Democrats not lining up to take on Capito

At this time two years ago, Rep. Shelley Moore Capito had three Democrats vying to challenge her, including a prominent state senator.

With a year to go before the 2010 election, the picture is very different.

Whether wary of predictions that next year’s election will be favorable to Republicans in general or simply weary after five costly, high-profile failures at ousting the state’s lone congressional Republican, potential Capito challengers are scarce in the 2nd District.

“If you’re running as a challenger in District 2, you’re fighting an uphill battle,” said Jim White, a political scientist at Concord University. “In 2010, your chances of winning are not good.”

A big part of the reason is incumbency, White said. Incumbents are overwhelmingly re-elected in the U.S., and this state is no exception. In West Virginia, 1982 was the last time a congressional incumbent was unseated by a challenger, when Democrat Bob Wise defeated Republican Mick Staton.

Calculations about the national political climate also play a role, White said. If Democrats are worried about losing seats to surging Republicans, they’ll devote more money to defending vulnerable lawmakers than trying to unseat incumbents.

“If the Democratic Party’s got extra money, they’re going to spend it defending some of the ground they gained in 2008,” he said.

As of the end of last month, one Democrat had filed pre-candidacy paperwork declaring his intention to run against Capito. South Char-leston resident David Harless, a political unknown, didn’t return calls to a telephone number listed for his address.

In contrast, by May 2007, Berkeley County Sen. John Unger had made it plain he would challenge Capito. Although he left the race in early 2008, at the party’s Jefferson-Jackson fundraiser in 2007, Unger was unofficially declared the party’s standard-bearer.

This year’s Jefferson-Jackson dinner has come and gone, with no Democrat of Unger’s prominence publicly announcing a challenge to Capito.

“I’m sure the Democrats will have a candidate to run against her, just as they have in every previous race,” Capito campaign spokesman Kent Gates said.

Democrats may be leery of such a challenge considering what happened last year. After Unger left the race, Anne Barth, a longtime aide to Sen. Robert C. Byrd, won the Democratic primary.

In a year with popular Democrats like Gov. Joe Man-chin and Sen. Jay Rockefeller on the ticket, a campaign visit on Barth’s behalf by then-Sen. Hillary Clinton and a national climate that heavily favored Democrats, 2008 looked like a golden opportunity to unseat Capito. Instead, she won with roughly 57 percent of the vote.

“I’ll let the election results speak for themselves,” Gates said. “Voters know her work, know who she is, and they know how hard she works for them.”

With no statewide races of comparable interest in 2010, and a vastly different national political outlook, the prospect for Democrats is grim, White said.

Capito will have a Democratic challenger next year, state Democratic Party Chairman Nick Casey said. But persuading someone to undertake the hard, expensive work of campaigning has not been as easy as in past years, he acknowledged.

“This is a year where there’s not a lot of excitement, in a broad sense,” he said. “There’s not a marquee, statewide race to generate excitement. I think that probably helps incumbents.”

The only statewide race on the ballot this year will determine who fills the remainder of the Supreme Court term of Justice Joseph Albright, who died this year.

Capito, meanwhile, has not been idle. At the end of December, her campaign had more than $250,000 on hand, and Gates said she’ll likely file the necessary paperwork for her re-election bid soon.