Barrow and Dold are meat. Some freepers in Dold-land on this thread saying they’re not voting for him. I would but I don’t think he can win that seat.
Schilling has a shot but not a great one. (burn in hell Pat Quinn and Mike Madigan and Scott Cohen) The rat candidate underwhelms me (as does the one for the Dold seat, he won the primary cause he had the most normal name) though she’s okay looking for a Stalinist witch.
I think Love will beat Matheson but he could win, Mormon Romney on the top of the ticket helps.
Bass is not an “underdog”, that race is a tossup.
Not mentioned here is another IL Republican, Joe Walsh. His district is better than any of the other vulnerable gerrymandered IL seats but he’s weak and most people think he has no chance.
I live in Rep. Dold’s new district, and I think that he’ll barely win, with about 50.5% of the vote. In his new district, the majority of the state legislators and county commissioners are Republicans.
Rep. Walsh will easily win. All of the voters, of the new 8th Dist., have a republican congressman, now, Walsh, Dold, Hultgren, or Roskam. The majority of those voters have a republican state senator, Murphy, Pankau, or Dillard.
I don’t see how the RAT Barrow can survive in the redrawn GA-12. Democrats are delusional if they think that the liberal-to-moderate Barrow can get enough conservative votes to make it close.
As for the IL races, I would rank the endangered Republican incumbents, in order of most likely to least likely to survive, as follows:
Biggert
Dold
Schilling
Walsh
I’d place Biggert’s odds of winning at 55%, Dold’s at 45%, Schilling’s at 40% and Walsh’s at 10%. Walsh’s CD is the least Dem of the four, but he was a fluke winner in 2010 in a GOP district and is a terrible fit for the new district.
As for Charlie Bass, I agree that reports of his demise are exaggerated. Yes, the district leans a bit Dem, and he is facing an extremely well funded challenger, but Romney could feasibly carry the district and Bass has at least even odds of holding on.
BTW, the RAT candidate with the most “normal” name won in IL-10, while the RAT candidate with the sexiest name (Cheri Bustos) won in IL-17—Bustos means “breasts” in Spanish. http://www.cheribustos.com/