Labor to the rescue: how Union Shoe Leather and unanswered attacks helped Democrat Peter Barca win in Wisconsin

It looked like the Republicans' best bet for a pick-up this spring among three U.S. House seats vacated by appointees to the Clinton Administration. Although industrial, the district was only marginally Democratic. The GOP had a well-financed, well-known candidate already lined up at the gate with a full organization in place -- a premium for the brief campaign season mandated by a special election. And the voters' penchant for sending messages in these by-elections would likely be amplified by Clinton's waning popularity and program for new taxes.

Still, it was a Democrat who emerged in triumph from the showdown in Wisconsin's First District, and a traditional Democrat at that.

At first glance, Peter Barca did not appear to be the type of candidate who would prosper in today's anti-establishment electoral environment, particularly in a constituency that had given nearly a quarter of its votes to Ross Perot. Six years of loyal soldiering for the party in the Wisconsin state House of Representatives had earned him the chairmanship of the majority caucus. The word was Barca owed his political career to the labor unions around his hometown of Kenosha, principally his fellow teachers and the United Auto Workers (UAW).

How did a standard party pol prevail when conditions seemed to be stacked against him? Partly because this pol wasn't so standard: A public school-teacher before his legislative service, Barca had maintained his middle-class roots and earned a celebrated local reputation for job creation. But more importantly, his seeming vulnerabilities were actually his greatest strengths:

"In a special election," observes Barca pollster Fred Yang, "turning out your base is almost everything." The low voter turnout inherent in such contests rewards the candidate with a large loyal following. Because of Barca's local popularity and legislative record, Kenosha and labor were there when he needed them, easily claiming credit for his razor-thin 740-vote win.

Back to Basics, Primarily

Despite the fact it had been the source of speculation for months, the appointment of incumbent Cong. Les Aspin (D-WI) as Secretary of Defense caught most First District politicos off-guard. Few Democrats were prepared to launch a full-fledged campaign for the seat on such short notice, so the favorite for the nomination became ex-state Rep. Jeff Neubauer (D-Racine), a former state party chairman who had also headed up Bill Clinton's primary campaign in the state. The only Democrat in the race with significant numbers of contacts across the district, Neubauer began the campaign with more than 70 percent name-recognition -- about double Barca's figure. The all-but-anointed GOP nominee was Janesville homebuilder Mark Neumann, who had garnered a respectable 42 percent of the vote in a spirited challenge to Aspin a few months before.

Each of the district's Big Three counties was represented by a credible candidate in the Democratic contest: Racine by Neubauer, Kenosha by Barca, and Rock by state Rep. Wayne Wood (D-Janesville). A staunch prolifer who railed against "baby-killers," the underfunded Wood was only able to attract the kind of attention that tended to flag him as a single-issue candidate. Consequently, Rock County -- a Democratic stronghold -- appeared to be the prime battleground.

Frontrunner Neubauer didn't take the hint. He ran a campaign that appeared to be a directed at Perot supporters, harping on the deficit and calling for deeper spending cuts than President Clinton had proposed. That tack would have been good politics in the huge turnout of last November's general election, but Perot's non-aligned following was unlikely to be as much of a factor in a party primary.

By contrast, Barca emphasized job creation, citing his successful efforts to retrain and place hundreds of Kenosha autoworkers who had been thrown on the unemployment rolls during the 1980s. Appreciative of Barca's past assistance and attracted by his campaign stance as a traditional bread-and-butter Democrat, both the UAW and the AFL-CIO endorsed him

To comprehend the scale of that boost, consider this: more than 60,000 union members live in the First District, 22,000 of whom belong to the UAW. A typical congressional by-election in this area attracts fewer than one in four voters. Clearly, the unions were in a position to exert a tremendous influence on the outcome if they became intensely involved. They pursued this potential to the fullest. Every UAW member in the district was informed of their union's endorsement, and hundreds of union members swelled the ranks of Barca's ground troops.

