Shift in Upstate N.Y. race shows GOP's split

Political analysts will sift the results of Tuesday's elections for governor in New Jersey and Virginia for clues to President Obama's standing with voters and what that means for the 2010 midterm vote, but a once-obscure special U.S. House election in Upstate New York might echo more loudly.

The race for the open seat in New York's 23d District - which stretches across the North Country from Lake Ontario to Lake Champlain - has become an ideological knife fight between conservative Republican purists and pragmatists over the future of the party and, ultimately, a test of whether politics should be about pushing a consistent set of values or forming diverse governing coalitions based on compromise.

Yesterday, the purists won.

Republican nominee Dede Scozzafava - a moderate state lawmaker who supports abortion rights and gay marriage and has voted in Albany for higher taxes - suddenly dropped out of the race in the face of polls showing her falling far behind a third-party conservative candidate.

The move thrilled right-wing activists from around the district and the nation. For months, they have been rallying to Doug Hoffman, an accountant who was rejected for the GOP nomination and is running on the Conservative Party line.

"We intend to take the party back from the elitists who have stolen it from the Reagan conservatives," Michael Patrick Leahy, a Tennessee limited-government activist who fills his TCOT Report blog with bulletins slamming Scozzafava and the GOP establishment, said even before yesterday's stunning development.

The special election was triggered when Obama picked Rep. John McHugh, one of only three Republicans among New York's 29 House members, to be secretary of the Army. Hoping to appeal to voters across party lines, the 11 GOP county chairmen nominated Scozzafava.

The campaign has been seen as the first ballot test for the grassroots "tea party" movement of conservatives who gathered last spring to protest skyrocketing federal spending and debt, flocked in August to protest Democrats' plans for health-care legislation, and marched on Washington in September.

Before yesterday, many observers thought the beneficiary of the fighting might be Democratic nominee Bill Owens, a registered independent. The region has been represented in Congress for nearly 150 years by Republicans, most of them members of that endangered species, the Northeastern moderate. Despite the 23d District's GOP heritage, Obama carried it by 5 percentage points last year.

Millions of dollars and hundreds of volunteers have poured into the district from around the nation. For instance, the Washington-based Club for Growth, which advocates tax cuts and smaller government, has spent $579,000 on TV, radio, and mail advertising in support of Hoffman, and its members have bundled an additional $325,000 in contributions to the conservative.

Many potential 2012 GOP presidential candidates weighed in as well, with conservatives such as Sarah Palin supporting Hoffman and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich backing Scozzafava.

Gingrich said there was "grave danger" in allowing factions of the party to bolt every time their favored candidate lost a nomination. "This will only lead to left-wing government," he said.

Besides, he argued, moderates were a crucial part of the coalition that gave the GOP its congressional majorities in 1994, helping to enact welfare reform and balanced budgets, among other things.

"Support from moderate Republican-elected officials enabled conservative governance, it did not prevent it," Gingrich said last week. "This is a lesson conservatives should keep in mind to counter the impulse to force out . . . anyone who is to the left of us on some issues."

The Republican National Committee and the party's congressional campaign arm also supported Scozzafava.

That changed quickly yesterday.

Calling Scozzafava's decision to release her supporters "a selfless act," RNC Chairman Michael Steele said in a statement that the party "will endorse and support the conservative candidate in the race, Doug Hoffman."

In her own written statement, Scozzafava said the mounting pressure "on many of my supporters to shift their support" led her to release them - but she pointedly did not make an endorsement herself. And her name will remain on the ballot.

The Republican establishment's original decision to support Scozzafava was the same logic used by Democratic strategists in 2006, when they recruited moderate candidates to run in some conservative districts, helping win back the House. Congressional Democrats now face strains holding their own coalition together, with many liberals angry at the compromises required to win enough votes to pass health-care overhaul.

Palin argued the counterpoint when she endorsed Hoffman. "Political parties must stand for something," Palin wrote on her Facebook page. "Unfortunately, the Republican Party today has decided to choose a candidate who more than blurs the lines."

Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R., Texas), who now heads the Freedom Works organization, was the first national conservative leader to get behind Hoffman. Armey said he believes the New York GOP misread the mood of its own base.

"The Republicans lost this race when they nominated this candidate," Armey said of Scozzafava. "A special election goes to those who have the energy, and there's no energy behind big-government Republicans - there is a militant disdain. . . . You want to talk about the 'big tent?' We've got it."

On the ground in the North Country, local tea-party activists provide the core of Hoffman's campaign army, augmented by compatriots from as far away as Colorado. But local organizers say they are not pawns of the national debate; rather, they say, people in Upstate New York are fed up with politics as usual.

"We are just the visible face for something much deeper and much less organized," said William Lamar Wells, an economist and farmer who leads CNY912, which takes its name from the Sept. 12 march on Washington to protest the federal government's growing role.

"I've never seen people so terrified of their government," Wells said, calling the national debt "a force of physics that is going to catch up to us."

Jennifer Bernstone, 36, an acting coach and personal trainer, was politically apathetic until the bank bailouts last year got her mad. Now, she is running a satellite office for the Hoffman campaign for 18 hours a day.

"People are trying to make this a party thing, but it's the principle," Bernstone said. "We spent too much and we're screwed and we need to stop . . . or bye-bye, America."