Enthusiasm gap

Tuesday, May 25, 2010

ENTHUSIASM GAP: Republican Dino Rossi appears to be ramping up this week for a run against Senate veteran Patty Murray, with even the New York Times reporting the perennially popular conservative may enter the race as this column hits the streets.

Nearly a dozen Republicans have already filed to challenge Murray, but national party leaders have continued to court the two-time guber­natorial candidate as their first choice for the Aug. 17 primary. Other contenders in the race include former NFL player Clint Didier, who won an endorsement last week from fellow teatard Sarah Palin, and Vancouver’s Sen. Don Benton, who has collected a constellation of endorsements from state officials.

Rossi has reportedly hired consultant Pat Short­ridge to help him with his bid. Short­ridge, a senior strategist for Florida Senate candidate and Tea Party favorite Marco Rubio, was also once a top lobbyist in Enron’s Washington office, where he lauded Enron as “a terrific company, very innovative, very free-market-oriented,” just months before it collapsed in scandal and indictments. Rossi—already tarred in a number of personal and financial scandals, including $20,000 in unpaid taxes—may fare similarly under Shortridge’s public relations savvy.

“At least Dino Rossi acknowledges the baggage he brings to the race and is building a campaign accordingly,” Eric Schultz commented dryly. Schultz is communications director for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the counterpart of the Republican recruiting committee led by Texas Sen. John Cornyn that strongly supports Rossi.

Meanwhile, Patty Murray—who seldom polls particularly well—appears to be climbing in popularity in the face of challenge.

An Elway Poll gives her a 51 percent to 34 percent lead over Rossi, while a SurveyUSA poll released this week shows her surging for the first time since January. This is in contrast to a SurveyUSA poll in April that showed Murray trailing Rossi by numbers so low the survey results were deemed unreliable by skeptical poll analysts left and right. More recent poll numbers are echoed by the rigorous and highly respected Washington Poll, released this week, that suggests Murray might fare worse against some hypothetical Republican opponent (42/39 percent) than against Rossi (44/40 percent).

Of course, almost all of Murray’s mercurial losses and gains have come from among Democrats and the liberal left.

“It is hard to imagine disaffected voters from either of these groups rallying behind Dino Rossi in November,” notes political analyst and blogger David Goldstein (aka Goldy). “With a number of controversial initiatives on the ballot, a Republican voter enthusiasm advantage may not translate to that much of a turnout advantage.”

Indeed, the Washington Poll indicates Democrats hold a 10-point lead against Republicans statewide, with the most unshakable conservative support headquartered in Eastern Washington where Republicans already hold office in most districts. As we reported last week, that doesn’t bode well for big Republican gains in the state Legislature, particularly in the Puget Sound region, with twice the number of legislative districts as the eastern portion of the state, where disfavored Republicans poll a whopping 25 points behind Democrats.

Murray’s volatile numbers may well be related to an “enthusiasm gap” among liberal Democrats, a phenomenon certainly seen in a number of state primaries last week, where Dems panned establishment candidates like Pennsylvania senator and psuedo-Dem Arlen Specter in preference to lesser-known (and more liberal) challengers. Republicans saw similar transfers of voter preference to dark-horse candidates of more extreme temperament, leading some analysts to declare—when the results fell outside the standard Obama/NObama narrative—an “anti-incumbency fever” was loose in the land.

“I don’t think that’s quite right, though,” said national pollster Tom Jensen.

“When we talk about the enthusiasm gap there’s generally an assumption that it’s a product of Democrats who went out and voted for Obama but haven’t been happy with the pace of change so they’re now not going to vote this year,” he said.

But “the enthusiasm gap may be caused not by disappointment with the way things are going, but rather contentment,” Jensen continued. “Voters tend to get more energized when they’re angry about something. A lot of Democrats feel like things are going fine right now, so they don’t have much of a sense of urgency about going out to vote. The biggest threat to the party this fall is not that its voters are unenthusiastic about how things are going, but that they are complacent precisely because they do like the direction the country is headed in.”

Certainly that was the case last November, as Bellingham voters—without much on the ballot to interest them—returned dramatically fewer ballots than the county as a whole. The result was a mild conservative shift on Whatcom County Council (followed by dramatic rightward shifts as a freshly empowered faction behaves as though they hold a powerful mandate).

This November, however—with energetic state ballot measures on an income tax, marijuana and liquor law reform, and even a few angry Eyman initiatives (perhaps along with several fruitcake “Tenther” initiatives determined to purge our state from the Union)—offers plenty to spur Western Washington’s left flank.

Coming in late with a war chest yet to build, Rossi will likely face an uphill challenge against the well-armored Murray. With two consecutive political defeats dogging him, it’s the career decision of a lifetime for Dino.