Scott Brown, the boyish Republican who briefly took over Ted Kennedy's former seat in the Senate, is a shameless and skilled politician. We saw that during the 2010 special election in Massachusetts, when he described himself as an independent thinker but also took money from the Tea Party and big Republican donors, and eventually outmaneuvered Martha Coakley, the Democratic candidate. We saw it in Washington, where he sought to water down the Volcker Rule, a stance favored by the big Boston financial firms and their brethren on Wall Street. Now, we are seeing it in New Hampshire, where polls show Brown gaining in the polls on Senator Jeanne Shaheen, the Democratic incumbent.
Widely dismissed as a carpetbagger who had fastened his personal ambitions on the Granite State, Brown has for much of the year trailed Shaheen, a popular ex-governor who was elected to the Senate in 2008. But a new survey from CNN/Opinion Research shows the Republican just two percentage points behind. And another poll, from American Research Group, puts Shaheen's lead at one point. Statistically speaking, the race appears to be tied.
What explains Brown's rise? Some commentators have focussed on his scaremongering about Ebola, which followed his earlier scaremongering about members of the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham, which is often called ISIS, infiltrating the United States from across the Mexican border. Speaking on Fox News in September, he said, "As you know, what happened recently with the beheading of one of our own, there's deep concerns that there are members of ISIS actually coming through the border right now." After two Texas nurses contracted Ebola, he cited the disease as another reason to toughen up border security, and criticized Shaheen, saying, "She's voted not to secure the border and I have."
Brown was also one of the first Republicans to call for ban on people travelling from Liberia and other West African countries. Last weekend, he wrote a public letter to Shaheen urging her to reconsider her opposition to such a move, saying, "This is not the time to put loyalty to President Obama and his policies above doing what’s right to keep Americans safe."
More about Obama in a minute, but first a bit more on Brown's political plasticity. In a televised debate on Tuesday, he denied ever having suggested that ISIS terrorists might slip across the border to launch an attack. "With respect, I did not say that," he told Chuck Todd, the moderator. "What I have said is that ISIS is real." As Bloomberg's David Weigel noted, "This answer belongs in the 'with all respect/all due respect' hall of fame." Just last week, as the Washington Post’s Greg Sargent pointed out, Brown told a local radio station,“I think it’s naive to think that people aren’t going to be walking through here"—the Mexican border—"who have those types of diseases and/or other types of intent, criminal or terrorist.”
That's the Scott Brown we are familiar with, but it may be a mistake to put too much emphasis on his rabble rousing. What's really working for him isn't his suggestions that Shaheen is soft on potential terrorists and Ebola carriers: it's his incessant efforts to tie her to President Obama, whose approval rating in New Hampshire, as elsewhere, is at a record low. If Shaheen loses, Ebola and ISIS won't be responsible. She will have been dragged down by an unpopular President.
In that sense, the election in New Hampshire is emblematic of the entire midterms. All across the country, Democratic incumbents and Democrats contesting open seats are putting up well-financed and spirited fights. I'm thinking of Mary Landrieu, in Louisiana; Mark Pryor, in Arkansas; and Mark Begich, in Alaska—but also many others, including Kay Hagan, in North Carolina; Michelle Nunn, in Georgia; Alison Lundergan Grimes, in Kentucky; and Bruce Braley, in Iowa. Some of these candidates may end up winning, as may Shaheen. But to do so, they will having to overcome an enormous burden. And although some of these candidates are trying hard to distance themselves from Obama, it's a mighty struggle.
In New Hampshire, Obama's approval rating is actually a bit higher than it is in some southern states, but that isn't helping Shaheen much. In the new CNN/Opinion Research poll, thirty-nine per cent of likely voters, and thirty-five per cent of all respondents, said that they approved of how the President is handling his job. Obama's disapproval rating was fifty-seven per cent (among likely voters).
Shaheen's own numbers are a good deal better than Obama's. Among likely voters, fifty-two per cent of respondents said that they had a favorable opinion of her, and forty-five per cent said that they had an unfavorable opinion. This survey also confirmed that Shaheen is more popular than Brown. Forty-eight per cent of likely voters have a favorable opinion of the Republican candidate; fifty-two per cent have an unfavorable opinion.
How do you go about unseating an incumbent whom the voters like more than they like you? To Brown, the answer was obvious. Since the start of his campaign, Brown has been emphasizing Shaheen's voting record in the Senate, which shows that she's almost always voted with the Obama Administration. Recently, he's stepped up these attacks and taken them to the airwaves.
In a fiendishly effective television ad entitled "Then and Now," his campaign showed some footage from 2008, in which Shaheen said, "I am so excited that it looks like Barack Obama is going to be our next President." The ad then moves to a more recent clip of Shaheen, in which Andrea Mitchell, of NBC, asks if the President will visiting New Hampshire to campaign for her. Shaheen replies: "Um, well the President is dealing with a lot of crises in the world right now. So I expect him to be in Washington."
As this equivocal answer indicated, Shaheen actually hasn't done very much to distance herself from the President—nowhere near as much as candidates like Mary Landrieu and Alison Lundergan Grimes. At the start of this week, Shaheen did reverse herself on an Ebola travel ban, saying that she is now open to one. But in Tuesday's debate, she strongly defended the Affordable Care Act. Asked if Obamacare was a proud achievement, she said, "Absolutely. I think making sure that almost one hundred thousand people in New Hampshire have access to health care is real progress for people in this state."
Shaheen deserves credit for sticking with principle and defending Obama's record in an area where it is often willfully distorted. But the difficulties facing her were illustrated when the moderator asked her a more general question: "Do you approve of the job President Obama is doing? There will be a chance to follow up but this is a yes-or-no answer. Do you approve, yes or no?" Shaheen's reply drew loud laughs from the audience. "In some ways I approve, and some things I don't approve," she said. "So, you know, like most questions that we deal with as policymakers there aren't simple answers. Yes or no."
If any of Shaheen's fellow Democratic candidates were looking in from around the country, they must have empathized with her predicament. By most objective accounts, she's done a decent job representing her state as a freshman senator. Most of her constituents know and like her. And yet, a week from Tuesday, she could well end up losing to a glib opportunist who only moved to New Hampshire at the start of this year, and who, as recently as last month, on an official form, listed his address as being in Massachusetts.
It's a lesson many Republicans learned in 2006: for midterm candidates lumbered with an unpopular President, politics isn't necessarily fair.
_Read more _analysis and commentary at our 2014 midterms hub.
