Aisle Hogs ’12: Changing of the guard

Tonight marks the last hurrah for a little-known congressman with a peerless knack for securing choice seating

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As soon as the sergeant-at-arms announces Barack Obama’s arrival in the House chamber Tuesday night, you might want to pay extra-close attention to your television screen: It will probably be your last chance to catch the dean of the Aisle Hogs in action.

Rep. Dale Kildee, an 82-year-old Michigan Democrat who has represented the Flint area since 1976, is retiring from the House at the end of this year, making this the final State of the Union address he’ll attend. There’s a good chance you’ve never heard of him, but if you’re a regular State of the Union viewer, then you’ve probably seen him â€" or at least the back of his head. Every year, without fail, Kildee arrives early â€" very, very early â€" to claim a choice spot along the center aisle, putting himself in position to greet the president as he makes his way to the front of the chamber.

Kildee is hardly the only House member to take advantage of the first-come, first-served seating policy for presidential speeches, but as best we can tell he’s been at it longer than any of his colleagues. In advance of last year’s State of the Union, Salon came up with a name for this peculiar subspecies of congressperson: Aisle Hogs.

Our idea was to identify the members who are most dogged about grabbing a nationally televised second of the president’s time on what is one of biggest nights of the year in politics. The process was thoroughly and admittedly unscientific. We looked back through C-Span’s online archive of the 10 previous State of the Unions and were entirely at the mercy of the random camera shots that were used for each year’s presidential entrance. Frequent cutaways to the first lady in the balcony or to the House speaker and vice president on the dais surely allowed an Aisle Hog or two to escape detection. Still, we felt confident that the five Aisle Hogs we settled on were all worthy of the title: Kildee, Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, Ohio’s Dennis Kucinich, New York’s Eliot Engel and Jesse Jackson Jr. of Illinois.

Sure enough, when Barack Obama stepped onto the center aisle last January, he was almost immediately greeted by Kucinich â€" and then Kildee, and then Engel and then Jackson Lee. So as we sat down to prepare our new Aisle Hog list for the 2012 State of the Union, their spots were secure. But we didn’t spot Jesse Jackson Jr. last year, and while it’s possible he was hiding along the aisle in plain sight, competition for Aisle Hog status is intense. So Jackson is off the new list and replace by (drumroll) … Rep. Todd Platts of Pennsylvania.

A moderate Republican now serving his sixth term, Platts is an accomplished Aisle Hog, a fact that was brought to our attention by his local newspaper, the York Daily Record, after our 2011 list appeared. Platts actually wasn’t on the aisle last year, but a review of the C-Span archive finds that he was there just about every year before then. He told the Record’s Mike Argento last year that he would secure his spot by leaving a folder on an aisle seat early in the day. Platts recently announced that he won’t seek reelection this year, and because of his past contributions to the form, we’re happy to announce that he’ll spend his final year in office as an official Salon Aisle Hog.

We also have our eye on a possible successor to Platts for next year: Republican Rep. Jean Schmidt of Ohio, who won her seat in a 2005 special election and who has been on the aisle for at least the past four State of the Unions. If she’s there again on Tuesday night, her candidacy to replace Platts will be a virtual slam dunk.

And then there’s the matter of Kildee, who will ride off into the sunset â€" and to a near-certain first ballot induction into the Aisle Hog Hall of Fame â€" at the end of the year. We asked his office if he had any parting words, but didn’t hear back.

Kildee’s exit means the Aisle Hogs will have a new dean in 2013, and it will probably be Engel, a 64-year-old New Yorker who came to the House in 1993. Barring a redistricting surprise in his home state, Engel, who is easily recognizable with his glasses and mustache (which Stephen Colbert once asked for the honor of combing), will have no trouble winning reelection this fall. When he appeared on last year’s list, the New York Observer asked Engel for his reaction. “Now what’s happening is that people look for me,” he told the paper. “If I wasn’t there people would think I was sick or something. I want my constituents to know that I am well.”

