In key Senate race, a headwind for Democrat Houck

FREDERICKSBURG — Edd Houck is facing his eighth contested election, but he has to go back nearly 25 years to recall one as demanding and close as this year’s Senate race against Republican challenger Bryce Reeves.

“I’ve had to fight for every one of them,” Houck said, looking tired late one afternoon last week with an evening political rally still ahead of him before he could call it a day. “But this is what I want to do. I would be here anyway, in the thick of it. I’m not finished.”

At stake in this 17th Senate District race is whether the GOP can consolidate its grip on state policymaking by winning back the Senate majority the Democrats won in 2007.

With a net gain of three seats, Republicans would hold an outright majority in the Senate in addition to a comfortable House of Delegates margin and the governor’s office. With a gain of two seats, they achieve a 20-20 split in the 40-member Senate but with Republican Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling breaking tie votes.

Senatorial candidate committees had raised $15.4 million by Sept. 30 in this make-or-break election, with millions more in the hands of partisan political action committees and independent nonprofit organizations that don’t have to disclose their fundraising sources. In September alone, Democratic and GOP party organizations disbursed slightly more than $1 million, most of it to candidates in key contests such the race between Houck and Reeves.

A former undercover Prince William County drugs and vice detective, Reeves left police work and opened his own business. His exposure to government regulatory hassles nudged him toward politics. He ran unsuccessfully for a Spotsylvania County Board of Supervisors seat in 2007 but his conservative outlook, his gregarious nature and chiseled good looks served him well within the local GOP committee. He became the Spotsylvania GOP chairman and in 2009 chaired Gov. Bob McDonnell’s gubernatorial election campaign in the county.

Reeves is waging this race on familiar Republican themes, promising state spending reductions, a lighter and more stable government regulatory environment and never to vote to raise taxes.

He’s opposing a Democrat in a year when a Democratic president’s low popularity energizes GOP voters. He’s running in a redrawn district that voted 61.2 percent for McDonnell in 2009. The 17th District now includes part of northeastern Albemarle County, Orange County and most of Louisa County.

He assails Houck for supporting tax and fee increases and vaguely asserts that Houck has been mute in advocating for the fast-growing region where Northern Virginia suburbia is sprawling into conservative, still-rural Virginia.

“I see where we lack leadership and job growth and all those things that are very important to folks in the 17th District,” he said in an Associated Press interview last week. “Edd wants to grow jobs for government. That’s not the way you create a vibrant economy.”

Spotsylvania’s unemployment rate for August was 5.6 percent, the 11th best among Virginia localities, and better than the statewide average of 6.5 percent.

Reeves said his conclusion comes from personally knocking on almost 15,000 doors and his campaign’s 80,000 voter calls.

He calls Houck’s support for business “abysmal” in his 28 years in the Senate, citing Houck’s overall rating of 73 percent in the National Federation of Independent Business’ scorecard of Virginia lawmakers in the 2010 and 2011 General Assembly. Yet Houck holds the NFIB’s endorsement in the race, an advantage Reeves ascribes to the power of incumbency.

Reeves rails against government red tape that stifles small businesses, particularly startups. Asked to name three burdensome state regulations that should be rescinded, however, he drew a blank, saying that’s what the expertise of legislative committees is for.

“You have to look at all of them. I haven’t been approached about what committees they’d like me to serve on,” he said. “I’m kind of at a loss for specific legislation off the top of my head right now.”

Reeves, a broad-shouldered former Army Ranger who smiles easily and looks younger than his 44 years, is also pro-gun, yet Houck holds the National Rifle Association endorsement.

Reeves has a child in public school and supports an education voucher system by which local governments help subsidize tuition costs for children in private schools. He supports restrictions on abortion. McDonnell has appointed him to seats on the College Building Authority and the Military Advisory Committee.

Houck, 61, knows Reeves has scant experience as a candidate, but he knows he’s energetic and determined. He knows the listless economy under the watch of a Democratic White House adds to his load. And, even though he had raised nearly $1 million since 2008, Reeves has allies in high places.

Houck chairs the Senate Education and Health Committee, and McDonnell has appointed him to panels tasked with recommending reforms in higher education and health care. He was a co-patron of Higher Education Opportunity Act this year.

Also a senior member of the budget-writing Finance Committee, Houck is a perennial pick to the small conference committee responsible for reconciling conflicting House and Senate versions of the budget. He has supported some of McDonnell’s budget-cutting initiatives. Houck also supported McDonnell’s charter school and laboratory school efforts, sometimes bucking his own party to do so.

Yet through September, McDonnell’s Opportunity Virginia PAC had given Reeves $50,000, making it by far Reeves’ top benefactor.

“I told the governor, ‘That hurt,’” Houck said with a chuckle.

Houck said the Democratic Senate majority has been “the necessary barrier to an ultra-conservative social agenda going forward.” His committee has shot down perennial measures from the GOP right, including anti-abortion, school prayer and school voucher bills.

In every one of Houck’s campaigns, Republicans have decried his opposition to abortion restrictions and other culturally conservative priorities, yet so far he has won them all.

“I know that come campaign time, they’re going to drag out all their little plastic fetuses ... and hand them out on the street and tell the voters that I’m the devil incarnate,” Houck said.