Democrats Appear Vulnerable in Several Close Senate
Races
By TODD S. PURDUM
OS ANGELES -- In 1992, in a good year for Democrats, Barbara Boxer won her seat in the
United States Senate with 48 percent of the vote. In the six years since, she has been a
reliably outspoken liberal from a state that is less so, and never managed to lift her job approval
ratings above 50 percent.
Now, in what is shaping up as a bad year for Democrats, Ms. Boxer is struggling to hold her own
against a comparative neophyte, the Republican State Treasurer, Matt Fong. Their contest has
become one of a handful of closely watched races that will determine whether the Republicans can
win a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority that could shape the Congressional landscape for years.
As the House of Representatives prepares to debate whether to open a formal impeachment inquiry
into President Clinton's conduct in the Monica Lewinsky matter, much attention has focused on the
plight of House Democrats in swing districts. But from California to Wisconsin, from Illinois to
Nevada, from Kentucky to South Carolina, Senate seats now held by Democrats are also in
jeopardy, raising the possibility of the biggest Republican majority in the Senate since the
Administration of Warren G. Harding in 1921-23, when the party held 59 seats in a 96-member
body.
"It's just that the Republicans have more opportunities, and better opportunities," said Stuart
Rothenberg, editor of a respected independent political newsletter in Washington. "The Democrats
are definitely still on the defensive, and it shows."
Although Clinton's own job approval ratings jumped to near his highest ever after the release of his
videotaped grand jury testimony last week, that support has generally not carried over to
Democratic incumbents around the country, some of whom, like Ms. Boxer and Senator Carol
Moseley-Braun of Illinois, were vulnerable long before Clinton's current troubles ever surfaced.
In the Senate alone, Democrats have lost 11 seats since Clinton's 1992 victory, and Republicans
hold a 55-45 majority.
"Publicly, the Congressional Democrats defend the President a bit," said Ross Baker, a professor of
political science at Rutgers University and a leading expert on the Senate. "But privately, they're
angry and worried and scared.
"It's a case of the ship leaving the sinking rats."
One senior Democratic Senator, now in his fourth term, summed up the situation this way, speaking
on the condition of anonymity. "When I came here, there were 64 Democratic senators," the
Senator said. "Now we'll be lucky to get 42."
With its magisterial pace, rarefied folkways and six-year election cycles, the Senate has always been
less subject to the vicissitudes of voter sentiment than the House, whose entire membership faces
re-election every two years.
But when changes in the body do occur, experience has shown that they can be big changes.
In years like 1980, for example, when the Republicans took a majority as Ronald Reagan was
elected President, or 1986, when the party lost control of the Senate (and lost more seats there than
it did in the House), or 1994, when the Democrats lost control of both houses after the failure of
Clinton's proposed health care overhaul, "all the close races went one way," Rothenberg said.
If Republicans win all the close Senate races where they are now thought to be in striking distance,
experts say they could well make the net gain of five seats needed to reach 60, the number of votes
needed to cut off floor debate and block a Democratic filibuster.
"I think there's about a 30 percent chance of that happening," said Jennifer E. Duffy, the Senate
editor of the Cook Political Report, another highly regarded nonpartisan newsletter in Washington.
"A gain of three seats is the worst they'll do."
Of the 34 Senate seats up this year, 10 are considered safely Republican and 9 safely Democratic.
The Ohio seat being vacated by John Glenn, a Democrat who is retiring, is considered a likely bet
for Gov. George Voinovich, a Republican, while the Republican seat in Indiana being surrendered
by Dan Coats is likely to be won by former Gov. Evan Bayh, a Democrat seeking to reclaim the
office once held by his father, Birch.
That means Republicans would have to hold onto all 5 of the remaining seats the party now holds,
from New York, North Carolina, Missouri, Colorado and Georgia, and pick up 6 of the remaining
8 Democratic-held seats to achieve the net gain of 5 seats needed to reach 60. Their best bets are
Illinois, California, Kentucky, Nevada, Wisconsin, Washington State and South Carolina.
Democratic senators are in trouble for a range of reasons, from changing voter demographics, which
have left incumbents like Harry Reid of Nevada and Ernest F. Hollings of South Carolina facing
electorates decidedly more Republican than the ones that chose them to begin with, to the failure of
some senators, like Ms. Boxer and Ms. Moseley-Braun, to solidify their original base of support.
Ms. Moseley-Braun, like Ms. Boxer a member of the 1992 "Year of the Woman" class and the first
black woman ever elected to the Senate, is running 10 points behind her Republican challenger,
State Senator Peter Fitzgerald, in the latest polls, and national Democratic officials seem to have all
but conceded the seat. In Washington State, another member of the 1992 class, Patty Murray,
holds only a slight lead over her Republican challenger, Representative Linda Smith.
