Losing a Fragile Coalition

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

For Republicans, the House is not a home

Superficially, the new House of Representatives elected last Tuesday is primarily the old House. Of the 382 Democrats and Republicans running for reelection, only29--26Republicans and three Democrats--lost. But the results also disclose important shifts, some obvious, some subtle.

The most immediately apparent switch, of course, is the net Democratic gain of 26 seats. Assuming that the Democrats score expected victories in two Georgia seats that, because of late redistricting, will not be filled until special elections on Nov. 30, the House will consist of 269 Democrats and 166 Republicans. The margin is less overpowering than it looks. It includes at least 39 "Boll Weevils"--conservative Democratic supporters of President Ronald Reagan's policies--who were reelected, and four to six more Southern Democrats who might turn Boll Weevil once they get to Washington. No matter: even given their maximum possible strength, the combination of Republicans and Boll Weevils will no longer control the House.

The more subtle shifts involve regionalism, ideology and experience. A continental population shift disclosed by the 1980 census created 17 new seats in the South and West, mostly taken away from the Northeast and Midwest. That was once expected to help Republicans, but Democrats proved more adept at the fine art of gerrymandering, and so they won nine of the new Sunbelt districts. Regardless of party, however, the shift in the regional balance of power will inevitably affect the way the new House squints at the nation.

It was a bad election for ideologues. Far-right Republicans lost some of their most notable House seats; liberal Democrats scored something of a comeback, but mostly by stressing that their liberalism was not the free-spending variety of old. Of the 52 freshman Republicans who were swept into Congress by the Reagan victory in 1980, 14 were swept right back out. Moreover, many had been newcomers not just to Congress but to politics, and they were replaced mostly by Democrats who have acquired solid experience in state or local government.

These general patterns, however, were as always distorted by a thousand issues of personality and local concern. Among the more significant results:

WEST. California picked up two new seats as a result of redistricting, increasing its congressional delegation to 45, the largest in the nation. The Democratic state machine, led by San Francisco Congressman Phillip Burton, shaped the new district lines so deftly and redrew old ones so adroitly that the Republicans conceded the Democrats were likely to add perhaps five seats to the 22 they already held. In 'act, the Democrats gained six, unexpectedly taking the Northern California seat that had been held for ten terms by Don Clausen, 59. Clausen lost to 36-year-old State Assemblyman Douglas Bosco, who was a congressional page when Clausen arrived in Washington in 1963. Bosco hammered away at unemployment in the district's dominant lumber industry, while a group opposed to atomic weapons heavily publicized Clausen's vote against a nuclear-freeze resolution that lost in the House by exactly two ballots.

Other notable G.O.P. losers were Johnnie Crean and John H. Rousselot. Crean, 33, beat 17 party rivals in a primary campaign so unscrupulous that he was censured for it by the ethics panel of his own Orange County Republican Committee. One of his victims, Ron Packard, 51, was so incensed that he ran as a write-in candidate. He drew such a heavy sympathy vote that he beat both Crean and Democrat Pat Archer, thereby becoming only the fourth person ever elected to Congress by write-in votes. Rousselot, a Congressman for 14 years and member of the John Birch Society for 21 years until 1979, was artfully gerrymandered into a heavily chicano district near Los Angeles already represented by Democrat Mathew Martinez. Rousselot ran a vitriolic campaign but was overwhelmed.

Early in the campaign, Golden State Democrats feared that Burton, of all people, was headed for defeat. In the interest of helping fellow Democrats, the boss gerrymandered his own district to include a higher Republican registration. Also, he had become a virtual stranger in San Francisco; he admitted spending only nine nights in the city last year. Republican State Senator Milton Marks effectively attacked Burton's "arrogance of power" and briefly led in the polls. Burton struck back with an old-fashioned campaign, stumping in person at gatherings ranging from ethnic rallies to the Gay Olympics, and in the end swamped Marks by winning 58% of the vote.

MIDWEST. Unemployment in aging "smokestack" industries and drastically reduced farm income have made the nation's heartland something of a depressed area. As expected, Democrats picked up eight additional seats in the 15-state region, but Republicans won some of the most publicized races. House Minority Leader Robert Michel squeaked through to re-election with 52% of the vote in an Illinois district centered on Peoria. Some 13,000 of Caterpillar Tractor's workers in the area have been laid off because of the recession and Reagan's sanctions agains the Soviet-West European gas pipeline for which Caterpillar would have supplied equipment; another 23,000 workers are on strike. Discontent among grain farmer gave a further opportunity to Michel' opponent, G. Douglas Stephens, a labor lawyer. But in the end Michel's statu was too much for Stephens to surmount.

