Top-Gun Democrats Aren’t Rushing to Retake Congress

At a time when Democrats, rebounding from the 1994 Republican election sweep, are buoyed by their prospects in the fall congressional contests, they have a problem. They couldn’t get California state Sen. Mike Thompson, or a number of other high-caliber officials, to step up and run for Congress.

Thompson, a popular veteran Northern California lawmaker, was well positioned to run against one of the most vulnerable members of the House GOP freshman class, Rep. Frank Riggs (R-Ukiah).

Democratic bigwigs from the upper echelons of Congress encouraged Thompson to make the run. Even White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta, in a rare foray into candidate recruitment, urged him on.

But Thompson said no-go, preferring the certain power he has accrued in Sacramento to becoming a backbencher in Washington. “I’d just been made chairman of the [state] Senate Budget Committee, and felt I could do a lot more for my district in that position than as a freshman member of Congress,” Thompson said in an interview.

Unfortunately for Democrats hoping to retake control of the House, Riggs’ district is not the only critical election battleground where potentially strong candidates are sitting out the election.

In Nevada, Jan Laverty Jones, the mayor of Las Vegas, resisted heavy pressure from national Democratic leaders--including Vice President Al Gore--and decided not to run against a GOP freshman who is a top Democratic target.

In Montana, a number of prominent state officials have refused to run for the state’s open House seat.

And elsewhere in California, former Rep. Lynn Schenk, who narrowly lost her House seat in 1994, has declined a rematch against Rep. Brian P. Bilbray (R-San Diego).

Some analysts say those decisions raise questions about whether Democrats will have the top-drawer candidates they need to capitalize on their improved political fortunes.

“One of the Democrats’ real advantages in the past has been that they had superior, more experienced challengers than Republicans did,” said Gary Jacobson, a political scientist at UC San Diego. “If they lose that advantage, it’s yet another thing that will make it more difficult for them to retake the House.”

It is, however, early in the political cycle for House races, Jacobson cautions, and the candidate field is still taking shape in most states.

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Democratic operatives insist that the party has turned a corner and is suffering far fewer recruiting disappointments now that the prospects for regaining control of the House have improved. They tout coups like the former mayor of Tampa running for an open seat in Florida, a state House speaker running against a vulnerable Republican in Oklahoma, and a popular Vietnam War veteran running in a top-priority contest in Nebraska.

“As time goes on and our chances [to retake control of the House] look better and better, stronger candidates are deciding to run, whereas six months ago things didn’t look so good and some people decided not to,” said Rep. Martin Frost of Texas, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. “You don’t always get your first choice, but we have good candidates everywhere.”

Indeed, every election year inevitably brings its share of disappointments to both parties as they try to recruit candidates to challenge incumbents or to run for open seats. The stakes for Democrats are especially high this year: They can ill afford to miss any political opportunities as they seek to pick up the 20 seats they need to recapture the House.

“We don’t have any margin for error,” said Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), who is active in the Democrats’ candidate-recruitment effort. “We need to have our best people in every seat that gives us an opportunity.

“Are we disappointed we didn’t get the best in every district? Yes,” Hoyer said. “But we’re pleased with what we got and think we got enough to win.”

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A year ago, Democrats’ prospects for winning back the House and Senate were deemed utterly hopeless by most political analysts. They were in disarray as the GOP dominated the political and legislative scene for much of 1995.

Now things don’t look so bad. Polls show the public souring on some of the Republican agenda; the GOP balanced-budget drive has collapsed; President Clinton is looking politically stronger than most analysts thought possible a year ago.

That turnaround has improved Democrats’ chances in Congress, although most analysts say their prospects for winning a majority in the Senate are still slim and that recapturing the House remains a bit of a long shot.

Disappointingly for the Democrats, many would-be candidates made their decisions last year. That is especially true for the Senate prospects because most of them must decide at least a year in advance whether to mount an expensive statewide campaign.

“The sting of 1994 certainly lasted all through 1995,” said Donald Foley, executive director of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, who said career politicians he tried to recruit generally seemed to be the most reluctant to run. “It brings out a different kind of candidate. Our motto is: We are looking for successful Americans, not necessarily successful politicians.”

Many Senate candidates in the Democratic roster are business people and others with nonpolitical backgrounds--something Foley touts as a plus at a time when voter mistrust of politicians is high.

But Jacobson said that even in this political environment, traditional notions of who makes a strong candidate for Congress--state legislators and other elected officials--still hold. In a study of Republican challengers running in the House general elections in 1994, Jacobson found that candidates were four times more likely to win if they had previously held office than if they were political novices.

That’s why Hoyer and other Democrats were disappointed last year when Thompson turned down pleas to run against Riggs, who represents a district that has changed hands between Republicans and Democrats in every election since 1990. Several other Democrats are competing in Tuesday’s primary for the right to oppose Riggs, but GOP strategists do not consider any of them as formidable as Thompson would have been.

Thompson said his decision to stay in Sacramento was not affected by uncertainty about whether Democrats would regain control of Congress in 1996, but others’ choices were. Schenk said she was discouraged by the prospect of Democrats’ remaining mired in the minority and concluded, “I didn’t feel that I could serve effectively and deliver.”

If the improved political climate for Democrats does in fact help their recruiting, a bellwether will be Washington state, where the party has until a July 29 congressional filing date to line up candidates.

The state is packed with seemingly vulnerable Republican incumbents, but many of them have not yet drawn any big-name opposition. Rep. Linda Smith, a top Democratic target, may face a challenger no more formidable than a little-known college professor. “We’re still working on it,” Frost said.

But Democrats may be particularly wary in Washington because the party was so badly routed in 1994, when six of the state’s eight Democratic House seats--including that of then-House Speaker Thomas S. Foley--were won by Republicans.

“The 1994 election had a very chilling effect,” said former Washington Democratic Rep. Mike Kreidler, who lost his seat to Republican Randy Tate. “There’s a perception that this isn’t the greatest year to be a Democrat and be running.”

Elizabeth Wilner, an analyst with the nonpartisan Cook Political Report, likened skittish Democrats to “generals fighting the last war.”

“Republican recruitment is going gangbusters because the party did so well in the last election cycle,” she said. “Democrats’ recruitment has been suffering because they did so poorly last time.”

But Hoyer said many of the Democrats who refused to run were driven by personal reasons--citing in particular the failure of a high-pressure effort to get Jones of Las Vegas to run.

Jones was a dream candidate for a seat that Democrats see as one of their most promising targets--freshman Rep. John Ensign. A single mother of three, she got calls from Gore, House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) and many others but turned down the job, citing family concerns.

The decisions by Jones and other top-flight Democrats not to run provide examples of an obstacle the party faces that may have nothing to do with whether they are in the majority. Recruiters from both parties increasingly find potential candidates reluctant to put up with the long hours, heavy fund-raising demands and lack of public esteem that now comes with the job of serving in Congress.

“The attractiveness of the job is not what it was 10 years ago,” Jacobson said. “But it is easier to get people to run when you are in the majority.”

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