Government Executive - Authors - Alex Roarty

House Vote Gives GOP the Upper Hand in Refugee Fight

Alex Roarty and Daniel Newhauser, National Journal — Thu, 19 Nov 2015 16:09:18 -0500

The House bill pausing Syrian refugee resettlements into the U.S. may never become law, but a strong bipartisan House vote all but assures the issue will resurface after the Thanksgiving break with Republicans in a position of strength.

With 47 Democrats joining all but two Republicans to pass the bill to require executive-branch officials to certify every Syrian refugee before they can be admitted into the country, Democratic leaders will be hard pressed to make the case that similar legislation is a poison pill if it is attached to an upcoming must-pass omnibus spending bill.

That emboldens Republicans to press Senate leaders to pass the bill, and President Obama to abandon his veto threat and sign it. Yet even in the instance that the upper chamber stalls or Obama vetoes the bill, House Republicans can make a solid case to include it in ongoing spending discussions.

“That’s what’s going to happen if we don’t get this bill, and that’s part of my message to Democrats. This is much more reasonable than what you may see later in an omnibus. This has the best chance of the president signing it,” Rep. Richard Hudson, the bill’s author, said Thursday. “There are some sincere Democrats on this issue, like Dianne Feinstein and even Chuck Schumer, so my hope is we can work with them now on a path forward with this bill.”

House Democrats handed Speaker Paul Ryan a veto-proof majority on the legislation Thursday, despite Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer voting against. Like his House counterparts, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid has said he will seek to protect Obama’s veto, promising that the bill would fail if it came up in the Senate.

“The problem is not with refugees,” Reid said Thursday. “I don’t think we’ll be dealing with it over here.”

Still, Republicans are hoping the public pressure builds. Polling shows more than half of Americans want the government to block Syrian refugees’ entry in light of the ISIS attacks on Paris last week. Intelligence Committee Chairman Devin Nunes, who is on the GOP task force looking at how to respond to the Paris attacks, said the omnibus would be the next logical place to push the issue, and the bipartisan vote strengthens the GOP’s hand.

“This bill is probably not the ultimate final [bill]. This is the start to a process that has got to be combined and finished by the time we leave here in two weeks,” Nunes said. “It will be something based on this that will get done by the end of the year, no matter where it has to go.”

Republican leaders, however, are under pressure from conservatives and outside groups to choke off funding to agencies tasked with admitting refugees. If they push too far on a spending rider—for instance, with a blanket ban on refugees—they could lose Democratic support. If they craft a narrow measure that mirrors the House-passed bill, they could walk away with a political victory.

Several of the bill’s Democratic supporters are already balking at the strategy of rolling it into the omnibus package. “If this bill doesn’t go anywhere, I think it’s unwise to roll it into an omnibus if you don’t have to,” Rep. Gerald Connolly said. “The omnibus is going to be complicated enough. … We don’t need, however worthy, other policy riders that just make life more difficult.”

Rep. Henry Cuellar, who also backed the bill and is a member of the Appropriations Committee, said he’s seen enough funding fights break down over unrelated amendments. “I don’t like controversial riders on that,” he said. “I don’t think this language will go in the [spending] bill.”

Others were hopeful that the strong bipartisan support in the House would cause Obama to change his mind on the standalone measure. “I’m hopeful he won’t veto it,” said Rep. David Scott. “I’m hopeful that we can come to some agreement here.”

Although many Republicans have been calling on Ryan and leaders to include a measure in an omnibus, others have urged caution. Rep. Trent Franks, a member of the House Freedom Caucus, said having Democrats on their side sets the issue apart from other, more partisan appropriations rider attempts, but that will only take Republicans so far.

“I think it helps some, but it just depends on, if the Left can get away with it over there, they’ll filibuster and once again drive that wedge between the Republican base and Republican leadership. They’ve been very successful at that,” Franks said. “I’m not against that at all, but the problem is it’ll be a miracle to get even a consideration in the Senate because of the Senate filibuster. Then what happens is we will have to allow them to shut the government down, for which we will be blamed, of course.”

Complicating the process is the hostility with which the issue has been debated. While some have raised alarms over national security, Obama has mocked the GOP for being “scared of widows and orphans.”

Many Democrats felt that rhetoric took the wrong tone, lumping those with legitimate national security concerns in with xenophobes. “I don’t think it’s a time for name-calling,” said Rep. Brad Ashford, a Democratic cosponsor of the bill that passed the House Thursday.

Rep. Ron Kind, who chairs the moderate New Democrat Coalition—which broke with most Democrats to help Obama pass trade legislation—also found himself at odds with the White House this week. “Part of the problem we have in this place right now is once one side proposes something, the other side knee-jerk is in opposition,” he said, noting that the bill was not the anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim measure it had been made out to be. “To Speaker Ryan’s credit, he didn’t go over the edge,” he said.

Even opponents of the bill said the White House could have done a better job acknowledging Americans’ concerns. “If we try to say, ‘Well, that’s silly’ or disregard the fear, the legitimate and very real fear that’s out here, I think we’re going to get slapped around,” said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. “The White House has been very measured in not acknowledging that it is easy to enter the United States. They’ve been a little strong in denouncing what they see as a political move.”

And many were not convinced by the administration’s appeal that the bill would be overly burdensome and slow the refugee process. “A lot of us went in with open minds and really wanted to understand the administration’s position on this,” said Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney. Ultimately, the White House did not change his mind. “Bring a better argument,” he said.

Still, Pelosi defended the White House’s pitch. “Some people walked into the room prepared to vote for the bill,” she said. “They solved their own problem.”

Alex Rogers contributed to this article

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Republican Debate Turns Spectacle and Leaves Trump on Top

Shane Goldmacher and Alex Roarty, National Journal — Fri, 07 Aug 2015 10:10:58 -0400

CLEVELAND—Donald Trump dominated the night, but the first prime-time Republican presidential debate of 2016 provided ample space for other contenders to make a mark on an uncomfortably crowded stage.

In fact, the first 90 seconds of Thursday's explosive main event were more entertaining than all 90 minutes of the earlier B-list debate that featured seven candidates who failed to qualify for the night-time show.

All eyes were on Trump coming in, and anyone who thought the real-estate mogul would take a softer tone on the debate stage than he has on the campaign trail was quickly disappointed. "We don't have time for tone," Trump said at one point. "We have to go out and get the job done."

After saying he might yet run as an independent—drawing boos from the audience and provoking an attack from Rand Paul—Trump was at the center of several surreal exchanges, including one in which moderator Megyn Kelly asked him about a history of misogynistic attacks on women.

"You've called women you don't like 'fat pigs, dogs, slobs, and disgusting animals,'" Kelly began. Trump interrupted: "Only Rosie O'Donnell."

Several thousand spectators inside Quicken Loans Arena roared as he dismissed her, and it was clear, less than 10 minutes into the event, that all rules and decorum governing typical presidential debates would not apply.

Other winners emerged: John Kasich capitalizing on the hometown crowd, Chris Christie emerging as a force on the big stage, and the three candidates perceived by many to be the likeliest eventual nominees—Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Scott Walker—staying on message and ignoring the mayhem unfolding around them.

But the night was about Trump.

There was no shortage of opportunities to attack him, and the Fox News moderators—Kelly, Bret Baier, and Chris Wallace—seemed intent on provoking such altercations. At one point, after Kasich refused to criticize Trump's comments about the Mexican border, Wallace said he hoped to "do better" with Rubio and teed up the same question for the Florida senator.

They pushed Trump and Bush to tangle directly when Bush declared, "Mr. Trump's language is divisive."

"I want to win," Bush said. "We're going to win when we unite people with a hopeful optimistic message."

Even when he wasn't attacking or being attacked, Trump, with his relaxed demeanor and from-the-hip style, produced many of the debate's most memorable moments.

When he was quizzed repeatedly on his past support of Democratic causes and politicians, Trump explained nonchalantly that he was essentially manipulating politicians to do what he wanted. He also defended his past giving to Hillary Clinton and Nancy Pelosi. Asked what he got for his money, Trump said, "With Hillary Clinton, I said, 'Be at my wedding,' and she came to my wedding."

Trump explained his past support for a single-payer health care system by saying, "It works in Canada."

Paul tried to jump on Trump for that remark, but he was cut off. "I don't think you heard me," Trump retorted. "You're having a hard time tonight."

The most heated exchange of the night, however, did not include Trump. It came when Paul and Christie went head-to-head on the tension between civil liberties and national security. It was clear that both men, who were perched at the stage's edges after fading from the top tier in the polls, relished the chance to do battle on the big stage.

"I want to collect more records from terrorists, but less records from innocent Americans," Paul declared.

"That's a completely ridiculous answer," Christie jumped in. "How are you supposed to know?"

"Use the Fourth Amendment! Use the Fourth Amendment!" Paul shouted, as they spoke over one another. "Get a warrant!"

Then Christie unleashed one of the night's most memorable lines: "Listen, Senator, you know, when you're sitting in a subcommittee, just blowing hot air about this, you can say things like that."

Indeed, Paul often found himself outnumbered in policy disputes. But he consistently asserted his voice on stage—which is more than could be said for Huckabee or Ben Carson, both of whom disappeared for long stretches of the debate and did not enjoy any memorable moments. When Carson got only his second question, nearly 45 minutes into the debate, he joked, "Thank you Megyn, I wasn't sure I was going to get to talk again."

Cruz, the much-touted collegiate champion debater, was similarly absent, scoring few notable blows for his anti-Washington message.

Bush and Rubio were confident and detailed in their responses. One of Bush's better moments was a response to questioning about his support for Common Core, and he earned sustained applause when arguing for high standards.

