Help wanted: why are so many potential candidates passing on the chance to run for seats in the House in 2004?

• Author: Stolberg, Sheryl Gay
• Position: National - Congressional candidates

With just 11 months to go until the 2004 elections, this is recruiting season, the time when party leaders fan out around the country in an effort to persuade potential candidates to run for Congress. This year, however, for Democrats and Republicans alike, it's becoming an increasingly tough sell.

Lisa Boscola of Pennsylvania is a case in point. A Democratic State Senator midway through a four-year term, she was a natural to run for a seat in the House of Representatives next year. There was a rare open seat in a rare swing district--one in which voters are evenly divided so that either a Democrat or a Republican could win--and her chances looked good. In the House, Republicans currently outnumber Democrats 229 to 205 (with one Independent), and powerful Democrats in Washington were wooing her to run.

But at a private dinner, she says, Pennsylvania Governor Edward G. Rendell, a Democrat, told her he needed every Democratic vote he could muster to sustain his veto in the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania Senate. She settled the "tug-of-war," as she calls it, in Rendell's favor.

"It's flattering to be asked," Boscola says. "But I kept thinking to myself, 'My biggest problem is, What would happen if I win?' " She is the third Democrat in the state's 15th Congressional District to opt out of the race.

Part of the reason that candidates are deciding not to run for House seats is that there are fewer seats worth running for. In the House, which has two-year terms, all 435 members are up for re-election in 2004. (In the Senate, which has six-year terms, 33 Senators--a third of the body--will be chosen.) But redistricting has reduced the number of competitive House districts to about four dozen, and few people want to undertake a campaign without having a real chance of winning.

POWER SHIFT

Yet even in districts like Pennsylvania's 15th, where seats are genuinely up for grabs, qualified candidates are staying away. They are citing family considerations, the grueling demands of fund raising, campaign mudslinging, and a sense that Washington has lost its allure, that the real action is now at the state level.

Boscola says her decision had a lot to do with the shift toward state power. Though she was arrested for drunk driving three years ago, she was re-elected to her State Senate seat with 63 percent of the vote. She insists fear of tough questions in a campaign for national office didn't deter her.

Her decision to remain on the state level...