Many Republicans Look Ready to Gamble on Immigration Reform

By Stuart Rothenberg

A fight on Capitol Hill over immigration reform now appears inevitable, even though it carries considerable risk for the GOP. Rank-and-file Republicans are up in arms over illegal immigration into the United States, and they are demanding legislative action.

Nothing illustrates the division within Republican ranks on the issue more clearly than the very different approaches being taken by Arizona’s two Republican Senators.

Sens. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) have introduced a bill that would allow illegal immigrants in this country to continue working in the United States, eventually earning permanent residency if they meet certain conditions.

McCain’s Senate colleague in the Grand Canyon State, Jon Kyl (R), not only hasn’t signed onto McCain’s bill, but he and Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) have introduced an alternative bill that would require illegal immigrants to leave the country before they apply to return as temporary workers.

McCain’s approach is much closer to the one initially preferred by President Bush, who proposed a guest worker program that would allow aliens in this country illegally to obtain green cards to work in the United States for an extended period.

But while many GOP allies in the business community applauded the White House’s proposal, and while "establishment" Republicans generally found favor with the approach, most conservatives reacted angrily, saying the idea rewarded illegal immigrants with "amnesty."

Whatever the Senate decides, House Republicans already have their collective minds made up. They clearly are more concerned with getting illegal aliens out of the country, and keeping them out, than with finding a way to allow aliens to work in the country.

Rather than producing a comprehensive bill, House Republicans seem to prefer dealing with the issue in two separate steps. The first bill would deal with border security and enforcement, while a subsequent measure takes up the guest worker issue. But you don’t have to speak with many House Republicans to understand that many of them wouldn’t care if they ever get to the second bill.

While analysts have been talking for months about the issue and its potential to shape next year’s campaigns, immigration already has become a thorny political issue, showing up in a handful of 2004 races, mostly GOP primaries.

Last cycle, Illinois Senate candidate Jim Oberweis ran a TV spot that warned "illegal aliens are coming here to take American workers’ jobs." In Arizona’s 8th district and Utah’s 3rd district, GOP primary challengers tried to use immigration to deny renomination to Reps. Jim Kolbe and Chris Cannon. And the anti-immigration Coalition for the Future American Worker ran TV spots against Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-Neb.) and two Democrats, then-Sen. Tom Daschle (S.D.) and then-Rep. Martin Frost (Texas), for their immigration positions.

Rules Chairman David Dreier (R-Calif.) saw his winning percentage plummet after being bludgeoned for backing Bush on guest workers.

Immigration already shows signs of being a big issue in next year’s elections. This year, state Sen. John Campbell (R), the favorite to win a special election to fill former Rep. Christopher Cox’s (R) open California House seat, has aired a TV spot in which he bragged that he "is working to stop illegal immigration."

Curbing illegal immigration is the primary issue for Canyon County Commissioner Robert Vasquez in a multicandidate Republican primary in Idaho’s 1st district. "I’m not a hyphenated American," Vasquez said. "I speak Spanish, I eat enchiladas. I appreciate my culture, but I love my country."

But while the immigration issue has the potential to rally the party’s conservative base and provide the GOP with an issue that could alter the overall national debate, it could also create a civil war within the Republican Party.

McCain already has mocked the opposing Senate bill, referring to it as "report to deport," and plenty of Republicans, including those in the business community, oppose punitive legislation that doesn’t allow undocumented aliens to work in jobs that many Americans don’t see as appealing.

Some Republicans also openly worry that the party will be branded as "racist" and "anti-Hispanic" if Congress deals with the issue as most House Republicans prefer. They note the problems California Republicans have had with Hispanic voters ever since then-Gov. Pete Wilson (R) took on illegal immigrants in his 1994 re-election campaign.

Not all party insiders agree with that fear, however. One GOP operative told me he doubts that is a huge problem as long as Republicans emphasize the "illegal" aspect.

Adding into the political equation on the issue is that the president’s standing in public opinion polls encourages House and Senate Republicans to fight him on immigration, regardless of what position he takes. As one consultant told me, "There are a significant number of Republicans looking to split with the president, as a way of helping them survive in ’06. That’s a piece of the puzzle, too."

Even with immigration reform’s potential downside, some party strategists believe immigration could emerge as an issue that Republicans can ride from now all of the way to next November. As one Republican strategist told me recently, "Better [immigration] than the other ‘I’ word" - Iraq.

