Posted on 03/29/2010 8:36:51 PM PDT by InterceptPoint
Here is an update to the Vulnerable House Democrats - Master List that was posted yesterday on this thread.
It is still a work in progress but at least we are making progress. Comments on any our choices are welcomed and we are particularly interested in who we should be favoring in the various Primaries. We need good strong conservatives who can win in November.
The Chart has grown large enough that I'm posting it in two parts. Note that Names with a * in front of the name represents a Freeper Endorsement. We need more of those from everyone to help sort out the mad scramble of the Republican Primaries. The little pink box on some lines tell us that there are more than just the 3 candidates listed that are running. Those listed may or may not be the best. We need help sorting that out. It is, at this point the most critical need we have.
The Leans R etc. data is from Larry Sabato, ElectionProjection.com and CQPolitics.com. There are some blanks that I will fill in for the next update.
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Re: Pa 17
I don’t know much about Argall. He was elected to the state Senate last year. Prior to that he was in the state house since 1984.
His voting record looks conservative to me. Obviously he’s a career pol. But voters in the area are familiar with him he has the best chance to beat the rat Holden.
You can see a list of all the other candidates here
http://www.politics1.com/pa.htm
if they’re missing someone you can email them
Re: Putnam
You list Florida 12 on you chart. That’s a current Republican seat being vacated by Republican Adam Putnam. So I don’t know why it’s on the chart, this is for democrat seats right? Also it’s safe. You can round the rats chances of winning it this year down to zero.
Mark Kirk’s (R) Ilinois 10th is also a current Republican (RINO) seat.
RE: California 23. I didn’t say that one was competitive I don’t believe it is or will be this cycle. Someone asked how safe it was for the rats. What I meant to say is that it’s possible to win being about 40% Republican. The circumstances would need to be right. It doesn’t belong on the chart.
Neither in my estimation does Florida 20 (Wasserman) which is less Republican that the Cali 23rd. Unless there’s some polling there I’m not aware of.
Re: Runyon
My bad I found his site
He’s the only Republican in that race that has gotten national attention. It’s a swing seat with a freshman rat. There are a couple other Republicans running.
http://www.politics1.com/nj.htm
Does Murphy live in her district?
Plenty of candidates ran. Most seemed to think the best choice was Village President Maria Rodriguez.
I think Walsh will win after Bean’s obamacare vote.
And that IL-17 is a real sleeper. The rat Hare is up just 7 points and most don’t want to see him reelected.
CQ politics has the Bean seat as “safe rat” and Halvorsen in the 11th as “likely rat”. Halvorsen trails the Republican by a significant margin, she’s toast. That one is lean GOP at least and Bean’s is a tossup.
Their ratings are seriously weak. You shouldn’t even list them Interceptpoint. Either they are a democrat’s wet dream or more likely they are just lazy and stupid.
Harry Reid was trailing everyone with an R for months before they even moved him to tossup.
NY20: “Chris Gibson has the Repub nomination locked up...
Can you say for certain that none of the other candidates are viable?
Tedisco didn’t enter this race.
2 others have formally dropped out (Stec & Harper)
Ziegler remains in at present. He was choice#2
in committee interviews & endorsements
Gibson (newly retired Army Colonel) was #1 by a wide margin
Although Ziegler could be a viable candidate against Murphy, we don’t want him staying in on another line in the general, and taking votes from Gibson (who is the stronger of the two)
Great effort being done with this project!
~Kate
You are right that these are Republican seats and they are on our Vulnerable Democrats list. I think we have to do that for cases where the seat is in play. If it's a toss-up district we want it on the list even if it's an Open R Seat. When I come up for air I'm going to put some sort of flag on the list to indicate which seats are Open R so it will be clear that we are protecting a nominally Republican seat.
What we don't want on the list are SAFE seats on either side. So if you are right about the vacated Putnam seat then it will fall off the list. But FL-12 is rated by our "experts" as Leans R, Likely R, Mod R and Likely R. That's from Sabato, CQPolitics, ElectionProjection.com and the Cook Political Report. None of those guys are rating FL-12 as SAFE R. So that's why it's on the list.
