It’s a battle of East versus West.
The contest for the Democratic nomination in the 9th Congressional District is shaping up as one of the most competitive races on the March 6 primary ballot in Ohio, as Toledo incumbent Marcy Kaptur faces off against Cleveland incumbent Dennis Kucinich.
Both are liberal Democrats, backed by labor unions, known for their rhetoric against Wall Street and opposition to the war in Iraq, with voting records in support of nationalized health care, rolling back the Bush-era tax cuts, and supporting alternative and renewable energy sources.
Both have proved successful at getting re-elected and raising the money they need to win. Both have been featured in the national media — Mr. Kucinich most recently for asked whether President Obama committed an impeachable offense in authorizing military strikes on Libya and Miss Kaptur for her appearance in Michael Moore’s left-wing movie Capitalism — A Love Story.
The primary will be the first election in the new 9th Congressional District, which links the cities of Toledo and Cleveland through nearly 100 miles of Lake Erie shoreline communities.
Miss Kaptur, thanks to a recent revision of the 9th District map, is widely viewed as having the upper hand in the Democratic match-up because there are many more voters in the part of the district that she has represented compared with those in Mr. Kucinich’s former district, the 10th.
But Cuyahoga County has more Democratic voters than Lucas, Erie, and Ottawa counties, areas that Miss Kaptur currently represents.
The Ohio secretary of state has not released a breakdown of registered voters inside the boundaries of the new 9th Congressional District. However, both the Ohio Democratic and Republican parties have done their own analyses, and both show more registered Democrats living in the part of the district that Mr. Kucinich currently represents than the parts that Miss Kaptur represents.
That’s important because only people who identify themselves as Democrats can vote in the Democratic primary.
According to the Democratic Party’s tally, there are 32,043 Democrats in the Cuyahoga County part of the district, compared with 20,293 Democrats in the Lucas-Erie-Ottawa part of the district. Another 7,810 Democrats are in northern Lorain County, which neither Miss Kaptur nor Mr. Kucinich currently represents and will be up for grabs.
State Sen. Mike Skindell, a Democrat from Lakewood in Cuyahoga County and a supporter of Mr. Kucinich, predicted that affluent and urban Democrats of western Cuyahoga County will turn out in greater numbers than the rural or central-city Democrats of Erie, Ottawa, and Lucas counties.
“It’s going to depend on the ground campaign of both Congresswoman Kaptur and Congressman Kucinich,” Mr. Skindell said.
He said it will be a low-turnout primary.
Others say the low Democratic numbers don’t reflect the actual Democratic vote in a presidential year.
“You have two well-entrenched, well-known incumbents, but I think the advantage goes to Kaptur because the bulk of the district is in her territory,” said David Cohen, a political science professor and fellow of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron.
“Kucinich is very popular in parts of that district. He’s really popular among anti-establishment progressives. He’s very much of a hero to them. There’s just a certain type of Democrat that is attracted to him,” Mr. Cohen said. “To mainstream Democrats, especially establishment Democrats, his routine gets a little tiresome.”
District makeup
The new district emerged in December when the Republican-controlled General Assembly condensed Ohio’s 18 congressional districts to 16 districts as a result of population shifts to states in the West and South. In the process, Republicans are believed to have established 12 safe Republican districts and squeezed Democrats into four solid Democratic districts.
The district is heavily Democratic. The precincts in the new 9th District voted 66.8 percent for Democrat Barack Obama for in the 2008 presidential election and 31.6 percent for Republican John McCain. That’s a higher percentage for Mr. Obama than supported him in the former 9th and 10th districts.
Mr. Kucinich and Miss Kaptur will contend with a third Democrat seeking the 9th District nomination: Graham Veysey, 29, a Cleveland video production entrepreneur.
The Republican candidates on the March 6 ballot are Steven Kraus of Huron and Samuel “Joe the Plumber” Wurzelbacher of Springfield Township. Sean Stipe of Lorain is seeking the Libertarian nomination.
The money game
Local Democrats strongly back Miss Kaptur, not surprisingly.
“Among elected officials I think she has a broad base of support in northwest Ohio. She is loved in northwest Ohio,” said Lucas County Treasurer Wade Kapszukiewicz.
He said Mr. Kucinich is not as enthusiastically embraced by his constituency but has a deep base of support nationally.
“I think Dennis probably has a better network of national contacts from his presidential candidacy,” Mr. Kapszukiewicz said.
But Mr. Skindell of Cuyahoga County said it’s not true that Mr. Kucinich’s base support is soft. He said Mr. Kucinich won the unanimous backing of the Lakewood Democratic Club last week.
Money in their campaign accounts and liberal expenditures of shoe leather will be keys to winning.
In 2010, Miss Kaptur and Mr. Kucinich each spent about $1 million to hold onto their seats against aggressive Republican opponents.
How much they’ll need to spend to defeat each other in the sprint to March 6 is information they weren’t willing to divulge.
“We’ll spend whatever we have,” Mr. Kucinich told The Blade.
Miss Kaptur said the campaign will cost “more than it should, and maybe more than we will be able to raise.”
As of Sept. 30, the most recent date covered by Federal Elections Commission campaign finance reports, Miss Kaptur had $604,917 in her campaign account, compared with Mr. Kucinich’s $99,440.
Mr. Kucinich, who sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004 and 2008, has shown he can tap a national network of donors who admire his political style.
In the first three quarters of 2011, he collected $87,715 from individual donors across the country, more than one-third of it from California. By contrast, Miss Kaptur raised only $7,250 from individuals in the same period.
