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Bill Foster is one of three Democrats who turned politics upside down in the last three months by winning election to the House in conservative districts that Republicans had long held. By nearly any standard, his victory in the exurban Illinois district that House Speaker Dennis Hastert previously represented did not fit the standard campaign playbook.

If one outside factor pushed Foster over the top in his 53 percent to 47 percent win on March 8, it probably was the encouragement, advice, and abundant advertising from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. "The DCCC's help was absolutely crucial," Foster said in a recent interview in the Speaker's Lobby outside the House chamber. "It might have made a 5-point difference."

Rep. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., the DCCC chairman, emphasizes that the House Democrats' successes in the recent special elections were driven by far more than just Republican failures, as many in the news media have suggested. Although eager to credit the individual candidates for their wins, he also attributes the outcome to changes he has made to centralize operations at the campaign committee, where he took control after the party's pickup of 30 House seats in 2006. And he contends that the results bode well for the November election, despite the historical pattern that a party that scores a big gain in House seats usually suffers losses in the next cycle.

"When I took over as chairman, I was determined to stay on the offensive and increase the majority," Van Hollen said in a May 15 interview. "We don't need to hunker down or circle the wagons."

Van Hollen pushes an aggressive campaign strategy that seeks to keep the pressure on GOP candidates. "It's absolutely necessary to inform voters of opposition research," he said. Republicans have complained that Democrats have overreached and leveled some unfair charges, but Van Hollen maintains that the DCCC's more hands-on approach to campaign tactics and voter turnout were instrumental in the wins by Foster and the party's other recent special-election candidates.

ON THE BATTLEFIELDGrudge MatchesFive former House Republicans are trying to win back their seats from the Democrats who ousted them in 2006.Richard E. CohenDid the 2006 Democratic tidal wave catch some innocent Republican victims in its tow? This November, five former House GOP members hope to prove that was the case. [more...]

The Illinois outcome, plus House Democrats' equally stunning victories this month in Louisiana and Mississippi, hold sweeping implications for this fall's congressional campaigns. They boosted Democrats' confidence, dramatized the continuing drag on Republicans from President Bush's low public-approval ratings, and signaled that restoration of GOP control of the House is not in the cards this year. Democrats now hold a 236-199 majority.

The results are also a reminder that timing often is crucial in politics. Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., who chaired the DCCC in more Republican-friendly 2002, recalled that she made extensive efforts to attract "pro-God, pro-gun, pro-life" moderate Democratic candidates in conservative districts. "But I had the wind in my face," she said. "It was a very different climate than now."

The broader national climate is surely significant. Often overlooked, however, is the fact that both parties' campaign committees--with their in-the-trenches expertise and deep pockets--play a vital role these days in determining when and how House campaigns gain political traction where it counts: at the local level.

For now, many discouraged Republicans are wringing their hands and pointing fingers. Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia, who chaired the National Republican Congressional Committee from 1999 to 2002, is warning that his party's campaign apparatus is badly broken. In a 20-page memo to GOP leaders that circulated widely the day after Mississippi's May 13 special election, Davis said that the three recent defeats are "canaries in the coal mine, warning of far greater losses in the fall, if steps are not taken to remedy the current climate." He contended that the party's message is "stale" and "obsolete" and needs to be rethought, and he called for an overhaul of fundraising and strategy.

Even before their special-election losses, House Republicans were facing an unusually large number of retirements this fall, plus a criminal investigation of allegations that the NRCC treasurer stole large sums of money. "The hits keep on coming," grumbled Rep. Tom Cole, R-Okla., the NRCC chairman, in a May 8 interview hours after Rep. Vito Fossella, R-N.Y., acknowledged he fathered a child with his mistress. "In this environment, if you have a cut, you will get gangrene."

In the days immediately following the GOP defeat in Mississippi, speculation mounted that angry Republicans might, in fact, want to cut Cole loose and install a new chairman. House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, brushed aside such talk during a May 18 appearance on ABC's This Week. "Tom and I had a very good meeting on Friday--frank and constructive and positive," Boehner said. "He's staying."

As he plods on, Cole concedes that "our brand is an enormous problem" for Republicans. "I support and admire President Bush," he said. "But his approval numbers are in the high 20s, we have an unpopular war and a softening economy, plus the scandals" involving the legal and ethical problems of several GOP lawmakers during the previous and current Congress.

"This makes it difficult to maintain donor morale at our committee and to paint a positive outlook for our members and candidates," Cole acknowledged, while adding optimistically, "but it creates an opportunity for rejuvenation. We will have a large freshman class next year that will provide new energy."

Follow the Leader?