And with that, we present the official Salon list of Congress’s top five Aisle Hogs for 2012:

Rep. Dale Kildee (D-Mich.); 82, first elected 1976

Rep. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), 64, first elected 1992

Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), 62, first elected 1994

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), 65, first elected 1996

Rep. Todd Platts (R-Pa.), 49, first elected 2000

Rep. Jean Schmidt (R-Ohio), 60, first elected 2005 (alternate)

* * *

And here’s the video we produced last year showing the Aisle Hog class of ’11 in action:

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Steve Kornacki writes about politics for Salon. Reach him by email at SKornacki@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @SteveKornacki  More Steve Kornacki

So far, he’s winning big with the top 1 percent â€" and getting his clock cleaned with the middle class

The defining test of Mitt Romney’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination is supposed to be whether he’s able to break through the resistance that the evangelical Christians and Tea Party true believers who comprise the GOP base feel toward him. But the first three contests have revealed a different problem, one with potentially serious general election consequences: Enthusiasm for Romney seems directly related to income level.

So far, Romney has fared best among Republican primary voters from the highest income tier, while struggling mightily with the middle and working classes. Consider Saturday’s South Carolina results. Romney lost the primary to Newt Gingrich by a 40 to 27 percent margin. But according to the exit poll, among voters with incomes over $200,000, Romney was actually the night’s big winner, swamping Gingrich by 15 points, 47 to 32 percent. Where Gingrich did his damage was with those making between $50,000 and $100,000 (41 to 25 percent) and $30,000 and $50,000 (42 to 22 percent).

The same phenomenon was evident in New Hampshire and Iowa.

Since it’s practically his home state (and since its GOP electorate is far more secular and independent-friendly than the national norm), Romney fared well to very well with just about every demographic group in the Granite State, winning with 39 percent overall. But he actually lost the lowest income tier, those earning less than $30,000, to Ron Paul by 3 points. And he only finished 4 points ahead of Paul among the $30,000-$50,000 subgroup. But with those making between $100,000 and $200,000, it was a blowout â€" Romney 47 percent, Paul 17. And the spread was even more convincing at the $200,000+ level â€" 52 to 18 percent for Romney over Paul.

In Iowa, where he received 25 percent of the statewide caucus vote (at least we think!), Romney won a resounding victory among those making more than $100,000 â€" 36 to 24 percent over his closest competitor, Rick Santorum. But he was the choice of just 16 percent of the $30,000-$50,000 subgroup and only 15 percent of those earning less than $30,000.

This data suggests two problems for Romney. The first is urgent: The national Republican electorate is evolving, with less-educated, lower-income voters growing in numbers. He’s going to have to win them over if he’s going to beat back Newt Gingrich â€" or any other primary season foe â€" and secure the nomination. Particularly alarming for Romney is that this income gap doesn’t seem to be a reaction to the “vulture capitalism” attacks on his Bain Capital record and the controversy over his own tax returns. Those topics were prominent in the run-up to South Carolina (and may well have exacerbated his problems there with non-rich voters) but not in Iowa and New Hampshire. The resistance of middle- and working-class Republican voters to Romney seems to have deeper roots.

This relates to the longer-term problem for Romney: Even if he wins the nomination, he may face a unique challenge in appealing to swing voters who aren’t part of the top 1 percent.

The Obama team, of course, is ready to paint Romney as a symbol of a pampered super-rich elite that, according to their narrative, GOP policies are designed to protect. As I’ve written before, Romney’s campaign has been aware of this and has taken some modest steps to insulate its candidate. Rhetorically, Romney goes out of his way to claim that the middle class will be his priority as president and to insist that “I’m proposing no tax cuts for the rich.” And while Gingrich is calling for the outright elimination of the capital gains tax, Romney has said he only favors cutting it for people making under $200,000. But none of this seems to be helping him. Rich Republicans overwhelmingly see Romney as their candidate, while blue-collar Republicans are far more friendly to his opponents. It suggests that Romney’s 1 percent image is a real drag â€" one that could prove costly if he makes it to the fall.

