OR-Sen: Gordon Smith to Get GOP Primary Challenger?
by Jonathan Singer, Mon Mar 26, 2007 at 06:23:05 PM EDT
Gordon Smith has proved to be rather adept at playing the game of moderation in Washington, DC, convincing not only the Beltway press but also many Oregonians that he is in fact an independent thinker willing to break from his party on key issues. Indeed, during the last few months Smith has eschewed his party line on Iraq and Alberto Gonzales, among other things, in an attept to shore up his reelection hopes for 2008.
New polling commissioned by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee indicates that Smith has been at least somewhat successful in cajoling his constituents to view him positively, with 56 percent of likely Oregon voters saying they have a favorable opinion of Smith and just 25 percent saying they view him unfavorably. Yet on the job approval question Smith's support among Oregonians is noticeably softer, with 46 percent of likely voters rating his job performance as "excellent" or "good" and 43 percent rating it as "fair" or "poor". What's more, other recent polling (which I have serious qualms about but which I will nonetheless cite here) shows that Smith's approval rating among Republicans is just 57 percent, an indication that the GOP base is not quite as happy with Smith as they might need to be in order for him to win next fall. In fact, these numbers indicate that Smith might not even be immune to a primary challenge, the type of which that is being talked up in the largest Republican blog in the state.
According to the Northwest Republican blog, Oregon anti-tax activist Bill Sizemore is now saying that it is "not far fetched" that he would mount a challenge to Smith in the Republican Senatorial primary next year. Sizemore, for those who are unfamiliar with him, has been at the forefront of a number of anti-tax initiatives in Oregon over the last decade and a half, and has been popular enough among the Republican base to have won the party's gubernatorial nomination in 1998.
True, Sizemore is just not electable on the statewide level; he lost the 1998 general election incumbent Democratic Governor John Kitzhaber by a 67 percent to 30 percent margin, losing all but one of the state's 32 counties (a stark difference from the GOP's 2002 and 2006 nominees who carried 24 and 20 counties, respectively, while losing statewide). That said, Republican primary voters around the country have shown quite a willingness to vote against incumbent blue state Senators who they feel have not been loyal enough to the GOP. Had it not been for the significant monetary support of the White House and the party establishment, Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter would have most certainly lost his party's backing in 2004, and the same can be said for Rhode Island's Lincoln Chafee in 2006.
And even if Smith is able to survive a heated primary, even narrowly, as did Specter and Chafee, a Sizemore candidacy could force him to move so far to the right -- or at least stop pretending to be such a moderate -- that Smith would have trouble in a general election. Already, polling (albeit partisan polling from the DSCC) shows Smith trailing against at least one Oregon Democrat, Rep. Peter DeFazio. What would an attempt to out anti-tax Bill Sizemore do to Smith in a general election?
Tags: Gordon Smith, OR-Sen, Oregon, Senate 2008 (all tags)
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