The differing backgrounds and routes to influence of the two House campaign committee chairmen help to explain some of the current political dynamics. It's significant that Democratic Caucus rules empower the party leader to tap the DCCC chairman, while the entire Republican Conference votes for the NRCC chairman.

The process required Cole to wage a grueling 18-month campaign against Reps. Phil English, R-Pa., and Pete Sessions, R-Texas, to secure the NRCC chairmanship. During that time, the three contenders had to choose sides in the February 2006 contest between Boehner and Rep. Roy Blunt, R-Mo., to succeed former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas, who had stepped down after his indictment. Cole was an early ally of Blunt, who narrowly lost. Although Cole insists he has good relations with Boehner, leadership contests can leave lingering animosities.

One consistent selling point for Cole, 59, is his lengthy background as a political operative. He served as Oklahoma GOP chairman, NRCC executive director, and chief of staff at the Republican National Committe; he also ran his own polling and political consulting firm before his election to Congress in 2002. "I have more experience with the [NRCC] than other chairmen in the past," he said. Cole, whose southern Oklahoma district features oil rigs and military facilities, also served in his state Senate and as secretary of state. He is the only Native American in Congress; his mother is in the Chickasaw Nation hall of fame.

Cole defended the GOP's campaign operation, which is more autonomous than the Democrats'. "It's good to have some separation, so that the committee is not seen as a club," he said. "It's important that members of the conference have a stake and responsibility."

During the last year, Boehner and Cole clashed repeatedly over strategy and resources, attracting considerable media attention in the process. In early May, Boehner created an advisory group of Republican lawmakers to oversee the NRCC and to assure accountability in its operations. Boehner and Cole on May 21 agreed to take additional steps, including an "audit" of how the NRCC handled the special elections.

On the other hand, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's influence at the DCCC is unmistakable. As was the case when Rep. Rahm Emanuel, D-Ill., held the DCCC chairmanship during the previous election cycle, Van Hollen consults with her constantly. She frequently visits the campaign committee's offices for political meetings and fundraising. Some top DCCC staffers--including Executive Director Brian Wolff and Communications Director Jennifer Crider--remain members of Pelosi's staff as well. "She is very active at the committee and knows the details," Crider said.

Republicans, for their part, have noticed improvements at the DCCC. Davis said that before Emanuel became chairman, the Democrats "were a step behind us" at the NRCC. But Van Hollen, in particular, "has made it a leadership committee, including a unity with the speaker's office," Davis noted.

Even before becoming chairman, Van Hollen had dealt closely with the DCCC: He received extensive support from the committee in his successful 2002 election challenge to veteran GOP Rep. Connie Morella, and in the 2005-06 cycle he co-chaired its "Red to Blue" program, which ultimately helped Democratic candidates capture 30 Republican seats.

That background helps to explain Van Hollen's sustained focus on seizing GOP-held seats. Shortly after the 2006 election, he convened his first meeting as chairman to review potential Democratic recruitment targets for the 2008 cycle. He and a core group of about eight Democratic members have continued to meet nearly every Thursday morning when the House is in session to plot strategy.

The 49-year-old Van Hollen, who represents high-income Montgomery County in the Washington suburbs, had a relatively upscale childhood. The son of a Foreign Service officer, he was born in Pakistan and worked at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee before he was elected to the Maryland Legislature.

During a 2006 interview with National Journal, Pelosi called Emanuel "as cold-blooded as I need him to be to make the decisions" as DCCC chairman, and his brash, in-your-face style is legendary. Although a bit lower key, Van Hollen is still scrappy and can take a hard-nosed political approach, too.

"I went through hard campaigns," Van Hollen observed, including his 2002 Democratic primary against Mark Shriver, a Kennedy scion who had the support of many national party activists and leading Maryland Democrats, including current Majority Leader Steny Hoyer. Van Hollen gave serious thought to running for an open Senate seat in 2006, although he ultimately deferred to more-senior Democrats. He is viewed as a likely contender to succeed Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., who will be 74 when her term expires in 2010. Asked about that prospect, he said, "You never know how events will unfold."

Pelosi has effusively praised Van Hollen's tenure so far. "From the beginning, he knew that winning tough races starts with recruiting the right candidates," she said in a May 16 memo touting the Democrats' victory in Mississippi. "By being prepared, focused, and organized, Chairman Van Hollen and his team recruited these talented candidates and provided them with the support they needed."

Van Hollen's close relationship with Pelosi has reaped rewards besides the DCCC chairmanship, including a seat on the Ways and Means Committee. Cole, by contrast, unsuccessfully sought to fill a vacancy on the Appropriations Committee early this year, although he secured what he views as a commitment from Boehner to join that panel in the next Congress.

