Dole voting more often with Dems as Election Day looms

Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.), a top target for Democrats this year, has broken with her party far more than she did in 2007, according to an analysis of her voting record.

With about six weeks left in the legislative session, Dole has voted with a majority of Democrats — and against a majority of her party — 25.5 percent of the time. That compares to 6.6 percent of the time in 2007.

{mosads}And it represents a shift since Dole was first elected to the Senate in 2002. In the 109th Congress, she voted with Democrats and against her party 6.4 percent of the time, compared with 4.3 percent in the 108th Congress.

The Hill examined the number of times Dole and other GOP senators voted with a majority of Democrats, instead of a majority of Republicans, and excluded both missed votes and times that the majorities of both parties voted the same way. In the past two years, the majorities in both parties were at odds on about half the votes taken.

Of the most endangered Republicans facing reelection, Dole’s voting shift is the most significant.

Most of the other Republicans senators in tough races — Ted Stevens of Alaska, Susan Collins of Maine and Gordon Smith of Oregon — have largely stayed consistent while voting more frequently with Democrats, according to the voting analysis.

Sen. John Sununu (R-N.H.), who faces a tough road to keep his seat, has sided far less frequently with Democrats, voting against his party 16.7 percent of the time in 2007, compared to just 11.3 percent this year.

Dole, who has $2.7 million in cash on hand through the end of June, has held double-digit leads over Democratic challenger Kay Hagan in many statewide polls. But Democrats sense that the popularity of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) in North Carolina, particularly among black voters, could help Hagan to an upset in November. Hagan has $1.2 million in campaign cash, and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee has indicated that it may pump millions into televised advertising in the fall.

Facing a tarnished GOP brand and sagging approval ratings for President Bush, Senate Republicans have increasingly sought independence on domestic issues, with their top strategists warning of big losses in November.

Dole disputed that she was making an election-year trek towards the middle, saying her position depends on the issue and that she does what’s “best for the people of my state.”

She cited climate change legislation, when she was just one of seven Republicans in June to vote to limit debate on an economy-wide bill to cap emissions, which her GOP colleagues derided as a recipe for higher gasoline prices.

“I’ve been interested in the climate-change issue for a long time, worked on that to see that evolve,” Dole said Tuesday.

Some of Dole’s most significant breaks with the GOP include backing a Democratic economic stimulus measure, supporting Medicare legislation that Bush vetoed, endorsing an amendment to expand children’s healthcare coverage to pregnant women and voting for an expansive amendment to lengthen dwell-time for troops before they return to Iraq. The dwell-time amendment also included an expansion of veterans’ education benefits, a ban on permanent bases in Iraq and a timetable for redeploying troops in combat in Iraq, all detested by the White House and GOP standard-bearer Sen. John McCain (Ariz.).

“It’s an effort to try to show a list of accomplishments,” Republican Sen. Richard Burr of North Carolina said of her shift to the center, saying he suspected that 19 Republicans facing reelection have made similar shifts.

Dole also has voted to kill a GOP amendment by hard-line illegal immigration foes to ensure federal assistance is not provided to cities that do not have tough immigration rules.

Brian Nick, chief of staff for Dole, said the senator supported the Democrats’ economic stimulus measure in January because of her support for the bill’s extension of unemployment insurance benefits and funding for heating assistance for low-income people.

Nick said Dole backed the dwell-time amendment because of concerns of the strains that troop redeployments were having on military families. He said she successfully pushed for a moratorium on the Bush administration’s Medicaid rules that would have hit some North Carolina hospitals.

Analysts see those points as efforts to show independence from the GOP and a Congress with historically low approval ratings.

“She can’t run simply as an ally of President Bush,” said Ferrel Guillory, director of the program on public life at the University of North Carolina. “She’s been an ally of President Bush for most of the last six years.”

Dole has stuck by the GOP this year on a number of tough votes. For instance, she voted several times for White House-backed measures to greatly expand government surveillance and rebuffed efforts by Democrats to provide safeguards that they said would protect civil liberties. She voted with Republicans to block Democratic efforts to overturn a 5-4 Supreme Court ruling against Lily Ledbetter, who sued her employer on allegations of gender-pay discrimination.

And she has at times voted against the majorities of both parties, like in May, when she supported a one-year ban on congressional earmarks.

Other senators have taken different approaches: Collins, in both 2007 and 2008, voted about 50 percent of the time with Democrats; Stevens voted with the majority 27 percent of the time in 2008 and 29 percent in 2007; Smith voted with Democrats 41 percent of the time this year and about 44.5 percent last year; Sen. Norm Coleman (R-Minn.) voted 28 percent of the time with Democrats in 2008, down nearly eight percentage points from 2007.

Sununu has largely stood by his party even as New Hampshire has shown signs of turning blue.

“I vote with New Hampshire 100 percent of the time,” Sununu said.