“He’s the hottest commodity in town up here,” enthused Minnesota Republican Jim Ramstad, whose conversation with Luntz was interrupted a half dozen times by colleagues wondering how to handle the loss of faith in Corporate America and the resulting political fallout. “Thank God it’s July and not September,” said Ramstad, who shares the widely held view among Republicans on Capitol Hill that the Bush White House has been slow to react to the ongoing economic decline. “The administration needs to be more aggressive and proactive on the economy, just as it’s been on the war on terror,” says Ramstad, a moderate Republican whose district is home to a number of high-tech companies. “And I agree with Frank that it’s not helpful that the Treasury secretary has been out of the country as the markets have plummeted and investor confidence has gone into the tank.”
Luntz is the Paul Revere of Republican politics, warning of the dangers ahead while there is still time to take corrective action. He sees echoes in the body politic that remind him of the ‘94 election. “I remember ‘94 like it was yesterday,” he says. “I watched the agitation at government grow and grow, and Democrats bury their heads-and Democratic leaders assure them in meeting after meeting everything was OK while the anger was exploding like a hot-air balloon.” Luntz was one of the few pollsters who foresaw the “angry white man” vote that was building in ‘92 and cost the first President Bush his re-election and that crested in ‘94 with the Republican takeover of the House for the first time in 40 years. “I see that same kind of voter rising again; it’s the irritated voter,” he says. They’re the folks who’ve lost a lot of money; they’re older, either close to retirement or retired, and they’re mad as hell. You could call them the Winnebago generation, and they vote like crazy in off-year elections.
House Republicans are worried that party leaders and the White House aren’t responding with sufficient alacrity to Wall Street’s woes and that they’ll pay the price in November. They don’t know what to believe-the dire forecasts in the media or the happy talk generated by the Bush administration. A memo distributed this week from Bush pollster Matthew Dowd was quickly dubbed the “Everything’s OK message.” It urged calm, pointing out that Dowd had predicted three months ago that Bush’s poll numbers would fall as the rallying effect of the 9-11 attacks faded. “I’m concerned that they have their heads buried; this is real,” says Luntz. Sounding the alarm is what Luntz does best, and he held forth at a “members only” strategy session on the first floor of the Capitol on Thursday evening. His message: Just as voters took out their anger at big government on Democrats in ‘94, voters could decide to vent their frustration over their lost wealth on Republicans, the party most identified with Corporate America. An absentee Treasury secretary adds to the image of an administration that doesn’t take the situation seriously. “The danger for Republicans is that they’ll come to represent the institution these voters hate,” says Luntz.
Republicans in Congress are so skittish that any faintly negative comment takes on a life of its own. Last week, GOP pollster Bill McInturff briefed House leaders on the upcoming election, delivering what he thought was a fairly routine overview. But by the time his report went through several iterations on the grapevine, Republican members were in a panic. The word in the marble corridors of Congress was that McInturff, a highly respected analyst, had predicted the corporate scandals would drive Bush down into the low 50s and that without the presidential pedestal, the normal off-year dynamics would assert themselves and Republicans could lose 20 to 30 seats.
I called McInturff to find out exactly what he said. He believes that presidential approval is generally about 20 points higher than the right-track number, as in, “Do you believe the country is on the right track?” The right-track number has dropped precipitously over the last month, and could sink even lower if the economy doesn’t improve. If McInturff is right, Bush’s approval rating would also erode. Applying historical standards, the party holding the White House would lose 20 to 30 seats.
But that’s the academic model, McInturff stresses, recalling that as a young staffer working for the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee in 1982, the Reagan White House applying the same academic measurement should have lost 43 seats. The GOP lost 26 seats, not a good year but not as bad as they feared. “It would have to get a s-tload worse to lock in this kind of macro environment to real races,” says McInturff. The GOP’s huge advantage in money and technology, gains in redistricting and the limited number of truly competitive seats (30 in all) limit potential damage. “Six weeks ago I was saying the outlook was by far the best I’d ever seen for any incumbent party,” he says. “Now we’re drifting back to what will be a nasty, brutish and negative campaign season. But that’s what it was in ‘96, ‘98 and 2000, and we still won.”
The most optimistic appraisal of the upcoming election comes from the White House. “We are in a position to defy history,” says a top aide, who likens this election to 1962 when John F. Kennedy was in the White House and the Democrats lost only one seat in the House. Kennedy was popular, but when he won narrowly in 1960, he had no coattails. He didn’t bring any Democrats to Congress. Just like Bush, the aide says. “We had no coattails. We had no coat. We didn’t even have a shirt.” Nobody on the Hill rode in with Bush except maybe Rep. Shelley Moore Capito in West Virginia, a state Republicans normally don’t carry. “We may have helped her win,” says the aide. If hardly anybody in Congress owes anything to Bush, does Bush owe anything to the members running scared in November? That’s the question GOP lawmakers are asking.
