Dan Coats Bid Inches Ahead
Former Indiana GOP Sen. Dan Coats is launching a political comeback, announcing Wednesday that he’s preparing to challenge Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh in a race that’s poised to be one of the marquee Senate contests of 2010.
“After coming back from Germany I was content to return to the private sector. But like many Hoosiers, I have become increasingly alarmed and frustrated about the direction of our country and the failure by leaders in Washington to listen to those they were elected to represent,” he said in a statement Wednesday. “After much thoughtful consideration, I have authorized my supporters to begin gathering signatures as I test the waters for a potential challenge to Evan Bayh in 2010.”
Coats, who represented Indiana in the Senate from 1989 to 1999, retired instead of facing Bayh, then the state’s popular young governor, in the 1998 election.
He later served as former President George W. Bush’s ambassador to Germany and worked on shepherding the Supreme Court nominations of Harriet Miers and Samuel Alito through the Senate confirmation process. Since then, he’s worked as a lobbyist for the Washington law firm King & Spalding.
Coats’s decision to challenge Bayh is a major recruiting coup for Senate Republicans, who kept their recruitment of Coats quiet even as several other high-profile Republicans — notably Rep. Mike Pence and Secretary of State Todd Rokita — passed on the race.
“It’s very exciting. It’s a game changer. Evan Bayh is very vulnerable, and certainly Dan Coats is one of the two or three people who can win the seat,” said James Bopp Jr., a Republican National Committee member from Indiana who said he will be playing an advisory role in Coats’s campaign.
Pence offered his own endorsement of Coats’s candidacy, calling the former senator “the ideal candidate for Hoosiers” in a statement.
Bopp said that Coats decided to officially enter the race after Pence and Rokita opted not to run.
Coats’s decision comes just over two weeks before the Feb. 19 deadline for candidates to file in Indiana to qualify for the ballot. He began enlisting political allies Wednesday to gather the 4,500 signatures — 500 per district — to become a candidate in the GOP primary. That’s not a foregone conclusion given the compressed time frame, but Indiana Republican operatives expect him to receive the assistance of the state party apparatus in the petitioning effort.
Assuming he qualifies for the ballot, Coats starts out as a heavy front-runner for the nomination against former Rep. John Hostettler and state Sen. Marlin Stutzman.
Against the backdrop of a difficult political environment for Democrats across the country, Republicans view Bayh as vulnerable to a serious challenger — and quickly ramped up their recruitment efforts in the wake of Republican Scott Brown’s upset Senate victory in Massachusetts.
Coats’s entrance into the race means Republicans now have a conceivable — though still highly unlikely — path to winning back control of the Senate, if everything falls their way in the November midterms. The Cook Political Report moved Indiana to its list of nine potentially competitive Democratic-held Senate seats on Wednesday, and the party needs to capture 10 seats to win back control.
Last month, Bayh polled under the 50 percent threshold considered safe territory for an incumbent in a Rasmussen Reports poll and even trailed Pence in a head-to-head matchup.
The two-term incumbent’s support for the Democratic health care bill was also viewed unfavorably — just 37 percent of voters said they supported the legislation, while 60 percent opposed it.
But recognizing the climate in a historically Republican state, Bayh has been distancing himself from much of the president’s agenda. At a Senate Democratic conference with President Obama Tuesday, Bayh confronted the president over the administration’s spending and handling of a ballooning deficit.
“The voters are way ahead of the political class on this. They understand in the long run, this is unsustainable, it’s bad economics,” Bayh told Obama. “There’s a sense of unfairness. ... Ordinary citizens are making sacrifices, and yet we want our earmarks for pet projects, and they tell us, 'Why can’t Washington make the same sacrifices we’re willing to make?'”
Bayh, however, is sitting on the most campaign cash of any Democratic senator, ending last year with nearly $13 million in the bank, while Coats is starting from scratch. Coats opted not to run for reelection in 1998 because of, among other reasons, his disinterest in raising the millions of dollars necessary for a highly competitive campaign.
“This race was 12 years delayed. This race was supposed to be in 1998. I think there is some personal and professional unfinished business,” said Indiana political analyst Brian Howey, who first broke news of Coats’s Senate aspirations. “I think there is a potential upset here.”
Democrats quickly moved to portray Coats as the ultimate Washington insider, citing his work representing clients including Bank of America, Lockheed Martin and various pharmaceutical interests, and noted that he doesn’t even live in the state anymore.
“Indianans won't ignore Dan Coats’s decade as a lobbyist working the system to gain special favors for the banking industry at the time of financial collapse and at the expense of working Americans,” said Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee spokesman Eric Schultz.
Another complication is that Coats has voted in Virginia elections for the past decade and needs to re-establish residency in Indiana to qualify as a candidate, adding fuel to the Democrats’ narrative against him.
One Republican Senate strategist, however, argued that Bayh has his own connections to moneyed interests, given that his wife, Susan, serves on corporate boards of businesses with issues before Congress.
“Do they really want additional light shined on the Bayh family partnership which has earned them millions of dollars over the years from companies who have key issues before the Senate?” said National Republican Senatorial Committee spokesman Brian Walsh. “Hopefully we can focus instead on the bread-and-butter issues that truly matter to working families in Indiana.”
