2014 Senate Races – 10 Rural States at the Fore November 16, 2012
Welcome to the 2013-2014 election cycle, a wonderful feature of the permanent campaign. As the ink has dried on the redistricting maps drawn after the 2010 federal census, it is now clear after the results of November 6, 2012 that Republicans should be locked into their majority control of the House for the balance of the decade, barring a tidal wave election along the lines of the 1974 post-Watergate tsunami. This built-in Republican advantage means that the GOP only need to win 28 of 99 swing districts/seats in any given election between 2014-2020 to remain in control of the House.
That again brings the focus to the Senate races which will be up in the 2014 midterms. While the various political handicappers are already prognosticating the outlook for the 20 Democrats and 13 Republicans up for re-election in two years, I will add my analysis on the basis of the impact and relevance of the rural nature of many of the states where these Senate fights will occur. States are ranked by % rural population:
Maine – 59.3% (2nd most-rural)
Sen. Susan Collins heads into her election for a fourth term as the Pine Tree State’s senior senator with the retirement of her longtime colleague Olympia Snow. Collins is the only Republican up in 2014 from a blue state. A strong case can be made that Collins is the Senate’s last Republican moderate. I’ll define GOP moderate as a member with an ADA (Americans for Democratic Action) score of 30% or more and Collins pulled a 40% in 2010. Collins, who hails from the potato-growing county of Aroostook in the far north, has been very responsive to parochial interests such as fishing, blueberries and the forest and wood products sectors (even though she was among a handful of senators to oppose the 2008 Farm Bill) and won her 2008 race by a comfortable 61%. But Collins, who got married at 59 this year, may decide that life in the minority in a more polarized and hyper-partisan Senate is not where she wants to be anymore. If Collins runs again, she is a lock for re-election.
West Virginia – 53.6% (3rd most-rural)
Here is a sobering fact for Mountaineer Democrats: Obama lost every county in WV on November 6, the first time that has ever happened to a major party nominee. The state has gone more and more Republican since 2000 when George W. Bush hit Al Gore hard on the issues of coal and guns. At the top of the retirement worry list for Democrats is Sen. Jay Rockefeller who is 76 and has held his seat since 1984. Rockefeller has been a champion for rural health care and has used his chairmanship of the Commerce Committee to push for upgrading the nation’s rural broadband infrastructure. If Rockefeller steps down, look for Republicans to push hard for Rep. Shelley Moore Capito to win the seat.
Mississippi – 53.1% (4th most-rural)
Today, Democrats are on retreat in the Magnolia State faster than the defeated Confederates during the Civil War. The party only has one statewide elected official (Attorney General Jim Hood); not exactly the bench with which to challenge Sen. Thad Cochran who sits at the desk once used by Jefferson Davis. In the new Congress, Cochran may decide to use his seniority over Kansas Sen. Pat Roberts to reclaim the ranking member slot on the Senate Agriculture Committee because Southern cotton, rice and sugar growers feel that Roberts has sold them out on the issue of price supports as the Senate crafted and passed its version of the 2012 Farm Bill last June. Cochran is also a member of the Appropriations Committee, where he can direct morsels of pork to one of the nation’s poorest states. Color this seat bright red.
Arkansas – 47.7% (5th most-rural)
Much has changed since Sen. Mark Pryor won his second term in 2008 crushing a little-known Green Party challenger with 80% of the vote. In 2010, Republicans captured two Democratic House seats while holding the open seat that John Boozman vacated as he defeated Sen. Blanche Lincoln, who was chairman of the Agriculture Committee by 21 points. This year, the GOP took over control of the state legislature and picked up the open House seat in AR-4 that had been held by Blue Dog Mike Ross. For much of the last two years, Pryor was Majority Leader Harry Reid’s point man on rural outreach for the Senate Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee before being replaced by Alaska’s Mark Begich. Expect Republicans to come after Pryor with either sophomore Congressman Tim Griffin or freshman Rep. Tom Cotton who took Ross’ seat.
