, you shouldn’t have a hard time holding the district. Yet the district’s Congresswoman, Rep. Jean Schmidt, barely won re-election last time and again is in a fight for her political life.

Schmidt, who was then a former state legislator, was the surprise winner of an 11-candidate Republican primary to fill the seat left open when Republican Rob Portman became the Bush administration’s trade envoy in 2005. She won that primary with just 31 percent, and went on to squeak out a win in the special election by just 4 points.

The Republican got off on the wrong foot in Washington, D.C., when, shortly after her election, she called Rep. John Murtha (D-Pa.) a coward. She subsequently apologized, but the damage was done.

In 2006, Schmidt narrowly beat former Rep. Bob McEwen (R) by 5 points in the primary. McEwen had finished second to Schmidt in the special primary following Portman’s resignation. Then she won the general election by only 1 point. This year, she faces a primary challenge from state Rep. Tom Brinkman, who finished third in the special 2005 primary.

I don’t know Schmidt, so I can’t speak about her. But lots of Republicans don’t seem to like her. She had two close calls last time, and her own January 2008 poll shows her barely cracking 50 percent among GOP voters.

Brinkman filed with the Federal Election Commission on Dec. 19 and announced his candidacy officially on Jan. 3, the day before the filing deadline.

Why did he wait so late to decide on running? A Brinkman supporter told my colleague, Nathan Gonzales, that the legislator made the decision to run at the end of the year because “no one was stepping up to take on the incumbent.”

In fact, while Brinkman was sitting on his hands, former Hamilton County Commissioner Phil Heimlich (R) filed with the FEC in May and was actively raising money and running against Schmidt.

In the candidates’ Sept. 30 FEC report, Heimlich showed that he had raised more money than the Congresswoman and had twice as much on hand as she did. As of Dec. 31, he had $266,000 in the bank to Schmidt’s $125,000. Moreover, Schmidt’s own poll showed her leading Heimlich by only 52 percent to 31 percent, with Brinkman trailing badly at 9 percent.

Veteran Ohio politicians say Brinkman doesn’t raise much money and doesn’t run good campaigns. The one thing he’s done this cycle is drive a credible primary challenger to Schmidt out of the primary.

Given the weakness of Schmidt and Brinkman, you’d think that the seat might simply fall into the Democratic nominee’s lap. And it might, even if Democrats once again nominate Victoria Wulsin. (Party switcher Steve Black is also in the Democratic race.)

Wulsin, a physician with a specialty in epidemiology, has an impressive résumé including an M.D. from Case Western and a doctorate in public health from Harvard.

But for a candidate running for the third time, Wulsin is, to put it mildly, scattered in her thinking. For example, she’s an anti-war candidate who says that she isn’t sure how she would have voted on the supplemental spending bill that has funded the war.

Wulsin ran a TV spot last month in which she pledged, “As your Representative, I will refuse Congressional health care until Congress does its job and passes affordable health care for all.”

Sounds like quite a sacrifice, doesn’t it? Of course, it isn’t, since Wulsin is covered under her husband’s “gold-plated” health care plan. When I asked her about this, she talked about the symbolism of her stand and the fact that Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland (D) made the same pledge previously.

Then, toward the end of the interview, with half a dozen other reporters present, Wulsin referred to her son as “a nice liberal, like his mother.” Hmmm.

When asked about that comment, Wulsin went through a lengthy verbal contortion to try to explain that she really is both conservative and liberal. “What I mean by [liberal],” said the pro-abortion rights Democrat at one point, “is that I want change.”

But what, asked a reporter, did she mean when she said that she was conservative on family issues? “I think marriage is great. I think motherhood and fatherhood is great,” she explained.

What about gay marriage? “I don’t think that the federal government should tell any church what to do or who to marry. I’m all for equal rights,” said Wulsin, digging herself deeper.

Anyway, Wulsin might well get elected to Congress. But if she does, it’s only because of Schmidt. And Schmidt might win. But if she does, it’s only because the district is so Republican. And Brinkman might win. But if he does, it’s only because of Schmidt.

This column first appeared in Roll Call on February 4, 2008. Copyright 2008 © Roll Call Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

For GOP, Florida Brings Another Dose of Worrisome News

By Stuart Rothenberg

Republicans got more bad news on Tuesday. No, it isn’t that Arizona Sen. John McCain has emerged as the frontrunner for the GOP nomination. That’s actually good news for party officials, since McCain may well be the only Republican who has a chance to hold the White House for another four years for his party.

The bad news is that Tuesday’s balloting once again exposed a deep division with the Republican Party.

McCain proved to be the choice of moderates and liberals, the less religious, pro-abortion-rights Republicans, voters who were critical of the Bush administration and voters who had a pessimistic view of the economy.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, was backed by conservatives, voters who said they favored making abortion illegal, supporters of the Bush administration and voters optimistic about the economy.

Maybe even more interesting, while the Florida primary was a “closed” primary contest in which only registered Republicans could vote, a not unsubstantial 17 percent of GOP primary voters identified themselves as “independents,” and those voters accounted for McCain’s winning margin.