I'm going to issue the updated list in a new thread later this morning with clickable links in pdf format and you will see that we have several candidates for removal from the list. And I think there are a few that will be in play that we haven't spotted yet. But very few. Separating the strong and conservative candidates from among the many running in the primaries remains our biggest problem. That's where we need all the help we can get. You will see most of your recommendations incorporated on that list.
Probably true but they are the best we have for now. I'm assuming that we will see movement in these ratings of the races as we move closer to the Primaries and to the November election. As these changes come in I plan to update the chart to reflect them. That may be a tall task but if enough people are looking at the Sabato et al data and our chart we should be getting enough feedback to keep it current.
And note that I've added Cook to the list so we have four "experts" evaluating the races. And, BTW, they seem to be in pretty close agreement with each other as you will see when I post today's update.
I hope that we are trying to do this right.
In CT-4, top challenger is now Tom Herrmann.
In CT-5, drop Carter who is minor, add Mark Greenberg (well financed)
RI, you are missing the Patrick Kennedy open seat.
MA-2 (Neal), top challenger is Jay Fleitman.
MA-6 (Tierney), top challenger is Bill Hudak.
NH-1, top challenger is Frank Guinta.
NH-2, top conservative challenger is Jennifer Horn (drop Clegg or Guida)
ME-2, challenger is Jason Levesque
NY-20, Tedisco is out.
NY-19, it is spelled DiCarlo. Drop McEnroe, add Thomas DeChiaro, well-financed conservative.
Me too.
Right now we are looking for exactly the sort of input you posted. We are counting on the broad reach of Free Republic to help us sort out the wheat from chaff in the Republican Primaries. Some of your recommended changes are already on our list but I will update the chart this morning to reflect the rest so you should see a better looking set of data when I post the updated list in a new thread later this morning. I'll add you to the ping list.
What is the column headed “HC”. At first, I thought it might be how they voted on Health Care, but if that was it, we ought to be able to fill in the box for every representative as Y, N, or Didn’t Vote. And why are some cells in this column pink and some green?
It is the Health Care vote but we've decided to take it off the list, at least for now. Trying to reduce the clutter and make the chart easy to read and easy to use. We will have pdf files will clickable links for all the R candidates later today.
If you want to add this as suggested by impy:
Illinois 17 Phil Hare
*Bobby Schilling, http://www.bobby2010.com/
CT 4- Easton First Selectman Tom Herrmann
He just announced for the race on March 10 and I couldn’t find a website. Here’s his facebook: http://ko-kr.facebook.com/pages/Tom-Herrmann-for-Congress/359470486950
Winning in the 11th, 14th, 10th, 8th and 17th is less about what happens in DC and more about what happens in the distrit.
Crane lost the 8th to Bean, not for what he did in DC, but for what he did not do in the 8th. I moved to the 8th in ‘83 and never saw Crane once til 2000 despite thousands of political and civic events I attended over the years. In contrast, Bean is everywhere, highly visible. Her staff mostly reads the constituent service mail and responds without that irrelevant form letter.
Walsh has zero knowledge and experience in pragmatic politics. He has no money. Rahm (his people) will define who Walsh. People will vote based on the image Rahm creates. That is what they did to McSweeney, and he had big money and years of experience in the trenches.
In Sept-Oct Rahm ran ads on insignificant issues “McSweeney out of the mainstream”. McSweeney (Charlie) did not respond as the issues were not what people would base their vote on. But Rahm established “out of the mainstream”. Then in the last week of the campaign Rahm heavily ran ads “McSweeney extremist”. McSweeney was toast.
Rahm will run that same campaign nationally. He will create media events that he and the media will use to define the Republicans .. and especially the tea partys ... as extremist. No swing district wants an extremist.
