Ken Mehlman: GOP Can Hold Congress

By Ronald Kessler

Despite what he called the toughest challenge Republicans face since they took control of Congress in 1994, Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, said he believes the GOP will retain control of both the House and the Senate in the November elections.

Speaking this week at the American Spectator Newsmaker Breakfast, Mehlman said opinion polls have generally underestimated Republican turnout. He said they do not necessarily take into account the planning that has gone into winning the coming elections and the resources available for the final days of the campaigns.

“If you add up the national parties, the state parties, and the campaigns in the places where this election will be decided, we have a $55.8 million cash advantage,” Mehlman said. “That is worth a significant amount. If you look at almost every competitive race, either themselves or themselves with outside assistance, we will be able to present very aggressive messages in the last three weeks.”

Polls in general have incorrectly favored Democrats, Mehlman said. In recent years, “Every one of the polls indicated an electorate that was more Democratic, significantly more Democratic, than any actual electorate we’ve seen in 25 years,” Mehlman said.

In the past, Mehlman and his colleagues have attributed this in part to a failure by both pollsters and the media to take account of demographic changes in recent decades. What they do not understand is that the greatest population growth has been in exurbs around large cities. People in those areas tend to vote Republican.

Polls Don't Count Last-Minute Campaigns

The polls also cannot measure the effect of the advertising blitz planned for the final weeks of the campaigns or Republican micro-targeting efforts aimed at turning out voters, Mehlman said. While the Democrats have the media on their side, they are far behind in developing sophisticated ways to locate voters who might vote their way and persuading them to vote. “Ken Mehlman’s Voter Vault,” a June 12, 2006 NewsMax story, detailed the RNC’s micro-targeting efforts.

“In Pennsylvania this year,” Mehlman said, “there will be 16,000 net new Republicans relative to Democrats because of our voter registration efforts. In Arizona, there’ll be 28,000 new Republicans relative to Democrats.”

Mehlman said the RNC anticipated that the races would be challenging.

“Races are not coming into play that suddenly require us to run around and change allocation,” Mehlman said.

“If you look at where the president has campaigned and who he’s raised money for; if you look at the unprecedented resources the RNC will be spending; and what the other parts of the campaign committees will be spending; if you look at the kind of coordination we’ve had; this is something we’ve anticipated for a while and made appropriate provisions for this kind of a challenging year.”

Clear Choices

The fact that the two parties present a clear choice works to the advantage of the Republicans, Mehlman said.

“It’s a choice in my judgment on national security — whether in the face of terrorists, we are strong with the Patriot Act, strong with surveillance, strong with interrogation, strong with missile defense, and don’t surrender the central front in the war on terror to the enemy,” Mehlman said. He contrasted this to “specific Democrat proposals to weaken those tools we need to win.”

The elections also present a clear choice on taxes and judicial approach, he said.

“It is a referendum on whether your taxes ought to go up or ought to go down, and it is a referendum on whether we want judges in the mold of Justices Roberts and Alito who are judges who will allow the communities to set their own standards, or judges who will legislate from the bench,” Mehlman said.

While there are some indications of a Democratic surge, Mehlman said the evidence on the ground suggests otherwise.

“There have been 39 primaries this year,” Mehlman said. “In 36 of the 39 primaries that have been held — these are Democratic primaries — in 36 of the Democratic primaries, turnout in the primary was lower this year than the average turnout over the last 20 years in that state.

"Now does primary turnout automatically extrapolate to general election? Not necessarily. But you would think if there was this massive surge, you’d see it at some level.”

Mehlman said the fact that 80 percent of Republican resources come from small donors, suggests a great deal of Republican enthusiasm.

“I was in Ohio where, between last Saturday and the following Wednesday, a quarter of a million volunteer neighbor-to-neighbor contacts were made on behalf of Republicans running in that state,” Mehlman said. “That’s akin to the kind of activity we saw five days before the last election, but it’s occurring three and a half weeks out.”

On the negative side, Mehlman said, people not only feel uneasy about the Iraq war, they feel insecure about their personal financial future.

Uneasiness Over Security Issues

“There is an underlying angst that exists in the country despite very strong economic numbers,” Mehlman said. “And the underlying angst has to do with the fact that the things people get for their own personal economic security — you ask them what makes them personally economically secure, it’s things like their health care, their pensions, and what are they paying in gas prices that are big factors.”

Yet, Mehlman said, people are feeling insecure about those items because they feel they can't rely on them. In part, that is because "we have a delivery model for health care and for pensions that is based in the past, not the future," Melhman said. And I think that while this is an economic challenge, it’s also an opportunity for conservatives.”

That opportunity comes with allowing people to take control of their own health care and insurance and their own retirement plan.

“That would increase people’s personal security, economic security,” Mehlman said.

Mehlman went on to say that in the face of the angst, Republicans can point to a clear record of accomplishment. “Every year that George Bush has been president, a tax cut has been signed into law,” he said. “You have the most pro-life president in history.

"You have Roberts and Alito added to the Supreme Court. You have an unrelenting moral clarity and follow-through in action in the war on terror that is consistent with what we’ve seen in our great right-of-center presidents like Ronald Reagan and his approach to the Cold War. You have, for the first time in a generation, real litigation and lawsuit reform that we haven’t had.”

Mehlman said he did not think the scandal involving messages sent to pages
by former Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., will affect voters’ choices when they vote for their own member of Congress. “There’s one poll which showed a significant
Foley effect, and it got a lot of attention, the Gallup poll — 23 percent switch
in the generic value. Every other poll you look at, if you average them, showed
a 2 percent shift [to Democrats], and two polls showed no shift.”

Mehlman Rises to the Challenge

Mehlman said he has been through tough races before, and he feels comfortable about the coming elections. “I don’t wake up in the middle of the night all worried about things, because I know that we’re doing everything we possibly can, running as effective an effort as we can. And if you do that, then you feel pretty good about what the outcome’s going to be. And you know that on the issues, the voters are with us.”

While the House will be harder to keep than the Senate, “I expect to keep both the House and the Senate,” Mehlman said.