A drumbeat of corruption, deficits and war dead has begun to haunt Republican candidates as they hit the campaign trail. The macabre cadence is playing more widely than just federal races: Since November, it has become the background music in a series of state special elections.<\/p>\n
Democrats are winning, often overwhelmingly, in districts and states that have backed Republicans in recent elections. The results show that state-level progressive candidates are better poised than at any time in the past 14 years to benefit from a defection of moderate conservatives and a slight left turn in the electorate.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Hans put together a pretty compelling list. A Dem scored a surprise victory in February in a special state House race in suburban Travis County, Texas, which had broke for the GOP in ’04. The same day, a Dem took the 37th state Senate seat in Kentucky, which was also a “red” district.<\/p>\n
In Virginia, a Dem took a state Senate seat in the D.C. suburbs that Democrats hadn’t even contested in 2002. Similarly, in Missouri, a Dem won a state House seat in February that the party also didn’t contest in 2004. Over the last couple of months, three Dems won special elections for state House seats in New Hampshire — and in each instance, the seat had been held by a Republican.<\/p>\n
Do these indicators really tell us who’s going to win congressional seats in November? Not really, but the results are encouraging anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Because most political observers, including me, are far too impatient to wait until November for elections, they look for “signs” of what’s to come. Developments that may or may not have any bearing become key indicators. Which side has more retirements? Which national party raised more money? Who won the off-year races? My friend Hans […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6901","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6901","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6901"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6901\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6901"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6901"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6901"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}