The Lofty Lantern

What’s striking is that the partisan polls are in agreement and disagreeing with the public polls. Usually, polls commissioned by Republicans tend to add 2 or 3 points to their side, and polls commissioned by Democrats tend to add 2 or 3 to their’s. For example, though the two most recent polls of the Colorado Senate race show the Democrat either tied or with a 3 point lead, the polls paid for by Democrats show him with a 9 point lead. It isn’t quite cheating; it’s just part of the game.

But this isn’t happening in the North Carolina Senate race. The public polls are showing the Republican incumbent Elizabeth Dole with support solidly over 50%, enough to make it seem like a safe election. Yet the partisan polls - of both Democrats and Republicans - are depicting a different story. The most recent Republican poll gives Dole a lead of 47-38, significantly below the crucial 50% mark that would make her appear downright vulnerable in the upcoming election.

For all of its percieved Republican-ness, North Carolina isn’t quite as conservative as assumed. With Perot’s help, Bill Clinton kept his Republican opponents below 50% both times that he ran, and even won the state in 1992. Though Bush won the state decisively with 56% in 2000 and 2004, no Republican Senate candidate has won by that margin in the last three decades. In 2002, Elizabeth Dole won her first campaign against a relatively strong and well-funded Democratic candidate, Erskine Bowles, by a 54-45 margin.

Dole is an unusual candidate. The former Secretary of Labor and Secretary of Transportation, head of the Red Cross, wife of former Republican nominee Bob Dole and Presidential candidate herself, has an unusual amount of national visibility for a state-wide candidate. Yet this national profile makes her a potentially weak candidate in a state-wide race, particularly against somebody who has spent more time in North Carolina over the past decades. Dole’s political skills have also been found wanting when she ran the disastrous effort by the National Republican Senate Campaign committee (NRSC) in 2006. This national-local divide has made it difficult for some national observers to understand her campaign, not certain whether to emphasize more what they know about her or what they imagine others do not know about her.

Her opponent, Kay Hagan, has proved able to keep the fund-raising contest close. Despite her national profile, Dole’s 2.7 million dollars cash on hand (CoH) is similar to the amounts held by James Inhofe, who is facing a much less aggressive challenger in the significantly smaller state of Oklahoma, or Roger Wicker, who is running in the also relatively small state of Mississippi. Hagan’s 1.2 million dollars CoH is respectable for a challenger at this stage, though not enough to defeat Dole without a large influx of money.

The unlikelihood of this happening is part of the reason that Congressional Quarterly is rating this a Republican favored election, meaning that there is a small chance that the Democrat will win the seat.

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Even charismatic politicians don’t always want to sound like a Martin Luther King or a Winston Churchill. Much of politics, like much of life is mundane. If you answered every constituent’s question by offering your blood, sweat and guts, or declaring that it is your dream to solve their mortgage, you will soon sound ridiculous. The staff of Kay Hagan, a candidate to replace Elizabeth Dole as the Senator from North Carolina, has been producing clean, professional political prose.

“After nine years in Raleigh, Kay is all too familiar with the ways Washington has repeatedly come up short for North Carolina. Today, Washington needs a voice like hers; a voice for the right kind of change, accountability, and an unwavering commitment to keep North Carolina strong and moving forward.”

What is interesting about this passage is that it is a subtle and almost nice complaint about the incumbent Senate which leaves space for proposing a positive message. It appears like a general argument for change, but by its formulation it allows it not to be a simple “outsider vs. experience,” or “change vs. more of the same” but “good local experience vs. bad Washington experience.”

Consider an example: “When Washington came up short on health care for North Carolina’s children, Kay led the effort to bridge the gap by increasing coverage through Health Choice for Children.”

The criticism, while present, isn’t quite indicting. It criticizes by assumption. The writer here realizes that one doesn’t need to explain that there are health care failures, nor that it is Washington’s fault - the voters are very willing to believe that. The soft reference to it allows the positive comment about Hagan’s health care actions to be a contrast to other’s failures.

Kay Hagan is still the underdog in the race, but there is a certain consistency and quality in at least the staffer who wrote this website that makes her an interesting candidate, worth following, at least.

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