Headwinds lash Florida

Trump headwinds lash Florida GOP congressman

By MARC CAPUTO and MATT DIXON

In a tough season for the GOP, Republican Rep. Vern Buchanan this week will start running the first television ads of his reelection campaign, an earlier-than-usual move that underscores the challenges ahead for the six-term incumbent as Democrats target his seat.

The political headwinds, stirred by low approval ratings for President Donald Trump, have already struck Buchanan close to home. His son, James, lost a special election in a Republican-leaning state House seat that accounts for more than 21 percent of Florida’s 16th Congressional District represented by Buchanan.

The congressman’s initial cable TV ad spending is relatively small, $128,000, and is aimed at an eastern Hillsborough County section of his district that was added in 2015. The following year, Buchanan didn’t feel the need to advertise directly to these new voters and he comfortably won reelection.

But after recent Republican losses in bellwether contests in Pennsylvania, Alabama and South Florida, Buchanan is taking no chances in 2018.

“Vern has a tremendous record of accomplishment to talk about and we’re eager to get to it,” said Max Goodman, a Buchanan spokesman.

The ad is a 60-second spot that focuses on Buchanan’s biography. A normal political ad is 30 seconds, but with few other campaigns on air this early, air time is much cheaper for longer ads that are generally used to frame a candidate’s background.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee has included Buchanan’s seat on its list of districts it wants to flip. Buchanan, of Longboat Key, is being challenged by Democrat David Shapiro, a personal injury attorney from Siesta Key. Shapiro’s campaign quickly raised $250,000, a number that helped him quickly pass early viability tests from Republicans sizing him up.

But Buchanan has spent more than Shapiro has raised and the incumbent is still sitting on a mammoth $2.2 million war chest, in addition to his huge personal fortune. He is regularly ranked among Congress’ wealthiest members, a distinction that brought him extra scrutiny Monday from the Associated Press because of the windfall savings he’ll see under the new tax law he helped craft.

Shapiro’s campaign has cast the contest as a David-and-Goliath match-up and said the Feb. 13 contest that Buchanan’s son lost for Florida’s 72nd House District was a warm-up for the coming general election for the congressional seat.

In that special election, Democrat Margaret Good beat James Buchanan by 7.4 percentage points. In 2016, Trump carried it by 4.6 percentage points over Democrat Hillary Clinton.

“Good showed that the growing wave coming from the grassroots has the ability to overcome dynastic political families, as well as the threat of unlimited political spending,” Shapiro’s campaign said in a memo after the election. “The Buchanan name only gets you so far these days, as establishment Republicans in Washington continue to sink in popularity.”

Indeed, in the portion of the state House seat that overlaps with the congressional seat, the younger Buchanan lost to the Democrat by 8.1 points.

The state House seat overall is less Republican than the congressional seat, which Trump carried by nearly 11 points. And the new portion of the district that Buchanan is advertising in went for Trump by about 10 points, according to an analysis performed by Matthew Isbell, a Democratic data and election analyst.

“Buchanan getting on the airwaves early is symptom of the nervousness Republicans are feeling. Democratic wins in special elections in Pennsylvania and Alabama have made members that before thought they were safe nervous,” Isbell said in an email to POLITICO.

“Buchanan also has to be looking at what happened to his son in the HD72 election, where a seat that went for Trump by more than 4 [percent] went for the Democrat by 7 [percent],” he said. “If that 11-point swing occurs in CD16, Buchanan's Trump +11 seat could be in jeopardy.”