In Wisconsin, Russell D. Feingold, the Democratic co-sponsor of the campaign finance reform bill
that bears his name, is testing that proposition in his own race, eschewing "soft-money" contributions
from his national party. He recently let his opponent, Representative Mark W. Neumann, broadcast
a heavy dose of unanswered television commercials. Ms. Duffy of the Cook Report moved that
race into the toss-up category this week.
The Kentucky seat being vacated by Senator Wendell H. Ford, a Democrat, appears to be a
tossup between Representative Scotty Baesler, a Democrat, and Jim Bunning, a Republican, with
the most recent independent poll showing a virtual dead heat.
Ms. Boxer's situation is fairly typical, with some problems of her own making and others
exacerbated by Clinton, to whom she is related by marriage. Her daughter, Nicole, is married to
Tony Rodham, Hillary Rodham Clinton's brother, and the Senator took some heat for her initially
low-key comments about the Lewinsky scandal, especially given her past outspoken opposition to
Senator Bob Packwood and Justice Clarence Thomas over allegations of sexual harassment against
them.
After Clinton's Aug. 17 admission of an "inappropriate" relationship with Ms. Lewinsky, Ms. Boxer
eventually condemned his behavior in strong terms on the Senate floor, but not until well after her
California colleague, Dianne Feinstein, had issued her own stinging rebuke of Clinton.
But Fong, who was elected State Treasurer just four years ago and whose inexperience on the
stump showed in his first debate with Ms. Boxer this summer, is hardly a powerhouse candidate.
Ms. Boxer has held roughly a 2-to-1 fund-raising advantage over him throughout the year, and he
barely eked out a victory in the Republican primary in June against Darrel Issa, a millionaire
businessman.
"If Barbara Boxer were all that strong politically, she'd be way ahead of Matt Fong," Rothenberg
said. "She would have put him away long ago."
Instead, recent polls have shown the candidates in either a dead heat, or Fong slightly ahead among
likely voters, though a Democratic operative not affiliated with either campaign said that recent
private Democratic polls had shown Ms. Boxer opening a single-digit lead.
Fong began his television advertising campaign this week, with ads in English, Cantonese, Mandarin
and Spanish touting his support for education and aimed at making inroads among minority voters
whom Republicans often overlook, though only the English-language version stresses the necessity
for children to "read, write and speak English so they are prepared to get a job."
By contrast, Ms. Boxer has been on the air for about three weeks, most recently with a 30-second
commercial, narrated by the actor Martin Sheen, that denounces Fong as "the gun lobby's favorite
candidate" and touts her support for new bans on assault weapons and cheap handguns. Unlike Ms.
Feinstein, Ms. Boxer has largely failed to move beyond her liberal base and establish a strong
anti-crime reputation.
In that regard, Ms. Boxer's first ad was perhaps even more revealing. Broadcast in her home turf of
San Francisco and featuring footage from old family home movies, it was a soft-edged hymn to her
support for children, in the form of after-school programs to keep them "out of gangs, and criminal
background checks for child-care workers."
"It's all about her losing a lot of her base from '92 and having to get it back," said Ms. Duffy of the
Cook Report. "This was for the soccer moms she should already have."
The national Republican Senatorial Committee is closely watching California as a promising contest,
along with Nevada, Wisconsin and a handful of others, said a spokesman for the committee, Mike
Russell. He declined to speculate about how much the party might spend to help Fong make his
case, but acknowledged that "it's certainly a race where those kinds of resources could make a
difference."
"In Boxer, you have a candidate who is stuck at 45 percent or below, and has no real room to
grow, since most people in the state already know her and have fixed opinions of her," Russell said.
"Matt is not only a sharp candidate, but as an Asian-American can chew into her base."
Even if the Republicans could win control of 60 seats, that would be far from the most lopsided
margin in Senate history. After the election of 1936, at the height of the New Deal, the Democrats
held 75 seats, to 17 for the Republicans and the remaining split among minor parties. And after
Lyndon B. Johnson's 1964 landslide, the Democrats had 68 seats to 32 for the Republicans.
Moreover, Professor Baker of Rutgers noted, maverick Republicans like Senators Olympia J.
Snowe and Susan M. Collins of Maine, James M. Jeffords of Vermont and John H. Chafee of
Rhode Island so regularly break ranks that even 60 Republican seats would not be enough to
guarantee an ironclad defense against a Democratic filibuster.
"It's such an individualistic institution," he said. "It's such a place of personalities and individuals, and
there's a real aversion on the part of senators to appear to be part of a herd, or part of an
unshakable bloc of votes." |
