The Last Hurrah?: Soft Money and Issue Advocacy in the 2002 Congressional Elections

Chapter Eight. Strings Attached: Outside Money in Colorado's Seventh District

In every general election political pundits select a handful of “toss-up” congressional races they deem too close to call.1 In 2002 Colorado’s newly carved Seventh Congressional District lived up to its competitive billing.2 Despite being outpolled on Election Day by 2,502 votes, Republican Bob Beauprez ultimately won the district by 121 votes over Democrat Mike Feeley.3 Unlike other closely fought congressional races, interest groups stayed above the fray, focusing their collective energy on Colorado’s U.S. Senate race. Instead, most of the heavy hitting in Colorado’s Seventh was carried out by Republican and Democratic national congressional campaign committees. The expenditures made by the two national parties—which dwarfed the spending by the candidates—had a nationalizing effect, as the outside money restricted the ability of the candidates to control the substantive issues debated during the campaign. While alarmed by the vitriol of the negative television ads and direct mail produced on their behalf, both Beauprez and Feeley became increasingly beholden to the directives of their respective congressional parties as the election neared. 180 EIGHT Strings Attached: Outside Money in Colorado’s Seventh District daniel a. smith Research for this chapter was conducted while I was on the faculty of the University of Denver. Joseph Lubinski provided excellent research assistance, and Andy Busch was an invaluable colleague. Josh Brodbeck and Kevin Opp kept me abreast of the latest campaign developments. Helene Orr and my department’s work-study students helped with administrative tasks, and the candidates , their staff, and the consultants were generous with their time. Although the use of outside money in federal campaigns is well documented , what is less known is the daily coordination that occurs between the candidates and the national parties. As stakeholders in the contest, the national congressional committees had a powerful incentive to ensure a yield on their investments—namely, that their candidate emerge victorious. In addition to making coordinated hard- and softmoney expenditures on behalf of the two candidates, both congressional campaign committees plied the candidates’ staffs with pointed directives from their Washington perches. Reflecting on the campaign a month after the election, Congressman-elect Beauprez deadpanned, “The national party swung pretty hard.”4 Inside the Seventh District Shaped like an unlucky horseshoe encompassing Denver’s older suburbs, the boundaries of the new district were established in January 2002 by a court ruling that approved a Democrat-sponsored redistricting plan. Although the district comprised roughly equal numbers of registered Republicans (120,009), Democrats (120,119), and “unaffiliated” voters (122,888), state Democratic Party leaders thought the district leaned their way. Of the precincts that would eventually compose the Seventh, Al Gore defeated George Bush by slightly less than 8 percent (about 2,000 votes) in 2000.5 The district resulted from a decade of explosive growth in Colorado, during which the state’s population ballooned to 4.3 million.6 The Seventh was the state’s second most racially and ethnically diverse congressional district. In 2002 minorities accounted for more than 31 percent of the population, including 19.6 percent Hispanics and 5.8 percent African Americans. Nearly 40 percent of the residents were renters, and one in ten constituents was sixty-five years of age or older.7 The Candidates and Their Campaigns As anticipated, the new district attracted several talented candidates in the primaries. On the Republican side, Beauprez, the sitting state party chairman, entered the race after receiving phone calls from White House political counselors Karl Rove and Ken Mehlman, as well as a visit by the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) chair, Representative Tom Davis (R-Va.).8 Although the front-runner, the fiftyoutside money in colorado’s seventh district 181 four-year-old banker was not a shoo-in as the party’s nominee. Indeed Beauprez failed to win the top line at the GOP’s district assembly caucus in May. In the primary, his three opponents labeled him a carpetbagger (Beauprez and his wife resided north of the district) and accused him of conducting push polls and authorizing his bank to run favorable radio ads. Beauprez outspent his opponents, airing close to $150,000 worth of television and $40,000 of radio ads. The straight-laced Republican withstood the intraparty wrangling and held on to win the primary with 38 percent of the vote.9 State and national Democratic Party leaders, including the House minority leader, Representative Dick...