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Steve Kornacki writes about politics for Salon. Reach him by email at SKornacki@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @SteveKornacki  More Steve Kornacki

If you thought Mitt Romney’s big lead in South Carolina evaporated fast …

Presumably, polling data that is more comprehensive and authoritative will be released in the next few days, but the initial indicators point to a Florida primary race that has been utterly transformed by Newt Gingrich’s resurgence.

Just a week ago, when he was coming off victories in Iowa* and New Hampshire and seemed on his way to a convincing South Carolina win, three different polls in the Sunshine State gave Mitt Rommey an average lead of 22 points, with Newt Gingrich running a very distant second in one of them and third (behind Rick Santorum) in the other. But now a new one-day survey from Insider Advantage conducted on Sunday finds Gingrich ahead by 8 points, 34 to 26 percent, while the polling firm PPP announced late Sunday that the first night of its three-day poll in the state found a virtual tie, with just two more respondents out of 600 choosing Romney than Gingrich.

Mind you, there are some asterisks here. Insider Advantage is run by one of Gingrich’s former political lieutenants, Matt Towery, and its polling track record hasn’t always been reliable. And the results from just one night of polling can be deceptive (although it should be noted that PPP’s final night of polling in South Carolina ended up being virtually identical to the actual results the next day).

But it wouldn’t be surprising at all if the race in Florida now is a dead heat, or if Gingrich has even moved ahead, because Florida has been the epicenter of volatility in what has been an almost absurdly volatile GOP race. Just over a month ago, Gingrich found himself sitting on a gigantic lead in the state â€" 48 to 25 percent in a CNN poll and 47-17 in PPP’s. Those advantages evaporated as a Romney-aligned super PAC moved into the state with an ad barrage and as panicked national Republican voices spent December chipping away at Gingrich’s standing with the party base. When the glowing press that accompanied his apparent successes in Iowa and New Hampshire was added to the mix, Romney suddenly looked invincible in Florida.

But the Republican universe in Florida is about as conservative and Tea Party-friendly as South Carolina’s. So if Gingrich could rally the GOP base back to his cause in the Palmetto State, there’s every reason to expect him to do the same in the Sunshine State, at least initially.

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Steve Kornacki writes about politics for Salon. Reach him by email at SKornacki@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @SteveKornacki  More Steve Kornacki

Newt Gingrich just made life miserable for Mitt Romney â€" and for his party

Topics:War Room, 2012 Elections, Newt Gingrich, Editor's Picks

Newt Gingrich wanted to make Mitt Romney’s life miserable, and now he’s succeeded.

After getting blown out in Iowa on Jan. 3, the former House speaker all but announced he was transforming his presidential campaign into a one-man crusade to exact maximum vengeance on Romney, whose super PAC allies had crushed Gingrich’s December surge with a barrage of negative attacks. Gingrich then suffered through a predictably miserable week in New Hampshire before moving to friendlier turf in South Carolina, where he completed one of the more improbable turnarounds in modern presidential campaign history on Saturday night with a startlingly lopsided victory over Romney.

The outcome severely complicates â€" and potentially imperils â€" Romney’s march to the Republican nomination. As the week began, he seemed positioned to post his third victory in as many contests in South Carolina, a feat that no previous GOP candidate had achieved and that would have essentially ended the race on the spot. But with his defeat, which came after some of Romney’s most problematic general election baggage was exposed, Romney’s standing in national GOP polls and in the next primary state â€" Florida, which votes on Jan. 31 â€" figures to plummet. Questions about his appeal to the Republican base and his vulnerabilities in the fall will invite new and intense scrutiny.

The good news for Romney is that he can probably make most of his troubles â€" not to mention Gingrich himself â€" go away with a solid win in Florida. The bad news is that Florida will look infinitely more imposing to him at the start of this coming week than it did at the start of this past one, when polls showed Romney opening a lead of more than 20 points. But the poll numbers in Florida, as elsewhere, have been absurdly volatile; it was just over a month ago that Gingrich enjoyed a 27-point lead over Romney. So the race in the Sunshine State should tighten dramatically in the days ahead, if it hasn’t already.

