The Special Elections of 2013

Thought premeditated, well calculated/The air's been tested, the people can't wait/So, ahh, we agreed to send one, to swim from lost and found/See truth be the life preserve, we can't drown/Drunk with the victory, the Wu cavalry.

Whoof. Enough about New Jersey for the moment, huh? Let's take us a breather and cool down with some scattered special elections scheduled for 2013. We'll take a look at the Jersey gubernatorial race in a few days.

Once again, Blue the Nation is a project for letting all my friends and family--and all their friends and family--know how they can help push this country to the left. It's not just about Presidential elections. It's not just about midterms. It's about the state legislatures. It's about statewide executives. It's about special elections. It's about every elected office. Every Democratic candidate, and even some moderate Republicans in states like Kansas and Georgia, needs your money, your time, your support, your energy. Here's a look at a few of those candidates, a few of those races.

We're all just gonna take a break and chill out with Rape-Face Paul Ryan.

U.S. House of Representatives

Until the DeMint/Scott situation, the only two special elections for the U.S. House were extremely safe seats for the incumbent party. That doesn't mean I don't think we should take a shot at MO-8, however. Remember, aim high, everything can be winnable, blah blah blah.

Missouri - 8^th House District – date TBD, likely Spring 2013 or early Summer 2013

Republican GOP representative Jo Ann Emerson is retiring. I kind of understand politically-motivated timing of retirements—i.e., winning your seat before immediately retiring to keep it in your party's control as long as possible—but it's not like the Eighth was really up for grabs whether or not Emerson ran. She didn't need to run to keep the seat red, is my point. I half-expect some crazy scandal involving rent boys to crop up out of Emerson's past. Until then, however, let's busy ourselves with figuring out what to do about the MO-8 Congressional seat.

The election date has not been announced, but Emerson's retirement is effective February 2013. By Missouri law, the election has to be announced 10 weeks in advance, so we're already probably looking at sometime in March at the earliest. Still, this one's probably going to be the first of the national special elections (of which, so far, there are three planned for 2013, with a fourth one almost 100% certain.)

Not to worry. Governor Jay Nixon has already dispatched a team of vampire
hunters to drive a stake through the beast's heart before it rises again.

Winnability: Emerson—easily one of the most awful human beings to ever darken the door of the United States Congress—won her district by 47 points in 2012. Although that's her largest-ever victory, it's pretty close to what all her other victory margins were. She hasn't had a competitive campaign since her first go-round, in 1996, when she ran as an independent. Arcane ballot rules prohibited her from getting on the ballot after her incumbent husband died, but she was still able to climb up just past 50%, with the official GOP candidate taking another 10%. Taken together as a conservative Republican bloc, they still beat their Democratic opponent 61-37. So that's the best the Dems have done in MO-8 in the era of Jo Ann Emerson. In this special election, I'm going to put the over/under on Democratic performance at 40%. We're not gonna win this thing. But if Democrats ignore it, they'll be making a grave mistake.

Who's on the bench: We have a unique opportunity to use this election as a laboratory. There's nothing to lose, right? So let's try something novel. One of the most fascinating Senate stories of 2012 was Heidi Heitkamp's upset of Rick Berg up in North Dakota. At the outset of that race, nobody gave Heitkamp a shot. But she went at the campaign in an old-fashioned way, a way you just don't see that often anymore. So much of American politics has become focused on urban centers—and rightly so, because that's where the people are—that the game has become totally urbanized. It's begun to feel like even the politicians with a more rural constituency end up campaigning like city politicos. A lot of advertising, lit-dropping, poll-checking...cookie-cutter campaign stuff, the things any political hack can tell you to do.

"...add two parts progressive populism to one part down-home folksy appeal..."