We cannot know whether these “independents” are former Republicans who have not yet changed their party registration, or whether they have been and remain reliably Republican voters who simply prefer the “independent” label. But we do know that for the fifth major GOP contest in a row, McCain failed to win a clear plurality of self-identified Republicans. Romney and McCain split that group, each winning 33 percent.

Conservatives simply have not yet warmed to McCain (Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee won a plurality of them in South Carolina, while Romney won a plurality of those voters in New Hampshire, Michigan and now Florida), and it isn’t clear they ever will. They may, of course, eventually vote for him, but actually warming to him is a different issue.

Republicans seem divided between those who strongly want change — and are backing McCain in primary after primary — and those who remain upbeat about their president and the country, who have been more comfortable with Romney.

Perhaps the most surprising thing about McCain’s victory was his win among those voters who cited the economy as the most important issue. It was Romney, of course, who stressed his ability to handle economic issues, while McCain always stressed national security and the war in Iraq and against terrorism.

Even though Florida Republicans said the economy is the most important issue of the day, it appears they did not vote that way. Instead, they backed McCain because of his “personal qualities,” not issues, and because he represents change.

McCain surely now has an advantage in the GOP race, and he should benefit from the exit and endorsement of former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. But Romney has the ability to spend heavily for Super Tuesday if he so chooses, giving him one last opportunity to mobilize conservatives and anti-McCain voters, especially in closed primary states. The ball is now in his court.

If the Republican results in Florida reminded us again of divisions within the GOP, the Democratic turnout in the state, in a primary with no delegates at stake, is a reminder of the Democrats’ enthusiasm.

But that doesn’t mean Tuesday night was not without its problems for the Democrats.

With the state stripped by the Democratic National Committee of all of its delegates, and all three of the major candidates still in the race promising not to campaign in the state, the sight of New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton cheering on enthusiastic supporters and claiming victory bordered on the bizarre.

True, Clinton received plenty of votes in the primary, and she probably would have carried the state even if she, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama and former Sen. John Edwards (N.C.) had competed in the state for delegates. But Clinton’s sudden effort to get the state’s delegates seated in Denver smacks of dirty tricks and fundamental unfairness.

Given the hardball that the Clintons have played over the past few weeks, her tactics can only inflame the Obama campaign and the Illinois Democrat’s supporters, as well as reinforce the perception that the Clintons will do anything to win.

It could well be that the Clinton campaign is more than willing to accept that risk for the sake of building momentum going into Feb. 5, especially after Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy endorsed Obama.

But Clinton appears to have a narrow advantage going into Feb. 5 anyway, and her campaign’s heavy-handed attempt to wring a benefit from a Florida beauty contest in which no delegates were at stake, and where neither she nor Obama campaigned heavily, does not put the Senator or her campaign in a favorable light.

This column first appeared in Roll Call on January 31, 2008. Copyright 2008 © Roll Call Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

New Print Edition: Nevada 3 & Ohio 2

The January 30, 2008 print edition of the Rothenberg Political Report is on its way to subscribers. The print edition comes out every two weeks and the content is not available online. Subscribers get in-depth analysis of the most competitive races in the country, as well as quarterly House and Senate ratings, and coverage of the gubernatorial races nationwide. To subscribe, simply click on the Google checkout button on the website or send a check.

Here is a brief sample of what's in this edition...

Nevada 3: One Ticket to Paradise
By Nathan L. Gonzales

Nevada Cong. Jon Porter is no stranger to Democratic target lists. Since his initial election in 2002, the Republican congressman has drawn consistent attention from Democrats looking to take over his 3rd District seat.

Democrats have yet to topple Porter, but his Clark County district was drawn to be politically competitive, and its exploding population virtually guarantees he will have another tough reelection fight.

Thus far, Porter has defeated a diverse group of Democratic candidates, including a wealthy gaming executive, a 30 year-old former Hill staffer, and a Clark County commissioner who went from Democratic rising star to a federal prison camp in Colorado after a strip club scandal.

After a number of more prominent elected officials took a pass on the race this cycle, Democratic hopes are riding on former Chief Deputy District Attorney Robert Daskas. The full story is available in the print edition.

Ohio 2: Popular Target

The only thing that changes is the year. Republican Cong. Jean Schmidt has been in Congress for less than thirty months, but she still faces critics and candidates from both sides of the aisle. Her outspoken style, comments on the House floor, and consistently poor showing in the polls makes her a consistent target in southwestern Ohio’s 2nd District.

Despite her detractors, Schmidt won four elections (primary and general elections) within a span of fifteen months, and survived the Democratic wave of 2006.

The congresswoman seemed to catch a break this cycle when former Hamilton County Commissioner Phil Heimlich dropped out of the Republican primary after mounting a spirited and well-funded challenge.

But Schmidt still faces state Rep. Tom Brinkman in the GOP primary, with Democrats Victoria Wulsin (the 2006 nominee) and attorney Steve Black vying for the right to take her on in the general election.

Under most any other circumstances, this Republican-heavy district wouldn’t be competitive, but some Republicans are concerned that Schmidt will be able to pull defeat from the jaws of victory. The full story is available in the print edition.