The Club For (Democratic?) Growth
In recent Senate races, Specter beat back a Club-supported primary challenge from Toomey and won in November despite conservative defections to Constitution Party candidate Jim Clymer. In 2006, Lincoln Chafee similarly repelled Club-endorsed Steve Laffey and lost the general election despite winning 94 percent of self-described Republicans. In New Mexico’s open Senate seat in 2008, the Club favored conservative Congressman Steve Pearce over fellow Rep. Heather Wilson. Pearce got pasted in November but Wilson didn’t poll any better and barely hung on to her own House seat in 2006 by just 861 votes. ~Jim Antle
Jim’s article makes a number of good points, and he is correct that one cannot lay most of the GOP’s woes at the door of interest groups, such as Club for Growth, that promote conservative challengers against Republican incumbents. However, for the Club’s strategy to make sense on their own terms, they need to be able to show not only that they are not consistently doing harm to the electoral fortunes of the GOP, but also that they are helping to get the most conservative candidates elected to office. On those occasions when their challengers have knocked off incumbents, they have not had any general election victories, and in at least one case, the MD-01 race, the primary defeat for Gilchrest all but ensured that the non-incumbent Republican primary victor would lose in the fall during an already difficult year for the party. Perhaps the Club can explain why having one less semi-reliable Republican vote is a better outcome.
For the Club’s approach to make sense, there would need to be some evidence that Steve Laffey, for example, was as or more electable than Chafee, but in a particularly brutal year such as 2006 Chafee’s incumbency was probably the only thing that kept the race competitive, and it still wasn’t enough. For the Laffey challenge to make sense against the backdrop of the 2006 slaughter, one would need to make the argument that Laffey stood a better chance of resisting the wave, when even Chafee, whose positions on many issues were indistinguishable from the Democratic candidate’s, was unable to survive. If one could not make that argument, targeting Chafee doesn’t seem to make much sense at all, regardless of how viscerally satisfying it might be to campaign against a liberal Republican.
In elections for open seats, such as the New Mexico Senate race, it is harder to blame the Club for electoral defeats. Certainly, no Republican was going to win statewide office in a year when Obama won 57% of the vote in New Mexico. (Full disclosure: I voted for Pearce.) However, the fate of Pearce offers a warning to Toomey and his supporters: states that lean heavily Democratic at all levels of voting, as Pennsylvania now does, are unusually poor places to test the electoral viability of a Club for Growth-approved Republican. Unmentioned in Jim’s article is the collateral damage from the race to replace Domenici: both Republican House incumbents vacated their seats to run for the nomination and both House seats were lost in the fall. Arguably, New Mexico was so rapidly turning blue that it wouldn’t have mattered whether Pearce and Wilson stayed in their seats, but at least Pearce was more aligned with his district and stood a decent chance of winning re-election despite the tilt to the Democrats. Perhaps if Pearce had not been encouraged in his Senate aspirations, the Republicans would still have another seat in the House.
The problem with the Club’s approach is not necessarily its goal of targeting moderate incumbents, which can make sense and be perfectly appropriate if these representatives consistently ignore their constituents’ views, but it is instead the Club’s awe-inspiring lack of any sense of timing or awareness of the political mood of the states where they are backing their challengers. For good or ill, the Club specializes in recruiting true-believing free traders and anti-spending enthusiasts, and at the moment I can think of few worse places to run such a candidate than Pennsylvania in a recession. Nominating Toomey in 2004 would have made sense given the generally better position of Republicans nationwide, and had Santorum backed Toomey then he would have received less grief from pro-lifers in 2006 and might have done a little better himself. However, to correct the blunder of ’04 by putting Toomey in a position to lose a seat in 2010 that Specter might not hold anyway will give the Democratic majority another reliable vote, and it will create a convenient narrative that will be exploited to the nth degree by precisely the moderate reformer types Toomey et al. oppose, who will cite Toomey’s defeat as proof that the Club for Growth is a largely destructive force in the GOP coalition. It is precisely those who tend to sympathize more with the Club for Growth and the kinds of candidates it recruits that need to raise the alarm about the political cluelessness of the Club’s approach to elections, but this is not happening.