What’s more, Florida proved itself in the 2010 elections to be particularly hospitable to the Tea Party strain of Republicanism that powered Gingrich’s South Carolina surge â€" and that has long been suspicious of Romney. In that year’s GOP gubernatorial primary, Rick Scott, a Tea Party-aligned outsider with a troubled past whose nomination state and national party leaders feared and strongly discouraged, defeated Bill McCollum, a well-credentialed political veteran with broad support from the party establishment. On the surface, at least, the dynamics of a Romney-Gingrich battle are rather similar.

Disrupting Romney’s easy glide to the nomination and forcing him into such a precarious position gives Gingrich at least a measure of the revenge he’s coveted. The question, though, is whether he can parlay his South Carolina moment into a serious push for the Republican nomination.

It’s anyone’s guess what will happen next, but four basic scenarios seem most plausible right now:

1. Mitt rights the ship: Romney did his best to project confidence and steadiness in his concession speech. What he seems to be counting on is that the GOP’s opinion-shaping class will respond to Gingrich’s win Saturday night the same way it responded to his surge in early December: with panic.

Much has been made of the role the pro-Romney super PAC played in undermining Gingrich last month, and for good reason. But his poll numbers didn’t just collapse in Iowa, where the ads aired; they fell everywhere. That points to the role played by many of the right’s leading voices, commentators, activists and elected officials who remember with horror Gingrich’s run as House speaker in the 1990s and who used their platforms to lash out against him. Their warnings trickled down to rank-and-file Republicans, who began to get cold feet.

That basic pattern, in fact, has played out multiple times during the GOP campaign, with nervous party elites helping to beat back surges from candidates they saw as unfit for the nomination. Romney clearly hopes the elites â€" and his super PAC buddies â€" will do some dirty work for him again now, arresting Gingrich’s post-South Carolina momentum and leaving Romney in position to score a Florida victory that would silence the doubts about his viability.

2. Newt supplants Mitt: On the strength of victories in Iowa* and New Hampshire that really weren’t that impressive, Romney’s national support practically doubled and he opened large leads in South Carolina and Florida. In the wake of South Carolina, though, he’ll experience the flip side of this, with his numbers tanking, just as Gingrich’s rise. So it can’t be ruled out that Gingrich will roll his sudden momentum into Florida, capitalize on the state’s Tea Party-friendliness, and engineer an equally impressive follow-up triumph â€" one that might lift Gingrich into a clear lead nationally and in the next wave of states.

3. The long slog: Or maybe the Florida result won’t prove much at all. The scenario is that South Carolina firmly establishes the GOP contest as a two-man race, with the Tea Party wing of the party largely uniting around Gingrich and everyone else siding with Romney. The two men would then trade wins and losses through a drawn-out, virtually momentum-less primary season â€" one reminiscent of Hillary/Obama 2008, Hart/Mondale 1984 and Reagan/Ford 1976. The wild card in this would be Ron Paul, whose strategy of targeting small and midsize February caucus states and gobbling up their delegates could make him much more relevant to the race than he’s been.

4. The chaos theory: This is the really fun one, and the least likely. But after Saturday night, it at least warrants a mention. The basics: What if Romney suffers such a bad loss in Florida that his campaign melts down completely and elite Republicans lose confidence in his ability to stop Gingrich? If they really are committed to stopping the former speaker, these elites would then be in need of a Plan B, leading to the “white knight” scenario â€" a new candidate drafted into the race who could qualify for the late big-state primaries and to prevent Gingrich from racking up the delegates he’d need for a first ballot nomination. There are many reasons to sniff at this possibility, not the least of which is that it’s unclear if the GOP has any candidate on the sidelines who’d be capable of this. But if Mitt can’t get the job done in Florida, expect to hear it mentioned a lot.