South Dakota – 47.6% (6th most-rural)
When you look at a map of South Dakota and see those little islands of blue counties amid a sea of red, know that they are mostly Indian reservations. The Native American vote has been critical to the electoral fortunes of Democratic Sen. Tim Johnson who has not said if he will seek a fourth term in two years. In his 2002 race, Johnson beat Republican John Thune (now the state’s junior senator) by 524 votes thanks to the turnout on the Pine Ridge Reservation. In 2006, Johnson was sidelined for months after an almost-fatal brain hemorrhage which has left some lingering health effects, although he rebounded in 2008 to win re-election with 62%. Former GOP Gov. Mike Rounds has already filed the paperwork for an exploratory committee and Democrats now suffer from Thin Bench Syndrome in this state that once sent George McGovern and Tom Daschle to represent them in the Senate. If Johnson steps aside, Democrats may prevail on ex-Congresswoman Stephanie Herseth Sandlin or Matt Varilek, a former Johnson staffer to carry their banner in an open seat. Varilek was handily defeated by Republican Rep. Kristi Noem for the state’s lone House seat; two years after Noem beat Herseth Sandlin in 2010.
Montana – 46.4% (7th most-rural)
Big Sky country could see another competitive race when Sen. Max Baucus runs for his seventh term as is expected. Baucus, who chairs the powerful Finance Committee, has drawn the ire of progressives for his deep-sixing of the public option during his drafting of Obamacare and his advocacy of free trade deals does not sit well with labor. Baucus spent north of $11 million in 2008 to win 73% of the vote against a Republican nobody. That was before Citizens United. Money will not be a problem for Baucus given his support for Big Oil, health insurers and other lobbies seeking loopholes and adjustments to the tax code. Baucus is also a major player on the Agriculture Committee where he authored a permanent disaster title in the 2008 Farm Bill to help his wheat growers and livestock producers cope with the ever-fickle weather of the northern plains. There is talk of a primary challenge by outgoing Gov. Brian Schweitzer but Schweitzer is more often mentioned as a dark horse presidential candidate in 2016.
Alabama – 45.2% (8th most-rural)
Crimson Tide. I know, you’re thinking it’s the nickname of the 2011 national champions in college football from that campus down to Tuscaloosa. You would be correct. It is also could be used to describe the color of the political geography that continues to sweep across the Heart of Dixie. AP recently reported that the GOP’s November 6 Bama beat down was so big that it swept away the last Democrat to hold statewide office and racked up wins in some rural counties that had long been Democratic bastions. The state’s Republican Party chair is now setting his sights on the Democratic sheriffs and other county courthouse offices for 2014. This is the environment that Sen. Jeff Sessions will see as he sets his re-election effort on cruise control for a fourth term. Sessions has won with 52% (1996), 59% (2002) and 63% (2008) and Democrats will be hard pressed to recruit a credible challenger to take him on in two years.
Kentucky – 45% (9th most-rural)
“Kentucky woman, If she get to know you, she goin' to own you.” Oh how Democrats in the Bluegrass State would love for those lyrics in that Neil Diamond classic to ring true in the person of actress Ashley Judd. Judd, (currently a Tennessee resident) who spent much of her childhood in Kentucky and is a University of Kentucky grad (and avid Wildcats hoop fan), opened the door to a possible run at Sen. Mitch McConnell on November 9 when she was quoted in the Louisville Courier-Journal as saying “I cherish Kentucky, heart and soul, and while I'm very honored by the consideration, we have just finished an election, so let's focus on coming together to keep moving America's families, and especially our kids, forward." A Judd-McConnell race would be the marquee Senate battle of 2014. McConnell (who sits on both the Senate Ag Committee and the Appropriations Subcommittee on Ag and Rural Development), only won his 2008 race with 53% and recent polling had his disapproval rating at 42% back home. Still, even a well-funded celebrity like Judd (who has been talking with EMILY’s List), would have her hands full trying to oust McConnell who would likely label her as a rich, educated, liberal, carpetbagging-elitist. Judd has called mountaintop coal removal “the rape of Appalachia,” and being perceived as anti-coal is a dangerous position for any Kentucky pol. Just ask outgoing Rep. Ben Chandler. I’ve always wondered why voters in the coalfields elect Republicans who go to Washington and work at weakening mine safety and health rules and defunding Black Lung benefits. Another school of thought is that Judd should pass on McConnell and instead run against Sen. Rand Paul in 2016. As one of my Democratic contacts said of Paul “that man isn't popular (because even hillbillies think he's crazy, and he's named after an atheist). He could be beaten.” Other Democrats getting mentioned for a challenge to McConnell are Gov. Steve Beshear who can’t run again in 2015, Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes, Lt. Gov. Jerry Abrahamson and Matthew Barzun, an Obama bundler.
