The midterm elections reveal the new power of the Rocky Mountain states.
New Mexico's first congressional race between incumbent Republican Heather Wilson and Democrat Patricia Madrid was high-profile, nasty and-in the end-a nail-biter that returned Wilson to office by 860-some votes.
But it wasn't the only political contest in the West's midterm elections that revealed how high the political stakes in the region have become.
Jon Tester, a 50-year-old farmer running against Montana Republican Sen. Conrad Burns, got hit with especially ugly attack ads in the run-up to the November elections. As authentically rural as they come, Tester lives on the farm homesteaded by his grandparents and told Time magazine, "I do some of my best thinking on my tractor."
But because Tester raised some campaign money in San Francisco, Republican mailers hammered him as a pawn of Left Coast hippies. The ads-starring goofy longhairs
who wore psychedelic, pot-leafed outfits and flashed peace signs against a Golden Gate Bridge backdrop-warned Montana voters that Tester "is as liberal as his supporters."
In the battle for Wyoming's lone US House seat, Republican ads also used the dreaded Golden Gate Bridge image, this time to bash Democrat Gary Trauner, charging he was nothing more than a stooge for Democratic House leader Nancy Pelosi, who hails from San
Francisco.
In Colorado, someone illegally tapped an FBI crime database to make an ad attacking the Democratic candidate for governor, Bill Ritter. The ad was sponsored by Ritter's opponent, Republican Congressman Bob Beauprez, who, ironically, has voted for crackdowns on database leaks.
When all was said and done, the Democrats gained the majority in the Senate and the House. But the shift of power in
DC wasn't the only significant outcome. Democrats also made dramatic gains in the Rocky Mountain states and the West as a whole. Five of eight Mountain West governors are now Democrats-in 2000 none were. These Democrat gains, and other outcomes, reveal several lessons about the new power of this region. Here are seven takeaways from the midterm elections.
1 The West has arrived.
Western voters and leaders now wield unprecedented power nationally. New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson is the outgoing chairman of the Democratic Governors Association and is reportedly lobbying for Denver to host the Dems' 2008 convention instead of New York.
Throughout the election season, George W Bush, Bill Clinton, Dick Cheney, Al Gore, Barack Obama and other celebrities kept popping up around the West, wooing voters to support House
and Senate candidates in such political hot spots as Albuquerque, as well as Billings, Mont., and Elko, Nev.
The national attention is partly a function of the region's growth. Since 1960, the West's population has soared, and so has its House delegation; 66 Western House seats have become 95, taking power from other regions and states that lost seats. (The House total is fixed at 435.) The West's higher profile is also a function of chance and the quirks of partisan perception and balance; this year, for example, a narrow victory in Montana was given credit for tipping control of the Senate to the Democrats.
The West's influence will become obvious when the next session of Congress convenes in January. California Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi will be Speaker of the House, and Nevada's Harry Reid will be majority leader of the Senate, thanks to Tester's Montana Senate victory, achieved by less than 1 percent of the votes cast. Anyone remember the last time Western politicians held the top posts in the House and Senate? Probably not, because it's never happened. And with two Westerners steering federal lawmaking, expect Western issues-public land management, the rush in oil and gas drilling, salmon declines and immigration across the Mexican border, among others-to get more attention in Congress.
2
Moderates rule.
Enough Republicans and independents turned away from the GOP's extremist candidates to elect not only Tester, but a flock of other moderate Western Democrats, including a new Colorado governor and four Democratic congressmen who took formerly Republican seats in Colorado, Arizona and California. Also, centrist
governors in Wyoming (Democrat Dave Freudenthal), Arizona (Democrat Janet Napolitano) and California (Republican Arnold Schwarzenegger) won re-election, even though their parties are in the minority in those states; they received significant support from voters in the opposite party as well as from independents.
To confirm that the West has entered an era of moderation and reduced hard-line party loyalty, examine Arizona's House District 5, a slice of metro Phoenix that includes Scottsdale and Tempe. Voter registration on Election Day showed 139,000 Republicans, 86,000 Democrats and 87,000 independents in the district. In the past four years, the only category to increase was independents (up 11,000, chiefly because of Republican shrinkage).
