GOP ‘tsunami’ predicted for exurbia, South, Mountain States

Former Rep. Thomas M. Davis III, the architect of previous Republican campaign successes, says outer-suburban voters eager to place a check on President Obama and Democrats are swinging back to the GOP and will power a Republican resurgence in New England, while aiding GOP “tsunamis” in Virginia, Colorado and Iowa.

Mr. Davis, the current president of the Republican Main Street Partnership, a group of the party’s more moderate lawmakers, told reporters Wednesday that the GOP has had its best-ever year of recruiting candidates for congressional elections, which has helped put so many seats into play.

He said Democrats are having a tough time reaching a balance of keeping regular voters happy while also appeasing the liberal voters who surged to the polls in the 2008 election.

“Those are the problems Democrats have coming in. The surge voters right now, they’re asleep. And the outer suburbs, the South, the mountain states, I think you can look for Republican tsunamis,” Mr. Davis said. “You’re going to have big years.”

A sign of how bad Republican fortunes have been the past two elections is their ouster from New England, where the GOP no longer holds any House seats. But Mr. Davis said Republicans will capture seats there this year, including both New Hampshire districts.

On Wednesday, Mr. Davis’ predecessor at the Main Street Partnership, former Rep. Charlie Bass, said he’ll run to try to recapture the House seat from New Hampshire that he lost in 2006 to Rep. Paul W. Hodes. Mr. Hodes is vacating the seat to run for the Senate.

Mr. Bass, who must face a bruising primary, drew immediate fire from New Hampshire Democratic Party Chairman Ray Buckley, who said running a repeat candidate was bad news for Republicans.

“The last thing we need right now is to go back to the policies that Bass’ record represents. Charlie’s call for a U-turn to those failed policies shows how grossly out of touch he is with the need to move our country forward and get our economy back on track,” Mr. Buckley said.

Democrats are eagerly watching primary battles such as the one Mr. Bass will fight with candidates born out of the “tea party” movement.

“The GOP civil war is alive and well and it’s playing out in House races all over the country,” said Ryan Rudominer, a spokesman for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee.

Mr. Davis acknowledged those intraparty battles, and said the tea party movement is a real force in politics, though it’s not clear how that plays out. He said they have a message, but without money they won’t be able to make much noise.

“The tea party people have started a parade and now you have all these politicians trying to jump in front of the parade,” he said.

The congressman said if Republicans gain fewer than 25 seats in the House it would have to be considered an upset, and they start with an assumed gain of five or six Senate seats though he cautioned that the atmosphere could tilt back in Democrats’ favor over the next nine months.

Mr. Davis ran the National Republican Congressional Committee in the 2000 and 2002 election cycles, and helped Republicans buck history by winning seats in the midterm elections when their party also held the White House.

From 1995 through 2008, he represented a seat in Northern Virginia, but when he retired the seat was won by Rep. Gerald E. Connolly, a Democrat.

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