New Hampshire – 42.5% (11th most-rural)
Over the last several cycles, politics in the Granite State has looked like a broken voltage meter with Democrats having big years in 2006 and 2008 and Republicans staging a sweeping comeback in 2010. The results of 2012 indicate more of a Blue Hampshire trend re-emerging with Democratic women winning both House seats and the governorship. This bodes well for Sen. Jeanne Shaheen who will be up for her second term. There is talk that ex-Sen. John Sununu will seek a rematch with Shaheen who defeated him 52%-45% in 2008 after losing to Sununu by five points in their first race in 2002.
North Carolina – 40.7% (12th most-rural)
Freshman Sen. Kay Hagan is on every pundit’s list of most vulnerable senators. In 2008, when Hagan knocked off Elizabeth Dole, Democrats flipped the Tarheel State to Obama, won the governor’s office and nabbed the House seat in NC-8 (birthplace of Jesse Helms). However the Democrats reversal of fortune began swiftly in 2010 as Republicans captured both houses of the state legislature for the first time since the 1890s and claimed victory when Rep. Renee Ellmers knocked off six-term Democrat Bob Etheridge in the majority-rural district NC-2. The GOP’s radical re-map caused two moderate Democrats to head for the exits in NC-11 and NC-13 (both open seats resulted in GOP pickups) and Rep. Larry Kissell was defeated in his re-drawn NC-8 seat. Highly unpopular Gov. Bev Purdue did not run for re-election, opening the door to the man she bested in 2008, Charlotte Mayor Pat McCrory, to win the keys to the governor’s suite in Raleigh. Hagan is a centrist but her job approval is in the toilet with a November 2012 survey by NC-based Public Policy Polling finding a 37% disapproval compared to 35% who said Hagan is doing a good job. Republicans seem to be looking at House Speaker Thom Tillis, a former IBM executive from Mecklenburg County (2012 site of the Democrat’s national convention) or Congresswoman Ellmers as their favorites to make Hagan a one-term wonder.
Drilling Down Into the 2012 Rural Vote
Rural Americans left some interesting and confounding footprints across the electoral landscape of 2012 in races up and down the ballot. While the mainstream media and punditocracy likes to neatly categorize rural voters as Republican, the results paint a more nuanced picture.
What IS the matter with Kansas?
For many elections now, the conventional wisdom was that Republicans take rural folks for granted while Democrats ignored them. That began to change a bit in the 2006 election and in 2008 when Obama won 7% more of the rural vote than John Kerry did in 2004. Obama’s rural gains came from executing a focused rural strategy and devoting resources to that effort.
However, Obama’s share of the 2012 rural vote dropped to 37% on November 6 as he lost eight of the 10 most-rural states to Romney and 15 of the 19 states that are more than one-third rural to the former Massachusetts governor.
This is somewhat odd in that it can be argued that much of rural America has thrived under Obama’s first term. The agriculture and energy sectors are strong with net farm income up for most crops and commodities and increased domestic production of oil and gas creating booming economies from Texas up into the Great Plains. Obama has invested heavily in rural broadband and pushed through trade agreements with Korea, Colombia and Panama that he hopes will expand exports.
Yet folks in the hinterlands were not happy with the president according to pre-election polls. One survey by Agri-Pulse drives this home with several WTF data points. This poll of 319 likely farmers who cultivate at least 500 acres, found a 77% disapproval of Obama with 78% saying they planned to vote for Romney. But get this, 46% of these farmers blamed the Democrats for failure to pass a new farm bill with only 19% saying Republicans were at fault. For the record, the Senate (controlled by Democrats) passed their farm bill back in June, while the GOP-run House has blocked action on a farm bill that passed the Agriculture Committee in mid-July. Even though they dislike Obama, 50% of these producers strongly or somewhat approve of the job that Tom Vilsack has been doing as agriculture secretary. Other head scratchers included 47% who said reducing the federal deficit was the most important issue for the new president to tackle. Do they remember that Bill Clinton left office with the first surplus since 1969 which was pissed away by George W. Bush by putting two wars on the credit card and cutting taxes for the most wealthy? Lastly, in this year of record drought and era of ginormous forest fires, only 7% cited climate change as the biggest threat to the future of their farming operations. Go figure.