At one point, Wallace pitted them against each other, asking Rubio whether he could make a better president than Bush despite no executive experience.

Rubio deflected and launched one of the sharpest attacks on Clinton. "This election cannot be a résumé competition. It's important to be qualified, but if this election is a résumé competition, then Hillary Clinton's gonna be the next president, because she's been in office and in government longer than anybody else running here tonight," he said.

Rubio repeated his thematic line about 2016 being "about the future," then added: "If I'm our nominee, how is Hillary Clinton gonna lecture me about living paycheck to paycheck? I was raised paycheck to paycheck. How is she—how is she gonna lecture me—how is she gonna lecture me about student loans? I owed over $100,000 just four years ago."

Another big winner Thursday night was Kasich, who was greeted with a thunderous standing ovation at the beginning of the debate and enjoyed what Wallace called "a home-field advantage" throughout. Kasich on several occasions appeared to be shadowing Bush, touting reforms made in Ohio that elevated people from poverty. Kasich also dealt effectively with a tough question on opposing gay marriage by declaring he'd recently attended a gay wedding and would support his children if they are gay, earning enthusiastic cheers from the hometown audience.

But in many ways, the night ultimately belonged to Trump. Despite some early provocations and statements that drew scattered boos, the billionaire businessman did not commit any serious errors. He was forceful with his answers and was consistently rewarded by the crowd for his spontaneous one-liners attacking Washington and career politicians. He even received some validation from his rival candidates.

"Here is the thing about Donald Trump. Donald Trump is hitting a nerve in this country," Kasich said. "People are frustrated. They're fed up. They don't think the government is working for them. And for people who want to just tune him out, they're making a mistake."

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Why the Chairman of the Senate Oversight Committee's Career May Be in Danger

Alex Roarty, National Journal — Tue, 23 Jun 2015 11:14:32 -0400

MADISON, Wisconsin—Talk to many Wisconsin Republicans about Ron Johnson, and they'll ask to keep their names out of the story. On the record, their kindest praise can sound like a backhanded compliment: The freshman senator is getting better at his job.

At a time of deep anger with government, many candidates profess to be political newcomers. With Johnson, it had the uncommon virtue of actually being true. The accountant who spent decades running a Wisconsin-based plastics company had never held elective office when he won his race in 2010—convincing voters, as he did in one memorable TV ad, that the Senate needed a manufacturer instead of a lawyer.

The hard part came next. Most observers expected the business executive with little experience in politics to struggle in the Senate; few, however, expected the learning curve to be as steep as it was. Interviews with ideological allies, Senate operatives, and Wisconsin Republicans all paint a strikingly similar picture of a political novice who struggled with basic tasks, alienated allies, and even prompted speculation that he wouldn't seek another term in office.

There's little doubt, in the minds of those Republicans, that Johnson has grown into his job, especially in the past year. It's just unclear if the improvement has come too late for a difficult reelection fight against the Democrat he defeated in 2010, former Sen. Russ Feingold.

"They had some missteps. They missed a lot of opportunities in those first few years," said Scott Klug, a former Republican congressman who runs a public advocacy firm in Madison. "The question will be: Is the last 18 months enough to turn around and make up for the gap?"

Johnson's tenure is seen as a test case for what happens when someone truly new to politics assumes one of its most difficult jobs. His reelection, in no small part, will be a referendum on whether voters will tolerate his steep learning curve.

It was as simple as the issues Johnson would discuss once in office. Both privately and publicly, the senator talked about only Obamacare and the debt and deficit—issues that, while important to Republicans, represented only a few of the issues that confront a senator daily. Some Republican leaders reported hearing the same presentation on the subjects—delivered via PowerPoint—three times.

"When he got elected, it was, 'OK, I got elected because of the debt' … and he was so hyperfocused on that, frankly, he did have a little bit of blinders on because of the debt, and spending that led to the debt, that he missed some of the other things that he should have been paying attention to," said Mark Graul, a well-known Republican and former strategist in Wisconsin. "You can walk and chew gum at the same time."

Current and former Johnson staffers call the griping around Madison and Milwaukee the simple byproduct of unhappy lobbyists flummoxed by a lawmaker focused on the big picture instead of their individual needs. And they're eager to embrace the notion that Johnson remains a political outsider, disliked by GOP insiders but still popular with the grassroots voters who put him into office in the first place.

"If you are saying that Ron Johnson is different from the career politicians that are so common in Washington, you are exactly right," said Betsy Ankney, Johnson's campaign manager. "The people of Wisconsin chose Ron Johnson because he is an accountant and a manufacturer and not a politician at all. That's exactly what the voters wanted after 18 years of a partisan Washington insider like Senator Feingold."

But Republicans say Johnson's fixation on that pair of issues was part of a larger political blind spot that also manifested itself when the senator made controversial votes. Johnson has taken a few of them seemingly at odds with his state's centrist electorate, such as opposing the farm bill shortly after taking office in 2011. But conservatives say he's also shown little feel for how his votes will play within his own electoral base, like in 2013, when he flipped against his initial opposition to the Ryan-Murray budget deal.

"One of the challenges he's had to deal with is anticipating the political fallout of particular votes; in other words, developing a good political radar," said Matt Batzel, the Wisconsin-based national executive director of American Majority, a conservative grassroots group. "Just because another Republican congressman like Paul Ryan can communicate the rationale for a vote, doesn't mean others will be able to explain it well to the base or an interest group or another demographic who might be upset."

Batzel added: "He's certainly had some tough challenges he's trying to overcome. You don't get brownie points for having your heart in the right place."

Those who have watched Johnson closely draw a straight line from his early struggles as a senator to his time in the business world. In his previous job, Johnson gave orders and watched as employees carried them out quickly and efficiently.

But that's rarely how business works in the Senate, or in politics more generally. And the new senator's frustration was plain.

"In Ron's particular case, I think someone coming from the business world … to a place that is just innately slow is gonna be frustrating," said Don Kent, Johnson's first chief of staff who left in 2012. "And probably more frustrating given his background than others. He wasn't a statehouse member, he wasn't entrenched in politics like a lot of these guys are."

"There are a lot of people who run outsiders, but very few actually are in every sense," said one high-ranking Senate Republican operative. "I think that Johnson's exposure to the day in the life of a senator was very limited until he became a senator himself."

Kent disputes that Johnson's operation was substandard in its first two years, arguing that complaints from Republicans outside the office are commonplace with new lawmakers. He added that anybody frustrated with a senator who talked only about debt and Obamacare should have paid more attention to his campaign, during which he also talked only about those two issues.

But by last year, Republicans began to question whether Johnson would even seek a second term. He had raised less than a million dollars for his campaign account, and the inability thus far to satisfactorily erase the deficit or repeal Obamacare had left him with little to show for his efforts in office.

"People wondered," said Robin Vos, the GOP speaker of the State Assembly. "Only because he was operating … where he really was focused on getting the most done for Wisconsin that he could in his job in Washington, as opposed to spending time in Wisconsin telling people what he was doing."

Johnson, of course, is running for a second term. And Republicans who are sharply critical of his first years in office say he's gradually acquired a much steadier grip on his role. Officials who once struggled to get even quick meetings with the senator now say they are given ample face time.

A senator who did little to tack to the middle during his first four years in office has taken small steps to do so this year, voting to confirm Attorney General Loretta Lynch and aggressively fix Obamacare should some of the program's subsidies be ruled illegal by the Supreme Court in the King v. Burwell case. One Republican said that despite Johnson's well-known aversion to politics, nobody worked the room harder at a recent fundraiser at the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

And to the relief of many Republicans, the senator has finally ditched the PowerPoint presentations that irritated so many of them. "Him moving away from the PowerPoint presentation probably allows him to connect more with voters," said Kurt Bauer, president and CEO of the Wisconsin Manufacturers & Commerce.

Many Republicans attribute the changes to new staff: Johnson's former state director, Tony Blando, took over as chief of staff after Kent left. The manager for his upcoming campaign, Ankney, has helped smooth over political problems back in Wisconsin for the last two years. Many other staffers have come and gone. "He recognized it and did make staff moves," said the senior GOP operative in the Senate. "He did correct the problem. Everybody says, well, there's been so much turnover. Well, you need turnover if you have a problem."

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Rick Santorum Is Running for President Again

Alex Roarty, National Journal — Wed, 27 May 2015 16:15:06 -0400

In Republican presidential primaries, the candidate who finished second last time usually begins as a front-runner when they run again.

That's not the case with Rick Santorum, who on Wednesday will announce he's once again running for president in an ABC New interview.The former senator from Pennsylvania begins his second campaign for the presidency as a prohibitive underdog, struggling to win back primary voters who have moved on after his runner-up finish to Mitt Romney.

Polls show Santorum trailing far behind the leading candidates in Iowa, whose caucuses he won in 2012, and he barely registers in national surveys of the primary. He's drawing little early support from major donors and even his social conservatives, the voters who regard Santorummost highly, have shown more interest in alternatives like former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Texas Sen. Ted Cruz.

The candidate who left public office in 2007 suffers the most from the perception that he's been eclipsed by a new generation of Republicans, like Sens. Cruz, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, and Gov. Scott Walker. Not only did Santorum lose his post in the Senate nearly a decade ago, he did so after losing his re-election by nearly 20 points. At the time, Santorum was considered too socially conservative to win over middle-of-the road voters who decide general elections, a perception that will continue to haunt his candidacy now.

Still, Santorum and his advisers feel they are in much better position now than they were for the 2012 campaign, with enough money and name recognition to build the kind of full-fledged professional campaign they couldn't previously.

