We're All Partisans Now

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By Mark Schmitt | bio

Bloomberg reports that six Republican-held congressional seats in New York State may be seriously in play in November, a pretty nice downpayment on the 15 seats Democrats would need to take back the House. This confirms something that one of the serious analysts of congressional campaigns told me a month ago: that with a national tide in favor of Democrats, and the strength of Senator Clinton's reelection bid and Eliot Spitzer's gubernatorial campaign, all the Republican seats in that state could be vulnerable.

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As a Democrat, I see this as is great news. (And incidentally, if you’re looking for just one campaign to support in this group, may I suggest Dan Maffei, who’s running against Rep. James Walsh in the Syracuse district, which hasn't appeared on a lot of "hot races" lists even though it's the only Republican-held New York district that Kerry carried in 2004. I’ve known Dan for almost ten years, and I’m enthusiastic about his candidacy not just because I think he can win, but because he would make a great member of Congress, with deep roots in Syracuse but also having worked for Senators Bradley and Moynihan and for the Democrats on the House Ways and Means Committee.) [UPDATE: I corrected the error in this paragraph which said that NY-25 was the only district in the state Kerry carried.]

With that experiment in violating the FEC’s regulations on blogs completed, I’ll return to the main point: Six Republican seats in New York could switch. Three of Connecticut’s five seats are held by Republicans; at least two are in play and possibly the third. Several Philadelphia-suburb Republican seats are vulnerable, along with a few in Ohio. I notice that even Frank Wolf of Virginia is potentially vulnerable, having been outraised by a great opponent, health policy expert Judy Feder. These are seats that were once as reliably Republican as Mississippi’s were reliably Democratic, the wealthy green suburbs of the Eastern Seaboard and industrial Midwest, where the Bush family has its roots.

One consequence of this outcome, however, is that the partisanship we’ve been discussing in the Book Club will become all the more acute. Not all of the Republicans who hold these seats now advertise themselves as "moderates," but many are allies on environmental causes and/or try to maintain good relationships with organized labor.

This November, even if the Democrats fall short of capturing the House, we are likely to find a Congress made up of two parties that are more ideologically homogenous and more regionally based than ever in history. There will be no truly conservative Democrats (some opportunists, of course), but that’s been the case since 1994 and the party-switches that followed. But there will also be no significant number of Republicans who are pro-environment (simple measure: the 34 Republicans who voted against Rep. Pombo’s near-repeal of the Endangered Species Act includes all of the NY, CT, PA representatives mentioned above.)

This will be an enormous challenge for, for example, environmental activists, because they are accustomed to operating across party lines, and in general it means that those trying to move any good policy will find themselves, through no choice of their own, more deeply embedded within the Democratic Party and more consistently opposed to Republican policies. The alternative is to wait around for the Northeastern moderates to reappear, which is as futile as waiting for Waco, Texas, to suddenly start electing Democrats. [Another error caught in comments: Waco is represented by Democrat Chet Edwards, one of the few survivors of the DeLay redistricting. Let's substitute "Gwinnett County, GA," for Waco.]

This is an important point about partisanship that needs to be made: Even someone who doesn’t have an ounce of partisanship, who has no interest in or respect for the Democratic Party, but who cares about one or several issues, is going to find herself increasingly in the position of a partisan. Since resistance is futile, it’s best to embrace the role.