Campaign Diaries

OR-04: A swing district that has not been contested for 22 years

Peter DeFazio would have faced some trouble represents a swing district that voted for Bush by 5% in 2000. Yet, he has never dipped below 60% at the polls in his 11 re-election races! Republicans look determined to finally contest the district in 2010, and they have landed a strong recruit: Springfield Mayor Sid Leiken.

While Springfield represents a small portion of the district, Leiken has served as the city’s mayor since 2000 Republicans also point to his business experience and his ties to the timber industry, which is significant in the area. On the other hand, Leiken’s strength should not be overstated. Sure, DeFazio  has not have been tested for decades, but neither has Leiken, whose past two races were uncontested. And while Springfield is a non-negligeable part of the district, its real population center is liberal Eugene.

Furthermore, DeFazio is a very strong incumbent, and he occupies a powerful position in the House as the chairman of the Transportation Subcommittee on Highways and Transit. He can point to the additional funding his seniority has allowed him to win for the district. And OR-04 has been getting increasingly Democratic: While the rest of the country moved to the GOP from 2000 to 2004, John Kerry improved Al Gore’s performance by 5% and Barack Obama swung the district by an additional 11%.

In short: DeFazio might have to spend a bit more time worrying about his re-election than usual, but he remains overwhelmingly favored to win a 13th term!

So why are Republicans so excited by Leiken’s candidacy? DeFazio is considering running in Oregon’s open gubernatorial race, and an open seat race would be competitive. Democrats would start with an advantage, but OR-04 is clearly a swing district both parties can hope to contest. In fact, the NRCC is surely hoping that Leiken’s candidacy will pressure DeFazio into exiting the race - though I doubt that the Mayor looks threatening enough for DeFazio to make the jump based on his entrance.

Interestingly, DeFazio welcomed Leiken to the race by blasting his support for last fall’s bailout plan. “Last fall, Leiken marched lock-step with George Bush, John McCain and leaders in Congress in supporting the massive $700 billion Wall Street bailout,” he wrote in a statement. While it seems unfair to blast Leiken as a Republican robot for a position shared by Barack Obama and the majority of Democratic House members, DeFazio was one of the bailout’s staunchest congressional opponents and he introduced an alternative plan. The Oregonian called him the “leader of the left’s anti-bailout forces in Congress.”

CA-47: GOP taking aim at another traditionally safe Democrat

Over the past decade, CA-47 has taken some wild swings in the presidential voting. After voting for Al Gore by 14%, it gave George W. Bush a 1% victory in 2004 and then swung by a massive 23%! Rep. Loretta Sanchez’s numbers have been more stable: Ever since unseating a Republican incumbent by 1% in 1996, she has easily won re-election.

Yet, the NRCC is convinced that the district is open to voting for a Republican and that Assemblyman Van Tran is the man who can unseat her. After weeks of being courted by GOP officials, the Vietnamese-American politician announced today that he would form an exploratory committee. Republicans are already celebrating the news, with one NRCC official saying Tran is “one of the top people” he has worked to recruit.

(A note of caution: The formation of an exploratory committee is obviously not equivalent to declaring your candidacy - and that warning might be especially appropriate for Van Tran: He formed an exploratory committee to run for a state Senate seat in 2006, but he did not pursue the race.)

I am somewhat puzzled by the GOP’s excitement about this contest: This is too blue a district for a Democratic incumbent who has shown no prior sign of vulnerability to be that endangered. George W. Bush’s 2004 victory in the district was surely appetizing for Republicans, but California has moved to the left since then and Gore and Obama’s big victories suggest that the GOP can only contest the race in the best of conditions.

A seven-term incumbent running for re-election is not the best of conditions, and it’s not like Sanchez has unexpectedly underperformed in recent cycles, which is usually what we look at to determine whether incumbents who are believed to be safe could be endangered: In 2006, she crushed a well-funded challenger; last fall, she received 70% of the vote.

Tran might be a credible candidate to run, and he could have a shot if the economic situation pushes the number of incumbents down and creates a toxic political environment for Democrats. At the very least, the GOP is clearly hoping to expand the map far beyond what they managed to do over the past two cycles, forcing Democrats. But Sanchez remains clearly favored to win and the GOP should be careful not to let itself be distracted: Given all the red territory Democrats conquered in 2006 and in 2008, the GOP already has a lot of obviously vulnerable seats to focus on without spending funds on blue districts like CA-47.

Note that CA-47 could be open (just as OR-04), as Sanchez has opened the door to running for Governor or even for Senate if Barbara Boxer chooses not to seek a fourth term. That possibility helps explain why Van Tran’s candidacy is appealing to Republicans, but this scenario looks fairly unlikely: Boxer has shown no sign that she is considering retiring and there does not look to be much of an opening in the gubernatorial run for Sanchez to jump in.

Update

I remain unconvinced that Sanchez should fear Tran, so I have changed the title of my post from “strong recruits” to “credible recruits.” The district has an important number of Asian-American voters - particularly of Vietnamese-Americans, with Orange County’s important Little Saigon - which helps explain why the GOP is attracted to Tran’s candidacy. But two other problems another problem for Tran: First, Ron says in a comment that Tran lives outside of Sanchez’s district. Second, his legislative district (California’s 68th) is far more Republican than the district-at-large as Bush received 60% there in 2004 - which is just about the number Tran has received in his own races; thus, he cannot argue that he has demonstrated great appeal to Democratic voters.