What I Am Reading: "Stranger in a Strange State: The Politics of Carpetbagging from Robert Kennedy to Scott Brown" by Christopher J. Galdieri
This book received enough plugs on Political Wire, and enough plugs in reference to future-Senator Donald Trump Junior, to keep it in my consciousness. It wasn't until I was reminded that it had a section on Endicott Peabody, though, that I put it on my reading list.
The book is about carpetbaggers in the era of direct election of Senators. It examines trends to find why carpetbaggers, those who have made a political career in other states, run, and what happens when they do. It focuses on the Senate because state boundaries, unlike Congressional district boundaries, are those most likely to evoke a sense of place and localism that transfers into a political context. Carpetbagging comes about, the book finds through its case studies, with a confluence of state party need and candidate availability.
The book focuses on nine races. However, being a poli sci book, it leads with a literature review on relevant theory. Prof. Galdieri examines carpetbagging in relation to theories of representation - should legislators represent the preferences of their constituents, or invoke their own judgement to represent their long-term interests? The most relevant representation theory is that of descriptive representation - that a legislature has the most legitimacy when it is made up of diverse legislators, and that constituents are likely to want to vote for a legislator who shares the same identity that they do. Being from geographic area may qualify as descriptive representation, and this of course comes in to play when voters are asked to consider a candidate who is not from their area. Galdieri also discusses the role of the candidate's ambition, and if it is discrete (only wanting to hold a specific office to accomplish a set goal), static (wanting to hold a specific office for as long as possible to accumulate seniority and such), or progressive (wanting to climb the ladder). Carpetbaggers seem to do better when they display progressive ambition, rather than static ambition. This is an important point, related to the abovementioned candidate availability: carpetbagging must be the most rational choice for a candidate to advance their political career. Galdieri covers the Fitzpatrick/Hero ideas of the three state political cultures, whereby carpetbaggers are better off with the strong party control in traditionalist or individualist states, or from party competition in individualistic or moralistic states. Additionally, the state matters because a more cosmopolitan state is more likely to be a place where a carpetbagger is viable, while a homogenous state may make outsiders stand out more (unless an outside is in the in-group). He covers the candidates themselves as mentioned, the roles of other actors, mainly state party institutions, and some other classic poli sci topics.
From here, the book proceeds to history and analysis the specific races. The first two are the two successful carpetbaggers: Robert F. Kennedy and Hillary Rodham Clinton, both of whom were elected to the Senate from New York. Both stories should be familiar enough that I don't need to repeat them, though I can recommend (beyond this book's brief summary, obviously) In Love With Night by Ronald Steel for RFK and Hillary's Turn by Michael Tomasky for HRC.
Bobby successfully overcame the carpetbagging charge in his 1964 race by reframing the situation and claiming that a state as important as New York needed to send a national leader to the Senate, not someone who simply voted the right way like his opponent, incumbent Republican Kenneth Keating. Clinton, meanwhile, put in yeoman's work on her long-running listening tour of upstate communities, defusing the carpetbagging charge by visibly seeking to learn more about the state. In both cases, Kennedy and Clinton were the best options for a party that was in a slump at the time, and were a way to circumvent longstanding factional division. Additionally, both Kennedy and Clinton were national-level figures who were looking for the next step in their careers after their time in Washington had come to an end, and not figures who were just 100% tied to a specific other state. They were both welcomed by state party elites.
The victories of Clinton and Kennedy contrast with the defeats of the other seven candidates in the book. The next two share a chapter, as they are both Senators who sought to return to the Senate from a different state. The first is James L. Buckley (brother of famous conservative pundit William F. Buckley), who was elected Senator from New York on the Conservative Party line in 1970, in a fluke three-way election. After his loss to Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1976, Buckley returned to his ancestral home in Connecticut and ran there in 1980, losing to Christopher Dodd. One of the book's main points is that carpetbaggers do best when party elites invite them to run and unite behind them. This was the case for Kennedy and Clinton; it was the case for Buckley as well, but another candidate, Richard Bozzuto, did well enough at the party convention to force a primary. Though Buckley won, this meant another several months of intra-party carpetbagger attacks (including from Republican Senator Lowell Weicker, clearly not a team player) that did him no favors against Dodd.
The other Senator who attempted in the modern direct-election era to return from another state was Bill Brock of Tennessee. After beating Al Gore Senior in 1970, he lost re-election in 1976 and became a Republican insider, serving as RNC Chair and in the Reagan cabinet. He hitched his star to Dole, though, and was thus out of power in the Bush years. He decided to run for the Senate in Maryland in 1994 against Democratic workhorse Paul Sarbanes. Brock is an interesting case because of the Maryland-DC connection, whereby of course Montgomery and PG Counties house a considerable DC suburban class of political/governmental employees, of which Brock had been one. However, he was still subject to carpetbagger attacks in the primary, after the party leadership was unable to clear the field and he faced off against local elected official Ruthann Aron, who later went to jail for hiring a hitman to kill her husband (a fact this book somehow does not see fit to mention!). Sarbanes, however, was a strong incumbent who was not going to lose even in 1994. His formidableness was a blessing and a curse for Brock, as it made him impossible to beat, but also allowed Brock to gain the nomination by scaring off any viable native candidates. Ultimately, both Brock and Buckley were too closely identified with another specific state to overcome the carpetbagging charge in their own races, and it seems to have been a viable attack against them. This was especially damaging in a primary, when the attack could not be dismissed as normal partisanship. Both were there in the first place because the Republicans in their state were in the doldrums, and didn’t have anyone local to make a better race of it.