No camera or mike records an alleged event, yet the media will happily play along with Rahm in alleging the event occurred. The lone idiot in a protest of 1,000 or 50,000 will be singled out as representative of the Republican candidate.
So she balances off Cao in New Orleans, fully guaranteed loser even had there been no fault of his own. Who else might lose?
In other words, Phil Crane just petered out and proved to be an asset in the end to IL Democrats he had long opposed.
Yes, State Sen. Matt Murphy lives in Rep. Bean’s district. Most of his state senate district is in Kirk’s district, but Murphy lives in western Palatine, which is in Bean’s district.
Phil Crane had a major drinking problem. He also spent more time on overseas junkets than in his district. Like I said, I attend a lot of political meetings and never once saw him ‘83 - 2000.
But he could have compensated for that if he had a staff that was competent and conscientious, which he didn’t. Constituent service is how congressmen get re-elected. For example, Ron Paul provides notoriously great constituent service, which is why he gets re-elected, and not due to his activities in DC (most of which I support).
Crane was ranking member of the powerful Ways & Means that controls the IRS and Social Security. The #1 request of constituents for service was directly under the jurisdiction of that committee. Crane totally ignored his constituents. The government bureaucracy was always right; his constituent always wrong.
For example, a voter in my 7 precincts had a gross income of $14,900 and requested a refund of a couple hundred dollars. The IRS agreed to the amount of his gross income. The IRS denied his claiming his wife and 2 kids as dependents. (But agreed to it in the prior and subsequent years.) The IRS demanded that Crane’s voter pay over $7,000 for that one year where they agreed he only grossed 14,900.
Crane’s response (staff’s) was a form letter saying that they could arrange for the voter to make the payments on that $7,000 over an extended period of time ... but of course, the voter would have to pay the interest that would accrue due to that payment plan.
In contrast, my congressman pre ‘83 was Rostenkowski who was the ranking Dem on the same Ways & Means. Although Rosty voted for every tax increase and Crane voted against it, when a constituent requested a service of Rosty, the constituent was always right, the IRS always wrong, regardless of the facts of the case.
And the IRS always did precisely what Rosty asked them to do. (The local civil service employees were really his patronage as the civil service test was given in his political office and one had to get past his gate keeper to take the test.)
The democrats have a serious shot at the following GOP seats in this order
1)LA-02 (Joe Cao in New Orleans) heavily rat seat very likely rat gain
2)Delaware At Large (Open), definitely lean rat
3)IL-10 (open) Tossup
If you list IL 10 you need to list LA-02 and DE-AL as well.
The second tier would include
PA-15 Charlie Dent who faces a strong opponent
Nebraska 1 Lee Terry who faces a strong opponent
CA-03 Dan Lungren possible ethics issues? I forget
WA-02 Dave Reichart he’s never won big
Jim Gerlach’s PA 6 was open and a tossup before he exited the Gubernatorial race and got back in the house race. I expect him to win easily.
Michelle Bachman will always be targeted but if she didn’t lose in 06 or 08 she won’t lose now.
All those are more likely to fall than Putnam’s seat and (CQ has them “lean Republican”) if you really wanna list all of those ‘potentially’ vulnerable GOP seats that aren’t a 100% lock. You’ll need an even bigger table. ;)
“Likely” btw is one step from safe. They list it there cause it’s open and McCain only won it by a hair due to big rat turnout in Florida. CQ politics lists 12! other GOP seats besides Florida 12 in that category.
If the election were today I’d be surprised if the rats won a GOP seat besides the 3 I listed.
The 4th most vulnerable seat is Dent’s swing PA-15 in my estimation. Because he faces a strong rat in Bethlehem Mayor John Callahan.
Bad constituent service has cost many a congressman their job.
Thanks for your valuable inputs impy. We are going to have to deal at some point with the issue of vulnerable Republican seats that can and should be saved. They will be on our list eventually. Right now I want to get the Vulnerable Dems list set the best we can. Stay tuned. This list has a way to go before we can rest.
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