BY HOWARD WILKINSON
The Cincinnati Enquirer
![[chabot]](/editions/1998/11/04/chabot_180x135.jpg)
Steve Chabot celebrates at his victory party with Air Force Lt. Col. John Pechiney,left, and Dennis Bley.
(Jeff Swinger photo)
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U.S. Rep. Steve Chabot, the Westwood Republican, won a third term Tuesday night despite a well-funded, aggressive challenge from Cincinnati Mayor Roxanne Qualls.
With all of the 1st Congressional District's 668 precincts reporting, Mr. Chabot led with 53 percent of the vote to 47 precent for Ms. Qualls.
"I have to feel very good about this," Mr. Chabot said. "There was a clear difference between us on the issues."
He weathered the stiffest challenge of a political career that goes back to the late 1970s when he first began running for Cincinnati City Council.
In the last week of the campaign, Ms. Qualls hit Mr. Chabot hard for voting against a federal budget agreement she said would bring millions into the 1st District. But Mr. Chabot stuck to his guns, saying the budget deal was "full of pork."
![[qualls]](/editions/1998/11/04/qualls_180x135.jpg)
Roxanne Qualls watches election results with friends and supporters.
(Steven Herppich photo)
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Ms. Qualls said that though she was disappointed, the race was "very competitive and a clear choice for the voters of the 1st District." Ms. Qualls has one more year on her term as Cincinnati's mayor; she cannot run for re-election in 1999 because of Cinicnnati's term limits law. But she said Tuesday night she has no intention of leaving council early.
"I plan to continue focusing on being mayor," Ms. Qualls said.
Turnout on the cold, drizzling, cloudy day favored Mr. Chabot. About 40 percent of the vote in the 1st District is in the city, where Ms. Qualls was strongest. Overall, turnout was 51 percent, about what elections officials expected. But turnout in city precincts averaged around 40 percent, while in the west suburbs, where Mr. Chabot is strongest, the turnout was closer to 60 percent.
Ms. Qualls was recruited by national Democratic Party figures -- including President Clinton.
The two candidates spent about $1 million each on the contest. The 1st District includes most of Cincinnati and many of the city's western suburbs. The race attracted attention not only from national news media, but internationally as well -- news crews from Japan and Great Britain were among the small army of media who descended on Cincinnati.
The 1st District was scrutinized for two reasons:
First, because it is a classic "swing" district -- one that is almost evenly split between Democratic and Republican voters, with a statistically small core of independent voters who usually end up determining the outcome.
Second, the candidates themselves made the race more interesting than most. In a congressional election year in which nearly half the House districts around the country featured incumbents with little or no opposition, Ohio's 1st District race pitted two of the best-known political figures in Cincinnati against each other.
Mr. Chabot, a 45-year-old Westwood lawyer, had been on the Cincinnati political scene for 15 years before he was elected to Congress in 1994, beating one-term incumbent Democrat David Mann.
Mr. Chabot had been a Cincinnati council member and a Hamilton County commissioner, which is where he made his reputation as an anti-tax, less-government conservative.
Ms. Qualls, on the other hand, began running for city council in the mid-1980s and was finally elected in 1991. Two years later, she became mayor of Cincinnati after finishing first in the council balloting. She has won re-election as mayor twice since then.
Facing the end of her tenure at City Hall (she cannot run for re-election in 1999), Ms. Qualls was courted by the Democratic establishment in Washington to take on Mr. Chabot. The courting included phone calls from Mr. Clinton and Vice President Al Gore and intense lobbying from House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt.
In February, she sounded a theme in her announcement speech that she would carry throughout the fall campaign -- that, as a member of Congress, she would "put people first." She tried to portray Mr. Chabot as a slave to his conservative ideology, voting against government spending programs that she argued would benefit the 1st District, such as the hiring of 100,000 new teachers nationwide and a federal transportation bill that would bring millions to Cincinnati.
But Mr. Chabot stuck to what has worked for him before -- an insistence that "pork is pork," even if the money is ticketed for his district. In October, he was one of 63 House Republicans who drew the ire of House Speaker Newt Gingrich when he voted against a $520 billion budget agreement because he said it was "loaded with pork" and dipped into the projected federal budget surplus to the tune of $20 billion.
It was a risky vote, and one that the Qualls camp jumped on in commercials, saying Mr. Chabot was putting ideology ahead of the interests of his constituents. Mr. Chabot said repeatedly through the campaign that, if re-elected, he would continue to push for broad-based tax cuts and that he would continue to try to reduce the federal government's role in subsidizing education and what he called "corporate welfare," when federal dollars go to private companies to promote their products overseas.
Ms. Qualls vowed to fight for a Democrat-sponsored "patient bill of rights," one that would give patients more ability to sue health maintenance organizations. And she said she would push for federal funding for rebuilding crumbling schools.
Some political observers thought that the scandal surrounding President Clinton might dominate the discussion in House races like the Chabot-Qualls contest, but that never happened.
Mr. Chabot is a member of the House Judiciary Committee, which will take up the question of impeachment. He had little to say on the subject during the campaign.
Ms. Qualls said Congress needed to move swiftly and give the president a "fair and impartial" hearing.
Each candidate raised and spent more than $1 million. Hundreds of thousands more were spent by independent groups and political parties on "soft money" advertising aimed at influencing voters.
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