The Fighting 29th

All about New York's 29th Congressional District

Hot buttons are issues of deep interest to a small, well-funded and vocal set of advocacy groups. They are the prickly pear cactus hidden in the lush green field of election-year politics. For politicians on the "right" side of a given hot button, they're a source of delicious, sugary treats. For anyone else, they're a hard-to-remove pain in the ass.

If you're an incumbent, the hot button advocates plow through your record with a fine-toothed comb and "grade" you. Those grades are usually "A" or "F" -- hot-button advocates require purity and slavish devotion to their cause. Challengers are also graded, often via the use of questionnaires.

Everybody's got a slightly different list of hot buttons. Abortion (including stem cell research), gay marriage and gun control are three* on my radar for the 29th. The addition of stem cells to the right-to-life/pro-choice debate adds some more fuel to this blazing pyre. The recent New York Supreme Court ruling on gay marriage has kept this issue front-and-center among state residents. And the 29th is New York's most rural district, so gun control is probably of more general interest here than downstate.

So let's see if there are any thorns in the garden for John R "Randy" Kuhl Jr.

On the three hot buttons mentioned above, Kuhl sits clearly on one side of the fence. He's got a 100% right-to-life rating, voted for the constitutional amendment to define marriage as the union of man and woman, and there's no reason to think he won't get another "A" rating from the NRA.

When it comes to gun control, Randy's in tune with his rural / suburban district.  A gun in the 29th means hunting, not urban assault, so his long-time stand on this issue should continue to cause him few if any problems come election time.

Gay marriage is politically interesting because it is so new that interest groups and voter opinion hasn't really gelled to the same degree as abortion and gun control. Though Rochester has a large GLBT community, that's primarily an urban phenomenon that doesn't reach into Randy's district. In addition, I don't see the GLBT community spending a lot of money on this issue. That's because the gay special interest groups seem to be suffering from Radiohead syndrome: they're so fucking special. The main gay PAC raised and spent twice what right-to-lifers raised in the recent cycle, but they used it all to fund gay and lesbian candidates. That may be a good long-term strategy (if you're measuring political progress in geologic time), but it sure doesn't put any money into defeating foes of gay rights in 2006.   

Having dodged the gay rights cactus, I'm afraid that Randy perhaps has impaled himself on an unexpected right-to-life prickle: stem cells. Abortion used to be so easy for a player: if you are right-to-life, you pick up the "hard right" and lose the "hard left". If you are pro-choice, expect the opposite. But stem cells have changed the landscape. This will be the first election where a solid vote (and veto) are part of the election debate. In the Greenberg Quinlan Rosner poll [pdf] of the 50 most contested districts, stem cell research was the top issue that made respondents more likely to support a Democrat. The stem cell issue might well be a crossover issue among older voters or voters who have personal experience with some of the diseases that could benefit from this new research.

Eric Massa is holding a press conference on the topic of stem cell research this morning in Rochester.  So he clearly thinks that this issue has legs.  We'll examine his position on the hot buttons in more depth soon.

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* I intentionally left flag-burning off this list - just because I hate writing about such a non-issue.