Russ Feingold and Winning After Losing

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI)

This past week, Sen. Russ Feingold made a major announcement in Wisconsin, announcing his candidacy for the U.S. Senate.  Sen. Feingold ran for and lost the seat six years ago, but seems determined to win his former seat, passing on perhaps more robust opportunities for the Senate in 2012 and the governor's mansion in 2012/2014.  This comes on the continued heels of Sen. Mark Begich persistently putting himself into the conversation for the 2016 Alaska Senate race, as well as amidst efforts to recruit Sen. Kay Hagan to run once again in North Carolina after a close loss in 2014.  Even former Sen. Evan Bayh, who retired in 2010, is being pushed to consider a comeback in the Hoosier State after the retirement of Sen. Dan Coats.  All of this has made me wonder-does being a former senator actually help you in reclaiming a Senate seat, or are all of these candidates faded glory, perhaps more likely to have a repeat of their previous defeats than have success at the polls next November?

It's an interesting question on-paper, after all, since these candidates all have won, sometimes multiple times, in their home states but with the exception of Bayh (who retired), they all have their most recent attempt at higher office being a loss.  In the cases of Hagan and Begich, they both were at the mercy of the weirdly cyclical swing we've seen between presidential and midterm elections in recent years.  Both senators defeated incumbent Republicans, both icons of the party (Elizabeth Dole, former presidential candidate, and Ted Stevens, President Pro Tempore of the Senate) during a huge wave election in 2008, though it's worth noting both candidates outperformed President Barack Obama in their home states.  Then they both got tied down by the President in 2014, when the Midterms resulted in massive losses for the Democrats (not just in their states but with a staggering five incumbent Democrats losing that cycle, ending a recent trend of incumbent Democrats having robust success at winning reelection).  With Sen. Feingold, it's a little different.  After defeating two-term U.S. Senator Bob Kasten (despite Bill Clinton only winning a plurality of the vote in the state in 1992), Feingold survived cycles both good (1998) and bad (2004) for the Democrats with relative ease.  It was only in 2010, when many claim he realized too late that he was running in a close election, that he finally faltered to someone with polar opposite views to his, becoming one of two Democratic incumbent senators to lose in the massive onslaught of 2010.  Finally, it's worth noting that while Sen. Bayh didn't lose in 2010, he did avoid an election many thought would be a tough challenge for him and that his seemingly competent Democratic successor, Rep. Brad Ellsworth, ended up being crushed in the general election.

As a result, the Democrats running (or potentially running) for the Senate in 2016 have to find a way to recapture what caused them to win in the first place while avoiding the mistakes of their losses.  They have what will surely be a more even-handed cycle than 2010 or 2014, provided that Hillary Clinton doesn't bomb on the campaign trail.  Feingold, in particular, has the comfort of knowing his state has gone Democratic since 1988, so there's a strong possibility that he'll have a top-of-the-ticket that will be going with Sec. Clinton (this, plus Sen. Ron Johnson's approval ratings, are why I think the Democrats' best shot at winning back a seat will be in the Badger State).  However, they also have to take a hard-look at their past candidacies and realize that vendettas, pettiness, or especially wiping away mistakes based simply on "the cycle" is not going to fly.  Feingold in particular ran too late in the contest, relying on past performance and the dynamics of his light blue state to carry him past the victory line-that's not going to work in modern digital campaigning, and he'll be a particularly interesting case study in the post-Citizens United world due to his longtime association with campaign finance reform.

Looking at past examples, though, we realize that there are rare cases where you can win back a Senate seat after losing an election.  The most recent example of this is Sen. Slade Gorton.  Gorton, like many of these candidates, was a victor as a result of a wave (the 1980 Reagan landslides), defeating an iconic longtime senator in Warren Magnuson (who was President Pro Tempore at the time).  Six years later, though, the conditions were toxic for Republicans and being in a blue state wasn't going to help him much, as Rep. Brock Adams crushed him.  Two years later, he came and won the state's Senate seat despite Gov. Michael Dukakis winning at the top of the ticket (both elections were close).  Gorton went on to serve two more terms in the Senate before permanently being retired by Maria Cantwell in a microscopically close election in 2000.

It's worth noting that Gorton's feat is rare.  Before him the last senator to win after losing was Sen. Howard Metzenbaum, and he lost in a primary, not a general election.  Other men like Kent Conrad, Frank Lautenberg, and Dan Coats all won Senate seats after giving them up, but they did so after retiring, not after losing the election.  More often-than-not, senators tend to lose if they've lost before (though, quite frankly, usually they don't run again to begin with).  Recent examples include Sen. Rudy Boschwitz, who, like Feingold, gave up easier shots at returning to office (most people agree that Boschwitz would have had a cleared field in 1994 had he run and considering the national climate almost certainly would have won, similarly to Feingold in 2012, but decided to push for an unsuccessful attempt at beating the man who defeated him).  Other senators, it should be noted, tend to sort of be jokes when they run again-people like Larry Pressler and Bob Smith have run for seats after losing, but they ended up being wildly unsuccessful.  Even iconic senators like Walter Mondale have missed out on opportunities to win after retiring.

Still, though, it's worth noting that duplicating Gorton's success isn't impossible, particularly if Hillary Clinton does well.  It's within the realm of possibility that she wins Wisconsin and either wins or comes close to winning North Carolina, which would be a similar situation to Gorton in 1988.  Perhaps the biggest challenge for the Democrats in these states is the fact that Gorton won an open seat, not defeating an incumbent.  The last time an incumbent lost reelection and then defeated another incumbent was in 1948, when Iowa Sen. Guy Gillette came off a loss in 1944 (due to initially declining support to Great Britain prior to Pearl Harbor) to win during the 1948 Truman victories.  That's a long time to go between defeat and victory, though as we constantly learn, history has a way of being the rule until it doesn't.  Still, Feingold, Hagan, and Begich all have a pretty steep hill to climb if they want to reach the World's Most Exclusive Club again.