19 Responses to “The Club For (Democratic?) Growth”
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Daniel, while I’m not aware of any left-wing group as well-organized and as well-funded as the Club for Growth, the same desire to unseat moderate Democrats certainly exists.
The argument seems to be (not that anyone has ever spelled it out in these terms, “We should be glad that our interference costs Gore and Kerry the election. While in the short term we get eight years of President Bush, in the long term we’ve demonstrated our power to the Democratic Party and they cannot take our constituency for granted. This will lead to policy changes. Policy changes will not only make the country a better place, but inspire the loyalty of many Americans presently ill-served by the Democratic Party’s moderate-ness. Thus it’s both in the nation’s best interest, and the Party’s best interest, for us to kick up a stink.”
As for the counter-argument that now is not a good time to undermine electable centrists, there appear to be two responses:
* Centrists would say it’s never a good time to stand up for principle. Therefore, we can ignore their self-interested pleas.
(Naturally, this doesn’t address the question of whether a genuinely bad time might exist, and if so, is this such a time. Institutional pressures–placating donors, retaining a committed membership–likely prevent serious consideration of the question.)
* Even if we hand the Democratic Party a defeat, there’s so little difference between moderate Democrats and the Bush administration that we really didn’t do any harm. The only way to get these people to change is through electoral blackmail.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the Club for Growth, and other hardcore right-wing organizations, have a similar mindset with the labels reversed.
The Club for Growth and similar issue groups are playing a years-long strategy that may not look good cycle-to-cycle but can be justly judged only after a period of election cycles.
Anyone interested in conservative governance probably doesn’t want Heather Wilson in the Senate for God knows how long, and so it was nice that Pearce stepped up. It cost you one seat out of 435 seats (which will be a challenge for a Democrat to hold in “normal” times) but again, measuring it against the opportunity cost of Heather Wilson occupying a Senate seat for many years, well; you gotta take risks like that if you want conservatives in office…
Same thing with Gilchrest. Instead of dealing with him for twenty years, the CfG risked knocking him off, ceding one seat out of 435 to a Democrat for two years, and then no doubt playing for a conservative challenger to the incumbent for the next few cycles. Since this is the Eastern Shore we’re talking about, it’ll be a challenge for a Democrat to hold the seat for long, which means that in a few years, Gilchrest and the Democrat may be gone and a conservative in power in a safe seat.
Ugh. If I didn’t know better I would think you are going soft Daniel. If the rhetoric so often heard after the election about returning the GOP to its conservative roots means anything at all it has to mean primary challenges to clowns like Specter, Chafee, etc. Otherwise all those people are just beating their gums.
Conservatives need to recognize that they are probably going to have to lose before they can win. They have to present their ideas with the possibility that they will be rejected. Otherwise, if they win on some other agenda then they really haven’t won anything. If their ideas aren’t in play then they lose by default.
There is virtue in primary challenges as such. Specter types have to pay a price for their infidelity or else there is no disincentive.
Although I do think the Club for Growth (which should be called the Club for War) is the wrong vehicle for these challenges. They opposed some candidates because they weren’t pro-war. The Campaign for Liberty is probably a better vehicle.
Hopefully Johnny “Bailout” Isakson here in Georgia will have a challenger.
“Although I do think the Club for Growth (which should be called the Club for War) is the wrong vehicle for these challenges.”
So, in other words, you don’t really think what the Club for Growth stands for is any good, but you want them to go around trying to knock off incumbents, including antiwar candidates, to teach moderates some undefined lesson? What if the wrong lesson they draw is to hew to the party line on foreign policy or free trade?
