As Republicans across the country celebrate their recent election victories, here in Maryland state GOP leaders should not let their limited success go to their heads.
While the 1994 election produced significant gains for Republicans in state legislative and local county elections, this may not necessarily set the stage for larger gains next time around. Now that the dust has settled from the state's most exciting campaign in more than 30 years, the cold fact remains that even in the wake of the largest Republican electoral tidal wave of this century, the GOP here lost all four statewide contests.
The next chance for Republicans to win statewide office in Maryland will not be until 1998, four years that could translate into a lifetime given the country's current political volatility.
The events and trends that shaped the 1994 election are not likely to be similar in the 1998 cycle, meaning that this past election may be one of missed opportunity rather than one that started a significant realignment.
Future Republican success in Maryland depends largely on the ability of the party to: (1) honestly assess its position; (2) learn from its mistakes; and (3) prepare a 1998 strategy that does not rely too heavily on trying to rerun the 1994 campaign.
In the immediate afterglow of the recent election, many a Republican leader was quoted as saying that Maryland is now "truly a two-party state." An appealing rhetorical bromide, but actually far from true. Yes, the GOP made significant gains in the General Assembly, but the current percentage of GOP representation there (about 30 percent in each legislative chamber) now only approximates the statewide voter registration numbers. The make-up of the state legislature now more closely reflects a "norm," and prior disparities were an anomaly that resulted from several decades of a weak party structure.
To get a sense of what they face in trying to gain equal footing with Democrats, Republicans only need to look back two years. In the three-way presidential race of 1992, Democrat Bill Clinton got 50 percent of the vote in Maryland, the highest percentage he received in any state except one -- his native Arkansas (54 percent).
In fact, Maryland's presidential voting history tells a lot about its position in the country's political spectrum. In the 1980 Ronald Reagan landslide, Jimmy Carter managed to win Maryland, and in 1984 Mr. Reagan swept to re-election with 60 percent of the vote nationwide but carried Maryland with only a 53 percent majority.
In 1988, George Bush won 54 percent of the national vote but only drew 51 percent here. With the exception of liberal Sen. Charles McC. Mathias, who in his day was never considered a "party animal," no Republican has been elected to statewide office in 24 years.
More Democratic than nation
Maryland remains more Democratic than the nation as a whole, simply because it is made up of higher percentages of many Democratic-leaning demographic groups. These include blacks, Jews, secular Catholics, labor union members and government employees. Due to the different political landscape, an election strategy that emulates successful GOP campaigns elsewhere may not work here.
Maryland Republicans missed their best chance in many elections to capture one of the state's U.S. Senate seats. Democratic incumbent Paul S. Sarbanes, a lackluster politician burdened with 10 years' worth of mediocre job-performance ratings from state voters, was clearly vulnerable. On paper, Senator Sarbanes was no stronger than dozens of other Democratic incumbents who eventually went down to defeat, yet he managed to easily win re-election to a fourth term. As in his previous race, he won primarily because he faced weak competition.
For the fifth time in a recent statewide race, Maryland Republicans nominated a candidate with no local political roots. Not only was Bill Brock a continuation of the failed notion that a former Washington operative could jump-start an elective career moving beyond the beltway, he was also poorly positioned to take advantage of Mr. Sarbanes' greatest weaknesses. The driving force behind the Republican success of 1994 was "change," but Mr. Brock proved to be an older dinosaur than Mr. Sarbanes. A career insider, the GOP nominee's own record as a Tennessee senator precluded any opportunity to exploit Mr. Sarbanes' vulnerabilities.
Ellen R. Sauerbrey was clearly the best gubernatorial candidate the state GOP has nominated in many years. Her strong primary campaign energized many Republican voters, and her tax-cut proposal clearly resonated with voters across party lines. As close as she came to winning, the natural tendency among many state GOP leaders might be to act deferential to Mrs. Sauerbrey -- to praise her accomplishments, spare her feelings and ignore her campaign's shortcomings.
However, a failure to recognize Mrs. Sauerbrey's limitations could doom the party to future election defeats.
The fact remains, despite a combination of factors working strongly to her advantage, Mrs. Sauerbrey still lost to Democrat Parris N. Glendening. She lost in spite of the unpopularity of Democratic incumbent Gov. William Donald Schaefer and a desire among voters for change in Annapolis. She lost in spite of facing an opponent with a discordant general election message and the charisma of vanilla pudding. She lost in spite of having a strong anti-tax message that matched the current political climate and in spite of many Republican successes, both nationally and locally.
Mrs. Sauerbrey's defeat can be attributed to a number of things. Her campaign will likely point to the fact that she was outspent by a 2-to-1 margin. Certainly, a campaign's funding is a major item in the world of politics, but if Republicans blame her loss completely on money, they would remain locked into a gestalt-like, growth-limiting position.
