Ten very tight House and Senate contests could determine which party controls Congress next year.
Missouri: Jim Talent (R) v. Claire McCaskill (D)
After a bruising final spate of campaigning that included half a dozen debates, a major push by both parties to court women and rural voters, and ads by Michael J. Fox for McCaskill and a host of celebrities for Talent, the Missouri Senate race remains deadlocked. It has now become a test of the two parties Get Out The Vote operations, with the GOP pouring volunteers into neighborhoods and drawing on the party's vaunted voter list, while the Dems scramble to mobilize urban voters in St. Louis and Kansas City. Democrats have to hope that two ballot initiatives — one for increasing the minimum wage, and another supporting stem cell research — will make up for the admitted advantage Republicans hold in targeting likely voters. Virtually every poll for the last six months has put the race in a dead heat, and in 2002, Talent won by all of 21,000 votes, so the final push will likely be the determining factor.
Dogged by connections to disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff and a series of campaign gaffes that included attacking some firefighters for doing "a poor job" containing a blaze in the state, Republican Conrad Burns is in danger of losing in Montana, where President Bush won by 20 points two years ago. Polls are virtually even in his race against Jon Tester, the Democrat who is president of the state Senate there.
To inoculate himself against attacks from Burns and national Republicans about the national Democratic Party's liberalism, Tester highlights his biography as a third-generation Montana family farmer with a flat-top haircut who lost three of his fingers in a meat grinder accident. He's also closely linking himself with Brian Schweitzer, the state's popular Democratic governor. Burns, meanwhile, is emphasizing his longtime efforts to bring back federal money to the state.
New Jersey: Robert Menendez (D) v. Thomas Kean, Jr. (R)
The Senate race here has been close, even though the state's voters lean Democratic, strongly oppose President Bush and the war in Iraq and the incumbent is a Democrat himself. The Republican challenger has moved to the left on some key issues, even calling for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to resign, but his success has mostly stemmed from having the right last name. Thomas Kean, Jr., is the son of Thomas Kean, who was governor of New Jersey for much of the 1980s, more recently the co-chairman of the 9/11 Commission and remains a revered figure by voters in both parties.
The race has become a bit of a proxy war, as Democratic incumbent Bob Menendez seeks to link Kean to President Bush and the Republican Congress, while Kean has relentlessly portrayed Menendez as part of a Democratic Party in the state that has been involved in numerous corruption scandals. Menendez, a longtime member of the House who was appointed to this Senate seat earlier this year after his predecessor Jon Corzine became New Jersey Governor, has also tried to cast the boyish-looking Kean, who has been in New Jersey state legislature since 2001, as too inexperienced for the job. If Kean wins, it will be very difficult for the Democrats to win control of the Senate.
Tennessee: Harold Ford (D) v. Bob Corker (R)
In the contest to replace retiring Senate Republican Leader Bill Frist, House Democrat Harold Ford has waged a surprisingly strong campaign against Bob Corker, the Republican candidate who used to be the mayor of Chattanooga. Ford was considered an underdog, both because a Democrat hasn't won a Senate race in the state since Al Gore in 1990 and because of the political baggage from his family, which is active in state politics but known for a spate of corruption scandals. His father, former Congressman Harold Ford, Sr., was charged with federal bank fraud and acquitted in 1993 and his uncle, a former state Senator, was indicted for bribery earlier this year.
Ford has emphasized his credentials as pro-gun, anti-tax, church-going politician to win in this conservative state, while Corker and the Republicans have sought to portray him as a rich, urbane liberal who wears fancy suits, stays in lavish hotels and has never held a real job other than being in Congress. Corker, who won an intensely fought primary over two more conservative G.O.P. rivals, has highlighted his success as a businessman in starting and developing a construction company that has earned him millions, much of which he pumped into his campaign.
A win by Ford would be historic, as he would be the first black Senator elected in the South in more than a century. Racial politics became a subject in the race last month when Republicans ran an ad attacking Ford for his attendance at a Playboy Superbowl party that included a blond white woman saying "Harold, call me' — which some Democrats said was an attempt to play on concerns about interracial dating. Corker himself denounced the ad, but the campaign has only gotten nastier and more heated as Election Day has approached.
Virginia: George Allen (R) v. Jim Webb (D)
Back in June, when former Secretary of the Navy and Republican-turned-Democrat Jim Webb won his party's nomination to take on Virginia Senator George Allen, it seemed he had no chance to win. Webb, who had never run for office before and had almost no money, was taking on a popular, well-funded incumbent in Allen, who had already been elected as both governor and senator in the state. Allen was in fact starting to prepare for a run for the G.O.P. presidential nomination in 2008.