Howey said that Bayh is personally well-liked back home and has never faced a serious challenge, but the state’s anti-Washington sentiment could seriously jeopardize his prospects.
“The voters in Indiana have not hesitated to throw the bums out. The question is whether that can be extended to a [Dick] Lugar or a Bayh,” said Howey.
Could Republicans Win Back The Senate?
Republicans suddenly have a conceivable path to winning back the Senate in November, after locking in top-flight candidates overnight in Illinois and Indiana.
A 10-seat pickup for the GOP — once regarded as an impossibility even by the party’s own strategists — remains very much a long shot. It would still require a win in every competitive race, something that happens only in wave elections like 1994 and 2008.
But only 14 months after the GOP was routed up and down the ballot on the night of Barack Obama’s election, the new political environment makes significant Senate gains likely. And within the past 24 hours, a Republican recapture of the Senate is at least within the realm of speculation.
With all the usual disclaimers attached — do not engage in political odds-making while taking medication or operating heavy machinery — here's why a Republican takeover is at least possible:
GOP officials tell POLITICO former Sen. Dan Coats will run against incumbent Democratic Sen. Evan Bayh, instantly transforming Indiana into a competitive race.
Rep. Mark Kirk won the Republican Senate primary in Illinois, beating back a tea party challenge and giving the GOP the best chance of winning President Obama's former seat.
This comes one week after Beau Biden, the son of Vice President Joe Biden, decided not to run for his father’s former seat in Delaware. Democrats have a credible backup candidate in New Castle County Executive Chris Coons, but GOP Rep. Mike Castle, who has run and won 11 times statewide, is the strong favorite.
To pick up 10 seats, Republicans would have to run the table in competitive races — and get a miracle (or a big favor from an old friend), too. More on that in a moment.
Republicans look very strong in many of those races. They are clobbering Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln in Arkansas by 20 points in recent polls. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid isn't faring much better. He's down by double digits to relatively unknown GOP opponents. Sen. Byron Dorgan's decision to retire made North Dakota an almost hopeless case for Democrats.
The GOP has pickup opportunities in three other states: Colorado, where appointed Sen. Michael Bennet's reelection numbers remain low; Pennsylvania, where Sen. Arlen Specter trailed former GOP Rep. Pat Toomey by 14 points in one recent poll; and California, where either former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina or former Rep. Tom Campbell could make 2010 Sen. Barbara Boxer's toughest campaign in years.
It would be a tall order for Republicans to take nine of those races on Election Day — and even if they did, they'd still be one victory short of the 51 seats they need.
But in both 2006 and 2008, almost all the competitive Senate races broke in the same direction. Democrats won control in 2006 by seizing six out of seven targeted seats, and by putting one more race in play Republicans would have a similar path to taking a majority.
They would also need to recruit a living, breathing, competitive candidate to run against appointed New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand. Former Republican Gov. George Pataki consistently leads Gillibrand in public polling. Even if he stays out, Gillibrand could be vulnerable to a second-tier challenger, as almost-candidate Harold Ford Jr. is proving to be in the Democratic primary.
If they can battle Democrats to a 50-50 split in the Senate, Republicans could also try to bring Democrat-turned-independent Sen. Joe Lieberman all the way across the aisle. Lieberman recently said "it's possible" that he could run as a Republican in 2012 — "a good, old-fashioned, New England moderate Republican" — which should have been an alarm bell for Democrats concerned about keeping his vote.
Democrats think it's absurd to speculate about the possibility of a GOP takeover. In the ultimate wave year of 1994, Republicans picked up eight seats, prompting Sens. Richard Shelby and Ben Nighthorse Campbell to switch parties only after the GOP already had control. Until Republicans have a concrete, nonspeculative path to 51, Democrats say, it's all a parlor game.
Make no mistake: It's much more likely Republicans will end up gaining a handful of seats but fall several short of a majority.
The GOP has a number of seats to defend, too — in Florida, New Hampshire, Kentucky, Ohio, Louisiana, Missouri and North Carolina — and Democrats hold a significant cash advantage. The DSCC had $12.5 million in the bank at the end of December, with $1.2 million in debt, compared with $8.3 million on hand for the NRSC. The DNC has an even wider cash advantage over its Republican counterpart.
But the remote possibility of a power shift gives the 2010 campaigns even more drama — and national significance.
Richard Burr Has $4.3 million For campaign
Republican Sen. Richard Burr began the year with a $4.3 million campaign war chest, almost certainly giving him a financial advantage over his potential Democratic challengers.
Burr raised $1.2 million in the final three months during the past quarter, according a report filed with the Federal Election Commission.
The Winston-Salem freshman reported raising $6.4 million during the election cycle and spending $2.5 million, Rob Christensen reports.
He reported raising $3.4 million from individuals and $2.4 million from political action committees.
He will likely face one of three Democrats seeking their party's nomination: former state Sen. Cal Cunningham, Chapel Hill attorney Ken Lewis, and Secretary of State Elaine Marshall.
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Sources: Politico, McClatchy Newspapers, Newsobserver, Boston Globe, AP, Google Maps
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