This column first appeared in Roll Call on October 24, 2005. Copyright 2005 © Roll Call Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Democratic Strategists, Take Note: It’s Time to Think Big

By Stuart Rothenberg

For the first time in a dozen years, the political environment looks right for generic party advertising. But tight finances and the difficulty in getting party committees to agree on a single message could dampen interest in a strategy that worked well in 1980 and 1982 but poorly ever since.

If that last paragraph seems vaguely familiar, you have an extraordinary memory. It led off a column that appeared in this space on July 15, 1993. Then, as now, I was convinced that a national advertising campaign and a national message would benefit the "out" party in the next midterm election.

Republicans didn’t take my advice (so what else is new?), but they were able to nationalize the 1994 elections by making them a referendum on then-President Bill Clinton and his agenda, riding a tsunami to control of Congress.

I generally dismiss early TV political ads, finding them wasteful and ineffective. Normally, only consultants, not their clients, benefit from early ads. But this isn’t a typical election cycle.

With President Bush’s poll numbers down, Congressional job approval in the tank, Republican ethics problems making headlines and conservatives less than enthusiastic about the nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court, Democrats need to do everything they can to create a "national election."

A Democratic nationwide television advertising campaign can help make every race a referendum on the president, the Republican Congress and the status quo. It’s worked before.

The most effective national party advertising campaign ran in 1980, when the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee and the National Republican Senatorial Committee pooled their resources to fund an advertising campaign that cost $8 million - an extraordinary amount of money two decades ago.

The spots began airing in late January 1980, more than nine months before the general election. In one ad, an actor who looked like Speaker Tip O’Neill (D-Mass.) ran out of gas. The spot’s tag line was: "Vote Republican. For a Change."

That fall, Republicans picked up 34 House seats and 12 Senate seats, giving them control of the Senate for the first time in almost 40 years and yanking power away from a Democratic Party that had controlled the House, Senate and presidency for the past four years.

Two years later, with the country in recession, Democrats ran their own effective generic advertising effort - a TV ad campaign proclaiming, "It’s not fair. It’s Republican." The party picked up 26 House seats.

So far, House Democratic leaders apparently have been spending most of their time trying to create a party message for the cycle. They are concerned about offering a positive agenda to counter Republican complaints that Democrats do nothing but criticize and stand for nothing.

That’s not what I’m talking about. In fact, there is no reason for Democrats to rush out an agenda of their own this fall.

Many people assume that the "Contract with America" contributed in some way to the GOP’s election success in 1994, but it’s a conclusion disputed by some Republican operatives actively involved in the cycle. Notably, that agenda wasn’t unveiled until Sept. 27, just five weeks before the election.

In fact, the phrase "Contract with America" didn’t appear in this newspaper until an article in late July, and then it was presented simply as an initiative on which the House Republican Conference was working. Until that point, Republicans focused exclusively on the Democrats’ failings.

Democrats don’t need to offer a positive agenda until next year. For the near future, they can do just fine pointing to the Republicans’ problems.

But a couple of waves of early TV advertising - possibly using the "together, we can do better" tag that has tested so well in focus groups - could help position the Democrats as the party of change and reform.

Some Democrats not only agree with me, they believe that the ads will come.

"The issue isn’t whether we should run ads, but when," one well-placed Democrat told me recently. "How we get the dollars and what the ads are going to say will be decided later. But there is no disagreement [among Democratic decision-makers] about whether to do the ads."

Other Democrats, though, are more cautious about the inevitability of a generic Democratic advertising campaign.

As it was back in 1993, money is again an issue now that soft money is not available to the parties.

Some insiders flatly predict that the Democratic National Committee will lack the resources to fund an ad, and even Democrats who support national generic advertising admit that the party would have to raise money specially for such an advertising effort. I would counter that a successful advertising effort could create a flood of new money for the party’s candidates and committees if Democratic donors smell blood in the water.

Other Democrats wonder whether party insiders who would have a role in any decision on a national TV campaign - the chairs of the two campaign committees, the party’s House and Senate leaders and an endless list of consultants - could possibly agree on what to say and when to say it.

My 1993 column ended by suggesting that if Clinton remained weak, a Republican generic advertising campaign might "force Democrats to defend more seats" and "help turn a small wave into a tsunami." That’s how I feel now, except that the beneficiaries this cycle would be Democrats, not the GOP.

This column first appeared in Roll Call on October 17, 2005. Copyright 2005 © Roll Call Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Is the House GOP’s Ace in the Hole Really a Deuce?

