Positions available: candidates for 1998; long hours, low pay - grassroots Democratic House campaigns

Progressive, The, Jan, 1998 by John Nichols

Dubuque grandmother Donna Smith was innocent enough to believe that winning elections in America had more to do with raising issues than raising money. Her naivete almost got her elected to Congress.

Outspent by a margin of ten to one, matched against one of Newt Gingrich's top lieutenants, abandoned by the national Democratic Party, Smith committed herself to a populist platform that rendered her of no interest to the special interests. The pundits wrote her off as a political nonentity. But on Election Day, 1996, she won almost 48 percent of the vote, nearly defeating Jim Nussle, the entrenched Republican in charge of managing Newt Gingrich's takeover of the House.

"We were on our own. We didn't have any consultants telling us what we couldn't do," says Smith. "So we went back to the grassroots and ran the kind of campaign Democrats should be running."

The story of Smith's challenge to Nussle is more than a hopeful anecdote from the never-ending campaign trail. It could serve as a model for grassroots progressives.

"The system is far more vulnerable than Mr. Clinton and Mr. Gingrich would let on," says Bernie Sanders, the independent U.S. Representative from Vermont. "I think there are openings. Not easy openings. But openings for progressives to run class-based, grassroots campaigns that challenge not just Republican incumbents but the whole system."

Walter Holden Capps mounted one such challenge. In 1994, the University of California at Santa Barbara religion professor was the Democrats' sacrificial lamb in the race for a California seat that the GOP had held since World War II. Badly outspent in a district famous as the scenic spot where Ronald Reagan maintains a ranch, Capps defended the rights of illegal immigrants, endorsed same-sex marriage and gays in the military, and called for broader protection of the environment. Asked about proposals to eliminate welfare, Capps said, "I wouldn't eliminate programs that are the reason we have government--to help those families and individuals that can't help themselves."

Political consultants labeled the Capps approach a roadmap to oblivion. But the professor, who had never before sought public office, got 49 percent of the vote in the face of the 1994 Republican landslide. He came back in 1996 and won the seat with ease. Tragically, Capps died of a sudden heart attack in October 1997, but his wife, Lois, who is equally progressive, appears to be a frontrunner to hold the seat in an early 1998 special election.

Other progressive candidates have broken the mold.

In 1996, Clem Balanoff capitalized on grassroots labor support to gain 48 percent in an Illinois race. Kim Tunnicliff ran a populist campaign that almost unseated entrenched Michigan U.S. Representative Nick Smith. New Mexico's Shirley Baca built a coalition of Hispanics, labor activists, Native Americans, and environmentalists that upped the Democratic percentage by 12 percent in her New Mexico district. And the Green Party's Carol Miller fared better than expected in a 1997 New Mexico special election. Even if they did not win, they placed and showed in districts where they now could emerge as 1998 victors.

There is an opening for new candidates as well. One such candidacy could be that of Margarethe Cammermeyer, who successfully fought the National Guard's attempts to discharge her for being a lesbian. She is planning to challenge U.S. Representative Jack Metcalf (Republican of Washington), an ideologue who dwells on the far-right fringes of the Republican caucus.

These openings exist, in part, because Democratic Party hacks are having trouble recruiting the sort of centrist candidates they prefer. A headline in Congressional Quarterly, the bible of Capitol Hill insiders, says it all: "With Major Issues Fading, Capital Life Lures Fewer: Both parties are struggling to fill campaign rosters for `98 races as potential candidates find reasons for staying home."

The November 1998 election will determine control of both houses of Congress, as well as the majority of governorships and state legislatures.

Even so. of twenty-nine Senate incumbents expected to seek reelection in 1998, "only a handful have as yet drawn a truly threatening rival," says Congressional Quarterly's Alan Greenblatt.

In competition for the House, it's even worse. "Recruiters for House races are struggling," says Greenblatt. "Once the obvious targets have been accounted for, the crowd of potential candidates thins out quickly. In at least a dozen districts where the current seat-holder won with 52 percent of the vote or less in 1996, no one has stepped forward to carry the opposition banner in 1998."

Two years ago, one of the closest Congressional races in the nation played out in central Illinois. In a House district long held by the Democrats, Republican John Shimkus squeaked out the narrowest of victories--winning the seat by a bare 50.3 to 49.7 margin.

Come next November, Shimkus ought to be in for the fight of his life. But with just weeks to go before the Illinois filing deadline for Shimkus's seat, he had no opponent.