Perhaps the biggest contrast between the two committees this cycle has been their fundraising. Each began with a huge debt from the 2006 campaign: $14.4 million for the NRCC and $9.3 million for the DCCC, as reported to the Federal Election Commission, albeit a bit higher once all bills were identified. But last year, the NRCC raised $49.5 million, compared with the DCCC's $67.5 million. And as of April 30, the NRCC had only $6.7 million cash-on-hand compared with the DCCC's $45.3 million.

Despite the DCCC's considerable fundraising advantage, Van Hollen cautioned that his committee does not have enough money to fully finance all of the opportunity contests he expects this year. His GOP counterpart, meanwhile, is obviously in far worse financial shape.

"I'm not critical that we went into debt to save a lot of seats" in 2006, Cole said. "But when you lose the majority and go into debt, there are consequences. I walked into a broken committee, because we had lost a war and the faucets were pulled out of the castle."

In the Trenches

Contrary to the three recent stunners that shifted party control, eight other special elections to fill vacant House seats in 2007 and 2008 turned out largely as expected. These contests were relatively conventional, although some of the candidates said they were keenly aware of the public's anti-Washington sentiment.

For instance, in the October special election for the seat of former Rep. Martin Meehan, D-Mass., who resigned to become a university chancellor, Democrat Niki Tsongas defeated Republican Jim Ogonowski. She was making her first bid for public office and had not lived in Washington since her late husband, Paul Tsongas, left the Senate in 1984. Her opponent painted himself as a political outsider, even though he benefited from NRCC ads, but Tsongas said she had limited dealings with the DCCC and instead relied heavily on a local team of advisers.

"Special elections are unique. You focus on your base," she said. Tsongas's victory was unexpectedly close: 51 percent to 45 percent.

In the December special election to fill the seat of the late Rep. Paul Gillmor, R-Ohio, Republican Bob Latta defeated Democrat Robin Weirauch, who had challenged Gillmor in 2006. Latta's 14-point victory was identical to Gillmor's in his win over Weirauch. The NRCC and DCCC each spent a few hundred thousand dollars in the race. "I talked to Tom Cole, who wanted to know how things were going," recounted Latta, who served a decade as a state legislator. "Because of the outside help [Weirauch] received, I needed all the help I could get."

The dynamics shifted with the three recent special elections in which the districts went from red to blue. Those contests have set the tone for the fall's House campaigns. In their wake, both parties are scrambling to assess their significance and to respond accordingly.

In his March 8 race for Hastert's seat, the victorious Foster got a big boost from the DCCC. A physicist for 22 years at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory outside Chicago, he also ran a small theater-lighting business with his brother that made him a millionaire. Foster had not sought public office before, and he entered politics in 2006 as a volunteer for Democrat Patrick Murphy, who ousted a House Republican in suburban Philadelphia. Why Murphy? "He was somebody I believed in, and he had a chance to win," recounted Foster, who developed a computerized get-out-the-vote system to help Murphy's campaign. The 52-year-old Foster then spent five months working on Murphy's staff on Capitol Hill.

After Hastert resigned in November, Foster paid for a detailed poll that surprisingly revealed that the district's voters would be attracted to a centrist Democrat who was "moderately pro-choice" on abortion and had a business and science background. "I went into the campaign knowing that it was long odds but that we had a chance to win," he recalled. Running in the Democratic primary against the more liberal Jonathan Laesch, who had lost to Hastert 60 percent to 40 percent in 2006, Foster got a break when Sen. Richard Durbin, D-Ill., endorsed him. "That was huge, and it divided the labor vote," Foster said.

At least as important to the outcome was the backstage support of the DCCC. As Foster later learned, Van Hollen quietly steered fundraising help to him in the primary. Although the campaign committee typically does not endorse contenders in a primary, "we can help shape the environment so that Republicans face a tougher race," spokeswoman Crider said. "We work behind the scenes with reporters, with bloggers, with activists to shape the narrative. When the primary was over, the narrative was already in place."

Foster won the February 5 primary 50 percent to 43 percent, after which the DCCC took a more prominent role. It financed more than $1 million in independent expenditures, mostly in the form of negative advertising that harshly criticized the Hastert-backed Republican nominee, Jim Oberweis, a dairy owner who had lost statewide campaigns previously. On Election Day, the campaign committee sent Democratic aides and insiders, including Rep. Jan Schakowsky of nearby Chicago, a close Pelosi ally, to get out the vote. "The DCCC did a lot of coordination with the Illinois delegation," Foster said.

The NRCC was likewise active in the race with many similar efforts, including spending $1.2 million on ads. Despite the widespread criticism of Oberweis's campaign, Cole maintained, "We helped him. We didn't fail." He noted that Republicans faced their own bitter primary in that contest, with the loser failing to endorse Oberweis, and that Foster got a bounce from an appearance by home-state Sen. Barack Obama.