Heitkamp switched gears and engaged in what today's pundits call “retail politics.” It used to just be called “campaigning.” She went all over the state, connecting and, in many cases, re-connecting with her electorate. As a lifelong public servant at various levels of the state, she'd come into contact with many of her voters over the years, and she remembered a lot of them, sometimes decades later. I remember one observer writing that it was actually possible that Heidi Heitkamp had personally met every single North Dakota voter over the course of her life. That's huge, and it's a key lesson in how Democrats can reclaim populism from the right.

"Yeah, haven't you heard? 'Retail politics' is the new jam. So call
me a political consultant then, I guess. Shop smart. Shop S-Mart."

The modern political dualism of “Democrats=liberal and elitist, Republicans=conservative and populist” is not really correct, but to the extent that it's perceived to be true, it's directly owed to two things: Nixon's Southern strategy and the emergence of elements like the Democratic Leadership Council. On the one hand, Republicans began appealing to base, obvious racism, nativism, and the generalized bigotry of the proudly undereducated rural masses. They found their populist issues, which eventually grew to include “family values” (really just striving to create a white Christian theocracy.)

Family values.

At the same time—and especially after the McGovern fiasco—the Democratic Party came to be, if not dominated, then certainly strongly informed, by fiscal conservatives like the guys on the DLC. These centrists didn't care for “class warfare,” which was the Democrats' populist issue and had been for decades. The Republicans had a way to be populists; Democrats hamstrung theirs. And so we lost the South. We lost the farmers. We lost the Midwest. We lost the working class. We lost the very people we were most in a position to help.

The idea that the Republican Party, an organization that exists solely for the enrichment of the already-wealthy, would be the party of populism is fucking disgraceful. And it's only possible because Democrats abandoned their populist issue. But that issue's been dead for so long that we can't just bring it back up. We have to do what Heidi Heitkamp did. We have to remind the voters that populism, speaking to voters' concerns, isn't just about piggybacking on whatever issue has been declared to be What People Care About In The Heartland by the pundit class, nor is it just about parroting the Democratic party line. It's about actually going out there and talking to voters. And not just at the occasional baby-kiss rally. Heitkamp went everywhere. She trudged up and down, north, south, east, west, front and back, all over North Dakota. And she won herself an election. And I'll be damned if she loses that seat anytime soon. Folk know who she is.

Pictured: A better encapsulation of What People Care About In The Heartland
than anything Newt Gingrich wants to talk to you about.

Missouri can be a perfect laboratory for testing this idea. In a way, it's the perfect place to rally populists against the establishment. In this special election, there will be no primaries. Parties will select their nominees. The GOP will pretty much just be handing this to whoever's been the most loyal and wants the seat. We're going to be looking at a lazy, unproven campaigner, picked for being a lifelong party hack, not expecting a vigorous challenge until the scheduled election in 2014. Meanwhile, we get to pick the best candidate with which to run the experiment. I think the ideal person is somebody very local, with a long shadow all over the district. Not a politico. Someone like a local business owner, or a longtime sheriff. And it really shouldn't be anybody that a queer commie tree-huggin' San Francisco Muslim Jewish gay Democrat Nazi socialist like me, with my marijuana and my long hair, should have heard of.

So basically we need Joe Don Baker to be a Democrat, and to move to the Eighth
Missouri Congressional District. Think you can take him? Well go ahead on.

Importance: If we win it's extremely important. If we lose it's meh. If we lose—even if we lose big—we'll have lost nothing we had before the campaign. You try to run a Big Blue Machine, straight-ahead Democrat with political connections and history, Russ Carnahan type out there, you're gonna get spanked in the Eighth. You try to run a conservative Democrat like Claire McCaskill, who only won re-election statewide because Todd Akin is insane in the membrane, you're gonna get spanked in the Eighth. Run a moderate Republican pretending to be a Democrat for the sake of a major-party endorsement like Rich Carmona over in New Mexico, and you're gonna get spanked in the Eighth.

That's a lot of spanking.