The district's Republican six-term incumbent, JD Hayworth, a former sportscaster, had shown himself to be consistently at the far-right edge of the right wing. This year, for instance, Hayworth voted for bills to erect a fence along the Mexican border and grant no amnesty for undocumented immigrants in the US, to extend Bush tax cuts despite record deficits, to make it easier to develop wetlands and log roadless forests, to cut funding for student loans, to oppose stem cell research and to grant new tax breaks for oil and gas drillers. Arizona's statewide daily, The Arizona Republic, endorsed Hayworth in all his previous congressional races, but this time, the Republic rejected him as "an angry demagogue" and "a bomb-thrower." Hayworth garnered just 46 percent of the vote, losing to moderate Democrat Harry Mitchell, a state legislator and ex-mayor of Tempe who supports immigration amnesty and stem cell research and is, according to Republic editorialists, a "consensus-builder."
3
Nothing Is impossible.
Just ask Rodger Schlickeisen, head of the national environmental group Defenders of Wildlife. Alarmed by the environmental policies of Bush and the Republican Congress, he set up the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund in 2001 to get more involved in political campaigns. At first, the fund just lobbied Congress. In 2004, it worked on Democrat John Kerry's failed attempt to unseat Bush. But in 2005, Schlickeisen surveyed the political landscape and set his sights on environmentalists' top enemy in Congress: California Congressman Richard Pombo.
As chairman of the key House Resources Committee, Pombo, a far-right Republican, pushed bills trying to sell federal land and drill the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge while killing
proposals to designate federal lands as wilderness. Most notably, he led the effort to eviscerate the Endangered Species Act.
A seven-term incumbent whose family was once the largest landowner in his farm-oriented district, located inland from San Francisco, Pombo looked unbeatable to many political experts. Reapportionment after the 2000 census put some San Francisco suburbs in his district, but Republicans still held a 6 percent advantage in voter registration. Schlickeisen sent in a team to do polling and focus groups in September 2005. The team found that, beneath the surface, many voters were turned off by Pombo's extremism and by allegations that he'd misused funds and aided developers. The Action Fund began running TV ads that portrayed Pombo as stealing candy from babies and quoted newspaper editorials that called him "slimy" and "the Dark Knight of the Environment."
The Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund team-a field director and four college-age lieutenants-moved into the district in early spring. They set up an office suite with wall maps, computers and boxes full of detailed voter data and rented a fleet of vans to haul volunteers, who began canvassing door-to-door. The Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters, Americans for Conservation and a small California group called Ocean Champions joined the effort. Schlickeisen also pulled in the Humane Society, because, he says, "Pombo was their biggest
enemy on animal welfare."
The environmentalists' $1.5 million anti-Pombo campaign eventually backed the ultragreen candidate who won the Democratic primary, wind energy consultant Jerry McNerney. They were helped by Pombo's personality. "Pombo is so damn arrogant, he refused to believe he could be beaten," Schlickeisen says. "We really didn't have that much money for a 13-month campaign, but he wasn't really responding."
Pombo and his party didn't recognize the threat until October. "They poured in about a million and a half dollars," Schlickeisen says, "and they sent the vice president out, and the majority leader, and the first lady, and Bush himself, to try to rescue Pombo." The Democrats' national funders hung back, he says, until the final weeks, when even they realized Pombo might be beatable. "The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee finally came to the party," Schlickeisen says, "putting in a few hundred thousand dollars."
In the home stretch, the environmentalist team recruited hundreds of volunteers, ran a phone bank and knocked on 75,000 doors, making sure the right people turned out to vote. On election night, as the vote counted up to 53 percent for McNerney, Schlickeisen celebrated at the Democrat's headquarters.
"A lot of people are declared unbeatable," Schlickeisen says. "You have to figure out whether that's just conventional wisdom talking. You have to analyze the situation. Some people are thought to be unbeatable, and they are. And [with] others, there's a hidden weakness."
4
Enemies can be allies.
