As the Mark Foley freakshow continues, the question on
everyone’s mind in Washington is how the scandal will affect the
upcoming elections. House leaders seem locked in a circular firing
over the questions surrounding who knew what about Foley and when;
will voters be disinclined to vote for their party next month?
The data is inconclusive. Yesterday the Pew Research Center
released the results of its latest poll
indicating that the results of their generic Congressional ballot
question (“If the election were held today…”) was virtually the
same before and after Foley’s resignation. On the other hand, a
Rasmussen poll released yesterday showed 61% of
respondents believe that GOP leaders have been “protecting Foley
for several years,” which may mean trouble down the road.
But even if the Foley scandal has no national impact at all, it
still may be very costly. That’s because the race for control of
the House of Representative is so close this year that a single
seat is a big deal — and Foley’s seat is almost certainly
lost.
Under Florida law, when a candidate quits the race, the state
party can choose a substitute to take his place. The Florida GOP
has chosen State Representative Joe Negron to run for the 16th
district in lieu of Foley. But Florida law doesn’t allow the
ballot to be changed after the primary; if a candidate
drops out after the primary, his name stays on the ballot but his
votes go to the replacement. To win, Joe Negron needs people to
vote for Mark Foley. Few besides Negron’s most loyal supporters
think that voters will do that, even with four weeks to explain the
ballot rule. Florida’s 16th gave Bush 54% of its vote in 2004 to
Kerry’s 46%. Though this is a conservative district that would
normally be safely Republican, it isn’t so overwhelmingly
conservative that Republicans can weather a storm like this.
One district that is overwhelmingly conservative is Texas’s
22nd, which gave Bush 64% of its vote in 2004. But Republicans have
even less chance of winning in Texas-22 than they do in Florida-16.
That’s because there’s no Republican on the ballot at all. Tom
DeLay insisted past his primary that he’d be running for another
term, and when he changed his mind, resigning from Congress and
withdrawing from the ballot, Democrats successfully sued to stop
the Republicans from putting any name on the ballot. (The local GOP
has endorsed a write-in candidate, Houston City Councilwoman
Shelley Sekula-Gibbs, but no one has ever won a write-in campaign
for federal office from Texas, and the process for casting write-in
ballots on the voting machines used in the district is very
cumbersome.)
How critical is each House seat? The most recent Constituent
Dynamics/RT Strategies Majority Watch polls, released earlier this
week, show just how big. Majority Watch polls registered voters in
each of 31 congressional districts. They now show 219 seats leaning
Democratic and another 2 tied. It takes 218 seats to make a
majority.
If the Majority Watch polls are predictive, the Democrats are on
track to win a majority with a margin of between 2 and 4 seats. But
what a flimsy majority it would be, one in which at least half
their margin of victory comes from seats that can be expected to
easily fall back into Republican hands in the next cycle.
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves and proclaim certain doom; a
lot can happen in a month, after all. But Republicans can take some
comfort in the fact that if they do lose, they’ll get a nice
consolation prize — in a box marked “Open in 2008.”