By Stuart Rothenberg

This week’s CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll numbers aren’t startling because they weren’t different from others we’ve seen recently. The president’s job ratings are bad. Congress’ job rating is low. A majority of Americans think the country is headed off on the wrong track.

But while National Republican Congressional Committee operatives have acknowledged the national mood is sour, they gamely argue that their incumbents are in much better shape than you might think.

"While generic polls have value, polls that gauge the likelihood of voters to vote to re-elect their own Member of Congress are far more meaningful," two NRCC communications staffers wrote in a mid-October memo.

The NRCC memo noted a September Pew Research Center poll that asked, "Would you like to see your representative in Congress re-elected in the next congressional election, or not?" found 57 percent saying they favored re-election. Only 25 percent opposed their representative’s re-election.

Well, I’m not convinced, especially after doing some digging through old poll numbers. I went back to similar polling in 1993 and 1994, before the Republican wave of 1994 swept Democrats out of the majority in the House and Senate, and found two interesting points.

First, the Pew results aren’t all that different from some poll results released a dozen years ago.

In June 1993 and January 1994, Yankelovich Partners asked a similarly worded question about voters’ own House Members in Time/CNN surveys: "In your view, does the U.S. representative from your area deserve to be reelected or not?"

Both surveys found 57 percent of respondents saying that their Representative should be re-elected. In fact, the results from the January poll were identical to the recent Pew poll - 57 percent said their Representative deserved to be re-elected, while 25 percent said they did not.

Gallup polls for CNN and USA Today from July 1993 to March 1994 asked a question that was worded much like the Yankelovich and recent Pew polls, and it produced similarly high results of support for incumbent re-election.

The Gallup surveys asked respondents whether their U.S. Representative "deserves to be reelected," and found 54 percent to 62 percent answering in the affirmative.

All of that sounded good for incumbents, didn’t it? But it wasn’t.

As we know, voters in 1994 tossed out 34 House Democrats seeking to return to office (and not a single Republican), even though the Gallup and Yankelovich numbers in the fall and winter showed a solid majority of Americans thought their Representatives should be re-elected.

That’s not great news for anyone citing last month’s Pew numbers in making their case that the situation isn’t all that bad for House Republicans right now.

But there is a second reason the Pew numbers should be viewed with caution. The wording of questions appears to be crucial in explaining the Pew, Gallup and Yankelovich numbers I just cited.

The ABC/Washington Post and NBC/Wall Street Journal polls of 1993 and 1994 asked respondents whether their Representative "deserved" to be re-elected or whether they were "inclined" to vote to re-elect their Representative in Congress.

But, unlike the polls that produced good numbers for incumbents, the ABC/Post and NBC/WSJ polls attached an additional clause that asked "or are you inclined to look around for someone else to vote for?" (ABC/Washington Post) and "or do you think it is time to give a new person a chance?" (NBC/WSJ).

When the question included an explicit alternative to re-electing the incumbent House Member, those being polled were much less likely to answer that their Representative should be sent back to Washington, D.C.

Specifically, the November 1993 ABC/Post poll found only 38 percent saying that their Representative should be re-elected, while 52 percent said they were inclined to look for someone else. In January 1994, only 32 percent said they’d vote to re-elect their Representative.

The NBC/WSJ poll results from July 1993 to May 1994 were similar, with 47 percent to 55 percent saying that it was time to give a new person a chance, and only 30 percent to 37 percent saying that their House Member deserved re-election.

Note that the Yankelovich, Gallup, ABC/Post and NBC/WSJ polls all were conducted in roughly the same period, between the summer of 1993 and the spring of 1994. Given that, the differences between the polls that offer a "new person" alternative and those that did not is dramatic.

Remember, the recent Pew survey wording was much, much closer to that of the Yankelovich and Gallup polling, which produced better numbers for incumbents and did not prove very predictive of the 1994 Republican wave.

The lesson, then, is clear. When it comes to the question of whether voters believe their own House Member deserves re-election, Republicans are in no better shape now than Democrats were at the same time during the 1993-1994 election cycle. A different "re-elect" wording would produce a result that shows greater vulnerability than does the Pew poll.

This column first appeared in Roll Call on October 20, 2005. Copyright 2005 © Roll Call Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

In Modern Politics, It’s Open Season on Congressional Leaders

By Stuart Rothenberg

Once upon a time, there was a Congress. And that Congress was made up of leaders and followers. The most important among them were the majority leaders, their whips and, in the House of Representatives, the Speaker.