Idaho's biggest environmental group, the Idaho Conservation League, has long battled industries and their politicians-the Republicans who've controlled the Legislature and most statewide offices since 1994-over water and air pollution and other green issues. But the group has also learned how to succeed in its seemingly hostile political habitat by finding islands of agreement with the other side. That openness proved more valuable than ever in this election.
The biggest threat Idaho faced at the ballot box, in the eyes of many environmentalists, was Proposition 2, a radical libertarian measure that sought to drastically limit land-use regulation. It would have forced state and local governments to pay
property owners compensation for any reduction in property values caused by land-use regulations-part of a bigger libertarian campaign that pushed ballot measures against various government powers in eight Western states.
On its face, Proposition 2 appealed to Idaho's traditional support for property rights. Two months before the election, it had no organized opposition. But Idaho Conservation League Executive Director Rick Johnson and others saw it would be a disaster: It would undermine not only environmental regulations, but also any regulations that protect communities from rapid growth and development that conflicts wildly with existing uses. Johnson also understood that the alarm had to be spread beyond the environmentalist ranks.
He began by shelling out approximately $17,000 for polling that tested how the anti-Proposition 2 message would be best framed, and what kind of spokesmen would best carry the message. Then he showed the poll results-which also suggested that voters would oppose Proposition 2, once they understood its real ramifications-to Republican leaders and representatives of major industry groups, including the state's 800-pound business gorilla, the Idaho Association of Commerce and Industry. They jumped in to oppose the anti-regulation
proposition, as did other environmental groups.
"We went from zero to 100 [miles per hour] in seconds," Johnson says. His group contributed about $200,000 to the campaign against Proposition 2-called Neighbors Protecting Idaho-and devoted four staffers to it. The Nature Conservancy-concerned about the proposition's impacts on its many Idaho properties and the rural communities it seeks to protect-kicked in $300,000, with the Greater Yellowstone Coalition adding $150,000 and other donors eventually bringing the anti-Proposition 2 war chest up to about $800,000.
Although environmentalists largely funded it, others presented the message to voters. The ad campaign featured a dairy farmer from Melba, a rancher from Sandpoint, a Boise Chamber of Commerce representative, outgoing Republican Gov. Jim Risch and highly respected Democratic ex-governor Cecil Andrus. Newspaper op-eds came from a Mormon state senator and others, across the political spectrum.
Out-of-state libertarian groups pumped significant money into their campaign for Proposition 2, but they lost in a landslide, getting just 24 percent of the Idaho vote. The margin against Proposition 2 held in metro Boise and in thoroughly rural counties.
"It completely transcended the partisan goofiness," Johnson says. "And everybody [involved] liked it."
The conservation league earned respect, Johnson says, by demonstrating that it represents mainstream values and knows how to win. And the victory may encourage other broad coalitions of "enemies" to tackle issues with voter appeal, including, perhaps, state tax incentives for conservation easements and sales taxes to fund mass transit, Johnson says.
Thanks to similar coalitions that set aside disagreements among interest groups, nine of the 12 libertarian ballot measures in the West failed.
5
Sometimes you have to lose first.
The moderate Democrat in Wyoming's House race, Gary Trauner, came within 1,012 votes of unseating Barbara Cubin, out of 193,000 total votes cast. Cubin stands squarely in the Republican right wing: She has suggested selling off public lands; she wants to fence the Mexican border; she's pushed bills against late-term abortion; and she favors "crack[ing] down on media behemoths who peddle smut on America's airwaves."
Previously a political unknown, Trauner far outperformed initial expectations, and the voting pattern indicates that a moderate Democrat with more experience could take the seat in
2008, should Trauner decide not to run again. Trauner drew 25 percent of the votes cast by registered Republicans, according to CNN exit polls, and 71 percent of the independents.
"I think Cubin is finished," one Wyoming lobbyist, a Democrat who asked not to be named, to avoid ruffling his
targets in the Wyoming Legislature, says. Regardless of what the Democrats do, the lobbyist says, moderates in Cubin's own party will bump her off in the next primary. "Her negatives are huge. She's rude, nasty, she's alienated a lot of Republicans, she's even out of step with the Republican leadership in the Legislature. We actually have a moderate Legislature; the Republicans have a veto-proof majority, and every year a few in the fringe bring up abortion and gay marriage. But the leadership won't pass any of that crap."
