By Kathy Kiely, USA TODAY
A Republican primary in a rural Tennessee district has become the most expensive House race in the country, demonstrating the recession-proof nature of politics in this high-stakes election year.
Voters in the Volunteer State will head to the polls today to pick nominees for fall races ranging from governor to state Legislature. Adding to the interest: Three of Tennessee's nine congressional seats are being vacated by retiring lawmakers this year.
Candidates in the 8th Congressional District, in the state's northwestern corner, have spent about $5.2 million, making the race the nation's costliest. It is "absolutely obliterating" 2008 campaign-spending records, says Dave Levinthal of the Center for Responsive Politics.
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The non-partisan campaign watchdog group calculates that two years ago, the average U.S. House race, including both the primary and general election campaigns, cost just under $2 million.
Primary contests will be decided this month in four races atop the center's spending charts: the Tennessee House race and Senate races in Connecticut, Arizona and Florida.
The huge sums being spent to attract the attention of voters in August, when many Americans are on vacation, illustrates "the arms race mentality" of a political culture awash in "an ever-larger pool of influence-seeking money," says Fred Wertheimer of the campaign watchdog group Democracy 21. "There is no such thing as a downturn in campaign spending."
This year's top-dollar races feature either nationally known candidates, such as 2008 Republican presidential nominee John McCain, running for re-election in Arizona's Senate primary, or those who are independently wealthy, such as businessman Jeff Greene, a Florida Democratic Senate hopeful, and former World Wrestling Entertainment executive Linda McMahon, seeking Connecticut's GOP Senate nomination.
The Tennessee contest is a case in which personal wealth is upping the ante. Incumbent Democratic Rep. John Tanner is retiring, raising GOP hopes of taking a district that voted Republican in the past two presidential contests.
George Flinn, a radiologist and radio station owner, has invested $2.9 million of his own money in his campaign. Another doctor hoping to turn politician, Ron Kirkland, and Stephen Fincher, a farmer and gospel singer who is backed by the National Republican Congressional Committee, each have spent $250,000 of their own money.
The mostly rural district — whose largest town, Jackson, has 63,000 people — has been blanketed with television ads, many of them negative. The big winner, says Vanderbilt University political science professor Bruce Oppenheimer, is Democratic candidate Roy Herron, a state lawmaker who is sitting on a $1.1 million war chest.
"Roy Herron has been sitting back and enjoying this," Oppenheimer says.
More funds are on the way for the eventual GOP nominee: The 60 Plus Association, a conservative group whose spokesman is singer Pat Boone, said it will launch a $222,000 ad campaign against Herron beginning Friday.
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