What I am talking about here is choosing battles wisely. The Club doesn’t do that. They target what few blue-state Republicans still exist and by the end make sure that there are none, while it seems that they get no one else elected. They have also chosen two unusually bad election cycles to make some very prominent challenges. I have railed against the political incompetence of the Club for years. If that counts as “going soft,” I have been that way for a long time.
“there’s so little difference between moderate Democrats and the Bush administration that we really didn’t do any harm.”
@ James Nostack
You are like the Boy in the Bubble– not living in reality.
So sorry for you.
@ red phillips– Right! what a really great way to stay out of power forever.
As has been noted in many places, what are today progressives, or even liberals, in days gone past (Reagan anyone?) were actually centrist Republicans.
The Republican party is not conservative, it is radical. Moreover, it is bereft of ideas. The only ideas left to adopt are ones currently held by Democrats. When your governing philosophy is labor sucks, moderately higher taxes on the wealthiest 1% suck, government sucks, the only good immigration is deportation, and finally greed is good, you don’t have much of a product.
I don’t agree with your social conservatism, Daniel, but at least it is honest conservatism. What passes for Republican conservatism? no so much.
In years to come, the Democrats will surely occupy the same wilderness that the Republican’s do now. But that won’t come about until the Republicans repudiate much of the base. Having a fringe element of society as your foundation is not a recipe for a return to power.
“So, in other words, you don’t really think what the Club for Growth stands for is any good, but you want them to go around trying to knock off incumbents, including antiwar candidates, to teach moderates some undefined lesson?”
I didn’t say that. I think conservatives should challenge moderates as a matter of course and be willing to vote third party in the general if they are unsuccessful. I was not defending the Club for Growth. I was defending primary challenges. Of course I would oppose challenging an anti-war candidate because they are anti-war. In the case of Gilchrist, he was a generalized moderate. (I probably would have voted for Gilchrist over his “conservative” challenger or else abstained.) In the case of Walter Jones, he was not a general moderate and was opposed on the War issue.
There is very little of your argument that could not be made and was not made by those who wanted us to get in line behind McCain. I believe you endorsed Baldwin despite the fact that it wasn’t politically wise to do so.
As I said in the post, I have no problem with primary challenges for the most part, and I think they are appropriate in many cases–goodness knows I wish there had been one when Wilson was still in the House. The Club has a gift for picking the wrong time and place; they give these primary challenges a bad name, if you like, and undermine them as a credible option.
McCain was substantively awful on conservative grounds and arguably no better than and in some ways worse than his opponent. With McCain we were talking about the vast power of the executive being put into the hands of an ideological maniac. There were any number of considerations that made the “lesser of two evils” argument irrelevant. Regardless, decisions about presidential voting are very different from debating how best to maximize numbers in a legislature. Governing parties in a large, populous country are going to have some diversity of political views, or else they are not going to have representatives from many parts of the country. Persuading and bringing people along are the right things to try to do, but if one’s party is reduced to a permanent minority in certain regions that persuasion is much harder to accomplish. I think that’s a reasonably realistic assessment of things. Maybe I have missed something, but as a matter of analysis I think it’s correct.
On the Club’s own terms and the terms of the people who sympathize with them, they routinely fail and need to rethink what they’re doing. That is pretty much all I am saying. I am not spinning out some grand theory of party-building. I am judging the track record of one fairly unsuccessful interest group.
Part of the Club’s strategy that seems to be missing in this discussion so far is the effect of primary challenges, or potential primary challenges, on the rest of the GOP caucus.
The Club has used borderline-extortion for years against moderate Republicans to try and get them to toe the line: “vote with us, or you’ll be staring down a well-funded primary challenger on your right, and we’re not afraid to lose the seat to the Dems.”
While their actual primary challenges may appear to be completely ineffective, I wonder if there’s a way of measuring these challenges’ effects on the voting patterns of the caucus as a whole.
That’s an interesting point. It seems to me that if the Club had put the fear of Growth into Specter, he would not have backed the stimulus bill or card check in the past. Specter must have been keenly aware of how close he came to being ousted in 2004, but it doesn’t seem to have changed his behavior.