And while Miss Kaptur’s individual contributors appear to be associated with industries or firms that have business with Congress, Mr. Kucinich’s contributors come from walks of life that are well outside the Washington beltway.
For example, two people who contributed $1,000 each to Miss Kaptur are officers of a Washington lobbying firm, Vansoyoc & Associates.
Mr. Kucinich has supporters in Hollywood.
Soap opera actress Deidre Hall of Santa Monica, Calif., who starred in Days of our Lives, gave Mr. Kucinich $5,500 last year and introduced him at a fund-raising event in April, 2010.
“When I heard Dennis Kucinich speak for the first time, I said I would follow him anywhere. I’ve said that about men in the past, but it’s never turned out so well,” she gushed in her introduction, according to her Web site.
Syd Leibovitch, a Beverly Hills, Calif., real estate broker, who, with his wife, Linda, contributed $4,800 to Mr. Kucinich in 2011, told The Blade he did so because of Mr. Kucinich’s anti-war stand.
“I really do think that he has a very good message in both his anti-war and anti-corporate mentality,” Mr. Leibovitch said.
He said he became a Kucinich admirer after seeing him on television speaking out against the Iraq war during the 2008 Democratic primary campaign.
“He may be extreme, but you need extremes like him to balance out the other side,” Mr. Leibovitch said.
Steve Fought, a spokesman for Miss Kaptur, said Mr. Kucinich’s fund-raising doesn’t reflect constituents support.
“He’s using the notoriety he got from his presidential race in his congressional race. It’s not because those folks have ties to Ohio necessarily or ties to Cleveland,” he said.
He said the Kaptur campaign has begun reaching out to individual contributors who aren’t yet reflected in the FEC report. He said a breakfast held for Miss Kaptur about two weeks ago at the Toledo Club raised about $8,000.
Union backing
Both Miss Kaptur and Mr. Kucinich raise significant funds from labor union political action committees.
In 2011, both got identical contributions from the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees ($3,000), the International Longshoremens Association ($2,500), and the Machinists/Aerospace Workers Union ($5,000). The Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers gave $2,500 to Miss Kaptur and $4,800 to Mr. Kucinich.
Whether any of those unions will take sides in the primary is yet to be known.
The United Auto Workers union for Ohio, which represents thousands of union workers throughout the new district, is expected to meet Feb. 15 to discuss whether to make an endorsement — and write a check — in the primary contest, said state Director Ken Lortz.
“We will probably sit that primary out. Both of them have 100 percent voting records on key labor issues. I think both of them are capable of raising funds in other areas, aside from labor,” Mr. Lortz said.
Another unknown is whether outside political-action committees will enter the contest with TV advertising, robocalls, or direct mail to steer voters to one candidate or the other.
“The other important thing, I imagine, down the road will be outside money, particularly from Democratic leaders,” said Justin Vaughn, a political science professor at Cleveland State University. “I imagine almost all of it will go to Kaptur unless early polling indicates Kucinich is well ahead of her. She’s been a more consistent team-player for the Democrats and has carved out a more valuable institutional path within Congress.”
Miss Kaptur said she has been making numerous forays into Cuyahoga County and is reaching out to friends and supporters to talk her up. She said it’ll be difficult to afford the costs of advertising in two big media markets.
The Cleveland media market is larger than the Toledo market. In 2011, Cleveland had the 18th largest media market in the nation while Toledo’s ranked 70th, according to the Nielsen Co. The two markets overlap in the Sandusky area.
Reaching out
Last week, Miss Kaptur was one of two area politicians — along with Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson — to have the privilege of greeting President Obama as he deplaned from Air Force One at Cleveland Hopkins International Airport (which is in the new 9th District) before he moved on to give a speech in Shaker Heights.
Asked about her campaigning, Miss Kaptur responded with detailed descriptions of the events she has attended in Lorain and Cuyahoga counties.
She said that since the beginning of the year she has attended the swearing-in of mayors in Avon Lake, Brooklyn, and Lorain, where she said Mr. Kucinich was not in attendance. She said she saw him at the swearing-in of the mayor of Parma, but not at the Mayor’s Ball fund-raiser for the Beck Arts Center in Lakewood before Christmas.
“I was very surprised because he maintains an office in Lakewood. There were hundreds and hundreds of people. Mayor [Michael] Summers introduced me there,” Miss Kaptur said. “I will have many communities with substantial populations with mayors, so I can see already how my modus operandi will have to be altered in order to embrace all these communities.”
Mr. Kucinich has offered no such laundry list of events he’s attended in Toledo. Asked how much campaigning he plans to do on the Toledo side of the district, he said, “I’m campaigning across from one end of the district to the other. That’s it. What else?”
In their voting records, voters will find little space between Mr. Kucinich and Miss Kaptur.
The American Civil Liberties Union gives them both a 100 percent ranking for their votes on five key issues in the current 112th Congress, including opposition to defunding Planned Parenthood, expanding vouchers for religious schools, and extending the Patriot Act.
The American Conservative Union gave Miss Kaptur a “lifetime” score of 15 and Mr. Kucinich a 9. By comparison, U.S. Rep. Bob Latta (R., Bowling Green) got a 99.
The anti-abortion rights group National Right to Life rated Mr. Kucinich a zero out of 100 because of his opposition to their seven key votes. The group gave Miss Kaptur a score of 14 out of 100 because she voted pro-life on one of those seven issues, to prohibit taxpayer funding of abortion. All other Ohio Democrats got a zero and all Ohio Republicans got 100 percent.
Contact Tom Troy at tomtroy@theblade.com or 419-724-6058.
First Published January 8, 2012, 5:00 a.m.
