Poor Atrios must be beating his head against the wall dealing with a mental midget like Joe Klein. To recap: Klein is one of those beltway asshats who thinks that primary challenges to incumbents are (to use his reference) something to delight the likes of Robespierre. In other words, anyone who supported Ned Lamont is a bloodthirsty tyrant and, presumably, deserves to be guillotined. Just call me St. Just.
Anyhow, the immediate context for this non-debate is the possibility of a primary challenge to Rep. Ellen Tauscher (CA-10), who sits in a district that went for Kerry 59-40. Suffice it to say, I’m not worried that, even if Tauscher were to lose a primary, a Republican would win the general. I say that in no small part because the bluest seat currently held by a Republican is DE-AL, which went 53-46 Kerry – and as many of you know, there are only eight GOP-held Kerry districts overall. In short, the GOP no longer plays very well in districts where voters like to pull the Dem lever at the top of the ticket.
But that’s not to say that “lethal” primaries never happen (as in, lethal to the party in which the primary upset took place). Indeed, they occasionally do. One relatively recent example: Party-switcher Michael Forbes (R to D) narrowly lost his primary in 2000, and the woman who beat him, Regina Seltzer, went on to lose to Republican Felix Grucci that fall.
So, going back to, say, 1980 (just to pick an arbitrary limit), what other lethal primaries for Senate and House seats are you aware of? And, so that we have a basis of comparison, how many incumbents lost primaries overall?
NY-SEN: Conservative Republican Al D’Amato beats liberal Republican Jacob Javitz in Republican primary. The liberal Javitz would have easily held the seat for Republicans in the general, but the Conservative D’Amato barely managed to defeat Democratic Congresswoman Liz Holtman in November by a 44.5-44.2 margin. Javitz took 11% as the liberal party candidate.
AL-06: Pro-civil rights incumbent Republican John Buchanan is defeated by very Conservative Republican Albert L. Smith in the primary in what was then a district that included all of Birmingham. Despite the pro-Republican tilt of the 1980 election cycle, Smith barely squeeked by the Democratic challenger in November. In 1982, Smith was defeated for reelection by moderate Democrat Benjamin Erdriech by a 53-46 margin.
In 1982, Rep. Thomas Railsback (R) was successfully challenged in the primary in his west-central Illinois district. Right-wing conservatives had not forgiven him for his committee vote to impeach Nixon all the way back in 1974! The general election was won by Lane Evans (D), who was originally considered a longshot as a young attorney having no elected office experience and running for a seat held by longterm incumbent Railsback. The primary results and the severe recession changed his odds dramatically.
As I recall, Sen. Charles Percy (R) was also challenged in his 1984 primary because he was being punished by conservatives for opposing a Reagan administration nominee in the Foreign Affairs Committee (which I think he chaired?). He went on to lose the general to popular Rep. (and former Lt. Gov.) Paul Simon who came out of a tight four-way primary for the Democratic nomination.
More than a half-century ago, in his definitive study of Southern politics, V. O. Key wrote that there could still be accountability in one-party states because the primary could substitute for the general election. Today, this is particularly true of districts represented by minorities. Just off the top of my head since 1980,
Harold Washington defeated Bennett Stewart (Chicago) 1980
Mel Reynolds defeated Gus Savage (Chicago) 1992
Chaka Fattah defeated Lucien Blackwell (Philadelphia) 1994
Shiela Jackson Lee defeated Craig Washington (Houston) 1994
Carolyn Kilpatrick defeated Barbara-Rose Collins (Detroit) 1996
Hilda Solis defeated Matthew Martinez (East LA) 2000
Artur Davis defeated Earl Hilliard (Black Belt Alabama) 2002
Henry Cuellar defeated Ciro Rodriguez (San Antonio & popints south) 2004
Denise Majette defeated Cynthia McKinney (DeKalb County GA) 2002
Hank Johnson defeated Cynthia McKinney (DeKalb County GA) 2006
In all of the cases listed, the winner of the Demcoratic primary was successful in the general election.
One example of an incumbent losing a primary and then the primary winner losing the general election occurred in OK2 in 1994. Mike Synar lost to Virgil Cooper who lost to Tom Coburn. Given the fact that Cooper only spent $20,000, Synar probably would have lost to Coburn also. What is interesting is that Synar entered Congress in 1978 by defeating an incumbent in the primary (Ted Risenhoover).
OK, I’m going back to before 1980 — to 1978. Progressive democrats were able to beat incumbent democratic Congressman John Breckenridge in the primary. The progressive was Tom Easley. The R’s had granted Breckenridge a pass and had nominated a nominal candidate, so we all celebrated what seemed a progressive win for Congress.
But the R’s were smart — their candidate dropped out and the party nominated Larry Hopkins, a local stock broker, as a replacement. Hopkins went on to take the seat and hold it for the R’s until he retired years later.
is going to be lethal in one more cycle!
The Graf-Kolbe struggle took place across a couple of cycles, but did prove lethal to that seat.
Lincoln Chafee, Arlen Specter, and Joe Lieberman are the only Senators to be challenged seriously in primaries in the last 15 years, right? Democratic State Senator Virgil Goode challenged Chuck Robb in 94, but I don’t know if that was serious or not.
this lethal primary ended one Congressional career and launched another.
In 1992 the Democrats had a contested primary for the right to challenge Republican incumbent Senator Robert “Landslide Bob” Kasten.
The two leading Democratic contenders were Milwaukee Congressman Jim Moody and Millionaire Milwaukee businessman Joe Checota. Also running was a little known State Senator from Middleton, Russ Feingold.
Jim Moody and Joe Checota proceeded to run the biggest mud slinging campaign the past 30 years at least. Moody was accused of ties to the backers of Milosevic in Serbia and Checota’s business practices were repeatedly questioned by Moody. They set spending records blasting each other and ignoring Russ Feingold. Meanwhile Feingold was running TV ads with Elvis impersonators in it that sought to amuse viewers, not attack the opposition.
At the start of the campaign Feingold was a distant third in the upper single digits in the polls, after the mud cleared Feingold took home a whopping 70& of the primary vote.
Moody and Checote blew each other away and have not been heard of since in Wisconsin politics. Feingold meanwhile remains a US Senator (hopefully for a long time to come).
Wingnut Roscoe Bartlett, R-MD, owes his seat to a lethal primary. Conservative Dem Beverly Byron held that seat for seven terms (I think) before losing the 1992 primary to, well, a real Democrat. I can’t recall the primary winner’s name, but he ran on a pro-health care reform platform and ended up with a respectable 46% of the vote. Not bad for a pretty Republican district, but I think it was the last time Bartlett had a tough race. (He had run against Byron once before, back in the ’80s, and was crushed.)
a congressman from North Carolina went though, was pretty deadly. He lost to Eva Clayton for his own father’s seat, and the experience is one of the things that embittered, and the main facotr he switched parties and knocked off a Democratic incumbent in the adjacent district in 1994. We might still have a Democratic Walter Jones if he hadn’t been denied the right to represent his father’s seat.