A Beginner's Tour of the Elections: Money, the Tea Party, and the House of Representatives

In an a normal election cycle, contests for the House of Representatives do not receive as much attention as races in the Senate. Representatives are elected every two years, with the possibility they may be defeated after a short period of time in Congress. They also possess little influence, when first elected, as power resides in the hands of the party leadership. As a consequence, campaign financers regard a Senatorial election as giving them a better return for their investment. Senators hold office for six years, and even the most junior member holds a significant ability to affect the proceedings in the upper chamber.

But this is not a normal year, and the story that is emerging alongside the partisan differences in the outlook of candidates is the astounding sums of money that are being spent on House elections. According to your personal opinion of how political business should be conducted, this is either a good development or a dangerous precedent. Conservatives maintain that the recent Supreme Court decision in Citizens United has merely extended the First Amendment right to free (political) speech enjoyed by the unions to citizens organized in advocacy groups. Liberals counter that the ruling, and subsequent defeat of the DISCLOSE Act by a Republican filibuster, has opened the floodgates for corporate interests –-- often foreign controlled –-- to corrupt politics by buying seats for conservative candidates through extensive anonymous funding of their campaigns.

After observing these elections closely, there is only one statement that can be made with certainty: Republicans have finally ended the traditional dominance of Democratic organizations in electoral spending, a development that has is having catastrophic consequences for some of the more moderate Democrats. Unions, especially, are abandoning Democrats who did not support health care reform to shore up the campaigns of more liberal candidates who are under sustained pressure from conservative groups.  

The final figures that will reveal whether the GOP has overtaken liberal spending awaits analysis until after the elections are over, but three races already illustrate how money, and especially the outside provision of attack ads that are stoking the fires of partisanship, are affecting the current mid-terms.

One striking feature of this election is the national mood “to kick the bums out”. Incumbents, especially those identified with inclination for politics as usual, are facing an anti-establishment backlash. Major casualties of this dissatisfaction with Washington as the master instead of the servant of the people include Chet Edwards of Texas and John Spratt of South Carolina. These two Democrat Representatives have held their congressional seats for 20 and 28 years respectively, yet both are down in the polls by 10 points or more and facing almost certain defeat.

But some incumbents are not as vulnerable. In the most expensive House race this year, the two-term Representative Michele Bachmann, doyenne of the Tea Party movement in the lower house, holds a healthy lead over her DFL (Democrat-Farmer-Labor Party) rival Tarryl Clark. Between the two of them, they have spent $15 million on their campaigns in the 6^th District of Minnesota, hardly a state known for its extravagant expenditure on elections.

The two held their first public debate on Monday at the St. Cloud Civic Center. Both agreed that the provision of jobs is the No.1 issue in the race, but very little else. Bachmann made the obligatory attacks on the deficit spending policies of the Democrat administration and, as the good conservative she is, also lambasted George W. Bush for allowing the national debt to explode. Clark countered by reminding Bachmann she was running against candidates from Minnesota, and not the Democrat leadership in Washington, and asked her conservative rival what she was doing for her home state.

Clark’s most persistent complaint, however, was the large number of negative ads the Bachmann campaign, with $11 million of funding, had aimed at her; which elicited the somewhat wearily honest admission from Bachmann that she didn’t enjoy the commericals: “Thank God, one week from today, we can all go to the voting booth and put an end to these ads."

That is hardly the kind of statement one expects from the most demonised Republican in the House of Representatives. Bachmann has received such extensive financing because, come the next Congress, she will be the face of the Tea Party movement in the lower house. Bachmann, along with 39 other Republicans, formed the Tea Party Caucus back in July, and the new crop of Representatives with conservative leanings is sure to see that number grow. She has promised that the Caucus will not act as a leadership vehicle for the tea party run by politicians in Washington. Instead, she emphasizes, the Caucus will represent (be a servant to) the interests of grassroots Tea Party members by voting as they would in Congress. And to help Republican members of Congress who have forgotten the conservative values that are animating the Tea Party movement, Bachmann has announced plans to hold classes on the Constitution, led by experts, when Congress reconvenes.

When the new Congress begins its work in earnest in January, expect to see and hear a lot more of Michele Bachmann. Along with Mike Pence of Indiana, she will lead the efforts of the Tea Party Caucus to disrupt the agenda of President Obama, whether the Republican leadership want her to or not. If, and I stress if the Tea Party movement is to evolve into a third-party challenge to the dominance of the established two parties by 2012, it is in the House of Representatives, with Bachmann to the fore, that you will witness the adversarial politics that a Newt Gingrich or Sarah Palin will capitalize on over the next two years.

If liberals are keen to accentuate the ‘extremist’ tendencies of Michele Bachmann, then Republicans are no less eager to highlight the radicalism of Alan Grayson, Democrat Representative for the 8^th District of Florida. Grayson’s attempts to win a second term in Florida deserve mention because, although he has raised significantly more campaign funding than his Republican opponent Daniel Webster, he is facing almost certain defeat.