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Steve Kornacki writes about politics for Salon. Reach him by email at SKornacki@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @SteveKornacki  More Steve Kornacki

The two very different narratives that could emerge from Saturday’s South Carolina results

If you’re looking for a silver lining in what has been a pretty rotten week for Mitt Romney, it’s this: The expectations for Saturday’s South Carolina primary have shifted so dramatically that even a razor-thin Romney victory will now be seen as a momentous triumph, while anything short of an outright win for Newt Gingrich will be regarded as a crushing disappointment.

The three most recent polls in the state all show Gingrich pushing into the lead after trailing by double-digits earlier this week, and RealClearPolitics’ polling average now puts him a point ahead of Romney. And it’s likely that Gingrich’s performance at Thursday night’s debate did nothing to slow his momentum, and may actually have increased it. So it’s not surprising that the Romney campaign is already seeking to soften the blow from a South Carolina loss. As the Huffington Post’s Jon Ward reported, one of Romney’s top surrogates, former New Hampshire Governor and Bush 41 Chief of Staff John Sununu, is again playing up the long game:

“I think you’re going to see the same kind of long slog that you saw in ’76, with [Gerald] Ford and [Ronald] Reagan, that it took the whole thing to win,” Sununu told reporters.

“This is a long slog,” Sununu said. “[Romney]‘s never suggested one or two or three primaries or caucuses would make the difference. The whole campaign has been designed to go through the long slog.”

Asked what Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, will need to do if Gingrich beats him in South Carolina, Sununu responded, “He has to do what they intended to do from the beginning: slog along.”

“Mitt Romney’s strength has been clearly defined as being ready for a long campaign under the new rules,” Sununu said.

This was the same message that Romney’s campaign emphasized back in December, when Gingrich opened wide leads in national and key early state polls. But when Gingrich’s numbers returned to earth and Romney posted victories in Iowa* and New Hampshire, the campaign didn’t exactly fight the conventional wisdom that a third win in South Carolina would effectively end the GOP contest.

Of course, Sununu’s basic point is right â€" financially and organizationally, Romney’s campaign does seem far more suited for a drawn-out battle than Gingrich. But Gingrich’s South Carolina rise is further proof of how unusually volatile this GOP race is â€" and how sensitive to shifts in the dominant press narrative public opinion can be. On the strength of two relatively unimpressive victories (one of which wasn’t even a victory, it turns out), Romney practically doubled his support nationally and opened commanding leads in South Carolina and Florida â€" two states that had seemed resistant to him for months. But just in the past few days, as the “Gingrich comeback” narrative has taken hold, that South Carolina lead has vanished and his national advantage has shrunk to just ten points.

Thus, the narrative that emerges from South Carolina Saturday night will go a long way toward shaping the GOP race in Florida. And here there are two very different possibilities:

• Romney holds off Gingrich: It was one of the worst weeks Romney’s campaign has faced, but in the end Republican voters in the Tea Party capital of America â€" a state where he finished a very distant fourth the last time he ran â€" found enough to like about Romney, and were clearly unnerved by the profound personal baggage of his chief rival, which featured prominently in the final pre-South Carolina debate and was aired by his ex-wife in an interview that aired 36 hours before voting began. By surviving a stiff test in such inhospitable territory, Romney has regained his footing, proven he can take a hit, and emerged well positioned to post another victory ten days from now in Florida.
• Gingrich completes his stunning comeback: Left for dead just a week ago, the former House Speaker revived his campaign with two dramatic debate performances and benefited from Mitt Romney’s self-inflicted tax wounds and his inability to win the trust of the conservative base â€" particularly evangelical voters, who may not be able to overlook his Mormon faith. Seen as the inevitable nominee at the start of this week, Romney now faces a troubling reality: He’s lost two of the first three contests, with his only victory coming in what is essentially his home state.  Florida, a state that provided one of the Tea Party movement’s signature primary season triumphs in 2010, now looms as a critical â€" maybe even do-or-die â€" test for him.

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Steve Kornacki writes about politics for Salon. Reach him by email at SKornacki@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @SteveKornacki  More Steve Kornacki