The TN district voted for McCain over Obama by over 2:1, but was more competitive in the 2000 presidential election and was traditionally a Democrat district. DJ, why did the Dem resign?
The OK district has a 2:1 Dem registration edge but the district has been voting heavily GOP for awhile. The incumbent Democrat resigned when he accepted a federal appointment.
More money from a different state teat.
I believe he resigned to take a higher paying county job.
The OK seat has only voted heavily Republican for national elections not for local elections. We kept getting closer with this seat and now we have won it!
That district had a GOP incumbent prior to Curt Cobb, he resigned to take a county job entitled “Clerk and Master.” The Dems ran his brother Ty for this seat, and we were besieged on the Nashville stations of slanderous ads against Pat Marsh in the past 10 days, which apparently some Dems now say backfired. Ty actually tried to run to the right of the Republican Marsh, got the right-to-life endorsement (I don’t know why Marsh didn’t), but apparently that endorsement was about as viscerally offensive to base liberal Democrat voters as getting an endorsement from Planned Parenthood would be to Conservatives for a Republican.
One problem for Ty Cobb was that it was reported he was too scared to debate Pat Marsh and dodged many, if not all, potential debate matchups. That was a bad sign that Cobb wasn’t up to the task, and why he and the State Dems threw everything but the kitchen sink into those non-stop tv ads. I actually never saw ONE ad by Pat Marsh.
I think with this, the Dems know 2010 is lost to reclaim the House (at least with their guys in charge, because even with the Puppet Speaker, he wasn’t enough to stop our party from electing the three statewide officeholders for the first time since Reconstruction and from ostensibly grabbing a majority on all of the county election boards, with a few exceptions).
They are terrified with what we’re going to do with the district lines. My Councilman in Nashville and one in the adjacent district, may be ginning up to run for the legislature, unthinkable under the current lines (and in Nashville, we have a 9D-1R delegation, obscenely out-of-whack, that were the GOP to draw them, and extend them partway into the adjacent counties, we might get 4 or 5, and unpacking the 1 hyper-GOP district and draw 2 marginal GOP seats in the South and SW part of the county, as we had in the 1980s, is just the bare minimum. A former House GOP Leader hailed from one of those districts, and they wiped out his seat deliberately). We’ve never had more than 2 House Republicans from Nashville in the modern era, probably not since the 1870s-90s.
Minor correction, I forgot there were two Cobbs from that area, I got them confused. There is another Ty Cobb (meaning had this Cobb won tonight, there would’ve been two Ty Cobbs from nearby districts). The other Ty Cobb was the sole Democrat win last November over an incumbent Republican, Tom DuBois, who was mercilessly attacked by the rodents because of a party at his house that had some underaged kids drinking (although little definitive evidence the guy knew what was going on, and how often do teenagers break into a liquor stash ?). DuBois got appointed to the State Election Commission. This “other” Cobb should be heavily targeted and taken out next year.