Nancy Pelosi key cog in GOP strategy; her name aired in Congress race in Arkansas' 2nd District

State Rep. Clarke Tucker is among a handful of Democratic congressional candidates who have openly opposed the leadership of Nancy Pelosi in the face of Republican attempts to link them to the House Democrat.
State Rep. Clarke Tucker is among a handful of Democratic congressional candidates who have openly opposed the leadership of Nancy Pelosi in the face of Republican attempts to link them to the House Democrat.

French Hill and Clarke Tucker agree on at least one thing: Nancy Pelosi shouldn't lead the U.S. House of Representatives.

They disagree, though, on whether the California Democrat has anything to do with their race for Arkansas' 2nd Congressional District seat.

If the past week is any indication, central Arkansas voters should be accustomed to hearing about Pelosi, the House minority leader.

Since Tucker secured the Democratic nomination on Tuesday, Republican groups locally and nationally have tied Tucker to Pelosi, despite his repeated insistence that he wouldn't support her for House leadership.

Even before Tuesday's primary, Hill, a two-term Republican incumbent, released an ad that opened with a clip of Pelosi on Fox Business Network. On Friday, the top hit on a Google search for "Clarke Tucker Arkansas" was a website -- clarketuckerandpelosi2018.com -- created by the political action committee of Arkansas' junior U.S. senator, Tom Cotton. The one-page site features cutouts of Tucker's and Pelosi's faces.

"Clarke Tucker is Nancy Pelosi's top choice ... But he stands for Pelosi's values, not for Arkansas," the page reads.

Tucker, a two-term state representative and attorney from Little Rock, said the site "would be funny if it weren't so sad." He said he'd rather focus on improving education, health care and worker's wages.

"While Rep. Hill and other Washington Republicans seem to be interested only in D.C. politicians, I am focused entirely on what matters, the people of central Arkansas and the issues affecting us," he said in a statement.

For the past decade, Pelosi has been one of Republicans' favorite punching bags, starring in numerous GOP attack ads dating back to the 2006 midterms. Indeed, Pelosi, who in 2007 became the first female speaker of the U.S. House, has been targeted at twice the rate of other congressional leaders from both parties since 2012, according to the Wesleyan Media Project, which tracks political advertising.

During Hill's first U.S. House run in 2014, the National Republican Congressional Committee tied his opponent, former North Little Rock Mayor Patrick Hays, to Pelosi.

Democrats have absorbed the blows in past election cycles, but a handful of Democratic candidates like Tucker have responded to the Pelosi attacks by openly opposing her leadership. Most notably, Pennsylvania Democrat Conor Lamb won a House seat earlier this year in a district that President Donald Trump won by 20 points after Lamb declared in the final weeks of his campaign that he wouldn't support Pelosi for House leadership.

Hill, a former banker, defended invoking Pelosi, saying she's relevant to the campaign because she's the spokesman for the Democratic agenda.

"No matter how you slice it, if the Democrats take the House, a vote for a Democrat is a vote for the Democratic agenda, and it's a vote for Nancy Pelosi," Hill said in a Friday phone interview. "I believe the Democratic agenda is an important aspect of the campaign because she has advocated, and the Democratic Party in the House has advocated for higher taxes and bigger government."

Hill said Democrats, if they reclaim a majority in the House, would reverse the progress made on regulatory and tax reform. In particular, he mentioned Pelosi's opposition to the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, which was signed into law last year.

The tax overhaul, Hill said, will cut income taxes "up and down the income ladder," double the child tax credit, increase the flexibility of education savings accounts, make corporate tax rates more competitive and decrease the estate tax burden on small businesses and farms.

Tucker has said he supports parts of the federal tax legislation that slash income taxes owed by middle- and low-income earners, but he said the bill was "by and large handouts to America's largest corporations."

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has attacked Hill's record on health care, chiefly his vote in support of the American Health Care Act of 2017, which would have partially repealed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, commonly known as Obamacare.

The Democratic committee, citing an article by Georgetown University's Health Policy Institute Center for Children and Families, said the bill would've jeopardized Arkansas Works, the state's version of Medicaid expansion, which uses Medicaid funds to provide private health insurance to about 280,000 Arkansans. Ultimately, the bill failed to pass in the Senate.

Elections experts are skeptical as to whether invoking Pelosi will flip any votes. Voters who are appalled by Pelosi wouldn't vote for a Democrat anyway, said John Hudak, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, a public policy think tank in Washington, D.C.

There could be other strategies at play, though, Hudak said. Republicans may be using the House minority leader to energize their base to ensure it turns out to vote.

The other strategy, Hudak said, may be to get Democrats on the record opposing Pelosi, so that if the House does flip, she won't be re-elected House speaker. Republicans would never admit it, Hudak said, but they might think she was too effective as speaker of the House from 2007-11.

"Republicans may be thinking, 'We've seen her in action, and we don't want her back in action,'" Hudak said, noting that Pelosi was an extremely effective vote counter.

Gary Nordlinger, a professor at George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management, said he didn't think Republicans were "playing that long of a game," but he agreed the strategy was unlikely to win votes.

"It's May 25. Looking at your typical persuadable voter, they don't really start paying attention until much closer to November," Nordlinger said.

Pelosi is 78, and younger Democrats are becoming emboldened to support new leaders. Nordlinger suspects her departure will in some ways be a disappointment to both parties.

The Democrats will have lost a key fundraiser and a leader who broke through Congress' glass ceiling. The Republicans, Nordlinger said, will have lost their biggest target.

photo

AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-California, waits to speak at the Polk County Democrats Spring Dinner, Sunday, May 6, 2018, in Des Moines, Iowa.

A Section on 05/28/2018

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