Neubauer captured the endorsement of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees (AFSCME), but its clout in comparison with Barca's labor allies was minimal. Although Barca's subsequent surge did not go unnoticed by the cognoscenti, his margin in the April 6 primary was stunning: He had polled half the vote to Neubauer's one-third, capturing four out of five votes in Kenosha County and besting Neubauer by a 5:3 margin in pivotal Rock. Far from being the expected battle of the bases, the returns showed Barca would have prevailed even if the Kenosha County vote were taken off the board.

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Winning Against the Wind

Mark Neumann was delighted with the result of the Democratic primary, reasoning that Barca would be easier to beat for ideological and geographic reasons. He hit the campaign trail the next day in a Clinton-style bus tour, accompanied by the state rep he had clobbered in the primary by more than 3:1. Also in tow: "young turk" Cong. Scott Klug (R-WI) and a gang of Republican legislators and local officials.

Neumann charged that while both candidates wanted to balance the budget, he wanted to do so through spending cuts and creating jobs while Barca's answer was to raise taxes. The Republican insisted the deficit could be eliminated over five years by simply reducing domestic spending to a two percent annual increase. Barca called the proposal a "joke" and aired ads that declared "it doesn't add up." The Democrat appeared to endorse the Clinton deficit reduction plan at the start of the campaign, but subsequent events led him to pull back from that position. On April 15 -- a little more than a week into the four-week general election campaign -- the Clinton Administration dropped a bomb on their own battleline in Wisconsin:

"I couldn't believe it," exclaims Barca media consultant Saul Shorr. "There it was, Tax Day -- April 15, everybody's moaning about their taxes. And everywhere you turn on the tube, administration people are there pushing the institution of a value-added tax....I knew instantly, we were in deep trouble."

Neumann received a windfall of voter support, blown in by increased tax consciousness. The polls had been even in the wake of the primary, but Neumann now opened a lead of 6-10 points.

"From that point 'til Election Day," Shorr recalls, "we were just trying to make up lost ground."

Shortly thereafter, Barca was confronted with an issue that threatened to deny him the initiative he so desperately needed to take. The Neumann campaign announced at a press conference that Barca's pollsters had been asking their respondents a "push" question referring to a trip Barca had made to communist Cuba while a legislator to meet with Fidel Castro, a junket paid for by the Cuban government. Barca's advisors blanched. They had indeed tested negative reactions to other Barca junkets, but not Cuba. The Republican's reference to the poll had been a clever stratagem, however, as it gave the appearance Barca's campaign had broached this potentially explosive issue; now they waited for the equally adroit usage of it in paid media. That blow never came.

One reason may have been Neumann's sensitivity toward well-circulated charges he was a ruthless right-wing radical. Only a few months had passed since his million-dollar, hard-edged assault on the popular Aspin, and Barca's radio was making sure voters remembered. The Virginia-based Christian Coalition was dropping 100,000 pieces in the district for the Republican and supporting him with a phone bank operation, as was Wisconsin Right-to-Life. Those facts were trumpeted by the national media, who angled the story as a test of clout between labor and religious rightists.

Neumann denied he was preoccupied with social issues and tried to cast the race as a referendum on Clinton's economic policies. His moderate approach appeared to be having the intended effect of maintaining his lead until Barca zeroed in on a chink in his armor and blasted away at it for the remaining ten days, effectively using direct mail created by the November Group.

"Last year, in his race against Aspin," Fred Yang recalls, "Neumann had proposed investing $60 million of the Social Security trust fund into loans to businesses. That's a red flag to older voters, of course, so we harped on that....To his credit, he never backed down."

Harnessed with a populist pitch against Neumann's wealth and opposition to higher taxes on the rich, the Social Security issue appears to have moved the numbers just enough at the end. Neumann never launched a counteroffensive, reportedly because his late polling showed him with a comfortable lead. Perhaps the GOP sampling screens weren't geared to pick up the big election turnout of unionists that materialized.

"Even though we had great air support," Barca manager Merle McDonald reports, "this thing was won on the ground."

COPYRIGHT 1993 Campaigns & Elections, Inc.
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