Ken Carr's Daily Read

Entrepreneur Donald Trump dismissed the surging candidacy of Rick Santorum by claiming that Santorum lost his Senate seat in 2006 by a wider margin than any incumbent senator in history. He’s wrong.

In fact, there have been two dozen incumbent senators who have taken worse beatings than Santorum did in 2006. Trump need only have checked back as far as the 2010 midterm elections — when Democrat Blanche Lincoln lost her Arkansas seat — to find an incumbent senator who lost by a bigger margin than Santorum did.

Trump, who flirted for months with a presidential run, announced his endorsement of Mitt Romney on Feb. 2. A week later, Trump opined on CNN about Santorum, who the night before had pulled off a clean sweep of caucuses and non-binding primaries in Colorado, Minnesota and Missouri.

Trump, Feb. 8: Rick Santorum was a sitting senator who in reelection lost by 19 points, to my knowledge, the most in the history of this country for sitting senator to lose by 19 points.

It’s unheard of. Then he goes out and says, oh OK, I just lost by the biggest margin in history now I’m going to run for president. Tell me, how does that work? How does that work?

With electability ranking as a high priority for Republican primary voters, Trump’s statistic is more than just cocktail party trivia. But he’s way off.

We came across some research on this very subject done by Joe Lenski, executive vice president of Edison Research, a market research and exit polling firm based in Somerville, N.J.

Using data from America Votes and Congressional Quarterly’s Guide to U.S. Elections, Lenski compiled a list of the worst drubbings ever absorbed by incumbent senators. Topping the list is Jacob Javits. Despite winning four terms in the Senate as a Republican, Javits lost in the 1980 Republican primary to Alfonse D’Amato. Javits then ran in the general election as a Liberal Party candidate, vainly trying to retain his seat. But he finished third in the race, 33.8 points behind the winner, D’Amato.

So where does Santorum fall on the list? Santorum — who in 2006 lost a reelection bid to Democrat Bob Casey Jr. by 17.4 points — is 24th. And that was before incumbent Democrat Blanche Lincoln lost her Senate seat in 2010 by 21 points.

Lenski noted in his Aug. 27, 2010, research that only 29 senators had lost by as wide a margin as 17 percentage points in 48 election cycles covering more than 1,000 reelection bids (less than 3 percent).

“When incumbent senators lose they usually lose by small margins,” Lenski wrote. “And with the advent of modern polling, when they realize they are heading for a big loss they tend to withdraw from the race first. That is probably why the only recent name on the list is Rick Santorum in 2006.”

It was a big loss for Santorum, Lenski told us by phone. But as is often the case, he said, when people use superlatives — as Trump did — “it is not 100 percent accurate.”

Speaking of which, Republican rival Newt Gingrich has several times made a similar claim, saying Santorum “lost Pennsylvania by the largest margin of any senator in the history of the state.” But even by limiting the claim to Pennsylvania senators, Gingrich is wrong.

Incumbent Sen. Joe Guffey, a Democrat from Pittsburgh, Pa., was soundly defeated in 1946 by Gov. Edward Martin, by a margin of 19.4 points. That ranks as the worst showing by a senate incumbent in Pennsylvania history.

When asked on CNN to react to Trump’s quote later in the day, Santorum wisely refrained from saying that his was only the 25th worst loss by an incumbent senator. Instead, he offered this comeback:

“Why don’t you ask Abraham Lincoln, who lost just about every single race he ran before he ran for president?” Santorum said. “A lot of folks lose races, but I didn’t lose, unlike Governor Romney, is my principles. I stood up and fought for what I believed in, in a very tough election year.”

Santorum, we should note, has himself not been immune to a bit of revisionism with regard to the topic of defeating incumbents. In August 2011, when Santorum claimed he “defeated three Democratic incumbents,” we pointed out that he defeated two incumbents; in two other congressional elections, he was the incumbent.

– Robert Farley

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Keeping both sides honest

Federal workers overall get just 2 percent higher wages than private-sector employees holding similar jobs, but they receive 16 percent more in total compensation because of generous benefits.

There are, however, great differences in wages and benefits depending on education levels; less-educated federal workers receive higher wages and benefits compared with private-sector employees, while those with advanced degrees are paid less.

