North Carolina’s seemingly endless quest for a successor to retiring U.S. Sen. Jesse Helms is nearly over. Voters will now have their say. I predict that most of them will choose Republican Elizabeth Dole over Democrat Erskine Bowles and Libertarian Sean Haugh.
Dole was never seriously challenged for the GOP nomination this year. Bowles, who was in the race, then out of the race, then back in the race, had more obstacles in his way to the Democratic nod. But he is a member of the state’s political royalty, he and his wife are wealthy, and Democratic opponents Dan Blue and Elaine Marshall fell short of what it took to make a compelling case to party leaders, donors, and voters. So Bowles, an unlikely politician, became the party’s standard-bearer in a race that many thought was already a foregone conclusion.
Dole, a national celebrity with many obvious talents, began the race far ahead of Bowles – with the latter lacking much time to make up the difference. He made a valiant, and costly, effort to do it anyway. In late September, outspending Dole significantly in television advertising, Bowles began to make his move in the polls. The Republican’s double-digit lead just after the primary fell to about 10 points in a Mason-Dixon survey, then 8 points in our own John Locke Foundation “Agenda 2002” survey, and then a bit closer in several homestretch surveys. Internal polls supposedly put the race into a dead heat, but they are usually not to be trusted.
Once Dole’s final push – combining TV ads with a statewide bus tour and visits from George W. Bush, his wife, and his vice president – began in late October, I think that Bowles reached the crest of the wave. There wasn’t enough left to bring him even, and past, Dole. He simply never made the case that Republicans should abandon Dole as a carpetbagger, that independent and Democratic women should fear her extremism, or that conservative Democrats should prefer Bill Clinton’s chief-of-staff to Bob Dole’s wife.
I also think that Bowles miscalculated in running a campaign of economic populism. His shrill, misleading, and brainless attacks on market-based Social Security reform were calculated to scare, not to inform. His attacks on free trade and Dole’s support of fast-track negotiating authority constituted not a bridge to the 21st Century, in Clinton’s famous words, but a laundry chute to the 19th Century. North Carolina’s future does not lie in withdrawing from the world or from the financial markets that create wealth and opportunity. Giving people more freedom to save and to spend theirmoney as they see fit – which are the practical impacts of Social Security reform and free trade, respectively – is hardly an extreme political agenda. It is a quintessentially American one.
And Bowles knows this. As I’ve written before, it wasn’t long ago that he advocated free trade and private investment of Social Security (albeit by the government, directly and coercively, rather than by individuals voluntarily). Populism and Erskine Bowles proved to be about as good a match as Justin Timberlake and Britney Spears (there’s my shameless Google-bait).
Of course, I could be totally off-base. Bowles could stun the pundits Election Night and upset Dole. In this topsy-turvy political season, confident predictions are impossible. But for what it’s worth, I’m expecting her to win the race by less than a landslide and more than a whisker. If her margin of victory exceeds 6 points, there could be some coattails down the ballot, particularly in tight legislative races.
And now a programming note. My liberal sparring partner Chris Fitzsimon (see http://www.common-sense.org) and I will be offering election commentary Tuesday night for two different radio stations: WSJS 600 AM in Winston-Salem and WPTF 680 AM in Raleigh. I’ll also be contributing pieces on Southern results to the election coverage over at www.NationalReview.com and will jot down some reactions for this space on Wednesday. Finally, my colleague Richard Wagner of Carolina Journal will be on the other side of the Triangle, offering election analysis on WUNC 91.5 FM.