And Santorum wants to rebrand himself not as a culture warrior but as a spokesman for the working class. He's built a platform that includes plans to reduce legal immigration while, rhetorically, accusing both parties of leaving blue-collar workers behind. Santorum's contention is that, as a native of hardscrabble Western Pennsylvania, he can bring those voters back into the Republican Party.

How successful he is could determine whether he's able to match, or even come close, to his second-place result of last primary.

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Obama's Immigration Order Has 2016 Perils for Both Parties

Alex Roarty — Mon, 17 Nov 2014 10:05:27 -0500

It didn't take long for the 2016 election to reach its first major crossroads. As early as this week, President Obama is expected to ignore the wishes of congressional Republicans and announce that he will unilaterally defer deportations for millions of undocumented immigrants.

When he does, Republicans and Democrats alike should worry he just made life harder for their next presidential nominees. Few decisions, even from the president, influence elections more than 23 months away, but Obama's immigration maneuver accomplishes the rare feat of exposing both parties to what should be their biggest cause for concern in the 2016 election.

At stake for Democrats is whether Obama's decision to take executive action prevents him from a broad political rehabilitation during the last two years of his presidency. If Obama fails to achieve a small recovery, even a well-known and relatively popular politician like Hillary Clinton will struggle to convince voters they shouldn't back the other party's choice for the White House—a situation not unlike the one that befell John McCain's campaign to replace George W. Bush in 2008.

But to the White House, the chance to reengage and reenergize the immigrant-heavy Latino community ahead of 2016 plainly outweighs the risk that doing so will alienate the broader electorate. And therein lies the danger for Republicans, whose leaders two years ago stated emphatically that the party needed to grow its appeal among Hispanic voters if it wanted to succeed in national elections. Broadly speaking, the executive order might be politically complicated, but within the Latino community, it is a guaranteed winner.

Democrats could use a winner with Hispanic voters after the 2014 election and the administration's failure, at least until the president's executive order, to stop the deportations of many members of their community. The party won 62 percent of the Latino vote in 2014, according to exit polls, but some immigration advocates say the energy and passion many of them showed for Obama's party—especially in 2012 after he ordered a stop to deportations for the children of illegal immigrations—was missing this election.

They cite Sen. Mark Udall's defeat in Colorado, one of the few states in play in 2014 with a large Hispanic vote, as evidence of what happens to Democrats when they don't advocate for immigration reform. It's something that would happen to the party's next presidential candidate, said Frank Shary, executive director of America's Voice.

"If the president's record ended up being little more than 2 million deportations and a lot of unkept promises, it's not so much that it would drive a lot of Latinos into the hands of Republicans, it would probably lead to a lot of them to stay home on Election Day," he said.

Complicating matters on the Republican side is the party's prospective presidential candidates, most of whom are positioning themselves to draw conservative support ahead of a competitive primary. Their reaction will receive disproportionate attention, and the eventual GOP nominee will have trouble repositioning an immigration agenda for the general election. It could be a repeat of what happened in 2012 to Mitt Romney, whose call during primary season for undocumented immigrants to "self-deport" helped Obama win Hispanic voters by a better than 2-to-1 ratio.

Even if Republicans avoid the harsh rhetoric that has marked the previous responses to immigration policy—something Republican strategists acknowledge is no guarantee—their explanation that their objections are based on overuse of executive power might not resonate with the Hispanic community.

"That won't matter," said one immigration policy strategist who works with both parties. "If they start filing lawsuits, making noise about impeaching the president over this, Republicans will have completely lost Latino and Asian voters. It will be seen not as a direct attack on president, but a direct attack on the community."

Whether the support Obama gains from Hispanics is enough to overcome the potential broader damage to his popularity remains to be seen. As Obama explained in his post-election press conference, voters are upset with Washington gridlock and dysfunction—two things he vowed to work to correct in his last two years in office.

Republicans have warned the president that any executive action, coming just weeks after his party's Election Day drubbing, will poison the well with Congress for the new session and make any new legislative deal-making much more difficult.

"It looks like a revenge move," said Ron Bonjean, a former top GOP congressional aide. "He's poking a stick in their eye.… Using his authority in that way shows he doesn't want to work with Congress. It further strengthens the Republican argument [that] if legislation lands on his doorstep, all he wants to do is … pretend he's a dictator. He doesn't want to work with Congress."

Even Republicans who have argued for the necessity of the party broadening its appeal with racial minorities are now saying that, in this case, the president's own move will backfire.

"There's always a danger for undisciplined politicians to overreact, and their overreaction always backfires," said Whit Ayres, a GOP pollster and frequent critic of the party's immigration policy. "But if Republican elected officials watch their tone and don't overreact, this move contemplated by the president will backfire."

This article appears in the November 17, 2014 edition of NJ Daily.

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Ebola Scare, Secret Service Enter Campaign Politics

Alex Roarty, National Journal — Fri, 03 Oct 2014 11:00:00 -0400

The Secret Service's public humiliation and the country's first Ebola diagnosis—topics that would appear at least one step removed from partisan warfare—aren't ready-made issues for the campaign trail. But in roughly 24 hours, one candidate has managed to insert both into his own race.

Thom Tillis, the Republican Senate nominee from North Carolina, on Thursday called on President Obama to ban travel from Ebola-stricken countries of Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Guinea, arguing that people from those countries could be vectors for the deadly disease. Just a day earlier, Tillis chided his opponent, Sen. Kay Hagan, and Obama for the Secret Service's litany of recent mistakes.

In both instances, the criticism made essentially the same point: The president can't keep America safe.

"How on earth can you protect the nation if you can't protect the White House?" he asked, according to an account of his speech Wednesday.

In a statement Thursday about Ebola, he said "it makes absolutely no sense to risk more cases" by allowing travel to the West African countries. "It's time for Washington to take action to protect the American people," he asserted.

It's unclear how either issue will resonate with voters in the state. At the moment, both are among the biggest stories in the country. Each has received disproportionately more coverage nationally than many topics discussed during campaigns, like abortion rights or Obamacare.

But it's also uncertain how much voters will hold Obama, much less Hagan, accountable for them. And the attempt exposes Tillis to criticism that he's shoehorning issues into the campaign in a desperate bid to attract attention.

"Speaker Tillis's campaign is trailing in the polls and flailing for a message," said Ben Ray, spokesman for the North Carolina Democratic Coordinated Campaign. "With less than five weeks to go to Election Day, the speaker's record of big education cuts and tax giveaways for millionaires is being rejected by North Carolina voters, and he'll say literally anything to change the conversation."

Tillis, North Carolina's speaker of the House, narrowly trails Hagan in a barrage of recent polls of the race. The Tar Heel State's Senate race is considered one of a handful—along with battles in Alaska, Colorado, and Iowa—that will likely determine which party controls the Senate in 2015.

This article appears in the October 3, 2014 edition of NJ Daily.

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Republicans Airing Ads Attacking Democrats as Being Soft on Terrorism

Alex Roarty, National Journal — Fri, 19 Sep 2014 11:53:26 -0400

House Republicans are making a big bet that in the final weeks of the midterm election they can exploit doubts about President Obama's foreign policy to persuade late-deciding voters to support Republicans.

The National Republican Congressional Committee announced Friday a quartet of new ads focusing on national security. One, airing against Rep. Dan Maffei of New York, accuses the congressman of "backing constitutional rights for foreign terrorists." Another, in a bellwether Iowa district, claims that Democratic candidate Staci Appel supports "passports for terrorists." These ads open with footage from Islamic State fighters.

At a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor the same morning, the group's chairman, Greg Walden, made clear it's a topic voters can expect to see more of from Republicans before Election Day.

Foreign policy and terrorism, he said, have seen a "big uptick" in polls, Walden said, and are contributing to a big shift among voters toward the GOP in recent weeks.

"There is just this growing sense that things are a little out of control," he said. "And I don't mean …. they don't like Washington. Fifty-seven percent of the American people don't think President Obama is doing a good job on the terrorist question. That points to a real, real problem for all concerned."

The NRCC chairman pointed specifically to "security moms"—women whose worries about national security nudged many of them to vote for the Republican Party in the 2002 midterms—as a bloc who have been sensitive to the issue.

There's a real debate within the GOP, in both Senate and House races, about how prominent a role foreign policy should play in the campaign's closing weeks. Many of the party's candidates have used the topic to argue that Obama is incompetent, but others have shown hesitation to distract their airtight message on domestic issues.

The NRCC, apparently, no longer shares those worries. Asked if foreign policy had overtaken the economy as voters' primary issue of concern, Walden demurred.

"I don't know that I could answer that at this point," he said. "I'd want to see more data." He added that it's a "very potent and important issue."

"In campaigns, you want to be talking about issues people care about."

(Image via Flickr user House GOP)

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Promises of Federal Spending Help Thad Cochran's Surprise Rebound Against Tea Party

Alex Roarty, National Journal — Wed, 25 Jun 2014 10:22:50 -0400

In a remarkable comeback for a candidate many Republicans had begun to write-off, Sen. Thad Cochran won a surprise victory Tuesday in Mississippi's Republican runoff race for the Senate, dealing a stinging blow to tea party-groups that considered the six-term lawmaker their best opportunity to knock off a Republican incumbent in 2014.

He now moves on to face former Democratic Congressman Travis Childers in the general election, a race Cochran enters as the prohibitive favorite in red-state Mississippi.

Cochran's victory caps what has been the most heated showdown of the 2014 primary season, a months-long battle that pitted conservative challenger Chris McDaniel and his allies—including groups like the Club for Growth and the Senate Conservative Fund—against Cochran, an institution in Mississippi politics who had the backing of just about every influential Republican leader in the state and in Washington. The race has included allegations of criminal wrongdoing, open questions about Cochran's state of mind, and personal insults directed both ways. Establishment Republicans spent millions of dollars trying to prevent a victory by McDaniel, whose history of controversial comments would not only jeopardize their hold over Mississippi's Senate seat but also damage their candidates elsewhere.

