Why it's an uphill climb for House GOP

Tom Curry National affairs writer • Profile • E-mail

WASHINGTON - Snapshots from four races across the nation reveal how things look for House Republicans with Election Day six months away.

House Republicans are already facing 29 retirements among their 198 incumbents.

In a body with 435 members, random, regrettable events always manage to strike sooner or later — but for Republicans, it just happened in a competitive congressional district.

On Thursday, the Washington Post reported that Rep. Vito Fossella, who has represented New York’s 13^th district since 1997, had been arrested for drunk driving in Alexandria, Va.

“Last night I made an error in judgment,” Fossella said in a statement.

“As a parent, I know that taking even one drink of alcohol before getting behind the wheel of a car is wrong. I apologize to my family and the constituents of the 13th Congressional District for embarrassing them, as well as myself.”

Who has more money?
In addition to this mishap, there’s also a money disparity that reveals all isn’t as it should be for the long-entrenched GOP incumbent.

Incumbents normally have more than a two-to-one cash advantage over challengers in House races.

Yet Domenic Recchia, a Democrat running against Fossella, had nearly $100,000 more cash in his campaign war chest than his competitor did at the end of March.

But maybe the prognosis isn't as bad for Fossella as it might seem: there are in fact two Democratic candidates running for Fossella’s seat and they'll have to duke it out with each other in a very late (Sept. 9) primary — unless party leaders persuade one of them to step aside.

Recchia will square off against Steve Harrison, who lost to Fossella in 2006. As of March 31, Harrison reported having about $91,000 in campaign cash.

Fossella has already spent more than $600,000 on direct mail, strategic consultants, polling and other expenses.

He is one of the few northeastern House Republicans to have survived the decimation of 2006, when voters ousted 11 GOP incumbents in New England, New York, and Pennsylvania.

Fossella’s district, which encompasses the borough of Staten Island and part of Brooklyn, has been an enclave of Republican loyalty in heavily Democratic New York City.

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President Bush carried the district by ten percentage points in 2004, and Fossella hasn't had a tight re-election race since he won his seat in 1997.

Meanwhile a couple of hundred miles north of Fossella’s turf, in an upstate New York district which Bush won with 53 percent of the vote in 2004, Democratic freshman Rep. Michael Arcuri has no Republican opponent as of now.

There is talk that a local Republican businessman, Richard Hannah, is about to enter the race. But if Republicans can’t field a well-funded opponent in what was, only two years ago, a Republican district, it will free the Democrats to spend money elsewhere.

Just an hour's drive west on the New York Thruway is the congressional district that has long been represented by Republican Jim Walsh who decided to retire after surviving a nail-biter in 2006.

His Democratic foe Dan Maffei is running again. Only this week did the Republicans find a candidate, Dale Sweetland, to oppose Maffei. To start fundraising on May 2 is daunting. Maffei already had more than $675,000 in the bank at the end of March.

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