Battle under way to define cap-and-trade’s role in Dems’ beating

Environmentalists, GOP strategists and others are offering sharply 
different views about whether votes for cap-and-trade legislation played a big role in the demise of the Democrats’ House majority.


A slew of the 211 Democrats who voted for the sweeping 2009 House 
climate bill lost their seats Tuesday, such as Reps. Rick Boucher (Va.), Zack Space (Ohio), Tom Perriello (Va.) and John Boccieri
 (Ohio).


“If you push a cap-and-trade bill that will destroy jobs and hurt the economy at a time when America is at a high unemployment rate, you are 
going to suffer consequences,” Ron Bonjean, a Republican 
strategist and former House and Senate GOP leadership aide, said Tuesday 
night.

But in Kentucky, a coal state like Virginia, Rep. John Yarmuth (D) won his race and Rep. Ben Chandler (D) appeared headed for victory in one of the tightest races of the election. Both voted for the bill.

Jeremy Symons of the National Wildlife Federation Action Fund pointed to 
their wins and the victory of Rep. Heath Shuler (D-N.C.), another lawmaker from a conservative-leaning region who supported the House bill last year.



“The only 2 incumbent Dems in this coal state, both Chandler and 
Yarmuth voted for the clean energy bill. This is a dog-bites-man story. In a state won big by McCain 2 years ago and by [GOP Senate 
candidate] Rand Paul today, these two House Democrats stood tall on clean energy and voters rewarded them for doing the right thing,” Symons said of the Kentucky results in an email to reporters Tuesday night.


Tony Massaro of the League of Conservation Voters had a slightly different take: Cap-and-trade wasn’t decisive one way or the other in House races.

He
 notes that the GOP wave also swept away a number of the 44 Democrats 
who voted against the climate bill, such as Charlie Wilson (D-Ohio) and Kathy Dahlkemper (D-Pa.).



“I don’t really see that ACES [the American Clean Energy and Security
Act] played a particularly significant role in the election either way,” said Massaro, LCV’s senior vice president for political affairs,
in an interview Tuesday night. “Democrats are losing and it doesn’t
matter which way they voted on ACES.”


Symons tallied the votes and concluded that 60 percent of the Democrats who voted against the climate bill lost Tuesday.


Massaro notes that the one place where emissions limits were explicitly on
the ballot – California’s Proposition 23 ballot initiative  – 
advocates successfully defended that state’s climate change law.



But Republican strategist Mike McKenna said cap-and-trade was one of three 
issues — alongside the health care and economic stimulus bills — that
 Democrats “were getting dinged on.” None more so than Boucher. “Cap and trade damaged all these other guys but it destroyed Rick Boucher,”
 McKenna said.



Joshua Freed, director of the clean energy program at the centrist
Democratic Third Way think tank, agreed.

“The one race so far where it
 made a difference was in Rick Boucher’s district certainly, and the 
ironic thing there is Boucher probably crafted as good a deal for the
 coal industry that anyone could ever have hoped,” Freed said. “And
 conventional energy ends up losing a really strong voice in the U.S. House tonight.”



On the other hand, Freed and NRDC Action Fund Director Heather Taylor-Miesle believe Perriello’s unabashed support for last year’s cap-and-trade bill helped him keep his race with Republican Robert Hurt closer than it otherwise would have been.

“He should have been dust 
months ago and he wasn’t,” Taylor-Miesle said. “He took hard votes and
he didn’t run away from them.”