Cross-posted from michiganliberal.com
Today we present the first of three installments of my interview with
Practical Political Consulting partner and voter file manager Alan Fox, taking an early look at some of the potentially interesting 2006 races for the Michigan House of Representatives.
Today, Alan gives us his general thoughts about the possibility for a shift in control of the Michigan House of Representatives, which is currently split 58-52 in favor of the Republicans. On Tuesday, Alan and I go through the most likely upset seats for Democrats. On Wednesday, we'll look at some of the Democratic seats the Republicans will be eyeing. Charts will be provided.
And...just for the sake of full disclosure, in my regular life, I'm the Director of Corporate Communications for PPC. Now you know.
MF: Let's start from the top. Just from a general level, what would you say are the odds of there being any change in control of the House at this point?
AF: The Democrats have a shot at it. It's an uphill shot. We just had probably the most partisan presidential election in recent memory, (except maybe the one before that) and so both parties have this wonderful tool for looking at targets of opportunity - and that's the Kerry/Bush percentages. Essentially, the Democrats are going to say "any district that Kerry won or did very well in and has a Republican Rep - that's a target of opportunity." Conversely, the Republicans are going to say: "wherever Bush did well and there's a Democratic Rep, that's one that we can take" - and there are about equal number of districts in each place. The Democrats have some good opportunities, the Republicans have some good opportunities. Most of the opportunities do not involve open seats, so that puts an interesting spin on what each party is going to try to do, because you normally look for the open seats as the best place to assert the normal partisan strength. For the Democrats to take control, they're going to have to knock off a bunch of incumbents - they're not going to be able to do it in open seats.
MF: But how much of a correlation can there be between how a presidential candidate does and how well a state Rep candidate does. Some of the people on the list we're looking at here - that can vary by as much as 26 points in one case.
AF: It can vary a lot. But it's a starting point. It can reflect a couple of different things - and maybe more than one thing at once. It can reflect the personal strength of an incumbent member, it can reflect the weakness of a challenger in seats were there was already an incumbent running for re-election two years ago. It may simply reflect the fact that the other party didn't target the seat, or that the partisan strength shifted in the seat and it didn't get caught until after the 2004 election when people say: "look at that - the Grosse Pointe House seat is now 53% Democratic." Who would've guessed? That's a seat -
(Rep. Ed) Gaffney's seat (the 1st district) - which you just sort of think of as a 40-something Democratic district - maybe a little out of reach, maybe a lot out of reach and suddenly Kerry gets 53% and its starting to look like a real possibility. It certainly didn't look like a possibility to the Dems running in 2004.
MF: What about the people who were elected for their first term in 2004 - are they really in any danger here? Does being a first-termer really constitute a disadvantage anymore in the (term-limited) House?
AF: I think it's less of a disadvantage than it used to be. Again, the first thing parties do is look at open seats, because with term limits there are always open seats moving up. If you see an opportunity somewhere and you know the rep is going to be gone in a term or two anyway, you might decide it's better just to hold off. And so it's probably less of a handicap than it used to be. Certainly before term limits the conventional wisdom was that the second term was the hardest to win.
MF: What effect, if any, are we likely to see from the top of the ticket in 2006 - how much does a strong showing from Gov. Granholm or (possibly) Dick DeVos really change things?
AF: Every election is fought in the context of stuff that's outside the House district. It's fought in the context of national trends, it's fought in the context of what's going on a statewide basis. So we use the Kerry numbers because it's the best thing we have to approximate partisan strength but it doesn't really say anything about what's actually going to be going on as we get toward Election Day. So the answer is kind of an obvious one. If what's happening coming into the 2006 election is Bush's popularity is down, Granholm and Stabenow are perceived as fighting against Bush's values, then some of the seats where I said I don't think Democrats will take a shot will be more attractive to them. Conversely, if Granholm is blamed for the state of the state's economy, and the Republicans really have a cohesive message that really goes after her on that, then it's going to work the other way around. The Democrats are going to be defending their current set of seats. There isn't going to be any inclination to try and add to those seats because there won't be the resources to do anything but to try and keep what they have.
MF: I've seen polls that suggest both weakness on the part of the Governor and the President - though Mr. Bush's numbers seem quite a bit worse. What if those numbers hold through the election...what if we have an unpopular president and an unpopular governor?
AF: Then it could be a little wilder and it may actually be a more sort of district-by-district sort of thing. You could well have a situation where in some of the suburban districts where the perception is that it's Bush's fault and Granholm has been victimized by the Legislature, while at the same time rural, small-town districts up north where the perception is that it's Granholm who messed up and its time to switch to the Republicans. We might well have a situation where each party picks up seats, and in that case, there's no telling where it might end up. But we have another year of political news and economic news...remember if we had done this same kind of thing in 1993 we would not be able to foresee what happened to the Democrats in 1994. Everything that happened in the '94 election came down relatively late in that cycle. We would've a year out predicted the Democrats would have done much better than they did. So there's no way to tell from here what's going to happen. What the two parties are going to do kind of steer a middle ground for now, figure out where their opportunities might be, have some stuff in the back of their minds in case things turn out to look better than they do now, but they're not going to take chances unless they see that the underlying climate is more in their favor than it is now.