“I’ve got butterflies,” Mr. Schilling, Republican of Illinois, said as he walked into a news conference about a bridge that has needed renovation for years, one that Democrats have accused him of abandoning by backing a Republican ban on setting aside federal money for such home-state projects. “If Durbin is here,” he said, referring to Senator Richard J. Durbin, the state’s senior senator, “I’ll give it right back.” He looked around and saw that Mr. Durbin, the No. 2 Democrat in the Senate and a man unafraid of a partisan confrontation, was absent. “Whew,” he said. “Makes things smoother.” During his 2010 campaign, Mr. Schilling, a pizza parlor owner and political novice, labored to persuade people that a Republican deserved a chance in a seat that Democrats had held for almost three decades. Now, like scores of other Republican freshmen across the country who triumphed that year in a Republican wave, he must prove he should be permitted to stay. For Mr. Schilling and roughly two dozen other Tea Party-backed Republican freshmen who now find themselves in districts where there are more registered Democrats than Republicans, a re-election campaign is a remarkably tricky task. They are the subject of constant attack ads, assailing them for votes on a budget that would change the Medicare system, accusing them of trying to curtail protections for women and criticizing their support for earmark bans that could impede local projects. But they are also scrutinized by conservative activists who were crucial to their election and want to make sure they do not stray too far from Tea Party orthodoxy in pursuit of a second term. Republican freshmen like Chip Cravaack of Minnesota, Robert Dold of Illinois and Ann Marie Buerkle of New York are among those eager to prove that they are more than flukes who rode in on a wave only to paddle back out to the sea of one-termers. It is one thing to run as an outsider taking aim at Washington dysfunction; when you are the incumbent, with Congressional license plates and a voting record for all to see, it is a whole new ballgame. “Here’s the problem,” Mr. Schilling said. Colleagues in highly Republican districts “put up bills that make them look tough back home,” he said, “and that makes for tough votes.” He recalled another freshman lawmaker, from a safe district in Indiana, who criticized him for “voting like a Democrat.” “I said, ‘I’ve got to vote my district, thank you very much!’ ” said Mr. Schilling, who punctuates most of his sentences with a blinding smile, a hearty laugh and “Oh, my goodness!” Nice try, local Democrats say. “He is out of step with the district,” said Steve Brown, a spokesman for the Democratic Party of Illinois. “I don’t know what he puts forth to voters that would make them retain him.” Mr. Brown said Mr. Schilling’s challenger, Cheri Bustos, a onetime alderwoman from East Moline and former baby sitter to Mr. Durbin’s children, would return the district to the Democrats. In recent months, in part to curry favor with crucial independent voters who wish for more comity in Congress, some freshmen in closely contested districts have worked to be more bipartisan. They have spoken out against their party’s bill for long-term transportation funding and voted for measures that they had originally campaigned against. “When it came to the debt ceiling vote, I once said, ‘Oh, I’d never do one of those,’ ” Mr. Schilling said. “But when you came down to the reality of what would happen if we didn’t, and I talked to local businesses about that,” the need to vote yes became clear, he said. At a series of public stops on Monday, he bragged repeatedly about his work with Representative Dave Loebsack, Democrat of Iowa, to pester Illinois for money to fix the aforementioned bridge, which links their states and districts. But Mr. Schilling and other Republicans, perhaps believing that their message will be embraced by swing voters worried about the budget deficit, still dish out plenty of tough talk against Democratic lawmakers and President Obama. “They are very anti-capitalist,” Mr. Schilling told a dozen female Republican volunteers, who call themselves the Old Glories because all are over 70, during a recess trip home. Responding to one woman who asked whether he thought Mr. Obama had campaigned in 2008 with a strategy “to make America fail,” Mr. Schilling said of the slow economic recovery, “A lot of people think this is being done on purpose.”
