Republicans are fit and fighting

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Oct 21, 1996 | by Michael Rust

If the presidential race tightens the GOP likely will show further Senate gains. Large early expenditures by organized labor have helped liberals but the South fast is becoming Republican territory.

When Bob Dole recently campaigned in the Washington suburb of Springfield, Va., it was a homecoming in more ways than one. Not only was the former Senate majority leader back within the Beltway where he made his mark during a 35-year legislative career, he also was back in the familiar mode of stumping for GOP Senate candidates--in this case his old friend, John Warner of Virginia, seeking a fourth term.

Warner, fresh from fighting off a conservative primary challenge, holds a wide lead in the polls over his similarly named Democratic opponent, Mark Warner. And the odds are good that Warner again will be part of a Republican majority. Democratic consultant Alan Secrest tells Insight his party's chances of regaining the Senate are only 1-in-3; Republican consultant David Keene suggests the GOP may even pick up a seat to improve on its current 53-47 majority. While chances of Republicans gaining the "veto-proof" margin of 60 seats are slim to none, the GOP doesn't look upon the Senate with the same trepidation it regards the struggle for the House. And yet, as the campaign moves ahead, GOP Senate hopefuls nervously are looking at the presidential contest, afraid that if the Dole-Kemp ticket doesn't pick up speed soon, their own efforts could crash.

Look at New Jersey, where GOP Rep. Dick Zimmer is locked in an acrimonious, expensive battle with his House colleague, Rep. Robert Toricelli. The polls say the Senate race is a statistical dead heat, but they also show the Clinton-Gore ticket with a double-digit lead. In New Hampshire, a state in which Bob Dole never has won a presidential primary, incumbent Republican Sen. Bob Smith is trailing his Democratic challenger. In Minnesota, Republican Rudy Boschwitz is in a rematch with Sen. Paul Wellstone, who unseated him six years ago. The polls show a close race, but the state hasn't voted for a Republican presidential nominee since 1972. In Oregon, state Senate President Gordon Smith holds a narrow lead over a Democratic millionaire in the battle to succeed retiring Republican Sen. Mark Hatfield--in a state the Dole campaign has quietly written off. And in Illinois, where the Democratic national ticket holds a comfortable lead, conservative state Rep. Al Salvi's surprising Senate campaign still is keeping within striking distance of Rep. Richard Durbin, the Democratic nominee.

At the same time, though, Republicans can focus on four open seats in the South vacated by Democrats; and in the Midwest there are reasonable GOP chances of picking up Democratic seats in Nebraska and Minnesota. And in Massachusetts, Gov. Bill Weld's high-stakes match with Sen. John Kerry is another GOP opportunity. More significantly, the Republicans are at least competitive in all of the races for Republican-held seats. "A last-minute rising tide could help Democrats but that's going to be a closer call," says Secrest. Still, stagnant poll numbers for the Dole-Kemp campaign leave no room for GOP complacency "The danger is that if Clinton were to do very very well in those states you could end up losing them," GOP operative Keene tells Insight.

And this is a distinct possibility. In the last week of September, Clinton held a 14-point lead in Illinois, and both the Pacific Coast and the Northeast reportedly were being quietly written off by the Dole campaign. Another Republican operative with ties to his party's congressional leadership is more blunt. "If the Dole campaign shows any signs of life, we should keep the Senate," he says. "If it doesn't, there could be trouble."

Still, even where Dole probably will win, a low Republican turnout could affect Senate races. In South Dakota, three-term incumbent Larry Pressler has become the largest recipient of political-action-committee largesse ever since he assumed the chairmanship of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee. However, he also is regarded as the most vulnerable Republican in his contest with Rep. Tim Johnson.

At the same time, the Senate offers conservative Republicans a silver lining to this increasingly gray electoral cloud. Whatever happens on Election Day, the GOP Senate Caucus almost certainly will be more solidly conservative than it has been in the past. When Dole left the Senate this summer, conservatives dominated the changing of the guard in the Senate leadership. "If you took a look at the leadership race that never shaped up, except for the involvement of [Mississippi Sen. Thad] Cochran, you had the prospect in the Senate of it being a race between [conservative] Trent Lott and [conservative] Don Nickles," laughs Keene, the chairman of the American Conservative Union. (Lott of Mississippi replaced Dole, while Nickles became majority whip.) "So that tells you something about the change that's taken place in the Senate over the course of the last few cycles. And you're going to get additional conservatives elected to the Senate this year."