(3 of 4)
Midwestern Democrats nonetheless scored some big victories. Marcy Kaptur astonished her own party by winning almost 59% of the vote in a Toledo district that had voted 56% for Republican Ed Weber only two years ago. One reason: the Toledo AFL-CIO hired some of the district's jobless blue-collar workers to make 30,000 phone calls on her behalf. South Dakota lost one of its two House seats to redistricting, forcing Incumbents Clint Roberts, a Republican who represented the conservative, ranching western part of the state, and Thomas Daschle, a Democrat who represented the more liberal, farming eastern side, to battle each other. Roberts, whose weatherbeaten, mustachioed face has peered out of an ad as the visage of the Marlboro Man, ran a bumbling campaign and lost to Daschle, a hard-driving sophisticate. Said Roberts, resignedly: "There is a lot of unrest out there, a lot of impatience. I can understand that."
In West Virginia, socially conservative Charlestonians and coal miners in 1980 elected to Congress Republican Mick Staton, who had won local fame by leading a fight to remove textbooks that he considered unpatriotic or too sexually explicit from Kanawha County public schools. Campaigning for reelection, Staton told constituents this year that he felt he had been "raised up by God" to lead them. The voters disagreed; heavy unemployment reminded them of their traditional economic liberalism. They elected Democrat Bob Wise, a populist lawyer and state senator.
Perhaps the most surprising Midwestern result was the upset of eleven-term Republican Congressman Paul Findley in Illinois. Findley had advocated U.S. ties to the Palestine Liberation Organization, a stand that brought him campaign contributions from pro-Arab groups—but also provoked Jewish organizations to pour money into the campaign of his Democratic challenger, Springfield Attorney Richard Durbin. The race turned, however, not on Middle East policy but on Reagan's budget cuts.
EAST. One of the most expensive House races in the entire country pitted Incumbents Barney Frank, a liberal Democrat, and Margaret Heckler, a moderate Republican, against each other in a Massachusetts constituency drastically changed by redistricting. Frank once likened running in the district, 70% of whose voters had been represented by Heckler, to "acting out a speaking part in my own mugging." But he put together a highly effective organization that spent around $1.2 million and tirelessly denounced Heck ler's votes for Reagan's economic policies. Heckler wound up spending more than $600,000, but could not overcome the effects of unemployment in places like Fall River.