That’s the conclusion of a new Congressional Budget Office report that dispels misinformation spread by both sides in a long-running debate over federal pay. As we wrote once before, it’s simply not true that the average federal worker is paid twice as much as the average private-sector employee doing similar work and with similar qualifications. But it’s even less true that federal employees are vastly underpaid, as public-employee unions would have you believe.

The CBO report found:

• The gap in wages between the private and public sectors isn’t that wide. Federal employees overall are paid about 2 percent more than private-sector counterparts.
• There is a significant gap, however, in benefits — largely because most federal employees have defined-benefit pension plans that are becoming less common in the private sector. Federal employees on average receive 48 percent more in benefits than those in the private sector.
• Bottom line: The federal government paid 16 percent more on average in total compensation — wages, plus benefits — than private employers paid similar employees.

But the picture is not so good for federal workers with professional or doctorate degrees. Even generous federal benefits cannot make up for the big wage gap between them and their higher-paid private-sector counterparts.

In addition, the CBO report is chock full of data that help illuminate the ongoing pay debate:

• Federal workers make up a declining percentage of the U.S. workforce. The figure was 1.7 percent in 2010, down from 2.3 percent in 1980. However, since President Obama took office, the size of the federal civilian workforce (exclusive of the U.S. Postal Service) has gone up by nearly 149,000 workers, an increase of 7.2 percent.
• The federal government spends about $200 billion a year on federal civilian wages and benefits. “Of that amount, $80 billion goes for civilian personnel who work in the area of national defense,” the CBO report says.
• Nearly two-thirds of federal civilian employees work in four departments: Defense, 35 percent; Veterans Affairs, 14 percent; Homeland Security, 8 percent; and the Department of Justice, 5 percent.

Federal Pay Debate, Continued

The CBO produced the report at the request of Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the ranking Republican on the Senate Budget Committee. The report was issued Jan. 30, and it was used two days later by House Republicans to support legislation to freeze federal and congressional pay for one year. As other reports have been in the past, this one was misused for partisan purposes during floor debate.

Rep. Dennis Ross, a freshman Republican and cosponsor of the pay freeze bill, incorrectly said “hardworking taxpayers” in the private sector “take home 72 percent less in benefits than their government counterparts.” That’s true only for private-sector employees who have no more than a high school diploma. At all education levels, federal workers receive better benefits, but the percentage varies depending on education — ranging from 2 percent to 72 percent.

Rep. Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat who represents many federal workers, correctly cited the CBO when he responded to Ross by saying that “[t]hose on the upper end of the scale aren’t doing so well” compared with their private-sector counterparts. But Hoyer falsely said of those highly educated federal workers: “None of them are getting paid as much as the gentleman [Ross] is who made this speech or that I’m getting. None of them are making as much as we are.” That’s not so. Rank-and-file members of Congress, including Ross and Hoyer, receive $174,000 in wages. As of September 2011, 19,592 federal workers were paid $180,000 or more, according to the Office of Personnel Management’s online database. Most were Veterans Affairs doctors, as USA Today reported in an article relying on September 2010 data.

Democratic Rep. Elijah Cummings sought to rebut the CBO report by citing the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ National Compensation Survey, which he said shows “that Federal employees were paid 26 percent less than private sector employees.” That’s true, but as we reported previously, the pay survey does not include federal benefits. And critics say it is flawed because the survey is too broad and not job-specific.

Rep. Henry Waxman, a California Democrat, claimed that “[f]ederal employees actually earn less than their private sector counterparts when factors such as skill and education level are taken into account.” That’s not what the CBO found in its report. The CBO says it compared federal and private-sector employees based on “similar observable characteristics.” The CBO “sought to account for differences in individuals’ level of education, years of work experience, occupation, size of employer, geographic location (region of the country and urban or rural location), and various demographic characteristics (age, sex, race, ethnicity, marital status, immigration status, and citizenship).”

Clearly, the federal pay debate will continue. The House pay freeze bill easily passed by a bipartisan vote of 309-117. In the Senate, a group of Republicans has introduced a bill — citing the CBO report — that goes even further. The Senate bill would freeze pay for federal civilian workers for two years, not one.

The CBO report will be cited by both sides and, if history is a guide, not always accurately.

– Eugene Kiely, with Michael Morse

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Keeping both sides honest