Southern Congressional Map
It isn’t easy to find bad news for the Democrats. The Senate map looks astonishingly strong for them, with a remarkable event having to occur to keep them from gaining at least 5 seats, and about a 50-50 shot of them gaining 9 seats. Congressional elections are shifting towards them as well, with a solid shot to pick up anywhere between 15 and 40 seats (over-under’s around 25). Barack Obama is steadily putting away all of the states that John Kerry won, and appears to have a virtual lock on the electoral college. Meanwhile, on the national level, the Democrats are wildly out-raising the Republicans, with Barack Obama alone getting 150 million dollars in September, and the DCCC and DSCC having solid advantages over their Republican counterparts.
But there is one bit of gray. The Southern Political Report found twenty Congressional seats in the former Confederacy which they rate as seriously contested. 16 are held by Republicans and only 4 are held by Democrats, an excellent position for the Democratic Party as they have little to lose and much to gain. Oddly, however, despite the general wind behind the Democratic backs, there are only four districts where their candidates have more cash on hand than the Republicans, which might decidedly limit their ability to capitalize on the potential gains in the South. In their defense, in a fifth district, the incumbent John Yarmuth has only 1,000 dollars less than the former incumbent Anne Northrup, but one might have hoped for more.
The issue isn’t fundraising - it’s spending. In 9 districts, the Democrat had raised more than his opponent, and in another two the differential was less than 100,000 dollars. Essentially, the Democrats have matched the Republicans in fundraising even in these very difficult districts against incumbents who tend to raise more money than their challengers, a not unusual situation considering the remarkable election cycle we are currently in. But the Democrats are spending more. Much of this is because the Democrats understood that they have a second line of defense - in a tight race the DCCC and the DNC can step in to back them in a way that the RNCC and RNC cannot this year. Yet, one can’t help but wonder how much of the attractive polling data the Democrats have in some of these races is because of early spending that they may not be able to continue through the final weeks of the campaign. It’s really too early to make any conclusions about this, but it is worth watching