First of all, the Sauerbrey campaign decided very early to take the public financing route that limited her total expenditures to $1 million.
Secondly, because she had a stronger message, $1 million was sufficient to get the job done. In today's media-driven environment of political campaigning, the content of the message is more important than the size of the advertising buy.
Too conservative for state
A major reason for Mrs. Sauerbrey's failure is that several of her positions were simply too conservative for Maryland. Her record on abortion, gun control and the environment was out of sync with the views of most Marylanders. While the Glendening campaign can hardly be classified as a textbook effort, it did manage to use these issues to raise Mrs. Sauerbrey's negatives higher than its own. She even offered an assist by proposing a school voucher plan, a loser of an issue that only served to reinforce the Glendening charge that she was too "right-wing" and out of the mainstream.
Much was made of the key role that Montgomery County would play in determining the statewide winner. Most observers felt HTC that Mrs. Sauerbrey needed 43 percent to 45 percent of the Montgomery vote to prevail. Her tax-cut message had the potential to allow her to exceed that percentage, because in recent years Montgomery countians have had their taxes raised more than was the case among voters anywhere else in the country. Their state taxes were raised by Mr. Schaefer, their local income and property taxes were raised by Democratic County Executive Neil Potter, and the Clinton administration's 1993 income tax increases on upper income individuals disproportionally impacted many Montgomery voters. Yet Mrs. Sauerbrey captured only 41 percent of the Montgomery vote, largely because her conservative social views did not play well.
Montgomery County was not the only area where these social positions caused her to underachieve. In Howard County, Mrs. Sauerbrey ran a full 10 percentage points behind Republican County Executive Charles I. Ecker, and her percentage in Baltimore County (57 percent) was below what other GOP candidates have posted in recent elections.
Another reason for Mrs. Sauerbrey's defeat was her campaign's inability to sufficiently tag Mr. Glendening as the guardian of the status quo, something that should have been relatively easy to do. While her promise of a tax cut offered a different approach, she never moved to the next level by making voters view Mr. Glendening's proposals as Schaefer retreads (her more combative style may have actually made her appear "Schaeferesque" to some voters).
Shortly after the primary, while appearing before a state employees union, Mrs. Sauerbrey had an opportunity to set the tone for the rest of the campaign but missed the mark. She declared that her tax cut would not cost state workers their jobs, that it would even leave enough money in the budget for pay raises. Not only did her moment of weakness come off as pandering, which undermined her attacks on Mr. Glendening for promising too much to special interests, it cost her the chance to demonstrate that she was a committed agent of change, willing to stand up to any group that might get in her way.
Republicans must acknowledge that the Sauerbrey campaign made a number of mistakes any one of which could have cost her the 6,007 votes separating defeat from victory. But some errors had to be expected. Making mistakes was an inevitable part of the process; learning from them is the key to future success.
Where does the Republican party in Maryland go from here? The future may not be quite as bright as it first appears. On the positive side, the GOP's local and legislative victories will provide it with a farm team that should eventually provide more high-quality candidates for statewide offices.
Conversely, by 1998 the playing field will look much different. The national dynamic that drove the 1994 election (anti-Clinton, anti-tax, anti-government, anti-Democrat) was the dog wagging the Sauerbrey tail. That message alone was good enough for Republicans to win in Texas and Tennessee, in Pennsylvania and New York, in Minnesota and Iowa, and in California and Arizona -- but not Maryland.
Immediate prospects bleak
Even if the GOP surge continues, its end result will elect a Republican president in 1996. That will make the 1998 election the first midterm election in more than 60 years in which the GOP is the party in control of both the White House and the Congress. If historical trends hold, this circumstance will set up Democrats for a modest national rebound in 1998.
Meanwhile, here in Maryland, Mr. Glendening and the Democratic General Assembly will have four years to set the local tone for the 1998 election. By controlling the political agenda, they would have a lot to say about their own destiny.
The Republicans in the legislature will primarily function in a reactive mode, and will be dependent upon the mistakes of the Democratic majority to build its case for the next election.
Additionally, Democratic Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski is up for re-election in 1998, and because her job performance rating has consistently been 20 points higher than Mr. Sarbanes', she will likely prove to be a much tougher target.
Having failed to ride the national Republican wave in 1994, a statewide GOP victory may not come until after the year 2000. To improve their prospects, Maryland Republicans need to recognize that they are in a situation that is quite different from their GOP-brethren around the country. The strategy of their statewide candidates in 1998 needs to rely less on a national party surge and more on tailoring a message that better connects with Maryland voters on a broader range of issues.
In the meantime, as a reminder to the professional Republican party operatives in Washington, Mr. Glendening should erect new road signs on the highways leading into the state that say: "Entering Maryland,'The Free State' -- Merge to the Left."
J. Bradford Coker is president of Mason-Dixon Political/Media Research Inc.