Campaign Battlefield May Grow

Few places in America are more reliably Republican than the southeast Pennsylvania congressional district centered in Amish country and Lancaster County.

So it’s little surprise that Republican Rep. Joe Pitts has faced only token opposition since he was first elected in 1996. In 2002, Democrats didn’t even field an opponent to run against him.

Last year, Lois Herr, a former corporate executive, entered the race against Pitts just before the filing deadline. She drew one-third of the vote.

But this year, Herr is seeking a rematch, and her uphill bid against Pitts could mark a crucial test for liberal activists pressuring Democrats to radically revise their strategy for recapturing the House of Representatives.

An array of liberal Internet activists is urging Democrats to vastly expand the 2006 congressional battlefield by recruiting and funding challengers in dozens of districts that have been virtually conceded to the GOP, like the one represented by Pitts.

Those calls are drawing new energy from Democrat Paul Hackett’s narrow defeat this month in a special election in an Ohio district where Republicans usually romp. Hackett’s showing “proved that you could build the party if you pay attention to every race,” said Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, founder of the popular liberal website the Daily Kos.

Rep. Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, has responded to the pressure from liberal activists by saying he intends next year to fund Democratic challengers for 50 Republican-held seats, about double the number the campaign committee backed in 2004.

But the committee, and many leading Democratic strategists, say that funding a wider circle of challengers in heavily Republican areas would divert money better spent on districts more closely balanced between the parties.

Mark Gersh, a longtime strategist for Democrats, said the liberal websites and blogs were right that the party needed to expand the battlefield for House seats.

“But to expand it into districts where [Democrats] have no chance of winning is absolutely crazy,” he said.

The dispute, complete with incendiary attacks on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee from some liberal websites, marks the latest disagreement between the Democratic political hierarchy and a left-leaning Internet activist base demanding a more aggressive strategy to regain power.

“The challenge the bloggers are laying on the table is to not concede and not accept becoming a minority party,” said Simon Rosenberg, president of NDN, a centrist Democratic group that has befriended Internet activists. “Their argument is correct. If we really want to win in 2006 and 2008, we have to expand the playing field.”

With Democrats needing to capture 15 seats to regain a majority in the House, party leaders in Washington have argued that it is most efficient to focus money on the districts most evenly balanced between the parties. Gersh said that in the last decade, each side had won only a single district where, in previous elections, more than 55% of the voters leaned to the other party.

Internet activists see Hackett’s 52% to 48% loss to Republican Jean Schmidt in Ohio’s 2nd District as proof that Democrats can compete in districts outside those guidelines. President Bush twice won more than 60% of the vote in the Ohio district.

In an article last week, Jerome Armstrong, co-founder of the popular liberal website MyDD.com, called on Democrats to run “Hackett-like operations” against every Republican House member.

But Gersh argued that it would be a mistake to build a strategy around the Ohio example, because special elections often produced surprising results that didn’t necessarily offer clues about the general election to follow.

Diverting money to long-shot contests is “what the Republicans would want to see,” Gersh said. “This kind of craziness would exactly play into Republican hands.”

Advocates of the expand-the-map strategy counter that writing off so many districts carries its own financial cost.

Walter Ludwig, a former aide in Howard Dean’s presidential campaign, has calculated that Democrats failed to mount serious challenges to about 120 House Republicans in each of the last three elections -- and that those Republicans contributed $63 million to colleagues in closer races.

“The fact that we are basically giving up on a quarter of the House in every cycle is just appalling,” said Ludwig, who has formed a political action committee called Project 90 to support Democratic challenges in heavily Republican districts.

Emanuel said he agreed that Democrats needed to enlarge their target list, though not by as much as many of the activists envisioned.

He said he had rejected the traditional milepost of only contesting seats where the GOP incumbent polled 55% of the vote or less. He said the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee would try to recruit and fund challengers in “every open seat, every seat where an individual Republican incumbent has an [ethics] issue,” and in districts where Bush’s performance fell short of expectations in 2004.

“We’ve got to get to 50 [challengers],” Emanuel said. “That’s my magic number. But I can’t say, ‘Go to Texas and take on a guy who has 80% [support] in a district where Bush got 78%.’ I am only going to have ‘X’ dollars.”

Such arguments have done little to still criticism from Internet activists.

“If Emanuel wants to be relevant, he can join ... in fighting everywhere, every day,” Bob Brigham wrote recently on a liberal website, the Swing State Project.

Still, there’s no consensus among activists about how many districts Democrats should target.

Moulitsas said in an interview that he would like to see Democrats, their allied groups and Internet activists “throw $50,000 to $100,000 into 100 districts or more that are not going to be the [usual] battleground.”

Ludwig has more modest goals: He wants to raise about $360,000 each for 10 to 15 underdog challengers like Herr, who he also advises as a campaign consultant.

The crucial variable in these projections is how much money Democrats can raise for long-shot House candidates, especially on the Internet.

“If the Democrats had unlimited funds, I’d say sure, spend it everywhere,” said Stuart Rothenberg, publisher of an independent political newsletter. “But they don’t, and investing resources in districts where Bush got [two-thirds] of the vote is simply not the best way to spend money.”

Advocates of the expand-the-map strategy see benefits even if few, or any, long-shot challengers succeed. In the near term, they think they can prompt Republicans to spend more to defend the districts than Democrats would invest in contesting them, since incumbents almost always outspend their challengers.

Over the long term, they say mounting more challenges would energize local partisans and strengthen the party’s image in Republican-leaning areas -- thus boosting Democrats in other races, such as the presidential campaign.

“We can’t just sit there and play in just Chicago and L.A. and San Francisco,” Moulitsas said.

In Pennsylvania, Herr said she had already seen an effect from her 2004 challenge to Pitts. “The party itself has grown, the local clubs have grown,” she said. “There is definitely more excitement.”

Amid the party infighting, signs of a possible truce recently appeared.

In his recent article, which appeared on TomPaine.com, Armstrong suggested a division of roles in which Internet activists tried to raise seed money for long-shot candidates and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee helped those who showed some potential.

“I could see that,” said one Democratic insider who requested anonymity when discussing the party’s 2006 strategy. “Let’s say [the activists] raise half a million for somebody ... the poll numbers move -- of course we would come in.”