Hell, Governor Jay Nixon himself could run for the seat and he'd lose. There's no conventional way to try to get this seat that's going to win you this election as a Democrat, so let's try something weird and see what happens. If we win, we gain an incredible new (old) way to campaign for blue collar white votes. If we lose, we're in the same place we are right now.

Price Tag: Find the candidate, build a ground army, get independent expenditures to go negative hard and early and then back off as the election approaches, while stressing that the candidate's campaign won't go negative at all. I see $4M being a worthwhile investment here. That's roughly seven times more than what Emerson raised through October 2012 for her re-election, and about double what she raised in 2010, but you gotta go big on this experiment.

Illinois - 2^nd House District – April 9, 2013

Oh Jesse Jackson, Jr. We hardly knew ye. I mean, really, we hardly knew ye. All ye did was constantly try to build another airport in Chicago. I think ye were even successful, although I don't think I give a shit. At any rate, the era of the ol' Triple-J is now over, and it's time for the Democratic machine to churn out an establishment candidate who will win a special election very easily.

Pictured: The raw material used by the two major parties to create a
machine candidate. Michael Breyer was sculpted from this batch.

Winnability: Winning this race will not be like shooting fish in a barrel. It will be like shooting a barrel. From right next to it. Let me explain something: Jesse Jackson, Jr. won re-election in 2012 while not campaigning at all and convalescing in a mental hospital somewhere, while under investigation for mismanagement of campaign funds and other various acts of corruption. And he won extremely easily. Now sure, part of that is that he's Jesse Jackson's son. Part of it is also that this race is literally impossible for a Republican to win.

Who's on the bench: Dude, you could run Tommy Carcetti for this seat and he'd win. And he's from Baltimore! And he's fictional!

Hey there. Hey buddy. I'm comin' for your state.

Importance: In the sense that it's a seat in the House of Representatives? Yeah, it's super important. In the sense that no one outside of Chicago political insiders should give a damn who wins? Pretty much not gonna pay attention to this one.

Price Tag: Remember way back when this all started and I mentioned that the Democrats and their allied interests shouldn't spend one dime on non-competitive races? This is the kind of race I was talking about. Whoever gets the nomination should feel free to raise whatever funds he or she wants, and I suppose the candidate will probably need a few thousand bucks for, I don't know, staples and stuff like that, but if you're trying to figure out what to do with your money, don't spend it on the special election in IL-2. The amount of money that the candidate, the party, and the allied interest groups will need to spend on this race is pretty much an accounting error compared to what we'll be spending on other races.

South Carolina - 1^st House District – TBD, probably sometime in May

Jim DeMint resigns from the Senate. Tim Scott is selected by the Governor as his replacement. Tim Scott's seat in the House becomes vacant. Special election time. People say this seat is a Republican hold for sure. I have my doubts.

Every fiber of my being wants to make a mint-related pun right now. So instead, this is happening.

Winnability: History, and conventional wisdom, say the Republicans are heavy favorites here. I understand that viewpoint. Tim Scott has been very successful, winning both of his elections to the seat by nearly 30 points. Before him, Henry E. Brown won with huge margins in 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006. 2008, however, should give us pause.

That year, Brown was challenged by Linda Ketner. Linda Ketner is openly gay. She is a progressive. She is (obviously) a woman. She is a Democrat, and she was running in a district that had elected its current incumbent Republican Congressman four times by an average margin of 56 points and 103,383 votes. This was a district, by the way, that would elect Tim Scott by 36.7 points and 85,747 votes two years later.

No way this lady can win, right? Wrong. Well, I mean, she didn't win, but she came really close. She lost by four points and about 14,000 votes. Now it's true that 2008 was a wave year for the Democrats, but South Carolina's Congressional delegation didn't change one bit, in terms of partisan makeup. All six incumbents—four Republicans and two Democrats—kept their seats. And it's also true that the First District has been redrawn since that election, but it was arguably redder in 2008 and 2010 than the new version is today, and certainly not any less red.

