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House special elections highlight GOP's woes

April 24, 2008 —  With fundraising problems and a wave of retirements, Republicans already are playing an unfamiliar defensive role in Southern congressional races this year. Things could be about to get worse, as the GOP faces possible special election runoff losses in two districts that only recently looked like safe territory.

Mississippi’s 1^st District went Republican in 1994, sending Roger Wicker to Washington, where he would become freshman class president of that year’s huge and boisterous freshman GOP class. On Tuesday, the district came within a few hundred votes of electing Democrat Travis Childers outright in a multi-candidate special election to fill the seat after Wicker’s appointment to a vacant U.S. Senate position.

Because he missed an outright majority, Childers, who is chancery clerk of Prentiss County, will face Southaven Mayor Greg Davis in a May 13 runoff. Even if the GOP’s vaunted turnout machine can be marshaled to overtake Childers in what’s likely to be a very low-turnout runoff, his success this week will have proved a costly embarrassment to the Republicans, who are being forced to pour money into a race that had seemed safely in their column.

Childers, who Northeast Mississippi Daily Journal editor Lloyd Gray describes as “a laid-back, old-style country politician,” is an experienced elected official with a lot of county courthouse connections across the district.

That’s a profile not unlike Democratic state Rep. Don Cazayoux, who faces Republican Woody Jenkins in a May 3 special election in Louisiana’s 6^th District, which has been held by Republican Richard Baker since 1986. Cazayoux’s campaign says he leads Jenkins in its internal polling and Cazayoux holds a huge advantage over Jenkins in cash on hand as this race nears its close.

Not that the two candidates are the only ones spending money in this race. The congressional committees of both parties, as well as Freedom Watch and the Club for Growth, are pouring money into the district’s mailboxes and airwaves. Trey Ourso, a Democratic consultant working for the Cazayoux campaign, estimated the combined barrage of political advertising amounted to 6,500 points a week on Baton Rouge television, a staggering amount for a single special election.

Ourso estimated that even though Jenkins himself has a limited presence on television, the balance, including the attack ads from national groups, is running about 60-40 against Cazayoux.

 But that again points to the fact that the Republicans and their 527 allies already are spending heavily in what were considered safe areas, in a year when they face challenges in districts across the country.

Another thing the Mississippi and Louisiana races have in common is that Republican rivalries have hobbled the GOP in both districts.

Voters in the Mississippi district have been afflicted with as much democracy as anyone in America this year. Both parties held primaries and primary runoffs earlier to determine who will be on the fall ballot. But because Wicker resigned to take the Senate seat, the special election was scheduled after these votes, with the tacit agreement that only the winners from the earlier primaries would compete – even though, just to be sure, everybody got their name on the special election ballot, which was set before the earlier primaries.

The agreement was kept in both parties, but with a big difference. Childers’ former Democratic rival, Rep. Steve Holland, has campaigned enthusiastically for him. But former Tupelo mayor and Tennessee Valley Authority chairman Glenn McCullough, stung by Davis’ attacks during the primary, has been largely silent on the Republican side.

The difference showed clearly in the sharp east-west tilt of Tuesday’s results. Davis drew by far the greatest concentration of his support from DeSoto County, the cross-border suburb of Memphis which is Mississippi’s biggest and fastest growing county, and its neighbors along the western border of the district. But Childers solidly carried most of small-town and rural Northeast Mississippi, including Lee County, McCullough’s home and the center of the district’s other Republican growth node.

The Louisiana race saw a similar pattern, with Jenkins, a former state legislator and community newspaper publisher, going through a more bruising primary than Cazayoux. Jenkins could also suffer in the May 3 election from the presence of a former Republican staffer turned independent, Ashley Casey.

The general tilt of these districts hasn’t changed dramatically, but with good candidate recruiting and widespread dissension within the GOP, Democrats are smelling opportunity this year in unfamiliar places.