The Nation's Pulse: Lost Shepherd
Milyo, Jeff & Groseclose, Tim
"The Nation's Pulse: Lost Shepherd" by Jeff Milyo and Tim Groseclose Lost Shepherd By now most Americans have heard about Rep. Enid Greene Waldholtz (R-Utah) and her husband and campaign treasurer, Joe Waldholtz;...
...Money helps, but not to this degree...
...Given the conservative tilt of her district—only 31 percent of its voters backed Clinton in 1992, compared to 43 percent nationwide —and the fact that she was the only non-Mormon in Utah's congressional delegation, Shepherd's voting record was quite extraordinary...
...This mid-term swing alone was sufficient to swamp Shepherd's 1992 victory margin...
...Despite the contempt being showered on Waldholtz, however, a few facts and a little analysis make clear that this election was surely not bought...
...Twelve of them, including Shepherd, were defeated in the mid-term elections...
...Ellen Goodman of the Boston Globe opined that the election was "probably bought" and that Waldholtz should "give up her seat...
...She even vowed not to vote for any tax increases...
...Once federal investigators started asking questions about her campaign financing, Joe bolted, abandoning his wife and their new baby for six days before finally surrendering to authorities...
...The American Spectator • April 19 9 6 55...
...Enid has denied any wrong-doing, and claims to have been an unwitting victim...
...In her first year in office she voted with Clinton 79 percent of the time...
...like Clinton, she was a "new Democrat" who supported term limits and a balanced budget amendment...
...Levitt examined repeat meetings of House candidates (like Waldholtz-Shepherd) over the last twenty years...
...First-term House members are always vulnerable to defeat, and mid-term elections usually claim several victims from the president's party...
...She voted for Clinton's tax increase, his stimulus plan, his crime bill, family leave, the Brady Bill, gays in the military, and federal money for abortions...
...Mary McGrory of the Washington Post characterized her as "sniveling" and "a typical Republican overspender" who defeated the "much admired Karen Shepherd...
...Joe Waldholtz probably has a better chance of going home to flowers and a warm welcome...
...The 1994 race was not the first time that Waldholtz ran against Shepherd...
...the same seat in 1992...
...If one excludes the third-party votes, Waldholtz won 56 percent to 44...
...Political scientists at Stanford have analyzed the electoral fates of incumbent House Democrats in 1994...
...In the 1994 elections, Republican vote share increased six percentage points in the average district, and even more in the South and West...
...This record so incensed her constituents, in fact, that at one district meeting she was given a police escort...
...he is a con man who married her under false pretenses and then bilked her father out of five million dollars...
...Add to this mix the fact that Enid had since married and was about to start a family, and it isn't hard to see why voters dumped Shepherd...
...Enid Waldholtz won the race handily by nearly 20,000 votes, or 46 percent to 36 (a well-known third party candidate, Merrill Cook, got 18 percent...
...Once in Washington, however, Shepherd shed her "new Democrat" cloak...
...Shepherd was able to woo many Perot supporters...
...TIM GROSECLOSE is a post-doctoral fellow in political economy at Harvard and MIT...
...By contrast, of the twenty Democrats who represented conservative districtsbut voted with Clinton less than 75 percent of the time, only four were defeated in 1994...
...they had fought for JEFF MILYO is an assistant professor of economics at Tufts University...
...Levitt's statistical models indicate that, even if Joe Waldholtz had funneled the money into Karen Shepherd's campaign, Enid Waldholtz would still have won the election...
...Shepherd's support of Clinton did not aid her re-election prospects...
...Somehow $1.7 million of that money found its way into Enid's congressional campaign funds during her successful 1994 run for the House...
...Shepherd may want to blame him for the fact that barely more than one-third of her constituents thought she deserved another term, but that pig won't fly...
...This margin is simply too large to be explained by the $1.7 million in illegal campaign funds...
...the House average was 62 percent, and the Democrat average was 77 percent...
...She stole the election with illegal money," Shepherd claims, and a number of female commentators have come to her defense...
...Back then, Shepherd rode the anti-Bush wave and narrowly defeated Enid by 9,000 votes, a 51-47 percent margin, in an open seat election...
...The most telling evidence that this election wasn't bought comes from a study by Steve Levitt, an economist at Harvard University...
...Even without her voting record, however, Shepherd's re-election chances were grim...
...Pat Schroeder said Waldholtz tried to "claim victimhood and therefore shed responsibility...
...According to the Almanac of American Politics, it also helped that Shepherd was "not shy about pointing out in family-friendly Utah that she was a wife and mother and [Enid] was single...
...THE NATION'S PULSE by Jeff Milyo and Tim Groseclose Lost Shepherd By now most Americans have heard about Rep...
...but that hasn't placated Karen Shepherd, the former Democratic representative whom Waldholtz unseated...
...They note that in districts that gave Clinton less than 40 percent of the vote, only nineteen voted with Clinton more than 75 percent of the time...
Vol. 29 • April 1996 • No. 4
