Midwest May Be Key to GOP Senate Hopes

Striding through the crowded midways of the Minnesota State Fair, Republican Senate candidate Norm Coleman sets a pace so brisk an accompanying camera crew can barely keep up.

And when he encounters voters, Coleman, a former mayor of St. Paul, doesn’t hesitate in trying to close the sale. “I need your vote,” he says amiably but insistently to one man unready to commit. “Take a yard sign,” he says firmly to another who promises his support. “Talk to your friends.”

Coleman’s urgency reflects the stakes in his spirited and bruising race against Democratic Sen. Paul Wellstone. In Senate contests this year, the Midwest has emerged as the largest cluster of GOP opportunity. Republicans are mounting serious challenges to Democratic incumbents in four states that tilted sharply toward the GOP in the 2000 presidential race, especially in rural areas.

To recapture the Senate, Republicans will almost certainly have to defeat at least one, and probably more, of those four incumbents: Wellstone, Tim Johnson in South Dakota, Jean Carnahan in Missouri and Tom Harkin in Iowa.

Amid public concerns about the economy and corporate corruption, all four Democrats look somewhat stronger today than they did earlier in the year. In the latest polling, Wellstone has opened a small lead over Coleman, while Johnson is locked in a virtual dead heat with Republican Rep. John R. Thune. The latest surveys show Carnahan with a double-digit lead over former GOP Rep. Jim Talent, and Harkin leading Republican Rep. Greg Ganske by nearly that much.

But none of these Democrats can breathe easy. That’s partly because none won more than 52% of the vote in his or her last election. Even more important, all are swimming against a current that has carried the GOP to big gains in rural and small-town America since the late 1990s.

Though the trend hasn’t attracted nearly as much attention as the Democratic advance in suburban communities around the country, Republicans have established enormous advantages in the parts of America where John Deere dealers outnumber Starbucks.

As recently as 1996, rural voters preferred the GOP by just 4 percentage points in congressional elections and gave Bob Dole only a 2-point advantage over Bill Clinton, according to the Voter News Service exit poll.

But in 2000, rural voters gave George W. Bush a 22-point margin over Al Gore in the presidential race and provided Republicans an equal spread in the congressional races, the exit polls found.

In that race, the bottom fell out for Democrats in wide swaths of Iowa, Minnesota, Missouri and South Dakota. In each state, Bush won back large numbers of counties that had backed Clinton in 1996--almost all of them rural communities or “exurban” counties on the crabgrass frontier, where the most distant suburbs blend into the countryside.

In this fall’s Senate elections, the critical question may be whether that massive shift represented a high point for the GOP in the countryside--or a new water level that will buoy Republicans for years.

Maintaining Bush’s breakthrough in rural and exurban communities is vital for the GOP because the evidence suggests the party hasn’t made nearly as much progress among voters living in the traditional suburbs close to major cities such as Minneapolis, St. Louis and Des Moines.

“We have to continue to run strongly in rural areas to be able to win these states,” says GOP pollster Linda DiVall. “The suburbs are changing.”

Both sides agree that a backlash against the Clinton scandal, and personal doubts about Gore, explains part of the GOP surge in the countryside in 1998 and 2000. But Matthew Dowd, the polling director at the Republican National Committee, says personalizing the problem to Gore and Clinton may be wishful thinking.

Dowd, who also directed polling for the Bush 2000 campaign, says the key to Republican Midwestern gains is that younger rural and small-town men across the region are migrating toward the GOP--mostly around taxes, national security and cultural issues such as gun control--the way their counterparts did years before in the South.

“It is the younger males more and more voting with the Republicans that is causing these states like Minnesota to become much more of a swing state,” Dowd says.

Dowd has in mind voters such as Mike Fournier, a hulking school bus driver who voted for Wellstone in 1990 and Bill Clinton in 1992 but has moved toward the GOP while leaving Minneapolis for the distant northern suburb of Spring Lake Park. “More and more I’m starting to lean toward the Republican Party because the things the Democrats are behind I can’t support anymore,” he says moments after promising Coleman his vote at the fair.

Yet Dowd acknowledges that this movement among small-town men isn’t enough to win these states for the GOP Senate hopefuls this year. “It is putting them in the game more than before,” he says, “but you are going to have to win more suburban women also to win.”

And that creates an inherent tension for Republicans because the culturally conservative, anti-tax, small government messages that sell extremely well with rural men can still drive away more moderate suburbanites, especially women.

In Minnesota, for instance, Coleman--a former Democrat who only switched parties in 1996 and still presents himself as a moderate--has tried to buff his environmental credentials by opposing Bush’s proposal to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil exploration. But in a debate this month, Coleman wooed farm votes by accusing Wellstone of an “absolutist approach” on environmental issues that he said was driving small farmers out of business.

Wellstone predicts that attack will hurt Coleman more in the suburbs than it helps him in rural Minnesota. “This state loves its rivers, lakes and streams,” he says, “and to be a strong environmentalist is a plus.”

Some recent trends may be bolstering these endangered Democrats. All may gain from helping to deliver the expensive farm bill that Bush recently signed into law. Apart from Ganske, who voted against the bill in the House, none of the challengers is criticizing the bill.

Nor are most of the Republican challengers as easy a cultural fit in rural communities as Bush. Thune seems at home in cowboy boots. But Ganske was a plastic surgeon from Des Moines, and Talent, a brainy lawyer, looks like he lives in the affluent suburbs he once represented. Coleman was born in Brooklyn, N.Y., and served as a big-city mayor here. Wellstone, as an organizer for liberal rural causes before his Senate election in 1990, probably has deeper personal ties in rural Minnesota.

More broadly, the Democrats may also be benefiting from the rising concern over economic security, which could eclipse the cultural issues that have keyed the Republican gains in the countryside. The sliding stock market has provided Democrats with a new argument against Republican proposals to partially privatize Social Security--an issue Johnson and Wellstone are stressing. And the concerns about corporate corruption have played to the strengths of Harkin and Wellstone, who defined themselves as populists long before Enron and WorldCom.

But the unsettled climate of 2002 is also highlighting traditional Republican strengths. Against the backdrop of the war against terrorism, Republicans in the four races are trying to paint the Democrats as weak on national security.

In Minnesota, Coleman has relentlessly portrayed Wellstone as “out of the mainstream” on defense. “The path he advocated would have severely undermined our ability to vanquish our determined enemies,” Coleman charges. In Coleman’s quick conversations with men who stop to support him at the fair, it’s clear that argument has an audience.

Republicans in these races are also betting heavily on taxes--especially the piece of Bush’s agenda of most direct interest to farmers. In June, all four Democratic incumbents voted against a Republican plan that would make permanent the repeal of the estate tax approved last year; currently, the tax is scheduled to be reinstated after 2010.

Americans for Job Security, a conservative group, has been pounding the four Democrats with radio ads on rural stations in which a fictional farm couple laments that the estate tax could force them to sell their family farm. The Republican challengers, especially Thune and Coleman, are banging that gong too.

But the Democrats--who all voted for a party alternative that would have permanently exempted the first $3.5 million in estates from taxation--aren’t shying away from the argument.

With their history of economic populism and cultural conservatism, these farm states lie across the fault line between the red (Republican) and blue (Democratic) America that emerged so starkly in the 2000 election. As the two parties claw for control of the Senate, even small tremors here may send large shock waves around the country.