There’s a good deal of laughing going around about the DCCC’s latest quote-unquote ‘Red to Blue’ announcement, mostly because it’s fairly clear that they’re kind of doing it wrong.  Generally speaking, it’s not really considered newsworthy that you’ve managed to find a candidate for a seat that you’re already holding, but the current officeholder is abandoning like a scared little puppy; and yet the DCCC has seven of their eleven new ‘challengers’ doing precisely that.  The list is below:

(Rankings via Cook) Let me put this in starker terms: if the Democrats somehow manage to run the table with these eleven races the net gain will be D plus four. They won’t. MO-06′s Jo Ann Emerson got 71% of the vote in 2008. MN-06′s Michele Bachmann and PA-06′s Jim Gerlach both survived 2006 and 2008; they’ll survive 2010 much more easily. HI-01′s Charles Djou is the most at-risk, but the DCCC is carefully not talking about how their first choice for that seat got shellacked. So that’s really (at absolute best) D plus one… and then one looks at all those vacated Democratic seats, and then one wonders how one could describe successfully keeping them as Red-to-Blue.  Unless, of course, the DCCC is conceding that they’ve already lost them to the GOP.

Which, of course, they have.  But their target community would rather gnaw off their own legs than have somebody from the Democratic party fill them in on objective reality.

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.