Weeks ago The Wall Street Journal highlighted Mike Synar, 43, the longest-serving Oklahoma congressman, as a rare loyalist “who unabashedly backs his president.” Fielding complaints by constituents “he refuses to yield an inch” while defending Clinton’s health care plan, about which he said: “The difficulties have come in our failure to market this thing.” Politicians in deep denial all say problems are failures of packaging, not substance. When speaking of Clinton, Synar used the pronoun “we,” to the consternation of his staff, to whom Synar replied, “I’m part of the team.”
Last week his constituents benched him. Seeking a ninth term, he lost in the Democratic primary to a 71-year-old retired school principal with no prior political experience. Synar has had nothing but. He was the archetypal baby boomer liberal, a student government activist at the University of Oklahoma determined to get into real government as quickly as possible and stay as long as possible. Out of law school in 1977, he was elected to Congress in 1978. It is, then, particularly interesting that more than the margin of his 51-49 defeat probably came from the surge of voters pulled to the polls by the chance to vote for term limits, which Oklahomans enacted last week in a landslide.
Synar’s 1992 voting record–for banning the hiring of striker replacements, for cutting defense, for gun control, against the Gulf war, against parental notification of minors’ abortions, against restricting the National Endowment for the Arts – earned him a 95 percent approval from the Americans for Democratic Action, a hyperliberal group with few members in Muskogee. He won in 1992 anyway, but spent 39 times more than his opponent ($1,190,197 to $30,312) and he got only 56 percent of the vote. This year he spent upwards of $300,000. The man who beat him spent $19,600.
Synar was a defeat waiting to happen in some year when not even huge disparities in fund raising could overwhelm ideological difficulties. This may be such a year for many Democrats.
Measuring conservatism by distrust of government, the country has been becoming more conservative for a generation and is much more conservative than it was 14 years ago when it elected Reagan. Yet the liberal party has easily held control of the House of Representatives, even while House Democrats have been becoming a more homogeneously liberal bloc (because there are fewer conservative Southern Democrats and more minority Democrats produced by racial gerrymandering). One reason is that incumbents get the lion’s share of contributions from individuals and interests currying favor from those in power.
For many Democratic incumbents, money has been able to compensate for their ideological incompatibilities with their constituents. But American politics is becoming more ideological. And at high levels of spending there is a steeply declining marginal utility of the last dollars incumbents’ campaigns spend. So, how many Democrats are vulnerable to the rising saliency of ideology over funding?
Michael Barone, the human Almanac of American Politics who every two years decants himself into a book with that title, recently went to Michigan to observe the re-election campaigns of two Democratic congressmen, Dale Kildee and Sander Levin. In 1992 Kildee won a ninth term by outspending his opponent more than 6 to 1 ($795,484 to $128,840–and remember, such numbers do not count the cash value of such perquisites of incumbency as franked mailings). But Kildee got just 54 percent of the vote. In 1992 Levin won a seventh term by outspending his opponent more than 6 to 1 ($1,185,400 to $190,203). But Levin got just 53 percent of the vote. This year both Kildee and Levin face their 1992 opponents again in races that will test the new correlation of ideology and money.
Speaker Tom Foley is suing his constituents and the rest of the people of Washington state, trying to get a court to overturn their 1992 vote in favor of term limits for members of Congress and senators. Last week his district in eastern Washington filed its own opinion. It did so in an open primary, in which all candidates of both parties ran together, the top vote-getters from each party to face off in November. Foley got just 35 percent of the vote. So 65 percent of the voters preferred one or another of the other four candidates, all Republicans. The leading Republican, George Nethercutt, got 30 percent. The Republicans’ votes totaled more than 78,000. Foley got 42,000. In the 1992 primary he got 68,536.
In 1992, when Foley won his 15th term, he got 53 percent in the open primary and just 55 percent in November. To win this year he needs a 15-point improvement on his primary percentage. Foley is in danger of becoming the first Speaker beaten since 1860, another interesting year.
Democrats fear that if they lose control of the House, and all those committee and subcommittee chairmanships that make them gatekeepers for legislation, their life-support system will be unplugged: Contributions will suddenly flow toward the incumbents in the new majority. And if a money advantage then reinforces rather than counters an ideological advantage, the Democratic Party’s standing will become precarious.
Last Wednesday Newt Gingrich, Republican Speaker-in-Waiting, got this projection for House races: a net gain of 47 seats–52 pickups and five losses. A 40-seat gain would make Gingrich Speaker. On Thursday one of the candidates assumed lost got polling putting him well ahead. At lunch Friday in the House dining room Gingrich was handed a note: A Spokane television station’s poll showed Nethercurt 58, Foley 39. Usually in September Republicans are winnowing the list of races in which they are competitive. This September they have been expanding the list. Campaigns across the country are reporting unusually low numbers of voters still undecided. It used to be axiomatic that many people did not make up their minds until after the World Series.
