Pete Sessions: ‘100 percent’ of GOP House candidates would campaign with Mitt Romney

(Brian Snyder - Reuters) The Republican lawmaker responsible for electing other Republicans to the House thinks “100 percent” of his colleagues would campaign alongside Mitt Romney this year.

National Republican Congressional Committee Chairman Pete Sessions (R-Tex.) declined to take definitive stances on several campaign questions asked of him Wednesday, but when asked how Romney might help GOP candidates this year, he said “I know of not one Republican candidate that would not appear publicly with Mitt Romney and I know many Democrats that don’t even want to be in the same city, forget the same stage, with President Obama.”

“I think that that’s really the key takeaway: 100 percent of Republican candidates would appear with our entire ticket — up and down — from president all the way down, and I know a huge number of Democrats that will be busy those days and don’t even want to be seen with the president,” Sessions added.

Turning the issue on its head further, Sessions said Democratic congressional candidates should be asked: “Would you want to be seen with Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi in your district?” He said he suspects the answer would be “no” in several cases, but provided no specific examples.

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.) (Bloomberg News) The Texas Republican, who has led the GOP campaign shop since the 2010 cycle, said he hopes Romney emerges as “a standard-bearer who’s able to effectively stand up and talk about what our agenda is and to match up against the president on jobs, the economy, on spending, on policy and on a forward-looking vision.”

Sessions spoke with reporters Wednesday at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor.

Other quick takeaways from Wednesday’s session:

●Nationally, Sessions believes “the landscape in 2012 is exactly what it was in 2010” because of continued voter frustrations with the 2010 health-care reforms, growing government spending and a lack of job creation.

●Sessions expects Republicans and Democrats to essentially split House seats across the country that faced redistricting, but noted that 14 Republican seats now have stronger GOP enrollment majorities than before.

●Though he repeatedly declined to name the specific number of seats he expects Republicans to pick up this year, Sessions named several races where he expects the GOP to win or do well: The races to replace Reps. Joe Donnelly (D-Ind.) and Dan Boren (D-Okla.); the races against Reps. John F. Tierney (D-Mass.), David Cicilline (D-R.I.) and Rubén Hinojosa (D-Tex.) and other races in Arizona and Colorado.

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