Bilbray Heartens the GOP – WSJ’s Political Diary
Republicans can breathe a sigh of relief. With some 40,000 absentee ballots yet to be counted, moderate former GOP Congressman Brian Bilbray won a much-watched special election in San Diego yesterday. Mr. Bilbray won 50% of the vote to Democrat Francine Busby’s 45%. Should those numbers hold through the absentee count, it will mean that Ms. Busby won only the base Democratic vote in the district — John Kerry won 44% there in 2004.
What makes the Bilbray victory noteworthy is that he was a weak candidate, having won a divided GOP primary with only 15% of the vote and losing 5% of yesterday’s vote to right-wing third party candidates. Even the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, which spent an unheard-of $4.5 million on his behalf, noted this morning that Republicans had succeeded despite a weak hand: "Democrats effectively attacked Congressman-elect Brian Bilbray for being a lobbyist as well as for being a former Member of Congress who missed votes to travel on junkets. All this in a district where the former Member [Randy "Duke" Cunningham] went to jail for being bribed by a lobbyist. This was a very effective attack for the Democrats."
But Mr. Bilbray also caught some breaks. Ms. Busby ran as a moderate but made a fatal error last week when she told a Spanish-speaker at a meeting of Hispanics: "You don’t need papers for voting." Captured on tape, the gaffe was replayed endlessly on talk radio and became a powerful get-out-the-vote motivator for the GOP. The final poll last week had Mr. Bilbray ahead by only two points; the Busby booboo probably padded his lead to the eventual five points.
Ms. Busby also slipped when she felt compelled to go on local talk radio to explain her "papers" comment. During the course of the interviews, she made the case for why she was a conventional liberal — despite her soothing moderate rhetoric — when she came out in favor of repealing the Bush tax cuts and also acknowledged she had once supported raising the gas tax.
Still, for Republicans to have been pressed so hard in a traditionally friendly district shouldn’t be of much comfort to them. The political environment remains negative for the GOP with voters saying the country is on the wrong track by at least a two-to-one margin. What the San Diego special election showed is that voters aren’t ready to accept that Democrats have any better answers.
— John Fund