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Analysis: Democrats win in South Dakota
By Peter Roff
June 3, 2004

For the first time since George Herbert Walker Bush was president, the Democrats have managed back-to-back victories in congressional special elections called to fill vacancies in seats held by the other party.

Democrats want to sell the idea that these wins are bellwethers that signal the 10-year Republican hold on the U.S. House of Representatives is in jeopardy. Republicans downplay the losses and say the two successive defeats are of little national significance.

Who's right?

As in the case with any post-election analysis, there are the facts and there is the way in which they are interpreted or, to use the political vernacular, spun. The two things that are absolutely unarguable is that the Democrats have won two seats -- one in Kentucky and one in South Dakota -- that had been held by the GOP. All else is commentary.

One such observation, made frequently one month out from Tuesday's South Dakota special election and with less regularity as the actual voting drew closer, is that the Republicans led off their 1994 national landslide with an impressive array of off-year and special-election victories in 1993, including the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia, the mayoralties in New York and Los Angeles, and the pickup of longtime Democratic congressional seats in Oklahoma and Kentucky.

The inference is that the back-to-back 2004 wins in the Kentucky and South Dakota special elections presage a similar comeback by the Democrats in November. The overlay, however, is not as simple as that.

It is true that, as a matter of presidential behavior, the Kentucky and Oklahoma seats from 1994 and the Kentucky and South Dakota seats in 2004 had a long history of going to the Republicans. But the vacancies that arose in 1994 resulted from the death and retirement of two veteran Democratic legislators, each of whom had a firm hold on the electorate in their districts. By contrast, the incumbents who occupied the seats that came vacant in 2004 were relative short timers. Kentucky's Ernie Fletcher first won election in 1998. South Dakota's Bill Janklow was barely midway through his first term when a conviction for felony manslaughter led him to resign his seat.

In the 1994 races, all four candidates in the general election were relative unknowns. In Oklahoma, the race came down to a contest between Republican state legislator Frank Lucas and Dan Webber, a 27-year-old Democrat whose principal political credential was his work as press secretary to the state's senior U.S. senator, David Boren. In Kentucky, the candidates in the special election were Republican Ron Lewis, the owner of a Christian bookstore and Baptist minister and Joe Prather, the former majority leader of the Kentucky state Senate.

The same was hardly true in the two recent special elections.

In Kentucky, former state Attorney General Ben Chandler won the special election called to fill Fletcher's seat just weeks after he had lost the gubernatorial race to Fletcher, the first Democrat in two generations to fail to win the governor's mansion in a general election. The Republican state legislator who lost the race, in spite of strong backing from Senate Majority Whip Mitch McConnell's political machine, was not nearly as well known throughout the district as Chandler, whose grandfather, A.B. "Happy" Chandler, had been governor, a U.S. senator and Major League Baseball commissioner.

The story was much the same in South Dakota. The victorious Democrat, Stephanie Herseth, lost her 2002 bid for Congress to Janklow, 53 percent to 46 percent, out of more than 330,000 votes cast. She had already announced she would be back for a rematch and never stopped campaigning.

The man she defeated Tuesday, former state legislator Larry Diedrich, was hardly as well known and had been one of close to a dozen Republicans seeking the nomination before the South Dakota Republican Party chose him to be the candidate.

Herseth won on Tuesday, but with less than 51 percent of the vote out of almost 250,000 votes cast, especially in light of the fact that she initially led by 30 points in most of the public media polls.

Nevertheless, the Democrats did emerge from both contests as the winners, something that is sure to give Republicans pause as they consider their strategies for the fall campaign.

It is likely, however, that there are no great political lessons to be learned from either the Kentucky or South Dakota special elections of 2004. They did more to confirm some of the traditional truisms of politics, like the importance of high name identification in irregular elections, than to confirm the idea that the Republicans' hold on the U.S. House of Representatives is imperiled. The Democrats may, as the result of concentrated campaigns in a very few districts, be able to take seats away from the Republicans, but it is generally conceded that it is unlikely they will be able to go all the way to majority. The special elections in South Dakota and Kentucky did nothing to alter that overall perception.

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The Peter Principles regularly explores issues in national and local politics, the American culture and the media. It is written by Peter Roff, UPI political analyst and 20-year veteran of the Washington scene.

Copyright © 2001-2004 United Press International

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Note -- The opinions expressed in this column are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions, views, and/or philosophy of GOPUSA.