But then Allen, at a campaign rally in August, referred to a South Asian supporter of Webb's as "macaca," a term considered by many to be a racial slur. That helped lead to accusations that Allen had used racial slurs to describe blacks in the 1970's and put his campaign in a downward spiral that eventually put the race into a dead heat. It's been a bizarre campaign: Allen learned in the midst of it that his mother was Jewish, while Webb has become dogged by accusations that's he's a sexist, brought on by a 1979 article in which he called the Naval Academy's co-ed dorms a "horny woman's dream." Democrats have suggested, without any evidence, that Allen may have been arrested for domestic violence in the 1970's, while Republicans have attacked Webb for sexual scenes in his novels. These character attacks and odd controversies have detracted from the biggest difference between the two candidates on the issues, namely that Webb has long opposed the Iraq War, which Allen voted for in the Senate.
Connecticut: Chris Shays (R) v. Dianne Farrell (D)
This is the second time these two have faced each other; G.O.P. incumbent Chris Shays defeated former Westport First Selectwoman Dianne Farrell 52% to 48% in 2004. This time Shays, who has held this seat since 1987, has a major problem: Iraq. The moderate Congressman has become closely associated with his support for the war, as he has visited Iraq more than a dozen times since the invasion.
Farrell opposed the war from the beginning, and Shays' position has become increasingly unpopular in this blue state. In August, Shays became one of the few Republicans to call for a timetable for withdrawing from Iraq, while Farrell has called for creating benchmarks that determine when troops return home. Farrell's challenge is to convince voters to dump a well-liked congressman because they disagree with him on Iraq and want Democrats to control Congress as a check on President Bush.
North Carolina: Charles Taylor (R) v. Heath Shuler (D)
Democrats have for the last decade struggled to win in the South, but they think Heath Shuler may be the candidate to start a new tradition in this western North Carolina district. Shuler not only was a football star, both in North Carolina in high school and then at the University of Tennessee, but he's also anti-abortion and frequently talks about his hunting, which has helped him appeal to conservative and rural voters in this area. Taylor, an eight-term incumbent, says he would be much more influential for the district than Shuler, because he sits on the powerful House Appropriations Committee, which determines where much of the federal budget is spent. And he never fails to argue that Shuler doesn't have enough experience for the job
New Mexico: Heather Wilson (R) v. Patricia Madrid (D)
A battle between two tough public servants, this race has followed the party playbooks to the letter. Wilson, a centrist Rhodes scholar and former National Security Council member, has run a non-stop stream of ads calling her opponent weak on law enforcement and national security and a liberal who will raise taxes. Madrid, New Mexico's attorney general and a former district judge, has relentlessly tied Wilson to President George W. Bush in ads and campaign events, finishing off the season with a TV spot with the tagline, "Heather Wilson and George Bush: Desperate to Hide the Truth." The district, which includes Albuquerque, has always been closely divided. An election-eve poll found Madrid surging to a four-point lead, though still within the margin of error. Wilson released her own poll showing herself up by two points. Both showed 6% of voters still making up their minds just a week before the election.
Ohio: Deborah Pryce (R) v. Mary Jo Kilroy (D)
No race better demonstrates the difficulties that Republicans are up against this year than the re-election battle of Congresswoman Deborah Pryce, the fourth-ranking Republican in the House leadership. Pryce has not faced a serious challenge since her first election in 1992, despite the fact that her Columbus, Ohio, district has otherwise trended more Democrat. But as election day has approached this year, the moderate Republican has been considered the underdog against liberal Franklin County Commissioner Mary Jo Kilroy.
Though Kilroy is a stronger opponent than Pryce has faced in the past, the incumbent's difficulties come largely as the result of a lagging state economy, a G.O.P. scandal in the statehouse and opposition to the Iraq war. As if all that weren't enough, in a local magazine interview published just a month before the Mark Foley scandal broke in Washington, Pryce named the Florida Congressman as one of her closest friends in the House. Kilroy seized upon that connection in an ad she placed on Christian radio stations, in which the announcer intoned: "Deborah Pryce's friend Mark Foley is caught using his position to take advantage of 16-year-old pages."
Kilroy has largely hammered on national Democratic themes. Her mantra: "We need a change in Washington. We need a new direction." Pryce has portrayed herself as a moderate counterweight to the rest of the GOP House leadership, and to the Republican Party nationally. She also has stressed the amount of federal money that she has been able to bring back to her district by virtue of her seniority and her leadership position. Both sides agree that this race will ultimately be a test of which candidate has the better turnout operation.
Pennsylvania: Jim Gerlach (R) v. Lois Murphy (D)
The suburbs outside of Philadelphia have become one of the key battlegrounds of 2006, with three close House races, and the contest between Democrat Lois Murphy and incumbent Republican Jim Gerlach is perhaps the tightest of them all. Gerlach eked out a victory in 2004 against Murphy, collecting 51% of the vote. To hold his seat, he is trying to focus the race on local issues like the federal money for local roads he's brought home, and at the same time trying to link Murphy with Nancy Pelosi, the San Francisco lawmaker likely to become Speaker of the House if Democrats win control. Gerlach says Pelosi and the Democrats would raise taxes and oppose measures like the Patriot Act that he says keep the country safe. Murphy, like Democrats across the country, is trying to unseat the incumbent by highlighting his support of President Bush, particularly on the Iraq War. Gerlach has tried hard to show how often he disagrees with Bush, such as his support for expanding embryonic stem cell research.
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