Next, the book lumps an additional four candidates together in less dramatic races. My candidate of interest, Endicott "Chub" Peabody, had a varied career after his time in Massachusetts. There, he was a normal WASP success story, winning election to the Governor's Council in the '50s, losing primary contests for AG and Governor, then winning a single two-year term in the post-Cuban Missile Crisis Kennedy landslide of 1962. After being turned out by John Volpe, he lost a Senate race to Edward Brooke in 1966. From there, Peabody engaged in a more dilettante career, running for Vice President in the 1972 New Hampshire primary in an effort to raise support for voter nomination for that office. After moving to New Hampshire in the early '80s, he lost a race for the State Legislature in 1984, but won one for delegate to the state constitutional convention, where he argued for direct election of the state AG. In 1986, he was successfully recruited by New Hampshire Democratic leaders to run for Senate against first-term Republican Warren Rudman; not because he could beat Rudman, but because he could beat Robert A. Patton, a Lyndon LaRouche supporter attempting to hijack the party nomination. Fearful of the downballot affects of this after a demonstration in Illinois that same year, the state party turned to Peabody, and he indeed won the primary decisively. Rudman successfully convinced voters to "Scrub Taxachusetts Chub" that year, but Peabody's purpose was served by winning the nomination. He went on to lose one last State Legislative race from Hollis in 1992, something I have considered writing about separately if I can find enough information on it.
The next minor candidate is Alan Keyes, a conservative African American former Ambassador who ran for the Senate in Maryland a couple of times in the H.W. Bush era before becoming an early practitioner of the fringe Presidential candidate-to-TV host career path. He was, famously, flown in to be the Republican nominee in Illinois in 2004. Republicans argued that since State Senator Barack Obama had nationalized the race by gaining acclaim for his DNC address that year, they were allowed to bring in a national ringer. More accurately, this was necessary because their planned nominee, a Chicago businessman with an inspiring biography, dropped out of the race after his divorce records were unsealed and made his embarrassing sex life public. Other local Republicans passed on the race, and Keyes lost overwhelmingly to Obama.
Next is the abortive race of Harold Ford Junior, former Tennessee Congressman who lost a Senate race in that state in 2006 before moving to Manhattan and mulling a primary challenge to appointed Senator Kirsten Gillibrand in 2010. Gillibrand, however, moved decisively to lock up the state's various Democratic constituencies, and Ford never seemed to be running to represent a place as much as he was running to represent Manhattan's global elite and their financial priorities. Like other potential opponents for Gillibrand, he ultimately passed on the race.
The last of the four was also an aborted race, as Liz Cheney, Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter, made no headway trying to run against Wyoming Senator Mike Enzi in the 2014 Republican primary. Cheney failed to acclimate herself to the rural state's local political norms, attempting to gain a resident fishing license when she didn't qualify for one and trashing critical local newspapers (a robust institution in Wyoming) as if they were the same "liberal media" that conservatives routinely hype themselves up against. Cheney's problem, like Ford's, was that she had no support from party elites, who had no beef with Enzi, just as they hadn't with Gillibrand. In these two cases that never went before the voters, the party in question did not need a carpetbagger; Cheney, however, played the long game and was elected to the state's House seat in 2016.
Finally, the book tackles Scott Brown, former Senator from Massachusetts who decided that his next move was to run for the Senate in New Hampshire in 2014. Brown, fluke golden boy of the meathead motorist constituency, does not need my introduction. His race against Jeanne Shaheen was made possible by the NH Republicans' wipeout in 2012 that left them without any more viable candidate interested in chasing the seat, and by rogue former senator Bob Smith's own carpetbagging run upon his return from Florida that made a more respectable choice necessary. Brown kept it close against Shaheen in the general election though, and she only won with the same margin as she had in her previous election. However, Shaheen was able to turn the carpetbagger charge to her advantage, using it not just as a free-standing attack but making it part of broader attacks on Brown's positions, saying that it didn't matter that he wasn't from New Hampshire since he also "wasn't FOR New Hampshire." Shaheen was able to make inroads into traditional Republican constituencies that Brown wasn't able to reciprocate with Democratic ones, perhaps a function of her longevity in the state. Ultimately, though Brown lost narrowly, it is impossible to say if a non-carpetbagger would have won.
The conclusion from all of these cases is that carpetbaggers run for the Senate because of a confluence of a need on the part of the party and an availability and desire on the part of the candidate. This situation comes up infrequently because usually a nomination is valuable to locally-grown candidates because either they can win the election or because they are playing the long game to increase their name recognition. These local candidates muscle out the carpetbaggers who have a ready-made attack against them and no existing base of support to draw upon. In the circumstances where a carpetbagger is an option for a state party, such as when a strong opponent has frightened off local challengers, the carpetbagger is usually starting at some kind of disadvantage anyway, and usually loses. So far, the only candidates to carpetbag successfully have had, along with the invitation and opportunity, national-level profiles and comparatively weak identification with another state. The least successful candidates, those who never even ran, were those rejected by state party elites.
However, as with Brown’s near miss, carpetbagging may be a more viable path in the future, because of the decreasing strength of parties, increasing partisanship and wave election years, and the normalization of small-dollar fundraising, especially that which comes with a built-in base. The book briefly notes then-future Senator Mitt Romney, clearly a candidate more in the Clinton/Kennedy mold than the Keyes/Peabody mold. This doesn't have me worried about Senator Trump Junior, R-PA. Not yet.