The "50-state strategy" of Howard Dean, head of the Democratic National Committee, beefed up campaign funding in Wyoming and other states where the party's candidates looked like long shots. The Wyoming Democratic Party had one full-time staffer until,
13 months before the election, Dean's group sent money to hire two more. The new staffers organized far more volunteers than had been available in recent campaigns and "really built up our ground game, the infrastructure," Mike Gierau, state party chairman, says. The close results in Trauner's race and the party's net gain of three seats in the Legislature will encourage more viable Democratic candidates to run in 2008. Dean's strategy "was an immense help in Wyoming," Gierau says.
6
Money doesn't always win (but it's still nice to have).
In Oregon, Democratic Gov. Ted Kulongoski was outspent, 2-to-1, in his re-election campaign, but he still crushed his Republican challenger, Ron Saxton.
In Montana, ousted incumbent Burns outspent Tester by nearly 2-to-1.
In Arizona, incumbent Hayworth also outspent his vanquisher, Mitchell, by a large margin.
Cigarette corporations and their allies burned way more money than their opponents as they tried to defeat anti-smoking measures in Arizona and Nevada. The corporations lost.
Still, in most campaigns, either the richest war chest won, or the winner had about the same amount as the loser. And the price of winning or being competitive often set new records.
Consider Hollywood producer and real estate heir Steven Bing. He put approximately $50 million of his own money into a ballot measure that sought to impose a new tax on California oil companies; proceeds from the tax would've funded alternative energy development. Other entrepreneurs, including the founders of Google, chipped in enough to bring the total campaign budget to nearly $57
million. But they provoked corporate giants: Oil companies poured in $90 million, and eventually about 55 percent of the voters decided to reject the measure. It was the most expensive ballot-measure war ever in California (and probably anywhere else on the planet).
In a similar vein, tobacco companies fought off an anti-smoking measure in California by outspending health care advocates, $60 million to $14 million. The archconservative national Club for Growth dispatched more than $1 million for attack ads used in Bill Sali's winning campaign in Idaho; the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee sent more than half a million and national anti-abortion groups gave $64,000, according to Sali's opponents. Thanks to the money from outside Idaho, they say, Sali ran the priciest congressional campaign in the state's history.
7
Environmentalism matters.
Voters across the West approved new local taxes to buy open space, parks, streamside habitat and trails in communities across the political and cultural spectrum (so long as local economies were healthy).
Conservation measures passed in metro Portland and Salt Lake City, in suburban Seattle, in Democratic Missoula County and Republican Ravalli County in Montana, and in many other Western locales.
Further, issues that have long been "Western issues," such as oil drilling and energy policy, have now become national issues of importance. And Democrats have been able to use the Bush administration's poor environmental record to their advantage.
"Westerners have awakened to the fact that we are environmentalists," Pat Williams, a Democratic congressman in Montana from 1979 to 1997 and now a senior fellow at the Center for the Rocky Mountain West in Missoula, says. "That's one of the things that has begun to turn the West politically."
When it comes to environmental issues, Williams says, many of the Westerners in Congress need to catch up with the people who sent them there. If or when voters make it absolutely clear the environment is a priority that their national leaders absolutely need to address, the West will have finally settled on a part of the cohesive political identity that will bring it lasting national clout.
Rocky Mountain Roundup
By Ray Ring
ARIZONA
After taking office in 2003, Democratic Gov. Janet Napolitano vetoed more than 110 bills passed by the Republican Legislature. Voters seem to like her stands. She won re-election by roughly 2-to-1 over archconservative Republican Len Munsil. Both ran campaigns with public financing-about $1 million each from Arizona's unusual Clean Elections Program.
Democrat Gabrielle Giffords, an ex-Republican, won a House seat in southeast Arizona that includes parts of metro Tucson; her opponent, Randy Graf, who belongs to the Minutemen group, ran as an immigration hard-liner.