But those efforts looked doomed to fail after Cochran didn't win his June 3 primary. Because both he and McDaniel fell short of 50 percent of the vote, both men entered a runoff race to be held three weeks later.

That was supposed to favor the insurgent state lawmaker, who seemed to emerge with momentum and confidence that his activist base would turn out again on Tuesday while overall turnout decreased, as it usually does in runoff elections. Even some of Cochran's fiercest allies appeared to dial back their criticism of McDaniel in the race's closing weeks, mindful that any criticism against him could help the Democrats in a general election.

But in a brilliant strategic ploy, Cochran and his allies—notably, the Super PAC led by Henry Barbour—focused their efforts on turning out black voters instead of winning over activists. Those voters, swayed by Cochran's pledges to continue delivering federal money to the mostly poor, rural state appear to have changed the composition of the electorate enough to give Cochran the win, according to an assessment of the early vote tallies.

In Jackson's Hinds County, where two-thirds of the population is black, Cochran was winning 82 percent of the vote (with about half of precincts reporting). In the primary, he only tallied 66 percent of the vote. Turnout was up significantly in heavily African-American counties in the Mississippi Delta, like Quitman and Coahoma, where Cochran increased his margins over McDaniel.

Before the primary, most Mississippi political experts predicted turnout would reach a high of about 250,000. On Tuesday, in a runoff race that usually features a drop in turn out from the primary, more than 360,000 people voted—a remarkably high turnout figure that topped even the number of people who voted in the 2012 GOP presidential primary there.

That strategy, however, is likely to engender discontent from conservatives unhappy that a Republican primary was decided, at least in part, by Democratic voters. It's something McDaniel referenced directly in his concession speech, in which he derided his GOP opponents "abandoning" the conservative movement.

"There is something a bit strange, there is something a bit unusual about a Republican primary that is decided by liberal Democrats," McDaniel said, drawing big cheers from his supporters. "So much for bold colors. So much for principle."

The state senator offered nothing in way of support for Cochran during his speech and instead noted what he said were "dozens" of irregularities at the polls today. Citing Mississippi law, conservatives had expressed concern before the runoff that Democrats voting on Tuesday would do so illegally.

"Today, the conservative movement took a back seat to liberal Democrats in the state of Mississippi," McDaniel said.

In the bigger picture, Cochran's victory is also a major coup for Senate Republicans. McDaniel was last of the candidates they feared could win the party's nomination who could emerge as a Todd Akin-like figure—someone who could give Democrats a chance even in Deep South Mississippi. Worse, they feared anything controversial he said would go national in the same way Akin's comment about rape did in 2012, damaging the party's chances of retaking the Senate.

Republicans have now received the candidate they wanted—or at least avoided the ones they didn't want—in a host of battlegrounds with competitive primaries: Georgia, Iowa, North Carolina, Colorado, New Hampshire and, now, Mississippi. There are still a handful of primaries left—most notably, a three-way Republican battle in Alaska—but Republicans are confident they pose little threat to their preferred candidates.

That's an important milestone for the NRSC and GOP leaders, and breaks a streak of two consecutive election cycles in which Republicans squandered winnable Senate seats with radioactive nominees (Christine O'Donnell in Delaware and Sharron Angle in Nevada in 2010, Akin in Missouri and Richard Mourdock in Indiana in 2012).

Josh Kraushaar contributed to this article.

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Pork Is Back On the Table In Mississippi

Alex Roarty, National Journal — Tue, 29 Apr 2014 10:45:03 -0400

A fight over earmarks isn’t unusual in a Republican primary. Two GOP contests in Mississippi, however, are flipping the usual terms of the debate.

A pair of Republican candidates—Sen. Thad Cochran and former Democratic congressman-turned-GOP challenger Gene Taylor—are embracing the now-banned practice sometimes labeled pork-barrel spending, using it not only to bolster their own campaigns but to cudgel their foes.

If that seems strange, it should: The Republican Party has all but driven supporters of earmarks from its ranks, convinced that they’re the hallmark of politicians who don’t adhere to conservative principles.

But Cochran and Taylor are arguing that earmarks offer an essential supply of money to cash-strapped Mississippi—with each citing the devastation wrought on the Gulf Coast by Hurricane Katrina as a prime example. On the campaign trail and in ads, they’re calling out their opponents’ positions by name.

One such ad, produced by a super PAC backing the long-term incumbent Cochran, blasts his opponent, GOP state Sen. Chris McDaniel, for equivocating in an interview earlier this year over whether he would have supported a fiscal relief bill for the region after the 2005 hurricane.

“Chris McDaniel: We just can’t count on him,” a narrator intones, after audio of the state senator’s interview plays.

The beginning of the spot touted Cochran’s own efforts to support the legislation and bring money back to the state, setting up another clear contrast between the two candidates. (They also have a substantial age difference; Cochran is 76 and McDaniel is 41.)

Taylor, meanwhile, has been outspoken in his campaign against Rep. Steven Palazzo, criticizing the two-term Republican incumbent for opposing a relief bill in 2013 for victims of Hurricane Sandy. Like Cochran, Taylor touts his own efforts to work with the state’s delegation to pass a relief bill after Hurricane Katrina.

“He basically stuck his finger in their eye,” Taylor said during the opening event of his campaign rollout in late March, according to The Mississippi Press. “It’s unbelievable that after all we’ve been through, after asking for Katrina aid himself, he would say no to Hurricane Sandy victims.”

Cochran and Taylor come from very different backgrounds: The six-term senator and master appropriator has been a pillar of the Republican Party in Mississippi since the 1970s, while Taylor last held office as a Democrat until Palazzo beat him during the 2010 Republican wave. He officially switched parties only this year.

But both represent the old-guard political establishment, a throwback to a time when delivering pork-barrel spending to constituents was viewed not only as a positive but as a necessary function of the job. The calculation is that even as Republican politics has become less tolerant of ideological deviations in recent years, Mississippi conservatives will still look fondly enough back on how things used to be done that they’ll send both men back to Washington.

To be sure, their opponents welcome the fight. They’re confident that voters will ultimately process the election not as a choice between the good old days of the past and an uncertain future, but as a decision between authentic conservatives and moderate squishes.

“What we’ve proven, time and time again, is that once voters realize that senators like Thad Cochran traded funding for things like a lobster institute in Maine or a ‘bridge to nowhere’ in Alaska in exchange for parochial projects back home, they quickly begin to blame both the earmarks and the people who voted for them for our $17 trillion in debt,” said Barney Keller, spokesman for the conservative Club for Growth.

Conservative groups have lined up behind McDaniel’s quest to unseat Cochran, making him arguably the single biggest target within the GOP establishment this year. They’ve sought to make Cochran part of the past, a symbol of a dysfunctional political system that has failed the country.

That’s where Cochran’s continued support of earmarks could return to haunt him—not because of the anger it elicits among voters, but because it could associate him with a past many conservatives don’t regard kindly.

“Thad Cochran doesn’t have a primary fight purely because of earmarks. He’s vulnerable because over five decades in Washington he’s become part of the problem and the reason we have $17 trillion in debt,” Keller said. “Earmarks are part of the story, but those, combined with his support for bailouts, tax hikes, and his support for Obama’s debt-limit increases, tell the tale of a senator far too liberal for a conservative state like Mississippi.”

Any suggestion the Mississippi duo signals a new embrace of earmarks among Republicans seems doubtful. In most Republican primaries across the country, candidates would sooner discuss repealing the 16th Amendment or abolishing the Department of Education than bringing back earmarks.

But in Mississippi—for now—they’re making a comeback. It’s up to voters to decide whether the practice should be revived.

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The GOP's Talent Gap

Alex Roarty, National Journal — Mon, 24 Feb 2014 17:00:00 -0500

Republicans who run campaigns gripe they lose races because of candidates and ideology. It's easy to understand why. Nominees who deny they belong to a coven or confuse—in the most offensive way conceivable—the basic biology of sex aren't ideal nominees. The more electable ones, like Mitt Romney, are forced to adopt such a rigid agenda that they irritate half the electorate before the general election even begins. So victories are hard to come by, just as they would be for a sprinter with two sprained ankles.

But those same Republicans who have shepherded countless Senate, House, and presidential candidates should add one more culprit to their list: themselves. Because there's mounting evidence that the party's political class simply isn't good at running campaigns anymore.

They're certainly not as good as the Democrats. The turnout experts, TV whizzes, and all-around gurus of the Grand Old Party have been outnumbered and outsmarted by their adversaries, who have spent a decade retrofitting their entire political infrastructure. The result is a dizzying talent gap between the two parties' political classes, one that shows few signs of closing as the 2014 midterms begin. In some ways, the GOP is years behind on solving a problem that has no quick fixes.

The chasm is widest in technology, an area where Democrats have innovated heavily while Republican tactics ossified. But the data and digital divide, while getting most of the attention, is only a symptom of a larger problem that cuts fundamentally to how the Republican Party operates—not just at a tactical level but also a philosophical one. The well-worn pathways of the party's operatives, in which every low-level staffer commits his or her career to becoming a well-paid TV specialist, must change. The party's best and brightest need to emulate the career arc of their Democratic counterparts, who devote themselves to data and fieldwork, areas where races are increasingly won or lost.

