Congressional Quarterly
Washington, DC
Monday, August 13, 2007
www.cq.com

An Upset Bid Democrats Won't Ignore This Time

By Marie Horrigan, CQ Staff

CQ WEEKLY – COVER STORY
Aug. 13, 2007

National Democratic strategists earned plaudits for their 2006 gains, but there were flubs. Will earlier party support put their defeated challenger to GOP Rep. Robin Hayes over the top — or is the incumbent better prepared, too?

Voters in the mostly working-class precincts of south-central North Carolina that connect Charlotte and Fayetteville were faced with a study in opposites in their candidates for Congress last year. The Democratic challenger was Larry Kissell, a social-studies teacher who also spent 27 years in midlevel jobs in a hosiery mill. The Republican incumbent was Robin Hayes, a millionaire hosiery mill owner and descendent of one of the region's founding families. Despite being outspent 3-to-1 and being cut off from support from party headquarters in Washington, Kissell managed to come within 329 votes of one of the year's biggest upsets — and created the second-closest House race in the country.

This time around, Democrats are betting heavy — and betting early — on Kissell. In 2006, they didn't recover after their favored candidate, Fayetteville trial lawyer Tim Dunn, dropped from the race. Dunn, a 20-year Marine veteran, threw his support behind Kissell, but national Democratic offices didn't follow through with significant organizational or financial resources, even after Kissell won the May primary and the right to face a notoriously politically weak incumbent. Hayes never won more than 56 percent of the vote in his first four elections.

The other candidates "just didn't impress the folks in Washington," said Ferrel Guillory, director of the Program on Public Life at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Over the course of the campaign, however, "Kissell surprised them with his energy and his tenacity and his creativity."

A shrewd campaigner, Kissell leveraged a significant amount of free publicity through events such as his summertime gasoline sale, in which he offered to make up the difference between the pump price in North Carolina in August 2006 ($2.89 a gallon) and the price when Hayes took office in 1999 ($1.22). The event drew some 500 motorists to Benjy Dunn's Filling Station in Biscoe and won Kissell media coverage that his underfunded campaign could not yet purchase.

Hayes, meanwhile, was weakened by the overall anti-war and anti-Republican sentiments that pervaded the electorate — and by some politically risky votes he took out of loyalty to the Republican Party. Hayes was a deciding vote for the Central American Free Trade Agreement in 2005 despite having earlier declared himself "flat-out, completely, horizontally opposed" to it, a difficult vote given the major textile interests in the district.

Although factors were adding up to make the seat a possible takeover target, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent a paltry $31 — out of a $64 million independent expenditure budget — on the race.

Already this year, Kissell has seen more support from Washington than he did throughout his last campaign. The DCCC's new chairman, Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, says his organization is "working from day one with Larry Kissell." In April, the former DCCC chairman, Rahm Emanuel of Illinois, hosted a fundraiser for Kissell in Raleigh; Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California held a fundraiser this month to help Kissell retire his 2006 campaign debt. And already the DCCC has made and bought time for television ads critical of the incumbent.

Kissell remains outgunned in head-to-head fundraising, however. In the first six months of the year, he raised $160,000, compared with $496,000 by the incumbent.

Kissell also could face a challenge from up-and-coming state Rep. Rick Glazier, although the DCCC has said it will support Kissell against intraparty contenders. And top-ballot races — for president, governor and the Senate — could overshadow the congressional race. "Kissell vs. Hayes will involve several thousand voters — maybe tens of thousands of voters — who did not participate in 2006, and Republicans in this state and in the South tend to do better in presidential election years," Guillory said.

Kissell said that although the new attention from Washington is nice, he's focused on his own efforts to win. "It's just not a job that's done," he said. "We didn't win, so we're not affecting policy. . . . It's just the halfway point, it continues on."