Campaign

Incumbents battle each other in pair of Tuesday primaries

by Aaron Blake - 06/02/08 5:51 PM ET

Two members of Congress will face retirement Tuesday, when voters head to the polls in New Jersey and New Mexico to sort out a pair of the biggest races of the primary season.

The efforts of two GOP House members in New Mexico to make the leap to the Senate means one of them will see his or her career effectively come to an end, while Rep. Robert Andrews’s (D-N.J.) unexpected two-month challenge to Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) means one of them will be gone as well.

{mosads}Andrews is an admitted underdog against Lautenberg, who has seen the New Jersey Democratic establishment rally around him and brace for the eleventh-hour coup attempt from the 10th-term congressman.

The outcome in New Mexico is anybody’s guess. Rep. Steve Pearce has polled a slight lead over Rep. Heather Wilson down the stretch in the GOP primary, but Wilson nabbed the last-minute support of retiring Sen. Pete Domenici (R), whose seat the two of them are seeking.

Domenici has long been seen as a Wilson backer, as she is his political protégé, but he stayed neutral until Friday. He told local reporters that he feared Wilson would lose if he didn’t publicly weigh in.

Pearce led 45-39 in a Research and Polling Inc. survey released Sunday by the Albuquerque Journal. The data was collected before Domenici’s endorsement.

“There are three or four events in every campaign that could really unsettle you, and all we do is we stay focused on our message, our business,” Pearce said.

Domenici said in a robocall that he is backing Wilson “because out-of-state special interest groups like the Club for Growth are spending hundreds of thousands of dollars unfairly distorting her record and trying to influence this election.”

Club for Growth spokeswoman Nachama Soloveichik responded: “Heather Wilson has a history of voting for tax increases and wasteful spending, and people in New Mexico have a right to know the truth.”

In New Jersey, Andrews had hoped he would get a boost from debates with Lautenberg over the closing weeks of the campaign. He wound up with only two, one on the radio on Thursday and another on public television Friday.

Though observers agree Andrews is the superior orator, there were no big moments in the debates, which were largely overshadowed by other political stories in the news.

“There may be some people who tuned in and felt the way Lautenberg spoke was just not dynamic enough, but that’s the way he’s been speaking for 25 years,” said Ingrid Reed, the director of the Eagleton Institute at Rutgers University.

Lautenberg has weathered a barrage of attacks from Andrews, who has hit the senator for his age, 84, and his vitality. Andrews last week began running a campaign ad featuring the father of a Marine killed in Iraq who said Lautenberg’s office didn’t respond to his inquiries.

Lautenberg spokeswoman Julie Roginsky said: “Rob Andrews, who co-authored the war in Iraq and lobbied to get our troops to Iraq, should not now be exploiting for political reasons what happened to them once they’re in Iraq.”

Roginsky said the Lautenberg campaign is confident. The senator has polled ahead of Andrews in all major public polls on the race.

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Andrews spokesman Michael Murphy noted turnout Tuesday could be historically low, and his campaign feels it can pull off the upset with a strong turnout in Andrews’s base in South Jersey.

“We keep it close … and lose by 10 points or so in the north, and we get high turnout and win by 10 or 15 points in the south,” and it could be a historic upset, Murphy said.

The only two sitting members to lose elections so far this cycle have been Maryland Reps. Wayne Gilchrest (R) and Albert Wynn (D), who both lost in reelection primaries.