In Iowa, Cooper Evans, a wealthy farmer and Republican incumbent, won 55% of the vote against feisty Democratic Challenger Lynn Cutler in a race that had been rated a tossup. Both drew help from their national parties; Vice President George Bush flew in to campaign for Evans, and former Vice President Walter Mondale stumped for Cutler. But Cutler undermined her campaign by foolishly remarking that anyone who paid as much federal and state income tax as Evans did ($116,000) was too dumb to be in Congress. Evans sounded what became a popular Republican line, supporting "the President's general goals" but emphasizing disagreement on specifics.

Midwestern Democrats nonetheless scored some big victories. Marcy Kaptur astonished her own party by winning almost 59% of the vote in a Toledo district that had voted 56% for Republican Ed Weber only two years ago. One reason: the Toledo AFL-CIO hired some of the district's jobless blue-collar workers to make 30,000 phone calls on her behalf. South Dakota lost one of its two House seats to redistricting, forcing Incumbents Clint Roberts, a Republican who represented the conservative, ranching western part of the state, and Thomas Daschle, a Democrat who represented the more liberal, farming eastern side, to battle each other. Roberts, whose weatherbeaten, mustachioed face has peered out of an ad as the visage of the Marlboro Man, ran a bumbling campaign and lost to Daschle, a hard-driving sophisticate. Said Roberts, resignedly: "There is a lot of unrest out there, a lot of impatience. I can understand that."

In West Virginia, socially conservative Charlestonians and coal miners in 1980 elected to Congress Republican Mick Staton, who had won local fame by leading a fight to remove textbooks that he considered unpatriotic or too sexually explicit from Kanawha County public schools. Campaigning for reelection, Staton told constituents this year that he felt he had been "raised up by God" to lead them. The voters disagreed; heavy unemployment reminded them of their traditional economic liberalism. They elected Democrat Bob Wise, a populist lawyer and state senator.

Perhaps the most surprising Midwestern result was the upset of eleven-term Republican Congressman Paul Findley in Illinois. Findley had advocated U.S. ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization, a stand that brought him campaign contributions from pro-Arab groups--but also provoked Jewish organizations to pour money into the campaign of his Democratic challenger, Springfield Attorney Richard Durbin. The race turned, however, not on Middle East policy but on Reagan's budget cuts.

EAST. One of the most expensive House races in the entire country pitted Incumbents Barney Frank, a liberal Democrat, and Margaret Heckler, a moderate Republican, against each other in a Massachusetts constituency drastically changed by redistricting. Frank once likened running in the district, 70% of whose voters had been represented by Heckler, to "acting out a speaking part in my own mugging." But he put together a highly effective organization that spent around $1.2 million and tirelessly denounced Heck ler's votes for Reagan's economic policies. Heckler wound up spending more than $600,000, but could not overcome the effects of unemployment in places like Fall River.

Elsewhere in the East, Democrats tasted sweet revenge. In New York, freshman Republican John LeBoutillier won fame far outside his affluent Long Island suburban district for his eccentric ideas and acid tongue. He advocated a "polar prison" for hardened convicts to be built on an island off the coast of Alaska and likened House Speaker Tip O'Neill to the Federal Government: "Big, fat and out of control." The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee retaliated by supplying his opponent, Suffolk County Legislator Robert Mrazek, with a campaign manager and a press specialist. Mrazek, insisting that the district needed "responsible representation," persuaded voters to give "the Boot" a boot out of Congress.

In Western Pennsylvania, Eugene Atkinson was elected to Congress as a Democrat in 1978, converted to Republicanism after Reagan's sweeping tax and budget victories, and was welcomed to the party fold by the President at a ceremony in the White House. The Democrats at first had a hard time finding anyone to oppose him but finally came up with Joseph Kolter, an ex-Marine and state representative, who denounced unemployment in the steel mills and won handily.

SOUTH. Democrats arrested the gradual shift toward the G.O.P. that has been going on for decades, winning two additional seats in Florida, two more in North Carolina, and three each in Virginia and Texas. The most heavily spotlighted contest turned out to be no contest. Cissy Baker, the 26-year-old daughter of Senate Republican Leader Howard Baker, campaigned in a newly created Tennessee district with help from such outsiders as Mrs. George Bush and former President Gerald Ford. To many voters, however, she seemed to have nothing to offer except her name. She bragged, "I can get you a tour of the White House"; that was scarcely the most pressing concern of voters in a district suffering 16% unemployment. Said her Democratic opponent, James Cooper, 28: "During this campaign, people walked up to me on the street and asked me for a job because I had a shirt and tie on." Cooper, also the scion of a prominent Tennessee political family, took two-thirds of the vote.

As always, inspection of these varied results leads to one general conclusion: the House reflects all the diversity of America. Speaker O'Neill's favorite maxim, all politics is local, did not hold completely true this year. But while national issues like the economy influenced the outcome of many elections, the House races just as often turned on local political phenomena: the personalities of the candidates, how they campaigned and where they stood on community issues. --By George J. Church. Reported by Lee Griggs/Peoria and Neil MacNeil/Washington

With reporting by Lee Griggs, Neil MacNeil

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