Michigan Democrat Fights His District’s Freshman Curse
Freshman House Democrat Mark Schauer hopes his 2010 race breaks a negative streak in the congressional politics of Michigan’s 7th District. His two immediate predecessors lasted just two years in office before they were ousted by voters.
The good news for Schauer — the former leader of the state Senate’s Democratic minority — is that both of those one-term wonders were Republicans.
Joe Schwarz, a GOP moderate, won an open-seat race after defeating a crowded field of conservative rivals in the 2004 Republican primary. In 2006, he lost a one-on-one primary race with former state Rep. Tim Walberg, one of his 2004 primary opponents. But Walberg’s bruising challenge, backed by attacks against Schwarz by the conservative group Club for Growth, left such hard feelings that Walberg only narrowly defeated a little-known and underfinanced Democratic nominee.
That outcome set him up for his 2008 loss, by just more than 2 percentage points, to the better-known and experienced Schauer, who rode a national tide running in favor of the Democrats and portrayed Walberg as too conservative and too much a supporter of Bush’s unpopular administration.
The not-so-good news for Schauer is that he could face a 2010 rematch bid by Walberg in a district that, while no longer the Republican stronghold it once was, can hardly be described as safely Democratic.
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