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.
In other words, Phil Crane just petered out and proved to be an asset in the end to IL Democrats he had long opposed.