A party that celebrates individual achievement must learn to better share information and work together to form a new way of politicking—a practice Democrats have emphasized for years. For conservatives, that will smack of a collectivist mind-set they detest as a matter of public policy. But a top-to-bottom change in how the GOP's political leadership thinks is exactly what many of its own strategists argue is necessary to catch up to Democrats.

"If you think [the] reason you lost to Obama is because you didn't have a database, that's just a fundamental misunderstanding," said Patrick Ruffini, one of the party's foremost digital consultants. "The problem lies not so much in not having those specific things. The problem lies in a culture."

Tech-savvy consultants use the word "culture" a lot as they try to convince party leaders that closing the gap isn't about finding the next technological widget. It's about transforming how the party conducts its campaigns, from operations that rely heavily on TV and conventional wisdom to data-driven efforts that reach across all media. Most important, it requires that staffers on those campaigns, from campaign manager to rank-and-file workers, overhaul not just what they do but how they think.

And changing that culture will take more than a single election cycle, or even two. That worries some Republicans, who gaze at the 2014 landscape and see a year in which the party could easily capture the Senate majority while extending its grip on the House. The GOP will win those races because of Obamacare's unpopularity or a sagging economy, but that won't mean the party has suddenly figured out a better way to run its campaigns.

Republicans like Ruffini say short-term success could cost the GOP in the long run. "Say we do win in 2014; say we do win in 2016. I still think without a systematic review or systematic uprooting of how we operate, we're going to be swimming against the tide of history," he said. "Did Democrats have a better campaign infrastructure in 2010? Yes, they did. They still lost. As a result of that campaign, we took wrong lessons out of that."

SHALLOW BENCH

The biggest deficit Republicans face isn't the skills of their operatives or the absence of newfangled campaign technology. It's their numbers: The GOP simply doesn't have enough people—or a wide-enough variety of them. And even those men and women who are working are often fitted into the wrong kind of job.

"Republicans concentrate their talent on the most traditional aspects of campaigning, while Democrats tend to blaze new ground in areas like data analytics"

A December study by the progressive political firm New Organizing Institute found a wide chasm between the number of staffers on Democratic versus Republican campaigns—nationally, the ratio was close to 3-to-1 in favor of Democrats. In swing-state Nevada, where Republicans had hoped the housing bust and vibrant Mormon community would lift Mitt Romney to victory, the totals were even more lopsided: 498 Democrats worked the state, to only 20 Republicans.

While the study isn't perfect—it doesn't offer a full count of staffers who worked for a consultancy, for example, and it doesn't differentiate between those who worked on a campaign for three months and those who were there for just three days—its findings rang true for many plugged-in strategists who work on campaigns. "The end of our pool is smaller than the end of their pool in a lot of vital areas," said Rick Wilson, a Florida-based Republican operative.

Worse, according to some Republicans, those who are working aren't in the right positions. "Anyone who has hung around GOP campaigns can tell you that this sounds totally intuitively right," Ruffini wrote in a blog post assessing the data. "Republicans concentrate their talent on the most traditional aspects of campaigning, while Democrats tend to blaze new ground in areas like data analytics, and focus more on [the] field."

Fieldwork might sound mundane, but it's where many smart campaigns are investing the most money. There's no better example than Obama's last campaign, which emphasized voter-to-voter contact among its army of volunteers and low-level employees. The ground game was the largest in presidential history.

To Ruffini and other Republicans, this misallocation tugs at a related and equally daunting challenge. GOP leaders have hemmed and hawed about the party's digital and technology gap since losing to Obama's technologically superior effort in 2012. They've invested millions of dollars, especially at the Republican National Committee, to remake their voter-outreach and political-analytics efforts. But as the NOI data show, money's not the big problem. It's people. And the GOP can't train, or retrain, a generation of operatives overnight.

"As far as this gap, we've been doing a lot in the last year to close it: buying the technology, buying the talent," said Alex Lundry, who served as Romney's director of data science. "But the thing you can't buy is the culture. And that's the place where we're struggling the most."

Some doubt that the GOP's leadership truly understands the breadth and depth of the challenge before the party. Vincent Harris, a well-known GOP digital strategist, points to last year's Virginia gubernatorial election between Democrat Terry McAuliffe and Republican Ken Cuccinelli as evidence. While McAuliffe invested heavily in analytics and fieldwork, Cuccinelli's effort looked an awful lot like campaigns of the past. His investment in data, analytics, and voter-targeting paled in comparison to McAuliffe's. In the consultant's estimation, it's a sign that many of the Republicans running major campaigns still don't get it.

"I think the Republican Party is doing a lot of talk," Harris said. "But without a doubt, it has definitely not moved to where Democrats are."

BLUE-COLLAR POLITICS

Democrats had the help of a major ally in the quest to modernize their campaigns: unions. The labor movement might seem like an odd generator of cutting-edge tactics but, squeezed by declining membership and funds, it has turned into an innovation factory for the party. Michael Podhorzer, the AFL-CIO's political director, was a founder of the Analyst Institute, a group dedicated to testing the best methods for voter contact and persuasion.

Republicans don't hurt for allies. But many of them, like the Karl Rove-founded super PAC American Crossroads and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, follow a simple formula: Raise a bunch of money and spend it on TV ads. It's not exactly a revolutionary way to conduct campaigns. "What is the third-party group that is equivalent to the labor movement on our side?" Lundry asked. "Is it the chamber? Probably not."

A few GOP consultants say the party's conservative philosophy hinders the sharing of its best ideas.

Unlike unions, those GOP-leaning groups don't invest much in the ground game, which, to many GOP operatives who do work in the field, is part of a bigger problem. The GOP's political class simply doesn't value that kind of work, even if it's increasingly important in the 21st century.

Most young Republican operatives view organizing as a mere entry point to a career that will eventually lead to bigger, and better-paying, gigs. "Democrats actually set up and train people to think about those jobs as careers," said Brian Stobie, a partner at the GOP data-management firm Optimus. "A field-organizing roll can be a career over there. In our world, it's a $27,000-a-year job you can't wait to get out of."

"All you're thinking the whole time is, 'I can't wait to get out of this and be the political director,' " he added.

Other explanations are myriad. A few GOP consultants say the party's conservative philosophy hinders the sharing of its best ideas—both with other Republican campaigns and within individual campaigns themselves. "We are so individualistic on the Republican side, both in our philosophy and policy," Harris said. "It definitely bleeds over into how we are managing and structuring campaigns. And we have to break that."

Even the party's agenda can get in the way. As Robert Draper outlined in The New York Times Magazine in February, the party's conservatism on cultural issues might prevent it from recruiting the young operatives it needs from Silicon Valley and other places. The problems with these tech-savvy youths mirror the GOP's problem with young voters in general who might sympathize with the party's fiscal conservatism. As Draper wrote, the GOP's opposition to gay marriage and abortion rights alienates those would-be operatives. The talent pools the GOP must tap into, then, are running dry.

REINVENTING THE WHEEL

It's not that the GOP leaders don't get it. Most of them talk with guys like Ruffini, Lundry, and Harris all the time. They use the same language, too, urging the party to transform its political culture while overhauling its data capabilities.

"Our challenge is less of a technology problem and more of a culture problem," read the report from the Growth and Opportunity Project, the RNC's recommended changes to the party after the 2012 election defeat. "We need to strive for an environment of intellectual curiosity, data, research, and testing to ensure that our programs are working. We need to define our mission by setting specific political goals and then allowing data, digital, and tech talent to unleash the tools of technology and work toward achieving those goals. And just as with all forms of voter contact, digital must be tested, and we must measure our rate of return."

And they bristle at the suggestion that their changes are little more than rhetoric. To be fair, they're right. The RNC has spent tens of millions of dollars upgrading its data operations and hired a former senior Facebook engineer, Andy Barkett, as its new chief technology officer. It has worked with recruiting firms to hire young Silicon Valley talent, and even set up what it calls a Para Bellum Labs, a kind of start-up firm within the committee designed to help the party innovate new ideas.

The National Republican Congressional Committee has established its own de facto boot camp for party strategists, a program called ELEVATE, to train them in the best practices for digital strategy. That helps amend problems at the individual campaign level, says Gerrit Lansing, the NRCC's digital director. But he's more excited about changes made to the leadership at all the committees, changes he says will infuse them—and, by extension, the party's establishment—with the mind-set necessary to catch up to the Democrats.

"Everyone agrees cultural change was needed throughout the party, which is why the committees who have the greatest influence over party decisions have made major structural changes to how they operate," Lansing said. "Those structural changes—not larger ad buys or flashy gadgets—are the quickest, most dramatic way to affect cultural change throughout the party."

Some Republicans are putting those words into practice. Mitch McConnell's team in Kentucky, for instance, has pledged to build the most tech-savvy GOP Senate campaign ever. And they've turned to a surprising source to help them do it: NationBuilder, a political firm that grew up helping Democrats merge different strands of a campaign's operation.

"We didn't want information siloed," said Jesse Benton, McConnell's campaign manager. "I've been part of so many campaign operations where you have a fundraising database, a voter-contact database, other forms of data coming in, and they're not talking to each other. We wanted to have everything in one hub that could be then looked at and analyzed to make smart decisions."

What all of their efforts can't do, however, is make up for lost time and people. A decade of ignoring its own political practices has left the GOP in a deep hole, one it can't climb out of in a single election cycle. Republicans will need a focused effort for years to catch up to Democrats—one the party will have to maintain even if it manages to win big in 2014 without it.

This article appears in the February 22, 2014, edition of National Journal Magazine as The GOP’s Talent Gap.

