Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund Hone in on Musgrave, Hoping to Unseat Republican Incumbent

The last time the Defenders of Wildlife Action Fund honed in on a congressional race, seven-term incumbent Richard Pombo, a California Republican who was chairman of the House Natural Resources Committee and whom "Rolling Stone" magazine dubbed “Enemy of Earth,” lost his seat to a Democrat.

This year, the group is targeting a member of Congress who worked with Pombo when both were on the resources committee, and who held a hearing with him in Greeley about a sensitive environmental issue three years ago.

U.S. Rep. Marilyn Musgrave, a Republican from Fort Morgan, is already feeling the heat from the Defenders action fund, the political arm of Defenders of Wildlife, which advocates for the protection of native species and ecosystems.

The group has a pair of television ads excoriating Musgrave for votes against increasing mileage standards and against punishing price gougers. The ads cost $398,194, over less than two months.

And given that the group considers Musgrave’s bid for re-election in Colorado’s 4th Congressional District its second-most important race, the heat is likely to stay on through November.

“She was on our list for some time,” said the group’s president and CEO, Rodger Schlickeisen. “We didn’t have the money in 2006, because the Pombo race was so expensive ... The next two, we wanted to go after because they really distinguished themselves as our enemies.”

The No. 1 race is between sitting congressmen Tom Udall—a Democrat and cousin of senatorial candidate in Colorado Mark Udall—and “enemy” Steve Pearce, a Republican, who are running to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Pete Domenici in New Mexico.

Schlickeisen visited Fort Collins this week to talk about the group’s plans for the CD-4. The group has a field office, tucked in a labryinthine office park off Drake and Redwing roads, and employs a staff of 15, some of whom will split time between Northern Colorado and New Mexico.

Colorado’s southern neighbor is a cheaper media market, and a Senate seat is more important than a House seat, but Schlickeisen said the group’s focus on CD-4 should not be underestimated.

“We will work on a dozen races, but as far as full-blown, integrated campaigns, with people on the ground, this will be our biggest focus,” he said.

The group has hired canvassers, spent thousands of dollars on housing and equipment for staff and already staged a protest at a Fort Collins gas station to highlight Musgrave’s record on energy.

Their work in previous elections has proved successful—in 2006, the action fund spent more than $1 million and led a coalition of environmental groups in the effort to unseat Pombo, who was widely criticized for trying to scale back the Endangered Species Act.

“It was costly, but a good undertaking and very worthwhile,” Schlickeisen said. “Everybody thought he was unbeatable.”

He said there are similarities in CD-4, including the district’s rural nature—Pombo represented California’s farm-heavy Central Valley region—the incumbents’ views on the environment, and their vulnerability.

Musgrave’s campaign manager, Jason Thielman, called the group extremist and blamed them for blocking attempts to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and on the outer continental shelf.

Reached Wednesday in Denver after a fundraiser for Musgrave with Vice President Dick Cheney, Thielman admitted he gets “fired up” when talking about the Defenders group.

“What they stand for is $4 gas. What they stand for is an obstructionist agenda that is going to cost Northern Colorado jobs. What they stand for is electing like-minded leftists like Betsy Markey to Congress,” he said. “Colorado families can simply not afford their radical obstructionist policies, and they are not going to support their handpicked candidate. Some out-of-state leftist interest group that runs contrary to the way of life in Northern Colorado is not going to decide this race. If they do, it is going to be ensuring Marilyn Musgrave wins re-election.”

Schlickeisen used similarly bombastic language to levy the opposite charge: that Musgrave is the one out of touch.

He is soft-spoken and all businesslike, but does not hold back in his criticism of Musgrave, whom he called a “handmaiden to the extractive industry.”

“We believe she’s an anti-environment extremist,” he said. “We think it’s important to replace her because she’s from a district known for its environmentalism.”

Markey’s spokesman, Ben Marter, said the campaign is not legally able to comment on the group’s activities. If she condemned it and they stopped, she could run into dangerous territory because campaigns are prohibited by law from coordinating activities with independent expenditure groups and action committees.

Thielman said Markey should denounce the ads and call on the group to disclose its donors. But Schlickeisen said as a 501(c)4 nonprofit lobbying group, the action fund is not obligated to disclose that information. He said members and donors come from across the country, including Northern Colorado.

“These are all people who personally support our overall mission, and they leave it to our judgment to say who’s bad,” he said.

Colorado State University political science professor John Straayer, who has studied Colorado politics for decades, said the group would likely not target a sitting member of Congress who seemed safe.

“She’s not the only one, presumably, that they would like to see out of the Congress,” he said. “What that has to tell you is it’s a combination of their dislike for her policy orientation on environmental issues, and maybe more so, their sense that she is vulnerable. No interest group wants to throw money at a hopeless cause.”

Schlickeisen said the Defenders Action fund has done its homework.

Before deciding to invest half a million dollars into a race to unseat an incumbent—usually a Herculean task—the group researches voting trends and conducts polling to determine whether the person is beatable.

“(We see) whether anti-environmentalism is out of step with the district they’re representing, and I think that’s in spades in this case,” he said.

Thielman scoffed at that.

“They don’t live here. They just showed up on a plane ticket the other day, and they think they know what people here think, say and believe?” he said. “They have some fancy New York pollster who is telling them what everybody believes?”

To be fair, the Defenders fund is far from the only Washington, D.C.-based group watching CD-4 with eagle eyes. Two national congressional handicappers believe it’s a toss-up, and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee is flowing money Markey’s way. Local analysts like Straayer point to shifting voter registrations to show the “breeze is blowing” against Republicans.

While the Defenders group endorsed Markey, Schlickeisen said the group’s efforts are more effective when contrasts are drawn between the incumbent’s values and the district’s values. The result, then, is negative advertising against the incumbent.

The latest commercial, which has been on the air since July 28, features unflattering images of Musgrave with an announcer contrasting votes on fuel efficiency standards and gas price gouging with the rising cost of gasoline.

“Now, gas is over $4 a gallon and what is Musgrave doing? Voting against criminal penalties for price gougers,” the announcer says.

The ad references several bills Musgrave voted against, including two attempts to increase fuel efficiency standards and a bill she opposed that would have established a definition for price gouging.

Her campaign points out that she supported a different bill improving fuel efficiency standards, although that bill died. But in the frothy back-and-forth already distinguishing this campaign as one of the nastier races in recent memory, the defenders group points out that Musgrave knew that bill wasn’t going anywhere.

Schlickeisen said he couldn’t say yet how much more the defenders action fund would spend on CD-4. He said it makes sense to start early, because advertising is cheaper in mid-summer than in October, for one thing, and the group will have a longer time frame to define Musgrave to voters.

Straayer said if the group researched voter data and found the district trending Democratic, or at least away from Republicans—the latter is the case—it would make sense to spend money here.

“This is just a wild guess, but if they were to find that there is more growth in the presumably environmentally oriented areas, more movement in the Democratic areas than in those areas, that would be another factor that could make this district look inviting for them,” he said. “You can be sure that a group that is putting hundreds of thousands of dollars into this is doing it on more than a hunch.”