Wyoming’s Trauner Has a Chance

By Matthew Frank, 10-16-08

	Caption: Cynthia Lummis and Gary Trauner

Laramie—Barbara Cubin is winding down a seven-term run in Congress and retiring in January, after surviving a squeaker of an election in 2006 against Teton County Democrat Gary Trauner.

With the unpopular Cubin’s departure, many expected Wyoming’s at-large House seat to revert seamlessly to Republican hands. Ordinarily, the race is pretty much decided in the August Republican primary, an election to pick a GOP successor for a spot that hasn’t been in Democratic hands for 30 years. Given the GOP’s hold on the state, Wyoming’s general election has been more coronation than an actual battle.

So why does it look like we have another close one on our hands?

A Surprising New Poll

Given the size and political history of the state, polling data in Wyoming is about as rare as the Jackalope. Still, numbers are out there and the most recent survey of Wyoming voters, conducted by the national political polling firm Research 2000 shows a dead heat in the Congressional race between Trauner and former two-term Republican state treasurer Cynthia Lummis.

A study of 500 likely voters with a record of regular participation in past elections, commissioned by the political website DailyKos.com, produced predictable GOP-dominated results in most of the big races in the state. John McCain leads Barack Obama 57 to 36 percent; Mike Enzi leads Democrat Chris Rothfuss 59 percent to 35 in the race for his U.S. Senate seat; Interim Republican Senator John Barrasso leads Democrat Nick Carter 59 percent to 34 in the race to fill the remaining four years of the late Craig Thomas’ Senate seat. Results not unusual in a state in which Republicans enjoy a two-to-one advantage in registration and where the presidential race hasn’t gone to the Democrats since 1964.

But wait. Right in the middle of that long list of predicted GOP landslides is polling data that suggests the race for the House race could go down to the wire. Trauner and Lummis each have the support of 42 percent of the electorate, with 16 percent undecided.

The even split appears to carry through most age groups across the state, with Trauner enjoying his biggest margin (45 to 40 percent) among younger voters and Lummis finding her niche among voters in the 45-59 age group (44 to 41 percent). (The “youth” category – voters aged 18-29 – may actually be an even bigger strength for Trauner, since the Research 2000 poll was based on land-line telephone interviews, which miss a large number of young voters who rely exclusively on cell phones.)

Why is this House race different? For one thing, Trauner’s back and cashing in on the considerable goodwill and excitement he created in 2006. He’s facing an opponent bruised and battered by a tough primary campaign and, unlike his fellow Wyoming Democrats running for national office, he’s sitting on a healthy campaign war chest of his own, with more campaign funds than his opponent. While Wyoming remains a dependable GOP stronghold, social issues like abortion and gay marriage have taken a backseat to the economy, particularly in light of this week’s stock market crash, a decline that now exceeds the percentage of value lost in 1929 on the eve of the Great Depression.

“This coming campaign is not going to be about Rs or Ds behind names, it is going to be about who is the best candidate,” noted Bill Novotny, the campaign manager for Lummis’ primary opponent Mark Gordon.

Novotny said that the primary race was divisive adding that “there are about thirty-plus thousand voters who were not impressed by Cynthia Lummis.”

The Research 2000 poll data appears to bear out that assessment. Remarkably, while more than 92 percent of GOP voters seem to have made up their minds in the other races, a significant 25 percent of Republicans say they’re still undecided when it comes to this year’s House election.

Trauner may also get something of a boost from the presidential campaign of Barack Obama. While Obama trails Republican John McCain by 21 points – he’s polling better than did John Kerry in 2004, when the top of the Democratic ticket drew only 29 percent in Wyoming. The Obama campaign may have written off Wyoming, but the race continues to draw interest and energy and may boost Democratic turnout on November 4. That can only help Trauner.

And then there’s Libertarian David Herbert. Research 2000 did not include the candidate in its poll, but with margins this tight, it should have. Since 2000, third-party candidates have accounted for nearly 7500 votes in each election cycle in Wyoming. With the 2008 campaign in a virtual tie and the 2006 election decided by 1000 votes, the self-declared “clone of Ron Paul” could end up deciding the election. Do recall that Libertarian Thomas Rankin earned 7481 votes in 2006, well beyond Cubin’s margin of victory. Would those have gone to Cubin or Trauner? Tough call.

Cubin Libre

While many currently undecided voters may ultimately swing Lummis’ way, Novotny says that her biggest challenge will be “for her to differentiate herself from Cubin in the coming month.”

State GOP chairwoman Diana Vaughn is confident that by November 4 Lummis will convince undecided voters – especially that big block of them in her own party – to opt for the Republican.

“Due to Republican principles and the fact that it is a Republican state, people will vote with their principles and with the winning ticket we have produced.” Vaughn said, adding that Trauner’s largest obstacle is overcoming that ‘R” that comes after Lummis name.

After the dust settled in the 2006 election, Gary Trauner lost his election bid by slightly more than one thousand votes. Indeed, many observers said that if Cubin had sought re-election, Trauner could win by concentrating his efforts in key Wyoming communities. Thus, Lummis must clearly differentiate herself from Barbara Cubin.