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The Republicans Who Fear a Shutdown

Alex Roarty, National Journal — Fri, 20 Sep 2013 17:06:08 -0400

Thirty-three percent. That's President Obama's approval rating among white voters, according to an ABC News/Washington Post poll released this week. The number is even worse—30 percent—in the latest Allstate/National Journal Heartland Monitor Poll. Those are staggeringly low numbers for a president who claimed nearly 40 percent of the white vote during last year's election. And Obama's free fall is even worse for Democrats than it appears, because some of next year's key Senate elections take place in predominantly white states, such as Arkansas, Kentucky, Montana, and West Virginia. Obama is experiencing the kind of slump that besets a president when his second term has been marred by scandal, ineffectiveness, and a lackluster economy.

Republicans eyeing Obama's troubles should be giddy about next year's prospects for winning control of the Senate and maintaining their big majority in the House. Except, instead of dreaming about majorities in both chambers of Congress, they're more focused on one little, nagging concern: House Republicans could screw it all up.

The House GOP's decision to solder together plans to fund the government while defunding Obamacare—a proposal resolutely opposed by the president and Senate Democrats—boosts the odds of a government shutdown. Even if a funding resolution eventually passes, Congress then must reach an agreement to raise the debt ceiling. In both cases, a quick compromise seems impossible.

That's what has Republican Party officials and strategists nationwide worried. They fear the public will blame the GOP for Washington's dysfunction. And although developments 14 months before an election rarely matter, a government shutdown, which could lead to a severe disruption of services, and a debt-ceiling standoff, which could throw the country's entire economy into peril, have the magnitude to ripple until next November. Enough to change the political trajectory of the midterm elections from one that's promising for Republican candidates to one that will blow up in their faces. "This has potential to be something that voters notice," said Glen Bolger, a Republican pollster. "It could affect voters where they live."

The concern is most acute outside of Washington, where Republicans targeting vulnerable Democratic lawmakers worry they could be foiled before the 2014 campaign even begins in earnest. Shutting down the government, they say, would reinforce voters' worst impression of the party—that it favors ideology over practical solutions. "Some of the rhetoric and language coming out of Republicans in Washington is concerning, because those aren't the messages that are going to attract independent voters," said Matt Strawn, former chairman of the Iowa Republican Party. "In Iowa, independents are an overwhelming majority of our voters."

The impending retirement of Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, has opened the door for Republicans to fill that seat with one of their own. But while Democrats have rallied behind a single candidate, Rep. Bruce Braley, the GOP primary electorate is split among five hopefuls. And Strawn worries that in an effort to court the party's most conservative factions, the GOP candidates will back proposals to defund the 2010 health care law that will alienate moderates. (One of them, former U.S. Attorney Matt Whitaker, has already criticized his opponents for not pledging to do so.) "It is language that will lead to good receptions at party chili suppers throughout the fall, but it's not language of success for the general election," Strawn said.

GOP officials elsewhere voiced similar concerns. "[Voters] are looking for problem-solvers," said one North Carolina strategist, granted anonymity to speak candidly. "They're looking for people who put viable alternatives on the table. If Republicans don't do that … then [a shutdown] may hurt the Republicans more."

A shutdown poses risks for Obama and Democrats, too. A disruption of services could lead angry voters to blame the man in charge of government, the president. And conservatives hope that once the House passes its bill, the public will wonder why Obama doesn't just abandon his health care law, which recent polls have reported is at record unpopularity.

But past shutdowns—especially the infamous confrontation in 1995 and 1996 between then-House Speaker Newt Gingrich and President Clinton—have favored the man with the bully pulpit. Voters blamed Gingrich—and polls never again showed Clinton trailing eventual GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole. "My caution would be looking at 1995 and 1996; no matter how you think things are going to go for your side, the president has the bigger microphone," Bolger said. "And that makes it that much it more difficult to win an out-and-out fight."

In fact, for a president struggling with a second term, a showdown with unpopular House Republicans might be just what he needs. Even the conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board acknowledged the upside for the president in a potential fight. "With his own popularity fading, Mr. Obama may want a shutdown so he can change the subject to his caricature of GOP zealots who want no government," the newspaper wrote, urging House Republicans to abandon their plan to defund Obamacare. "He'll blame any turmoil or economic fallout on House Republicans, figuring that he can split the tea party from the GOP and that this is the one event that could reinstall Nancy Pelosi as speaker. Mr. Obama could spend his final two years going out in a blaze of liberal glory."

For their part, some Democrats welcome a shutdown. Said one party strategist, "One could only help they give us that Christmas miracle so early." House Republicans had better hope it doesn't come to that. At this point, they're the only obstacle standing between their party and a successful midterm election.

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GOP risks political backlash in Michigan labor fight

Alex Roarty, National Journal — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 14:08:21 -0500

But they haven’t had a second thought about another hot-button subject: unions. That much is clear with the sudden and successful push by GOP lawmakers and Gov. Rick Snyder to make Michigan a right-to-work state, banning public- and private-sector unions from forcing members to pay dues.

The measure -- passed on Tuesday amid large protests and signed into law immediately -- takes dead aim at the labor movement in an echo of controversial moves by Republicans such as Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker.

The political fallout from this course is unclear. Should Republicans lighten up on unions as they try to broaden their appeal to the middle class and lay the groundwork for a political comeback? Or is this agenda a proven winner for the GOP, essential not only to its free-market image but as a way to weaken support for the Democratic Party?

Thus far, there’s conflicting evidence over which side has the upper hand. The party certainly has one high-profile victor in Walker, who survived a bloody recall fight after signing legislation that banned collective-bargaining rights for government unions.

The relative ease of Walker's win, despite a fierce effort to oust him, was seen at the time as proof that challenging unions, even in the traditionally labor-friendly Midwest, was a winning proposition. Other GOP analysts say Indiana’s passage of a right-to-work law early this year didn’t provoke backlash, while voters in Michigan itself voted down a measure to enshrine collective bargaining into its state constitution.

In Wisconsin and Indiana, unions threatened to exact revenge for the laws, says James Sherk, a senior policy analyst in labor economics at the conservative Heritage Foundation. And in each case, they failed.

“It seems like unions have more bark than bite,” Sherk said. “Voters are not as sympathetic to their arguments as they might have been 30 years ago.”

Some Republicans concede Snyder’s effort is unpopular, but say the clear-cut, strong agenda is something voters will sign onto anyway.

“Anytime you try to make fundamental change like that, there’s going to be opposition,” said Henry Barbour, an RNC committeeman from Mississippi. “People are yearning for genuine leadership, and even sometimes if they don’t necessarily agree 100 percent with the person leading, they like the fact they elected a governor who gets up and does what he thinks is right.”

That labor’s standing has declined in the preceding decades is beyond dispute. And there’s little doubt that atop the list of the GOP’s political problems, other issues like immigration are more prominent. President Obama, in fact, did better among Latinos, 71 percent of the vote, than he did among members of union households, 58 percent.

But there’s also evidence of political damage as a result of efforts to stymie labor. In Ohio, Gov. John Kasich’s effort to rescind collective bargaining rights for all public-sector union workers -- including emergency responders exempted in the Wisconsin and Michigan laws -- was furiously overturned by referendum in 2011. And in the wake of Michigan’s drama, Kasich, Walker, and Pennsylvania Gov. Tom Corbett have all vowed to avoid right-to-work legislation. Each is also up for reelection in 2014 and considered potentially vulnerable.

“I think Scott Walker is stopping short of pursuing a Snyder-style extreme measure because he’s already worried about his reelection in 2014,” said Jeff Hauser, a spokesman for the AFL-CIO. “This is a sign of bad politics.”

In the presidential race, Obama’s standing with voters who have a union member in their household stayed strong even as his overall popularity declined. In 2008, he won 59 percent of the voters, according to exit polls, just 1 point less than the percentage he won in 2012.

The danger for the GOP, and partly why Ohio’s collective-bargaining legislation was overturned, is that its anti-union efforts reinforce a perception that it is indifferent to the middle class.

“I think there are those who have mixed views of unions, but do not dislike unions, do not hate them or want to see them disappear,” said Guy Molyneux, a Democratic strategist with ties to the labor movement. “When they see a politician who is overtly anti-union, that does send a message to voters that he cares only about business and not about working people.”]]>

An Ohio vote recount could be a mess

Alex Roarty, National Journal — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 10:22:17 -0500

It’s easy to imagine what the late Tim Russert’s whiteboard might say tonight: Ohio, Ohio, Ohio.

The Buckeye State has supplanted its Southern cousin Florida as the marquee battleground of the 2012 presidential election—the state most likely to tip the race to either President Obama or Mitt Romney. Both candidates and their allies practically took up residence there in the past month, while their ads inundated the airwaves.

But Ohio also bears another, more ominous similarity to the 2000 Florida: If a close race demands a recount, conditions are ripe for a repeat of the delays, confusion, and chaos that racked the Sunshine State. And just like 12 years ago, the state’s ultimate winner could very well determine who is the next president. Part of the reason is that swing states such as Ohio haven’t adopted some of the reforms that Florida enacted after its infamous recount.

The potential problems that could arise in a close race in Ohio are myriad. But the most obvious flash point involves provisional ballots, those cast if a voter’s eligibility is in question. Election officials don’t count provisional or absentee ballots until 10 days after Election Day. In case of a narrow margin and with hundreds of thousands of such votes still to be counted, neither candidate could claim victory. (Ohio recorded 200,000 provisional ballots in 2008, a number expected to rise this time.) “Everyone is going to be saying, ‘It’s just likeFlorida,’ ” says Trevor Potter, who was general counsel for John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign.