In the Appalachian coal counties, Romney appeared before hard-hat clad miners promising to stop “Obama’s war on coal” ignoring the fact that as a U.S. Senator, and now as president, Obama had championed coal (southern Illinois is coal country) much to the irritation of environmentalists and that as Bay State governor, Romney had once pledged to shutter the Salem Harbor Power Plant, one of the state’s “Filthy Five” coal plants.
As the political chattering class has breathlessly reminded us, the Republicans do have a demographic problem in their off-putting messaging to communities of color, women and younger voters. As Sen. Susan Collins (the last surviving GOP moderate?) told the New York Times on November 7, “Republicans cannot win with just rural, white voters.” However, the other side of that coin is, can Democrats claim to be a viable national party by losing white voters (still 73% of the electorate) where Obama’s share of the white vote shrunk from 43% in 2008 to 39% in 2012?
The Senate – Where Every State Has Some Rural
Several races for the upper house stand out for the influence of rural voters. In Montana, Democrat Jon Tester narrowly held on to win a second term against Rep. Denny Rehberg in the nation’s seventh most-rural state. Tester, the Senate’s only farmer, has championed the needs of rural veterans, fought for preserving postal service for small towns and authored a key provision of the 2010 Food Safety Modernization Act that protected family farmers. His victory in Big Sky County against a flood of outside special interest and super PAC money is heartwarming for all residents of this nation’s boondocks.
Next door in North Dakota, Heidi Heitkamp appears to have held off freshman Republican Rep. Rick Berg, to hold the open seat vacated by retiring Sen. Kent Conrad for the Democrats. This was a race that all the know-it-alls said would go to the GOP just because of the ruby red hue of the Peace Garden State which Romney would carry easily. But Berg was clearly hurt by the fact that House Speaker John Boehner and Majority Leader Eric Cantor chose to not bring the farm bill up for reauthorization before the 2008 law expired on September 30. Few states are as dependent of agriculture as North Dakota and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee cut TV spots hammering Berg for leaving his state’s farmer’s high and dry going into the next planting season and it had an effect at the polls. This race is also significant because North Dakota does not have a deep bench of Democratic talent and Heitkamp should bring a strong dose of prairie populism to Washington in the Nonpartisan League tradition of ex-senators Byron Dorgan and Quentin Burdick.
Massachusetts is only 9.4% rural but eyebrows were raised in October 2011 when consumer advocate Elizabeth Warren was quoted by AP as saying that she was “going for the hick vote here” and that “I think I’m in a new category, the elite hick.” Over the course of the next year, Warren proceeded to avoid rural precincts of the Commonwealth like the plague, never campaigning at any farms, sportsmen’s clubs, gun ranges or county fairs. Incumbent Republican Sen. Scott Brown by contrast was often seen in the cranberry growing counties of southeastern Mass and made numerous forays into rural communities in western Massachusetts that he lost in the 2010 special election. On election day, Brown won 90 of the state’s 172 rural towns (with a population of 10,000 and less) to 82 for Warren, with the Harvard professor winning all of Berkshire County and taking most of Franklin and Hampshire counties in the upper Pioneer Valley, a swath of Baja Vermont and liberal college towns derided as “People’s Republics” by a well-known columnist for one of the Boston daily papers. Brown’s haul included sweeping the rural parts of Hampden County in the western part of the state and Norfolk, Bristol and Plymouth counties in eastern Mass., all home to many ‘Reagan Democrats.’
