Abortion rights group presses
Republican centrists on Roberts

Chafee's mixed record
Chafee has a mixed record on the most contentious of Bush’s judicial nominees: He voted for California conservative Janice Rogers Brown, but voted “no” on Alabama appeals court judge William Pryor, who’d been sharply critical of Roe v Wade before becoming a judge.

Chafee also voted “no” on appeals court nominee Priscilla Owen, who’d criticized abortion and on district court nominee Leon Holmes, who had written critically of Roe. The Senate voted to confirm the nominations of Brown, Pryor, Owen and Holmes. In May, Senate Democrats dropped their filibusters of Brown, Pryor, and Owen.

West, who directs Brown University’s John Hazen White Sr. Public Opinion Laboratory, did a survey of 470 registered voters in Rhode Island in late June and found that 41 percent would support Chafee, compared to 36 percent for Whitehouse, making the race a dead heat considering the poll’s margin of error.

“Our June survey shows a very close race between Chafee and Whitehouse,” West said. “I expect Rhode Island to be the South Dakota of 2006, in terms of the closeness of the race.”

In a bare-knuckles race in South Dakota last November, Republican John Thune edged Democratic Senate Leader Tom Daschle.

Jennifer Duffy, who tracks Senate races for the nonpartisan newsletter the Cook Political Report, rates a Chafee-Whitehouse contest as a toss-up.

As of June 30, Chafee’s campaign had $1.1 million in cash on hand, just slightly more than the Whitehouse campaign had, compared to $467,000 for Matt Brown, the Rhode Island Secretary of State, who will face Whitehouse in the September 2006 Democratic primary.

Mike Guilfoyle, a spokesman for the Whitehouse campaign, said Whitehouse has “serious questions about John Roberts and his record. Where does he stand on Roe and a woman’s right to choose? Would he alter the balance of a narrowly divided court in a radically conservative direction?”

Guilfoyle added that Whitehouse hadn’t yet decided to oppose Roberts and will wait to hear what Roberts says in his confirmation hearings which begin on Sept. 6.

Democrats open attack on Chafee
The general theme of the Whitehouse campaign is that Chafee has too often supported Bush.

An analysis by the non-partisan Congressional Quarterly found that Chafee supported Bush 76 percent of the time in a sample of votes in 2004 and 77 percent of the time in 2003.

“You can’t side with President Bush and represent the values and interests of Rhode Island,” said Guilfoyle.

Rhode Island is one of the two or three most Democratic states in the union, with Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry winning 59 percent of the vote there last November. Only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia showed stronger support for Kerry.

Chafee may face his own primary challenger, Cranston Mayor Stephen Laffey, who is backed by some fiscal conservatives but who hasn’t yet declared his candidacy.

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