Ask Republican candidates for office what they think of their chances on Tuesday, and even many of those who have no shot at winning — if you believe the polls — are expressing optimism.
Ask GOP operatives what they expect on Election Day, and promise them anonymity in exchange for their answers, and you get a much different response.
Political operatives and analysts have suspected throughout this election cycle that the Republican Party would lose ground as a result of Tuesday’s election, but, before the nation’s economy tanked in September, a number of GOP operatives in New Mexico remained confident in off-the-record conversations that several of their candidates would win on Nov. 4, including Darren White in the 1st Congressional District race, Minority Whip Leonard Lee Rawson in the state Senate District 37 race, and, to a lesser degree, Ed Tinsley in the 2nd District race and John McCain in the presidential race.
At McCain’s Saturday rally in Mesilla and in several conversations since, that sense of optimism was largely gone.
“He’s already lost the state,” one prominent GOP source said at the Mesilla rally about McCain. That was an opinion not shared by a different active Republican who said he believes Democrats will probably win every congressional race, but McCain will win
Though various GOP operatives interviewed for this article still have high hopes for certain candidates in the state’s hottest races — most often McCain, White and Rawson — the sum of a number of conversations with Republican and Democratic operatives is a growing belief that Democrats might win all federal races in New Mexico — president, U.S. Senate and three House races — and that Democratic challengers might defeat Republican incumbents Rawson and Diane Snyder, R-Albuquerque, in the hottest state Senate races.
Such a scenario would be a seismic political shift for a state that currently has three Republicans and two Democrats in its congressional delegation.
“It really is demoralizing,” said one GOP operative close to the campaigns who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “We were really holding tough until the economy tanked, and then the bottom fell out.”
That operative says he still believes White and Rawson can win, but he sounds less optimistic than he did several weeks ago. Tinsley is probably going to lose, he said, and 3rd District candidate Dan East and U.S. Senate candidate Steve Pearce have no chance of victory.
Snyder’s biggest problem, the operative said, is that polls have indicated “a real possibility” that Obama will “run away” with
Signs point to potential losses
Rawson was among a number of elected officials, including Tinsley, Pearce and East, who said in e-mails and interviews that they’re optimistic about their chances on Tuesday. But GOP operatives point to several signs of a potential bloodbath:
• While early voting is at record levels in Obama-friendly Albuquerque and high across the state, one GOP stronghold appears to be lacking the fire that’s driving people to the polls in other counties. The Farmington Daily Times reported on Wednesday that about half as many people had voted early as of Tuesday in Republican-friendly San Juan County compared to the number who voted early during the same period in 2004.
• White and Tinsley trail by narrow margins in the most recent publicly released polling of their races. The fundraising arm of House Democrats has spent millions to promote their candidates, while the cash-strapped House Republicans’ campaign group has done little to help White or Tinsley.
• McCain trails Obama by several percentage points in polls in
A second GOP operative said that, if the election “turns out to be as bad for Republicans as some fear,” the cause will be national forces: “the worst political environment for Republicans since Watergate and a woeful lack of resources nationally.” The fundraising arm of Senate Republicans is in as bad a position as the House group. Both have had to take out emergency loans to try to stop the bleeding.
As a result, candidates in whom the national GOP once placed a lot of hope, such as White, have been left to fend for themselves.
Democrats aren’t celebrating yet. Brian Colón, chairman of the state Democratic Party, said the party has strong candidates, but “anything can happen between now and Election Day.”
“As we have seen in the past, this state can decide the fate of a president with as little as a few hundred votes, which is why we aren’t taking anything for granted,” Colón said. “Until the polls close on Nov. 4, we will be out knocking on doors, phone-banking, holding early vote events throughout the state and driving voters to the polls, so that when we wake up on Nov. 5, we have done everything we can to turn New Mexico blue.”
After Tuesday
There is one bright spot for the GOP in
For that to happen, the operative said, winning the governor’s race in 2010 “is do or die.”
“In addition to the impact a Republican governor will have on building the party and fundraising, it’s absolutely critical for redistricting,” the operative said. “If Republicans do not have a seat at the table for redistricting in 2011, we will once again be gerrymandered into the minority in the Legislature and the congressional seats will be heavily tilted towards the Democrats.”
The active Republican who believes McCain will win said the party is going to have to change in order to regain ground, and he expects it will take at least eight to 12 years for that to happen. He cited the fact that the ideologue Pearce defeated the more pragmatic Heather Wilson in the GOP U.S. Senate primary.
“It’s a clear example of the two camps at battle in the Republican Party, and it clearly shows how many more of those old Republicans there are than the new, pragmatic ones,” the operative said, adding that he believes Wilson would be in a much closer battle with Udall than Pearce is.
The operative said the party must return to its core values while, at the same time, modernizing. He said the Republican Party of the 21st Century must become more pragmatic.
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