Arizona’s Senate contest between Rep. Jeff Flake, the Republican and Democrat Richard Carmona, was a race where the rural vote proved critical – and costly for Carmona. At almost 18% rural, the Grand Canyon State is not a place that most people think of as all that rustic. But 13 of the state’s 15 counties are rural and for the 12 years Flake has served in the House, he had gone out of his way to vote against their interests on issue after issue. Carmona, a Vietnam vet and former cop who served as surgeon general under President George W. Bush, was a huge recruiting coup for the Democrats. Early on, Carmona’s primary opponent dropped out, while Flake had to battle a free-spending developer to win the Republican primary in late August. When you look up the definition of the word extremist in the dictionary, it says Jeff Flake. This guy is an opposition researcher’s wet dream. On lob-sided votes where the minority side is recorded in single digits (out of 435 members), that is where you will find Mr. Flake. Carmona had a strong September and began to hit Flake (who had never worn the uniform) hard for his sorry record against veterans. By early October, several polls showed Carmona leading or tied and Democrats began to feel as though they could elect a centrist in the mold of Dennis DeConcini. Then it all went horribly bad. Carmona made some rookie mistakes but he never aggressively went after Flake’s record of hurting rural Arizonan’s on the issues of agriculture and rural development, health care, transportation, renewable energy and water. The low point came on October 25 at a debate on rural issues at Arizona Western College in Yuma. Carmona had known that he would be asked about health care, water policy, and farming and ranching among other topics. Instead of skewering Flake over his votes against two farm bills, clean water infrastructure, funding for distance-learning and telemedicine grants and community and rural health centers, Carmona let the smarmy Flake wriggle off the hook. Carmona compounded this problem by failing to attack Flake on rural radio, airing a boilerplate spot that promised voters he would be “an independent voice” rather than spelling out how in his messianic zeal to cut every last penny of federal spending, Flake had ravaged his state’s small towns and rural areas that depend on vital droplets of largess from Washington. Flake handily won nine of the 13 rural counties on Election Day.
The House – Black and Blue Dogs Take Another Beating
When Democrats took back the House in 2007, things were downright giddy in the Democratic caucus. The infusion of freshmen moderates, many recruited and hand-picked by then-Chicago congressman Rahm Emanuel, who chaired the DCCC that cycle, meant that the liberal old bulls would regain chairmanships on powerful committees. Progressives like David Obey (Appropriations), Barney Frank (Financial Services), John Conyers (Judiciary) and Charlie Rangel (Ways & Means) would once again wield gavels on their panels and it was made possible largely by victories from newbies from districts that were at least one-third rural. Interestingly, most of these new moderates were not from the south but from places like upstate New York, northeastern Pennsylvania, Appalachian Ohio and Iowa and Minnesota.
The Obama wave election of 2008 added more rural Democrats in purple-turning states like Colorado and North Carolina. Then came the 2010 midterms. Blue Dogs were clubbed to death like baby seals on an arctic hunt. In 2011, rural voters got the government they deserved (at least in the House) when the Tea Party class began to get down to the work of screwing their own base. From essential air service for rural airports to agricultural research and extension to mine safety and Social Security and Medicare, these programs all had to be cut back so “we can get our country back” according to the Tea Party mantra. With the Republicans back in charge, the surviving rural Dems suddenly didn’t feel the love from their urban and suburban colleagues. In the Tea Party wave to capture the U.S. House, many state legislatures also fell yielding crayon boxes with which to control redistricting for the 2012 elections. Faced with both a miserable life in the minority and drastically re-drawn rural turf, many Blue Dogs headed for the exits this cycle creating lots of new GOP pick-up opportunities in open seats. Some, who stayed, faced head-to-head death matches with better financed Republicans like the race between Leonard Boswell (D) and Tom Latham (R) in IA-3.
Now as the smoke from November 6 has cleared, the casualties litter the map across the nation including: AR-4, IN-2, IA-3, KY-6, NC-8, NC-13, and OK-2, all Republican wins. Democrats were able to pick off seats in IL-17, MD-6, MN-8, NY-24 and TX-23. Congressman John Barrow of Georgia hung on to his seat and is now the last white Democrat from the Deep South in the House.
Going forward, it will be hard to remain successful as a national party if Democrats cannot be competitive in huge swaths of the nation such as the Deep South, Appalachia and the Great Plains that include rural political geography. Last year, Democrats lost the Virginia state Senate and the Mississippi House. On November 6, Democrats in Arkansas (the nation’s fifth most-rural state) lost control of their state House, for the first time since Reconstruction. Democrats had controlled both chambers since the post-Civil War period ended in 1874.The Republican dominance in state legislative chambers is now complete all across Dixie.