Pictured: Linda Ketner at a campaign rally in late October 2008.

Back then, it contained most of light-blue Charleston County, part of light-red Georgetown County, and most of solid-red Horry County. Today it consists of most of light-blue Charleston County, pieces of solid-red Dorchester and Berkeley Counties, a little bit of light-blue Colleton County, and most of solid-red Beaufort County. So you have to give a lot of credit to Ketner, and also to what must be called a slowly shifting electorate on the South Carolina coast. 2008 isn't a complete aberration.

So why the disparity in results? Leaving aside the presence of Barack Obama at the top of the ticket and 2008's wave election, what can Democrats recapture from Ketner's candidacy? Keep in mind that 2012 was a minor Democratic wave election, but it didn't help whoever was running against Tim Scott. Neither did Obama's coattails.

Tim Scott is a charismatic candidate, much more so than Brown, who never really had to run in a competitive race until 2008. He had the power of a Republican wave on his side in 2010 and the incumbency in 2012. It's unclear who will get the nomination from either party in 2013, and it's just as unclear what the political temperature of this district will be come May. But with no incumbent and no clear election wave—at least nothing overwhelming—materializing nationally, this race is much more up for grabs than pundits think it is.

2012 was the first election held in the new First District, so that's all the data we can go on in terms of turnout. Just a hair over 290,000 people cast ballots in the House race. About 160,000 people voted in Charleston County, most of whom were voting in the First District. Based on coastal South Carolina's usual turnout trends, I would expect about 190,000 D1 voters overall, 90,000 from Charleston County, in a normal midterm Congressional election such as 2010 or 2014. But this is an off-year special election, which should drive turnout down even further. Expect about 130,000 voters in the election, with about half of them coming from Charleston County.

Pictured: One of the busier precincts in the last South Carolina special election.

Obviously a huge part of making this race interesting will be a concerted effort to get the Democratic base to the polls for an off-year special election. But assuming the county's usual 54-46 Democratic tilt, a Dem candidate here can expect to win the county about 35,000-30,000. To win the seat, the candidate would then need to find 30,000 more votes somewhere else in the district. Put another way, the candidate would need to lose the rest of the district by no more than about 5,000 votes.

Who's on the bench: Well, there's Ketner, and I think she would make by far the most sense, but she doesn't seem interested in running for elected office right now. She politely declined numerous requests that she run against Scott in 2010, and she again declined to run in 2012. More recently, and more to the point, sources close to her are saying she's ruled out running in 2013 as well. I don't really understand why, but whatever.

The Democratic bench in the district isn't phenomenal, but it isn't horrible either. We've got Stephen Colbert's sister Elizabeth, who works in the administration at Clemson. We've got the state Representative for the 119^th district, Leonidas Stavrinakis (awesome name.) And we've got Ashley Cooper, who didn't lose that badly in 2010 when he ran for Lt. Governor. Other possibilities include D121 state Representative Kenneth Hodges, D116 state Rep Robert Brown, D111 state Rep Wendell Gilliard, D103 state Rep Carl Anderson, and D43 state Senator Robert Ford. Personally, my pick would be Ford, but any of these candidates would be a formidable opponent for the GOP, particularly given that the Republican nominee is probably going to be treating the election as a formality.

THIS! IS! SPARTA!
...actually, this is Leonidas Stavrinakis.

Importance: The most important race we've looked at since the beginning of the blog. Hands down. It's a winnable seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, but widely seen as a likely Republican hold. If we win here, we make a statement that the 2012 Democratic coalition is going to keep showing up at the polls. We pick up a seat in the House, cutting the GOP lead to 233-202. We strike fear into every Southern Republican politician. And we probably position ourselves well to make serious runs at both South Carolina Senate seats in 2014.

Price Tag: As much as we have to spend on it. I'd like to see two or three million Democratic dollars spent on the race, at minimum. Up next: The Big Blue One...