Unfortunately, there isn’t much in the way of agreement between the DNC’s Howard Dean and the DCCC’s Rahm Emanuel, but one thing they both want is to see fewer Republicans elected without competition. Thanks to a lot of hard work, they’ve made tremendous gains this year.<\/p>\n
You know the drill; every campaign cycle, dozens of incumbents win re-election because no one wants to take him or her on. The district is considered so “safe,” that the lawmaker won’t even garner token opposition. MyDD ran an interesting item<\/a> over the weekend noting that the Dems made a goal of not letting that happen in 2006 — and they succeeded.<\/p>\n The best cycle in Dem history was in 2000, when Dems fielded 403 candidates (out of 435 congressional districts). The GOP record was 419 candidates, fielded in — you guessed it — 1994.<\/p>\n This year, 425 Democratic House candidates will appear on the ballot. Some won’t have a lot of money and some will struggle to stay competitive, but it’s still quite an accomplishment. Indeed, this year, Republicans will put up 390 candidates, the second lowest for either party since 1994. The 35-district margin is, Chris Bowers noted<\/a>, “twice the size of the previous record.”<\/p>\n Good. Voters in every district deserve a choice and it’s very encouraging to see Dems making sure so many people will have one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Unfortunately, there isn’t much in the way of agreement between the DNC’s Howard Dean and the DCCC’s Rahm Emanuel, but one thing they both want is to see fewer Republicans elected without competition. Thanks to a lot of hard work, they’ve made tremendous gains this year. You know the drill; every campaign cycle, dozens of […]<\/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-8201","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8201","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=8201"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8201\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8201"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8201"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8201"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}