Campaign Diaries

In a fair number of Senate races, parties only have one politician who could hope to mount a competitive run. Democrats need Governor Kathleen Sebelius and Rep. Stephanie Herseth Slandin to run if they want to contest Kansas or South Dakota. For Republicans, Vermont, North Dakota and Hawaii are lost causes if they cannot recruit Governors Jim Douglas, John Hoeven and Linda Lingle.

Thus, any news involving one of those five Governors is hugely important. The news that Herseth Slandin is eying a gubernatorial run, for instance is a deathly blow to the DSCC’s South Dakota prospects; for Obama to nominate Sebelius to HHS or the Commerce Department would certainly bury Kansas Democrats. And now, we are getting confirmation of the conventional wisdom that Vermont’s Douglas is unlikely to challenge Democratic Senator Pat Leahy.

Also, Research 2000 released a poll of North Dakota, testing Democratic Senator Byron Dorgan against Hoeven. The results are surprisingly good for the incumbent:

• Contrary to predictions that a Dorgan-Hoeven race would be a battle of titans, the Democrat crushes the Republican 57% to 35%.
• Both men have very impressive favorability ratings: 67% of respondents have a favorable impression of Dorgan (against 30%), and 68% have a favorable impression of Hoeven (against 27%).

Making the results all the more surprising, of course, is that North Dakota remains a staunchly red state. Barack Obama made dramatic progress, improving over John Kerry’s loss by 19%. But he still lost by 9%, performing 16% worse than his national result. What can explain the fact that North Dakota voters are so committed to their Democratic Senator as to massively reject their popular Republican Governor (currently serving his third term)?

Two weeks ago, I quoted The Madville Times’s description of South Dakota’s voting patterns: “Every South Dakota voter knows South Dakota is a welfare state, and we like sending Republicans to Pierre to keep our taxes down and Dems to Washington to bring home the pork to make up for the shortfall.” The same explanation holds for North Dakota, a small state that is heavily dependent on its congressmen’ seniority and committee chairmanship, and that is a tremendous insurance for the Dakotas’ incumbents. (It was not enough to save Tom Dashle in 2004, however.)

These early polls are very important because they can influence the rest of the cycle. How can the NRSC convince Hoeven to jump in the race if they have no promising poll numbers to point to? The politicians I listed at the beginning of this post are all major figures in their respective states. They are very unlikely to enter these difficult senatorial races unless they believe they have a clear shot at winning them. If other polls confirm that Dorgan would be heavily favored to beat Hoeven, the Governor will become less and less interested by the prospect of endangering his job with a seemingly hopeless candidacy.

The same problem is plaguing Vermont Republicans. A recent poll showed that Senator Leahy would crush Governor Douglas even if the latter chose to jump in the race - and such numbers will certainly weigh heavily on Douglas’s mind.

These are particularly depressing numbers for the GOP given how few Democratic-held seats they can hope to contest in 2010. They were at least hoping that recruiting Hoeven or Douglas would given them a shot at North Dakota and Vermont. Instead, the NRSC looks like it will have to stick to as narrow an offensive as in 2006 and 2008.