Campaign Diaries

Republicans have been for month insisting that they will put longtime Democratic-held seats in play, and they will soon have an opportunity to test their argument: Hawaii Rep. Neil Abercrombie announced today that he would resign to devote himself full time to his gubernatorial candidacy, which means HI-01 will be hosting a special election sometime in 2010.

This is not the type of district you would expect to be competitive: Barack Obama received 70% of vote in HI-01, and Hawaii has a whole has been very loyal to be the Democratic Party. Yet, the NRCC has long been touting Honolulu City Councilman Charles Djou, who’s been preparing for the 2010 campaign since before the 2008 election. Furthermore, this district gave John Kerry a surprisingly narrow 6% edge in 2004, suggesting that Republicans could win under the right circumstances.

Abercrombie’s unexpected resignation could very well set up such right circumstances: Under Hawaii law, a special election is a winner-take-all race in which all candidates run on the same ballot, regardless of how many are members of the same party. As such, Democrats will not be able to pick their standard-bearer in a primary, which means that former Rep. Ed Case and state Senate President Colleen Hanabusa could split the party’s vote, allowing Djou to pick-up Abercrombie’s House seat with a plurality. All the Republican might need is to land somewhere between the 28% McCain received in 2008 and the 39% Bush received in 2000 - not to mention Bush’s 47% in 2004.

(We have long known that Abercrombie would not run for re-election next year, so all three of these candidates have already been campaigning for months. All three have already confirmed that they will run in the special election.)

The Case-Hanabusa race was supposed to be one of the cycle’s most meaningful primaries at the House level. I profiled the stakes in detail in October: Case is a conservative Democratic who was a member of the Blue Dog Coalition when he represented Hawaii’s other congressional district earlier this decade, while Hanabusa has a progressive profile. As such, it would be a big setback for liberals in their quest to have a left-leaning Democratic caucus if they let Case replace Neil Abercrombie, who is a CPC member.

Now, not only is their confrontation moved up, but it will also take place with the threat that they let Djou score an improbable victory. We will have to see whether national Democrats or local party leaders move to convince one of the two to drop out. The problem is that given his history Case should be very hard to push out (he challenged a sitting Senator in 2006) while the last thing liberals should want is for Hanabusa to call it quits, since that would mean letting someone who supported the Patriot Act reauthorization (2004), Bush’s bankruptcy reform (2004) the Real Id Act (2005) and the permanent repeal of the estate tax (2006) occupy 72%-Obama district.

An alternative analysis is proposed by Swing State Project relies on the idea that there isn’t enough room for Case and for Djou in the special election: They would find themselves competing over the same pool of voters (centrist-to-conservative voters), whereas Hanabusa could pile up support from the state’s generally liberal establishment. If Djou rises, he would do so by capturing those independents or centrist Democrats Case needs; if Case rises, it would mean that he has essentially become the right’s de facto nominee, which would hurt Djou. In short, the more appropriate vote-splitting scenario involves not the two Democrats but the Republican and the centrist, which would help Hanabusa.

This scenario is certainly plausible, but it does depend on how effective Hanabusa’s campaign is in portraying Case as a right-wing politician: As a former Democratic congressman, Case does have credibility among his party’s voters - not to mention he received 46% in the Democrats’ Senate primary in 2006. Sure, some of that is due to the fact that Hawaii holds open primaries: since there was less action on the Republican side, Case received votes from non-Democrats. Yet, 46% is certainly no negligeable result and it suggests Hanabusa certainly cannot expect to receive most of the Democratic support.

Worse comes to worse, Democrats would have the opportunity for a do-over within few months: If Djou wins the special election, he’ll have to quickly prepare for the September primary and the November general election. Yet, he could very well receive majority support if he runs as an incumbent as HI-01 is certainly not as staunchly blue as Rep. Cao’s New Orleans-based district. The same goes for Case: If he wins this spring or if Hanabusa does not run in the special election, he would still be vulnerable in the upcoming primary. Yet, the fact that he has already served in the House combined with his incumbency status could make him hard to dislodge.

In short, this upcoming special election (whose date remains unclear since Abercrombie has not specified when exactly he will leave office) will be very important both from the perspective of the partisan balance of power and from the perspective of the Democratic caucus’s ideological make-up.