Campaign Diaries

The first public poll of the NY-20 special election confirmed the conventional wisdom about the race: Republican nominee Tony Tedisco has the upper-hand in the race for Kirsten Gillibrand’s old House seat.

The survey, released by Siena, shows Tedisco leading Democratic nominee by double-digit, 46% to 34%.

The poll’s internals suggest that both candidates have room to grow. On the one hand, Republicans are more undecided than Democrats, and that is encouraging for Tedisco. On the other hand, 60% of respondents have no opinion of Murphy, compared to only 34% for the much better-known Tedisco; as Murphy introduces himself to voters by airing ads using his own money, he should improve his name recognition and, Democrats hope, his general election numbers.

Democrats are spinning Siena’s poll as good news, arguing that it shows that Murphy is in a position to win; they point out that Tedisco’s advantage is much smaller than the 31% lead the Republican claimed last month based on his campaign’s internal poll. Both of these points are indisputable; but with less than 5 weeks left before the special election, a 12% lead is no small deficit for a candidate to overcome.

Of course, polls of NY-20 are unreliable because a special election is inherently unpredictable. Turnout will be low, and both sides’ partisans are not likely to be equally excited or participate at the same rate. Unfortunately for Democrats, who have grown used to great special election showings over the past few years, recent signs suggest that turnout patterns could favor Republicans: In LA-02, in LA-04 and in Georgia’s Senate runoff, conservative voters were much more motivated than the Democratic base.

And there is some parallel to Georgia in NY-20’s campaign. Once again, Republicans are mobilizing to win this race with many of the party’s stars traveling to upstate New York, while national Democrats are mostly staying away from the district.

At first glance, NY-20 should not be a lost cause for the DCCC. Sure, Tedisco looked like the favorite as soon as he was chosen by the GOP, the district is always described as conservative, and Republicans have a large registration edge. Yet, Barack Obama won NY-20 by 3% last November, confirming that Democrats can win in this district, and do so even if they are not running a conservative, pro-gun and anti-immigration campaign like Gillibrand did.

The problem for Democrats is that the district’s Republican roots gave the GOP strong candidates to choose from, while Democrats had practically no bench. And even then, I am doubtful Democrats chose their best available candidate. Murphy’s main (only?) asset is his ability to spend his own money to win the race; Is that enough to win such a difficult contest?

If Murphy manages to close the gap, perhaps positioning himself to score an upset and hold the seat for Democrats, it will be due to Tedisco’s mistakes rather than to Murphy’s strength.

Over the past few weeks, Tedisco has been on the defensive over his refusal to say how he would have voted on the stimulus bill. Not only is the Republican dismissing such questions as “hypothetical,” he is also labeling them a “diversion,” contrasting them to what he thinks is the contest’s more pressing issue - the fact that Murphy has missed voting in in eight elections between 2000 and 2008:

“It won’t just be this, it’ll be, ‘How would you vote on the war in Iraq?’ Those are hypothetical. Not walking into a voting booth that’s in front of you is not hypothetical. He really could have voted, and he didn’t.”

To be fair to Tedisco, the eight elections Murphy has reportedly missed are significant ones (one is the 2000 presidential election), unlike those Caroline Kennedy was reproached for skipping. Nonetheless, it is laughable for a politician to dismiss the stimulus and the Iraq War as “diversions” - as if voters are less interested in candidates’ position on these issues than in whether they missed voting in any election.

With upstate New York badly hit by the financial crisis, the economically distraught residents of NY-20 could punish Tedisco for thinking that something as important as the stimulus is a secondary issue - not to mention that Tedisco’s public indecision could help Democrats portray him as a demagogic political insider typical of Albany (Tedisco is the Republican leader of the state Assembly). Tedisco’s non-stance has already drawn scathing editorials in newspapers.

Republicans all over the country are surely watching NY-20 to learn how to deal with the stimulus issue. Republicans tied its fortunes to those of the stimulus by frontally opposing it, but Tedisco’s refusal to own GOP criticism by saying that he would have voted against the bill suggests that Republicans are not so sure that their strategy will pay off at the polls.

If Tedisco pulls off a decisive victory next month, it might embolden GOP opposition to Obama’s economic agenda; but if he loses or only ekes out a narrow victory, it could be enough to convince vulnerable Republican representatives that they need to cooperate with the White House.