Democrat Harry Mitchell, an ex-high school teacher and longtime local politician, took the suburban-Phoenix House seat held by JD Hayworth, another archconservative Republican.
Voters rejected competing state lands ballot measures, one backed by environmentalists, the other by ranchers, but passed a measure requiring better treatment of pregnant pigs at factory farms.
COLORADO
Democrat Bill Ritter, a Denver prosecutor, took the governorship in a state where his party is a minority, beating anti-tax, pro-oil Congressman Bob Beauprez.
Democrat Ed Perlmutter, promising to develop renewable energy and end the Bush tax cuts, took what had been Beauprez' House seat, besting Republican Rick O'Donnell, who wanted to deport all undocumented immigrants.
Democrats solidified their hold on the Legislature; for the first time in decades, they control both chambers and the governorship.
IDAHO
Democrats came closer than in some recent election cycles, but Idaho continues to prove itself the nation's most Republican state, with the GOP sweeping all statewide races. Conservative Congressman Butch Otter is now governor, and anti-abortion zealot Bill Sali has Otter's old House seat.
Democrats picked up six state legislative seats, chiefly in metro Boise districts; still, they hold just 26 of the 105 total seats.
Boise narrowly rejected a proposal to place a Ten Commandments monument in a city park.
MONTANA
Democrat Jon Tester, a beer-bellied, crewcut-topped organic farmer, barely took the Senate seat of Republican Conrad Burns, a gaffe-prone master of appropriating federal money for Montana projects.
Democrats lost a few state legislative seats, so the parties are nearly even in the House and Senate, making things tougher on Democratic Gov. Brian Schweitzer.
Voters in two fast-growing counties (liberal Missoula and conservative Ravalli) agreed to tax themselves for $10 million bond issues to buy open space.
NEVADA
Republican Rep. Jim Gibbons, who sponsored a recent proposal to sell off federal land, gave up his seat to run for governor and beat Democrat Dina Titus, a University of Nevada-Las Vegas political science professor, 48 to 44 percent. Four percent went for "None of These"-a Nevada innovation allowing voters to express general angst.
Democrats won races for attorney general and three other statewide offices, increased their dominance in the state House and nearly achieved a tie in the state Senate, all of which will pressure Gibbons to govern from the center.
NEW MEXICO
Here at home, Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson rode his party's numerical advantage and a $13 million campaign machine to easy re-election over obscure Republican John Dendahl, whose campaign had only $313,000. Although Dems were big winners overall, there were two notable failures. Outgoing Dem AG Patricia Madrid failed to oust Republican incumbent Heather Wilson in the First Congressional District. And, in state races, former state land commissioner Democrat Jim Baca lost to incumbent Republican Pat Lyons.
UTAH
All occupants of Utah congressional seats (two Republicans and a lone Democrat) won re-election, as did Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch; the party balance in the Legislature also didn't change (77 Repubs, 27 Dems).
First elected senator 30 years ago, Hatch had a $6 million war chest, while sacrificial Democratic opponent/Internet-access company owner Pete Ashdown had only $200,000. Ashdown campaigned for more than a year, driving the state in an old RV, but won just 31 percent of the vote.
Voters in the county that includes Salt Lake City-a Democratic stronghold-agreed to tax themselves for a $48 million bond to be spent on open space, wildlife habitat and trails.
WYOMING
Democratic Gov. Dave Freudenthal snuck into office in 2002, taking less than half the vote in a three-way race. This year he won 70 percent of the vote and re-election over lawyer-rancher Ray Hunkins. The victory may have been buoyed by a sense of financial well-being; Wyoming has a huge budget surplus, due to more than $1 billion in annual taxes on soaring natural gas production.
Wyoming voters haven't put a Democrat in their lone House seat in 30 years. But six-term incumbent Republican Rep. Barbara Cubin had to dodge an unexpected bullet, beating Democrat Gary Trauner by only about 1,000 votes. Trauner, an ex-Internet-access company owner whose only political experience was on a Jackson-area school board, traveled the state and knocked on an estimated 10,000 doors. But the National Republican Congressional Committee funded TV ads portraying him as an outsider-because he moved to Wyoming from suburban New York 16 years ago.