Did Toomey’s challenge have ripple effects on the voting of other Republicans? That’s hard to say. I suppose you could look at members’ ratings on fiscal and trade votes before 2004 and then look at them after that, but there would be too many variables to be able to determine what effect Toomey had.
I second DarrenG on that – for example, note that the House GOP had 100% party-line adherence on the stimulus bill.
But that was a function of the leadership’s insistence on unanimity. When the leadership has to whip the vote, that suggests that there are many members of the conference who would otherwise have voted for the bill. Mike Castle didn’t vote against it because he was afraid of the Club for Growth; he did it because the leadership told him to. Good or bad, that vote is the responsibility of the leadership.
Must the two be mutually exclusive? Can’t there be a set of Representatives who voted for the stim due to pressure from *both* their leadership and groups like the Club?
In fact, I suspect the two have become mutually reinforcing rather than mutually exclusive. The leadership understands that one of the sticks they can potentially wield against deviants is the threat of a primary challenge. This is Good Cop, Bad Cop 101: “You gotta understand, my partner here is crazy. I don’t know what he’ll do next, and if you don’t give me what I want I can’t protect you.”
“They target what few blue-state Republicans still exist and by the end make sure that there are none, while it seems that they get no one else elected.”
It may seem that way based on some of the high-profile races, but generally speaking that’s not really true. Most of the races the Club for Growth gets involved in occur in Republican or Republican-leaning districts and only a relatively small number of them involve challenges to incumbents.
In 2006, they endorsed against one blue-state Republican: they supported Steve Laffey over Lincoln Chafee. I personally supported Chafee on antiwar grounds and agree he had a better shot of holding on to the seat than Laffey, but based on Chafee’s overwhelmingly liberal voting record it is easy to see why the Club backed his opponent. The Club also backed the three unsuccessful Republican Senate candidates for Michigan, Washington, and Maryland.
During the same cycle as Chafee-Laffey, the Club for Growth endorsed Doug Lamborn (CO), Adrian Smith (NE), Bill Sali (ID), and Tim Walberg (MI). Only one beat an incumbent Republican; all won their primaries and the general. The Club did back unsuccessful primary candidates in Minnesota’s 6th Congressional District, Oklahoma’s 5th, and Nevada’s 2nd, but the eventual Republican nominee won all of those seats.
Sali and Walberg lost their reelection bids in 2008, and Andrew Harris didn’t win the general after beating Wayne Gilchrest in the primary. But Gilchrest-Harris was the only instance of the Club for Growth endorsing against a blue-state incumbent in that cycle. And even that race took place inside a reddish congressional district.
The Club’s record in swing districts and blue districts isn’t anything to write home about. But they have been fairly effective at winning primaries in red districts, without usually undermining the eventual Republican nominee even when they lose.
@ lebecka,
I receive far too little pity in my daily life to reject yours. But this is the first time I’ve been pitied for reporting what other people say, so I appreciate both the sentiment and the novelty.
James – you’re conflating “left” and Democratic. The people on the left who were happy to ruin Gore’s chances weren’t generally Democrats. They were leftists who may have voted Democrat more often than Republican. And there were far fewer of them opposed to Kerry.
The closest group to what you’re describing – Democrats who didn’t like their party’s selection, and wanted to throw the election – would be the small but vocal group of Hillary supporters who preferred Obama lose the election to give Hillary a better chance in 2012.
And that was a group which seemed to be not much more than a spokeswoman (Baroness de Rosthchild, IIRC, and forgive my spelling), a website, and gullible journalists.
I assumed CFG are like any other boutique lobby. The entity is chartered knowing there is no real chance to make a difference. It’s a business model. It’s not whether they win or lose but did they generate enough new ammunition to ferociously whip up their “subscribers” during the next “pledge drive”. For the folks who draw a paycheck from such institutions getting paid regularly may seem reason enough.
Like NORML. Or NAMBLA.
/tongue-in-cheek