Behind the scenes, Foster may also have benefited from Van Hollen's decision during the campaign to have the DCCC do its own research, rather than continue to use contractors. "We have organized a capability for rapid response for our candidates ... by quickly gathering information on [GOP] candidates," Van Hollen noted. He said that during the Illinois race, "we went into overdrive," as he met at least once daily with DCCC staff to review tactical decisions. That approach is part of what Pelosi often describes as her "five P's": Proper preparation prevents poor performance.

In the May 3 special election for the seat of former Rep. Richard Baker, R-La., Democrats found that too much preparation can be perilous. Democrats got an early start because they planned to run against Baker even before he announced his resignation in January to head the Managed Funds Association. By that point, Van Hollen had recruited and met his favored candidate--state Rep. Don Cazayoux. When Michael Jackson, a Democratic state lawmaker who is African-American, entered the contest to replace Baker, Van Hollen said that the DCCC shifted to neutral.

After Cazayoux won the primary 57 percent to 43 percent, Jackson objected that national Democrats had favored his opponent and said he might run as an independent for the two-year term in November. Although Van Hollen insisted that "we stepped back" from the primary, the DCCC moved quickly with a host of services for Cazayoux in his four-week campaign against Republican Woody Jenkins, providing research, communications, field operations, and at least $1.2 million in ads.

In the May 13 runoff for the seat of former Rep. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., who was appointed to the Senate, Republicans learned an unexpected lesson when their ads--seeking to link Democratic nominee Travis Childers to his national party, including Pelosi and Obama--backfired. "It's fairly clear that the attempt to paint someone as too liberal just doesn't work," Rep. Eric Cantor, R-Va., the chief deputy minority whip, told reporters the day after Mississippi voters went to the polls. A GOP leadership aide blamed party consultants and other advisers for launching "a group-think that runs campaigns %C3%A0 la 1986."

Among those most interested in the special-election results are the vulnerable House members--and their opponents--who face tough contests in November. Not surprisingly, Democrats, such as freshman Rep. John Yarmuth of Kentucky, see great significance in the races of the past three months. "The results tell me that the Republican coalition has unraveled and that their tactics are not as effective," Yarmuth said. "Their use of social issues and neocon philosophy no longer is so important, compared to jobs, health care, and retirement."

But former Rep. Anne Northup, R-Ky., whom Yarmuth ousted in 2006 and who is trying to get her seat back this year, is not concerned about any national trend. "We lose when we have flawed local candidates," Northup said. "That's not Tom Cole's fault."

The Campaign Ahead

Given the unusual and uncertain dynamics of this year's race for the White House, the House campaign bosses understand they are mostly on their own. They cannot count on coattails from the top of the ticket or guarantees of a 50-state campaign.

Of course, congressional Democrats could benefit from the increased voter turnout that has marked their party's long-running nomination battle. But Van Hollen says he isn't taking anything for granted. "In many states, we can't piggyback on a presidential candidate," he said. "We don't want our incumbents or our challengers to have to rely on somebody else's get-out-the-vote operation."

Republicans hope that their presumptive nominee, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, will open doors to more voters, including independents, conservative Democrats, Hispanics, and Jews. In a May 14 conference call with reporters, Cole said that polls show McCain "running a lot better than a generic Republican," but he cautioned that GOP congressional candidates will not automatically reap the benefit. Those who are "bold and take tough positions will do well," Cole said. "We need to take a lesson from McCain."

Davis, meanwhile, said he believes that once both parties have selected their presidential nominees and start to compete with each other, "voters will start looking at the campaign differently."

Given the entrepreneurial political environment, congressional leaders cannot force their campaign dictates on rank-and-file members. But few House members and challengers can afford to rely on state and local party organizations and that increases the need for them to go along with national leaders. Plus, House leaders in both parties use the lure of prime committee assignments and other perks to enforce party discipline. In varying ways, their campaign committees have become vital arms of those internal networks.

As they endure the exhausting run to November 4, both Cole and Van Hollen will face countless pressures on where and how to spend their finite resources, and how to advise candidates on this year's tricky political course. Second-guessing comes with the territory. Even the successful Emanuel conceded he missed some opportunities in 2006 contests where Democrats were narrowly defeated.

Although neither chairman ruled out seeking another term in their separate interviews, there has been widespread speculation that both plan to move on after the election. "I took this job for one term, and I am focused on this cycle," Van Hollen said.

For his part, the embattled Cole said he sometimes regrets missing his legislative work because of his NRCC commitments but adds he took the position because it's what his party wanted. As for the controversy, he said, "I expect internal strife. You always get more credit--and more blame--than you deserve."