And the leaders were powerful men (yes, Virginia, they were always men in the old days) who marshalled their troops on the floor much the way generals led their soldiers into battle. And the leaders were safe in the knowledge that they were invulnerable at home, let alone on Capitol Hill.

Sounds like a fairy tale, doesn’t it? Well, it is, at least these days.

Party leaders in the past have faced revolts in their caucuses or been defeated at the polls, but I doubt there has ever been a time when members of the Congressional leadership had as huge a bull’s-eye painted on their backs as they do now.

The recent indictments of then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay make the Texas Republican only the latest in a long list of legislative leaders to be driven from their posts.

Over the past two decades, the list includes Texas Democrat Jim Wright, California Democrat Tony Coelho, Georgia Republican Newt Gingrich, Louisiana Republican Bob Livingston, Mississippi Republican Trent Lott and now DeLay.

Wright announced in the summer of 1989 that he would resign as Speaker and from Congress after the House ethics committee charged him with violating 69 rules, while Coelho resigned his post as Majority Whip (and his House seat) in May 1989 following multiple allegations of financial improprieties.

Gingrich left the Speakership after the 1998 elections following two disappointing elections for the GOP and extensive ethics problems of his own, while Livingston’s tenure as Speaker ended before it officially began after his personal life became an issue. Lott stepped down when he complimented Sen. Strom Thurmond (R-S.C.) in a way that offended people who were looking to be offended.

And if opponents can’t drive you out by embarrassing you or by bringing legal action, they can always go after you politically, as Republicans did when they used all of their resources (nationally, not just in the state) to unseat South Dakota Democrat Tom Daschle, who was serving as Senate Minority Leader when he was defeated for re-election last fall. Daschle’s defeat followed then-House Speaker Tom Foley’s (D-Wash.) by 10 years.

Being in the legislative leadership in either chamber now means that you are a high value target to the opposition. Take down the leader, and you can discredit his or her party, or at least create the sense that the opposition is in disarray.

Successful Republican redistricting efforts in Texas to eliminate Martin Frost’s district don’t quite fall into the same category as partisan efforts to take down Daschle, DeLay or Lott, but it’s relevant nonetheless.

Frost, a former two-term chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, lost bids to move up into his party’s leadership and was only a member of his party’s rank and file when he went down to defeat. But he was one of the politically savvier Democrats in the House (and in Texas), and his smarts and effectiveness made him a Republican target.

DeLay’s indictment and resignation from the House Republican leadership isn’t the end of liberal and Democratic efforts to cut the head off of the GOP legislative operation. Now a new person has that target painted on his back.

Barely 24 hours after DeLay resigned his leadership post I received an e-mail "backgrounder" from the office of Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), ranking member on the Rules Committee, with an ominous headline: "Getting to know the new Interim Majority Leader Roy Blunt (R-MO)."

Among the items in the e-mail were "Blunt does favors for son-turned-tobacco-lobbyist," "Blunt has close ties to lobbyist under federal investigation," "Blunt secures ethics waiver after marrying tobacco lobbyist," and "Blunt uses lobbyists as de facto whips to pass corporate tax cut."

This wouldn’t be the first time, of course, that political opponents tried to make an issue out of a wife who also was a lobbyist. Some Republicans raised questions about Daschle’s lobbyist wife, Linda Daschle. The names and the parties change, but the indignation, innuendo and outrage somehow seem to be the same.

Blunt isn’t the only member of the current GOP legislative leadership who is a target. In the Senate, Rick Santorum (R-Pa.) faces a difficult re-election, and Democrats know that Santorum’s defeat would rattle his party, impress the media and get more attention than any other Senate victory.

And after Blunt and Santorum? It depends on who moves into the Republican leadership in the House and Senate next Congress. Whoever they are, they automatically are targets.

The same goes for Democratic leaders. DCCC Chairman Rahm Emanuel (Ill.) and Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (Nev.) are particularly obvious targets - Reid because his role as party leader could open him up to criticism back home, and Emanuel because he is smart, effective and hails from Chicago (where cronyism and corruption are not unknown in political circles).

Having all the power and prestige that go with being a legislative powerhouse must be fun and rewarding. But it’s also increasingly dangerous. And that’s something for ambitious politicians in both parties to think about.

This column first appeared in Roll Call on October 11, 2005. Copyright 2005 © Roll Call Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.