Her attendance at a candidate forum in Casper earlier this week was, in part, an attempt to make her distinct from Cubin. She highlighted her views on small government, low taxes and balanced spending. Lummis noted her experience as a member of the Wyoming Legislature for 14 years, and highlighted her attendance record, which was markedly better than Cubin’s in Congress.

However, the simple act of appearing in public talking to people sets her apart from Cubin’s 2006 campaign, during which Cubin limited appearances to debates and then joined Dick Cheney’s victory rally in Laramie on the last weekend of the campaign.

Lummis’ campaign also stumbles when her press secretary Rachael Seidenschnur called into a telephone press conference organized by the Trauner campaign posing as a Trauner supporter named “Sierra.” Seidenschnur resigned the next day after press reports described the incident.

Lummis said she didn’t fire Seidenschnur, that the former Cubin staffer left on her own accord.

“She is concerned that she doesn’t want anything to reflect poorly on the campaign, and she has made the decision on her own volition to leave the campaign,” Lummis said in a telephone interview with the Associated Press.

Lummis, however, declined to directly criticize her former press secretary.

“Well, I support transparency, that’s the best policy,” she said, “but as I said she chose to leave of her own volition.”

Some may have thought Lummis should have taken stronger steps to distance herself from the type of stunt that prompted Virginia Republican Senate candidate Jim Gilmore to immediately fire his communications director last month when she tried to use a fake name to join his opponent’s press list.

One Lummis staffer, who asked not to be identified, told WyoFile Seidenschnur simply got caught up in the heat of the election.

“My inclination is that the campaign did not endorse this measure and that she acted under her own authority. I personally don’t agree with the method and I personally find it to be a little bit crazy.”

A second shot

Trauner, on the other hand, is running a tight ship. He has experience and name recognition from the last campaign and appears to be taking full advantage of both.

But being a Democrat in Wyoming is a major obstacle and Trauner has made every effort to distinguish himself from his party. Trauner hasn’t been shy about blaming Democrats in Congress for the current financial crisis, striking a common (and oft-used) theme that he is running as an outsider, promoting his lack of political experience as an asset.

“A political philosophy is to blame, and clearly one party is in tune with that philosophy, but I’m not going to blame it on the parties alone because Democrats certainly have not done enough at times,” Trauner said during the same September 26 conference call into which Lummis’ former press secretary called.

Unlike Lummis, who opposed the federal bailout, Trauner has expressed reserved support for the idea, with a caveat.

“In return for any purchase of bad assets, we get a share in the company,” he continued. “If the federal government buys the bad debt off of a company, and sells the product off later for profit, the federal government should keep that money. However, if it sells the debt a lesser price, the federal government should receive a stake in the company in order to make up the difference.”

Perhaps one reason Trauner is the strongest of the Wyoming party’s candidates for federal office is that he garnered a degree of respect from voters in both parties in 2006. Faced with an onslaught of last-minute attack ads in the closing week of that campaign, Trauner refused national party advice to “go negative.”

“The national party was pushing hard to come back on her with the same stuff she put out on Gary,” one former Trauner advisor told WyoFile. “They had the ads and the money ready and he wouldn’t do it. It hurt at the time, but at least the guy can sleep at night and he can still show his face around the state without raising hackles.”

This year, Trauner’s ads have been airing regularly on Wyoming television stations and the tone has remained positive, in keeping with Trauner’s oft-repeated observation that “the way you campaign is the way you will govern.”

The money game

The reality of modern American politics is that it takes money to run a successful campaign. Positive or negative, those TV ads cost money, even in a market as small as Wyoming.

Lummis’ funds suffered in her tough primary battle with Gordon. Gordon used more than $750,000 of his personal fortune in the race. Although it didn’t give him the nomination, but did drain reserves Lummis would have ordinarily used in the general election campaign.

Indeed, to compete with Gordon, Lummis was forced to loan her campaign nearly $70,000 of her own money to compete with Gordon. Trauner, on the other hand, skated through his primary without an opponent, allowing him to keep reserves for the general election.

Since the primary, Lummis has had more success raising funds, but her war chest is still much smaller than Trauner’s. As of the last reporting period, Lummis had roughly one third of the cash on hand that Trauner did.

This gives Trauner a degree of flexibility in the final month of the campaign, the option to outspend his rival on media buys. Thus far, Trauner has spent around $450,000 in the 2008 campaign. So far, he has put almost $60,000 into media advertising, with much of the rest spent on travel and strategic consulting.

Down to the wire

While Trauner has a financial advantage one month before the general election, tight poll numbers may encourage donations from GOP activists, her fellow Wyoming Congressional candidates and the national party. The loss of Wyoming’s lone Congressional seat may not be the sort of hit the national party is willing to take, even in a year in which the GOP is expected to take big losses. Indeed, a few hundred thousand strategically spent in the closing weeks in a small, solidly Republican state could be viewed as a sound investment.

Either way you look at it, this one may be too close to call all the way up to November 4. Stay tuned, folks.

This article was first published by Wyofile.com