I have kept an eye open for Alan Grayson for the last six months. Whenever I visited the ActBlue website, the clearing house for donations to liberal politicians, there sat the Florida progressive cat the top of most received funds. As of October 13, Grayson had raised $5.1 million in total (about $1.3 million from organisations on ActBlue), compared to Webster’s $1.3 million. Despite this huge advantage Grayson trails Webster by seven points in the polls, with his support trending steadily downward.

Grayson is an unapologetic progressive who supports the public option (government provision) in health care reform and who has called for an extension of stimulus spending to create more jobs. Grayson might have used his extensive funding (largely from outside the state) to promote his defence of liberal policies, in a district that has more registered Democrats than Republicans, and to build a positive message to overcome voters antipathy to the administration. Instead, Grayson decided to launch a series of negative ads against his opponent that were no less controversial than some of the comments he made in his first term in Congress.

Sometimes, instead of reviewing the opinions of another writer, it is just wiser to refer a reader to their words themselves. To give you a hint, George Will launched an attack on Grayson last weekend that classified the likely defeat of the Florida politician as an act of “civic hygiene”. The context for Will's contentious opinion includes a controversial attack ad, "Taliban Dan", on Webster as an ally of Christian fundamentalists.  

Will fails to detail some of the statements Grayson made in Washington that alternatively saw him loved by the progressive left and hated by the right. Most famously, Grayson described America’s healthcare system as “Don't get sick, and if you do get sick, die quickly,” and later clarified his objections by apologizing only “to the dead and their families that we haven't voted sooner to end this holocaust in America”.

Grayson might be a firebrand, but he did secure a more than fair share of appropriation spending for his congressional district. His unfavorable/favorable rating in a recent Sunshine State News poll, however, stood at 55-30, a ratio a commentator in the paper described as “downright lethal” and attributed to the negative and nasty campaign he has run against Webster.  

Perhaps Alan Grayson had little other choice in a district that, according to the same news report, tends to vote Republican in off-presidential election years. But his experience shows that superior campaign finance is not the sole determinant of a favourable result. Money cannot overcome other factors when they are stacked against a candidate, but it can certainly make a race more interesting –-- or unnerving –-- as Bruce Braley is finding out in Congressional District 1 in Iowa.

Back in the summer Braley, a two-term Democrat incumbent regarded by some observers as a potential star of the future, appeared a shoo-in for reelection. Since then, the conservative advocacy group America’s Future Fund has poured in more $1 million to the District to finance ads attacking Braley’s liberal record. The beneficiary has been Ben Lange, the Republican opponent, who has been steadily clawing back Braley’s lead in the polls.

As is the nature of politics, once Braley’s campaign began bleeding, the sharks began to circle. Dick Morris, a Republican strategist, has stated that now the race has become closer, he plans to raise $100,000 to finance ads attacking Braley, adding to the $250,000 worth of ads the Chamber of Commerce began airing last week.

If these groups are successful and pull off an upset defeat of Bruce Braley, the result will highlight the observation in yesterday’s post that this will be the most polarized Congress in many years. Congressional District 1 of Iowa will replace a liberal Democrat who is still proud to defend the health care legislation he helped pass, with a Republican who believes “Obamacare pierces a fundamental principle underlying our limited, constitutional government” and who supports “those states who are challenging this action and fighting for liberties guaranteed by the 10th Amendment and our Constitution”. This criticism of health care from Ben Lange’s campaign website is not accompanied by a commitment to join the Tea Party Caucus if he is elected, but it takes little imagination to see that as the likely outcome.

Those readers who follow their US politics closely may have noted that Iowa has been a popular visiting ground for prominent Republicans this week. Rick Santorum, Haley Barbour, Tim Pawlenty, and Mitt Romney have all shown up, ostensibly to support the gubernatorial campaign of Terry Branstad. More pertinent is the hope of those leading Republicans to build their profile in the state that will, once again, kick off the GOP presidential nomination process in February 2012.

With a few days to go before the election all the websites are predicting a majority for Republicans in the House of Representatives. What the polls cannot predict, however, is the actions of those Republicans when they get to Washington. This is not a unified GOP, and already voices are being raised in the conservative blogosphere suggesting how the new members, and the Tea Party Caucus already there, can blunt the influence of the party leadership.  Tea Party activists are not going to tolerate Representatives they helped elect who compromise, and with those same members needing to stick to the limited government line to avoid a potential primary challenge in less than two years time, there is likely to be as much discord between Republicans as between Democrats and Republicans.

Ironically, President Obama may look back on these mid-terms and the defeat of his majority in the lower house as a blessing in disguise. If the Republican majority in the House descends into an intramural squabble over principles before pragmatism, for example, to push for a repeal of the health care reforms, and nothing gets done in Congress, Obama will find himself in a position to appeal to Independents, who seem to have deserted him in this referendum on his Presidency, that he is the only viable option in 2012.

President Obama must be rubbing his hands with glee at the possibility, and it is not one I would bet against, that the next presidential election will be a three-way contest where he can sit on the sidelines and watch the GOP slug it out with its Tea Party wing. The Republican Party split in 1912, --- over progressivism ,believe it or not --- and perhaps a century has not been enough time for Republicans to learn that principles, as important as they are, do not win elections by themselves.