Both campaigns are also girding for a fight over which provisional ballots will ultimately be deemed valid. And, here again, there is uncertainty. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit this week ruled in favor ofOhio’s secretary of state, a Republican, who had ordered that provisional ballots cast at the wrong location would not be counted. A lower court had overturned the secretary’s decision earlier this month. Challengers could appeal the Appellate Court ruling to the Supreme Court on an expedited basis, which would draw yet another comparison to 12 years ago.

The argument over which provisional ballots should be counted, Potter says, is where the process could degenerate into partisan warfare on a county-by-county basis. (Sound familiar?) If the campaigns learn the names and partisan leanings of the voters who cast each ballot, they’ll fight to keep some from being counted, Potter says. “Both parties have had teams of lawyers in Ohio for some time,” he says. “In a close race, you would see at least a 10-day period of disputes and uncertainty before the local boards.” Neither campaign will be caught flat-footed. Obama’s top attorney, Robert Bauer, and Romney’s, Ben Ginsberg, were each deeply involved in the Florida recount.

The biggest dispute will likely center on Ohioans who applied for an absentee ballot but decided instead to vote on Election Day. These voters will be allowed to cast only provisional ballots, which will be counted only after officials determine they didn’t vote twice.

This isn’t the first time Ohio has been poised for a fight over provisional ballots. In 2004, lawyers for Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry were ready to challenge the provisional ballots cast for President Bush. But the president’s margin in the state—more than 100,000 votes—made a challenge moot. Experts say that an Obama or Romney edge would need to be closer to 25,000 votes for provisional ballots to become a factor.

Legal challenges in the years since 2004 have removed some of the uncertainty, according to Edward Foley, who directs Ohio State University’s election-law program. But the state has never faced a test like the one it might see this month. “I’m not saying Ohio’s system can’t withstand it. It’s a question mark,” he says. “The question is: Can they do it fast enough? Can they do it fair enough?”

And if the confusion over provisional ballots wasn’t enough, the possibility of an outright recount further clouds Ohio’s outcome. The state will conduct an automatic recount if the difference between Obama’s and Romney’s tallies is less than one-quarter of 1 percentage point. But officials won’t begin that process until the election results are certified, which might not happen until early December.

Each county has 21 days to certify its results before submitting them to the secretary of state, according to a spokesman from the office, who then has an additional several days to do his own certification. Foley points out, however, that state law allows the secretary of state to speed up the recount.

Ohio doesn’t seem to have heeded the lessons of 12 years ago. After its tumultuous recount, Floridastreamlined its procedures—mandating an automatic statewide recount if the total vote is split by less than one-half of 1 percentage point. Rules there require that a recount would be ordered by the fifth day after Nov. 6 and must be completed by the eighth day afterward. “We’ve got 12 years of successful elections under our belt inFlorida since we were in the spotlight,” says Stephen F. Rosenthal, general counsel for the Obama campaign in Florida.

Not everyone sees disaster looming. Mark Weaver, a veteran of the George W. Bush campaign’s legal team in 2004 who is now working for Romney in Ohio, said that a worst-case scenario falls somewhere betweenOhio’s aborted recount in 2004 and the 2000 comedy of errors in Florida. But there will be no fodder for another HBO movie, he says. “You really can’t have another Florida precisely the way Florida was—if for no other reason [than] you don’t have punch cards anymore,” Weaver says. “And they were the heart of the problem in Florida.”

Maybe. But if this election goes into overtime, it will likely again be a single state that takes the blame.

A version of this article appeared in the National Journal print as “The Heart of It All.”

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Romney surrogate accuses administration of 'another national security leak'

Alex Roarty, National Journal — Mon, 22 Oct 2012 10:38:52 -0400

Portman, R-Ohio, said that the fact both countries are denying the story makes it look like another inappropriate leak from the administration rather than a diplomatic breakthrough.

It looks like “another national security leak from the White House,” he said on NBC’s Meet The Press. “They've done a lot of that.”

Criticism about national security leaks has been a constant refrain from the Romney campaign, and Portman’s response could serve as a preview of how the Republican presidential nominee will respond to the Iran report during Monday’s foreign policy debate. Portman is heavily involved in debate preparations for the Romney campaign.

Portman added that one-on-one negotiations would also be unwise because it would cast aside countries like France, which have helped marshal sanctions.

“The last thing we want is to abandon our allies on this,” he said.]]>

Biden offers most vigorous defense of Obama stimulus so far

Alex Roarty, National Journal — Fri, 12 Oct 2012 08:53:00 -0400

The vice president’s full-throated promotion of the stimulus – a program he oversaw after its 2009 passage – was a sharp departure for a White House that for most of President Obama’s first term often avoided even mentioning the package, officially called the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.

Ryan had just finished delivering a series of criticisms of the package, alleging it funneled billions to campaign contributors and special interests. But rather than change the subject, as the Obama administration often has done in the past, Biden went on the attack. He highlighted the fact Ryan had requested stimulus money for his congressional district in Wisconsin.

“This was such a bad program and he writes me a letter saying -- writes the Department of Energy a letter saying, ‘The reason we need this stimulus, it will create growth and jobs.’ His words,” Biden said.

Ryan, forced to acknowledge he had helped assist constituents apply for what he called “grants,” shot back that the program sent money to foreign countries, but Biden continued.

“Moody's and others said that this was exactly what we needed to stop this from going off the cliff,” he said. “It set the conditions to be able to grow again.” Its investment in green jobs, Biden added, had a “better batting average than investment bankers have.”

The stimulus was one of many topics on which the vice president offered a far more robust defense than Obama did a week earlier. That’s been Biden’s role in this campaign, and on Thursday night it also reflected an apparent calculation by Team Obama that it was time to abandon the cool detachment Obama showed last week.

Biden’s vigorous response was a stark contrast to the stimulus non-defense the president himself offered last week. In Denver, GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney berated Obama for handing out hundreds of millions of dollars to failed green energy companies. He quipped, “I had a friend who said you don't just pick the winners and losers, you pick the losers.”

Obama didn’t even bother to respond, simply telling moderator Jim Lehrer “OK” when Lehrer said he wanted to change the subject. It was left to FactCheck.org to issue an analysis headlined “Romney’s Clean Energy Whoppers.”

That was in keeping with a White House that, at best, would tout investments made by the stimulus but never mentioned the economic measure itself. Biden, for all his vim and vigor at the vice presidential debate, didn’t even mention it in his acceptance speech during the Democratic National Convention.

Polls show the act has been a political loser: A Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey from the summer of 2011 found only 34 percent of adults thought it had or would help the economy in the future. That reflects the fact that the economy was still in the doldrums and the GOP used the package as a punching bag. Now Biden is finally punching back.]]>

GOP convention to feature Ron Paul tribute

Alex Roarty, National Journal — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 17:44:56 -0400

The Republican National Convention on Tuesday will feature a video testimonial to former presidential candidate Ron Paul, a nod to the libertarian icon’s influence on the GOP.

During a Friday conference call with reporters, Mitt Romney campaign strategist Russ Schriefer also revealed the themes of each day of the convention:

Monday will focus on the idea, “We can do better,” a criticism of President Obama’s tenure.
Tuesday will channel the campaign’s new motto, “We built this,” a not-so-subtle jab at Obama’s suggestion earlier in the campaign that entrepreneurs weren’t solely responsible for their success in business.
Wednesday will focus on the middle class.
Thursday will culminate with the overall theme of Romney’s campaign, “We believe in America.”

Thursday also will include appearances from members of Romney’s church to talk about him -- an unusual move for a political candidate who rarely discusses his Mormon faith despite the significant role it has played in his life. It will also feature appearances, according to the campaign, from 15 Olympians, a nod to Romney’s role in leading the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

Schriefer said that Paul's aides initially approached the Romney campaign with the idea of paying tribute to the Texas lawmaker, and the Romney campaign agreed to a series of testimonials from Paul's colleagues. Schriefer said that despite Paul’s primary challenge against Romney -- one that continued as recently as this week while the two campaigns fought over delegates -- the two men still respect each other.

“Governor Romney and Congressman Paul, while they certainly disagree on many issues, they certainly have had -- if you watched the debates this year -- a lot of mutual respect between the two of them,” he said.

Reports have indicated that the Romney campaign might move Ann Romney's speech from Monday to Tuesday night after the television networks decided not to broadcast coverage on the convention’s first day. But Schrieffer said the campaign is “still optimistic” that the networks will change their minds, and he held out the possibility that Ann Romney could still speak on Monday.

Even if the networks have decided to broadcast only three nights, he said, one of them could cover Monday and skip one of the other nights. “I’m optimistic that the right thing will be done,” he said.

Romney will be officially nominated early on Monday evening, Schriefer said.

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Tampa mayor: Storm threat greatly diminished

Steven Shepard and Alex Roarty, National Journal — Fri, 24 Aug 2012 09:23:00 -0400

“I don’t think there’s any reason for concern as it relates to cancellation,” Buckhorn told National Journal. “We’re not prepping for an evacuation. We are doing what we do a dozen times a year during hurricane season.”

He added later, “The hysteria has pretty much passed now, and folks are on to other stories.”

Buckhorn spoke with National Journal shortly after taking part in a 5:15 p.m. conference call with RNC and state officials, the second of a twice-daily phone call among the different organizations to coordinate their response to approaching storm.

The possibility that Isaac, which is expected to turn into a Category 1 hurricane by the time it reaches Tampa, could force a change or even outright cancellation of the convention has weighed heavily on the event’s organizers and the approximately 50,000 people expected to attend. RNC officials have maintained throughout that they fully expect the convention -- during which Mitt Romney will officially be nominated as the GOP’s presidential nominee -- to proceed as planned.

