Shays Says Strong Incumbency A Response From Voters
By Paul Ziobro
WASHINGTON – Eight-term Rep. Christopher Shays, R-4, said Thursday he mentally prepares two speeches each election night, aware that voters might have decided to send him packing.
“When I win reelection, I’m excited about it but I don’t have any illusions,” Shays said in an interview. “Two years from now, I can be on the opposite side.”
But 4th district voters have yet to give Shays a scare, returning him to his seat with a comfortable majority in each campaign. Part of this success rate, Shays said, is the voters’ approval of his job.
“Incumbents tend to have an advantage particularly if they’re doing a good job,” said Shays, who plans to seek a 9th full term in 2004. “But if they’re not doing a good job, being an incumbent can be a pretty big disadvantage.”
Incumbents, however, have other advantages that keep them entrenched in office-mainly, name recognition and non-competitive districts, according to University of Connecticut political science professor Ken Dautrich. Access to money, media coverage and free mailing, he said, keeps incumbents’ names and faces fresh in voters’ minds come election time.
“More than half the battle with a congressional election is name recognition,” Dautrich said in an interview Tuesday. Challengers to an incumbent’s seat, he said, usually need a deep-pocketed campaign fund and near perfect campaign management to raise their name recognition to that of their opponent.
Name recognition oftentimes translates to campaign funding, where Shays has enjoyed a consistent advantage. Federal Election Commission (FEC) filings show that Shays raised and spent more than eight times as much money as his democratic opponent, Stephanie Sanchez of Greenwich, in the 2002 congressional campaign. Shays raised $975,551 over the 2001-02 election cycle, spending all but $60,438. that unspent sum alone was more than half the amount that Sanchez raised in her entire campaign, records show.
The same two candidates ran against each other in the 2000 election, with similar numbers, as Shays spent $1,401,299 in route to winning 58 percent of the vote while Sanchez spent $172,155. That has been the pattern since Shays won a special House election in 1987: he has always won at least 57 percent of the vote and has always outspent his opponent by at least $300,000.
Sanchez said in an interview Wednesday that free mailings for challengers and free television time for both candidates would be a step toward curbing the incumbent’s advantage in name recognition. State Democratic Party chairman George Jepsen suggested capping spending and publicly financing campaigns to reduce the advantage.
“What’s fair about a 98 or 100 percent reelection rate?” Sanchez said, referring to the 98 percent success rate that the Center for Responsive Politics (CRP) has identified for House incumbents. “Where’s the democracy-the level playing field-in that?”
Shays said reelecting him time and again represents constituents voicing their approval. “Instead of saying that someone who has been in office for a long time is not doing a good job, what I would say is they are doing a good job or they wouldn’t have been elected,” he said.
Continuity in Congress also benefits people back in the district. “I have more experience, I have more authority and I have more knowledge of the district,” Shays said.
Sanchez, who raised $118,970 for the 2002 campaign, said she fell prey to what he described as Shays’ advantage in getting contributions from individuals from political action committees (PACs) trying to gain access to the congressman. Shays received $157,257 in PAC contributions, compared to Sanchez’ $8,900, FEC records show.
The CRP found that $62,000 of Shays’ PAC contributions came from the finance, insurance and real estate industries and $47,500 from organized labor. He also received $18,825 from ideological and single-issue groups and $10,000 from the transportation industry.
Sanchez said the Shays-sponsored Bipartisan Campaign Finance Reform Act, which went into effect Nov. 6, the day after the past elections, would add to the fundraising advantage incumbents have. “The people that want to donate the large amounts, and the special interests that want access to these legislators-they’re going to find ways to donate to them,” she said.
Shays said the law deals with reducing the influence of corporate contributions and union dues money that distorted campaigns. However, he said, he would advocate publicly financing congressional elections and establishing low television advertisement rates during elections to level the playing field.
Thomas Mann, a senior fellow who studies campaign finance for the Brookings Institution, said the new law would have little or no bearing on an incumbent’s advantage. “The effort to improve the competitiveness of elections will require a subsequent reform agenda having to do with free TV time and such other things,” he said Wednesday.
Fairfield resident Charlie Gibbons, a Republican, said he and his wife, Jane, a Democrat, find few political issues to agree on but both support Shays as a candidate, contributing $1,750 to his campaign committee since 2000. But despite Shays’ easy victories, Gibbons said he thinks incumbents don’t have an advantage because they have more to answer to than their challengers.
“A new person coming in can say anything, promise anything, do anything-they don’t have to deliver,” Gibbons said Wednesday. “They (incumbents) can’t hide from tough decisions or just say things that make people happy.”
The other main factor keeping lawmakers in their House seats is that most congressional districts lean toward one of the major parties, making it difficult for a candidate in the district’s minority party to win an election, Dautrich said.
Connecticut, however, has a higher concentration of independent voters than most states-42 percent compared to a nationwide average of about 30 percent-so the state’s congressional districts are harder to characterize as either Republican or Democratic, said Dautrich, who heads UConn’s Center for Survey and Research Analysis. Shays knows this and said his “term limit” comes up every two years, when he has to win reelection in a “totally swing district.”
“Our founding fathers devised a system where you had to go out into the marketplace and make sure that people wanted you back in office,” he said.
Asked what it would take to mount a serious challenge to Shays, Sanchez responded, “If I could raise $1 million, I could afford to get my message out and reach the voters. No matter how idealistic or optimistic I’d like to be, realistically, it’s close to impossible.”
Jepsen, a former state Senate majority leader, also spoke uncertainly about being able to find a viable Democratic challenger for Shays’ seat.
“There’s a strong case to be built against Chris Shays, but it would take a well-financed, strong candidate who has spent a lot of time doing it,” Jespen said. “No incumbent is unbeatable, but the system is stacked.”
When asked the same question, Shays said he knew there were people who could present a stiff challenge, “and I hope they don’t run.”
Published in The Hour, in Connecticut.