“The convention is working closely with our partners at the federal, state, and local levels to monitor the weather, and we have contingency plans in place to ensure the health and safety of convention delegates, guests and visitors, and the Tampa Bay community,” convention spokesman James Davis said. “We are looking forward to a great convention.”

Tampa is still expected to be hit by wind and rain on Monday, and meteorologists caution the city remains at risk.

“They’re not off the hook yet,” said Dennis Feltgen, a spokesman for the National Hurricane Center in Miami. “We haven’t changed anything down here. They still need to watch this closely.”

Buckhorn earlier in the week sparked concern when he suggested that the storm could force the convention to be canceled. But his tone had changed dramatically by Thursday afternoon.

“If you’re not a Floridian, you don’t necessarily appreciate that this is part of our lives,” he said. “The national media gets worked into a frenzy over a storm like this. We deal with it on a regular basis.”

As of 5 p.m. on Thursday, Isaac was still a weak, disorganized system in the Caribbean Sea, approximately 255 miles southeast of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. The storm has turned to the west-northwest, the National Hurricane Center reported, moving at 16 mph. Continuing on that track, Isaac is expected to pass over or near the island of Hispanola on Friday, and Cuba on Saturday.

The exact track of Isaac will determine its strength as it treks across the Caribbean. If the center of circulation passes over land—particularly the mountainous areas of Hispanola and Cubs—that would weaken the system prior to entering the warm Florida Straits, where rapid intensification is possible.

The storm is currently forecast to be near Key West, Fla., by Monday morning, as a hurricane with maximum sustained winds around 75 mph. But long-term forecasts for tropical systems are not very reliable, and the Hurricane Center warns that the storm could be anywhere from just off the east coast of Florida to the central Gulf of Mexico.

Most of the computer models on which forecasters rely take Isaac over or near the west coast of Florida—including Tampa—Monday into Tuesday. Along a track such as that, the city can expect heavy rain, strong winds, and the possibility of coastal flooding of low-lying areas. But whether those conditions materialize—and to what degree—depends largely on the storm's ultimate track.

If the storm remains offshore in the Gulf, most computer models indicate it could threaten the northern Gulf Coast from the Florida panhandle west to Louisiana by midweek. That could remind some convention-goers and observers of 2008, when Republicans were forced to cancel the first night of their convention in St. Paul, Minn., as Hurricane Gustav made landfall along the Louisiana Gulf Coast.

Tampa is prone to hurricanes, although not as much as other parts of Florida. Over a 100-year period, the city is struck on average once every nine years, according to the Hurricane Center’s Feltgen. Miami is hit once every five or six years, he said. Of course, the city might also be due: The last hurricane to hit the city was in 2004, when Hurricane Jeanne came ashore.

Tampa was last hit by a major hurricane when a Category 3 storm wreaked havoc in 1921.

The twice-daily phone calls among officials were organized in part to avoid conflicting messages of the hurricane’s hazard to the city and convention attendees. Although Florida officials, including Gov. Rick Scott, a Republican, have said that organizers would ultimately decide if the convention goes on, Scott does have the authority to order an evacuation of the area, according to spokeswoman Julie Roberts.

“The goal of what we’re doing is to have these conversations so the governor doesn’t have to make that stand,” Roberts said. “All stakeholders are looking at it to make the best decision for the RNC.”

Roberts emphasized that a mandatory evacuation is a remote possibility in the case of a direct hit from a severe storm—but such an evacuation appears unlikely at this point. “We’re not talking about a mandatory issue,” she said.]]>

Former Supreme Court justice not surprised by Roberts' health care decision

Alex Roarty, National Journal — Mon, 06 Aug 2012 08:53:45 -0400

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on Sunday said she wasn't surprised at Chief Justice John Roberts’ decision to uphold the federal health care law and added that she didn't know if he – as reported – switched his vote.

“I don't have any information about the initial, tentative votes taken at the Court conference,” she told CBS’s Face the Nation. “I have not pried into it. I have not asked to be informed. Obviously it was a close decision because at the end of the day it was 5-4, so at the time of first discussion it may well also have been a close decision. I expect it was. That was a hard case.”

But she doubted Roberts, pilloried by conservatives since, had signaled a new, centrist tack for himself.

“I don't, I don't see it at all,” O’Connor said. “I see it deciding a very sensitive case with political connotations.”

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Santorum's twin southern wins make it a two-man GOP race

Beth Reinhard and Alex Roarty, National Journal — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 09:15:00 -0400

Alabama and Mississippi threw former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum a lifeline Tuesday, knocking Newt Gingrich on his heels and the Republican presidential nomination at least temporarily out of Mitt Romney's reach.

The twin Southern victories will help Santorum frame the contest going forward as a two-man race against Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who has won more states and delegates than any other candidate.

Gingrich, who tried to position himself as the South’s prodigal son after winning South Carolina and his home state of Georgia, will face mounting pressure to exit the race. The former House speaker spent more time in Alabama and Mississippi than any of his rivals. But Santorum has stolen Gingrich's base out from under him, having also defeated him last week in Oklahoma and Tennessee.

“No question, Santorum has emerged as the conservative challenger to Romney, while Romney remains a weak front-runner no matter how you play the expectations,” said Greg Mueller, a conservative Republican strategist. “He is having trouble energizing conservatives when choices like Santorum and Gingrich are in the race.”

A super PAC bankrolled by Romney’s allies heavily outspent Santorum and Gingrich, and the former corporate executive also enjoyed broad support from the party establishment, including all seven of the Republican elected statewide officials in Mississippi.

Santorum is relishing his role as the underdog. “We did it again,’’ Santorum told a cheering crowd in Louisiana, which will vote on March 24. “Who would have ever thought, in the age of media we have in this country today, that ordinary folks across this country can defy the odds day in and day out.’’

Just before the primaries, Santorum and Gingrich released memos arguing that the race is far from over, and the Romney campaign called Santorum’s argument “pure fantasy, or vanity, or both.’’

According to Santorum’s team, the current delegate estimates don’t take into account friendly conservatives who are not locked into voting for Romney and will participate in the forthcoming delegate selection process. If Romney falls short of the 1,144 delegates required to lock down the nomination, Santorum could win at a contested convention.

“The reality is simple: The Romney math doesn’t add up, and he will have a very difficult time ever getting to a majority of the delegates,” the memo said. “The situation is only going to get worse for them and better for Rick Santorum as time passes. Simply put, time is on our side.”

A buoyant Santorum pushed up the deadline in his victory speech Tuesday night. “We’re campaigning everywhere there are delegates because we’re going to win this nomination before the convention,’’ he said. In a sign of his confidence, he'll be in Puerto Rico on Wednesday and Thursday, reaching out to the Hispanic voters who go to the polls on Sunday and will make up a key swing vote in November.

While Romney wasn’t expected to win in the Deep South, polls indicated that neither Alabama nor Mississippi was totally out of his reach, and he boasted a huge financial and organizational advantage over competitors widely perceived as implausible nominees.

Exit polls showed 46 percent of primary voters in Alabama and 50 percent in Mississippi view Romney as the candidate most likely to beat President Obama. Majorities in both states also named the economy as their top priority, the issue the former corporate executive claims as his wheelhouse.

Yet Romney chose not to spend any money on advertising in Mississippi and little in Alabama, leaving it up to his allies' super PAC to fill the airwaves. Restoring Our Future knocked Santorum as a Washington insider in Mississippi but didn’t go after Gingrich at all. Romney also skipped forums attended by Gingrich and Santorum this week in Biloxi, Miss., and Birmingham, Ala.

A case can be made that once again, Romney let a chance to shut down the nomination battle slip through his fingers. To be fair, though, neither state looked friendly to a Mormon candidate from Massachusetts. According to exit polls, evangelical Christians made up 80 percent of primary voters in Missisippi and 74 percent in Alabama.

Exit polls also showed most voters in both states don’t think Romney’s positions are conservative enough. On one specific issue, 70 percent of the voters in Mississippi said abortion should be illegal. That’s a tough crowd for Romney, who once favored abortion rights.

“The demographics in the Deep South do not favor Romney, and with relatively few delegates, there’s not a great return on investment,’’ said Republican consultant John Keast, a former chief of staff to Mississippi Sen. Roger Wicker when he served in the House. “He’s tried to play it safe, and I think that’s smart. The risk trumps the rewards.’’

Romney was still expected to pick up delegates from caucuses Tuesday in Hawaii and America Samoa. Before Tuesday’s contests, Romney was the far-and-away leader with 454 delegates, according to the Associated Press. Santorum had 217, Gingrich had 107 and Ron Paul had 47.

“In what should be a rough week he’s still going to pick up some delegates,’’ said Henry Barbour, a Mississippi Republican Party leader and member of the Republican National Committee who backs Romney. “To be clear, Romney was the underdog in Tuesday's primaries.’’

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Perry dropping out; will endorse Gingrich

Alex Roarty, National Journal — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 00:00:00 -0500

David Goldman/AP

Rick Perry plans to drop out of the race for the GOP presidential nomination on Thursday and will endorse Newt Gingrich, sources tell National Journal . Perry will make the announcement in North Charleston at 11 a.m.

The move by Perry to end his flailing campaign was inevitable; it only comes a few days sooner than expected. The Texas governor has been unable to gain a foothold in South Carolina, where he was depending on the state's many evangelicals and social conservatives to give him a break-out win.

But polls show Perry running dead last in the Republican pack. He had only 4 percent support among likely GOP voters in South Carolina in a poll by NBC News/Marist published on Thursday, the same as his showing in a CNN/Time polls on Wednesday.

Perry had weighed dropping out of the race after finishing last in Iowa, among the candidates currently in the race, but decided to stay in to make one last play for the nomination in South Carolina.

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