Republicans have found candidates to run in 430 of 435 districts this fall, a total that tops the party’s previous high of 427, which was set in 1996.
[snip]
In 2006, there were 422 Democrats on the ballot compared with 388 Republicans. Last cycle, House Democrats put up 420 candidates to Republicans’ 392.
Oh, I guess we’re just going to have to forgive the NRCC this one time, though.
If I’m reading this correctly, the Democrats are somewhere below 415 themselves in this particular competition; they are, of course, in full defensive rhetorical mode, waving around their cash-on-hand advantage as if it were an apotropaic amulet. Which doesn’t particularly explain why they’re throwing a quarter of that money at races where the incumbents are racking up ten-to-fund fundraising advantages already, and not at the ones where the incumbent is more at parity with the GOP challenger, or even behind…
OK, what does explain that is that the DCCC is trying to build a firewall. They can read the tea leaves as well as the next national party committee, and they know darn well that thanks to Van Hollen’s inability to stand up to the Democratic party’s leadership the DCCC has pretty much frittered away the chance to lock in the gains made in ’06 and ’08 for a generation. The names on what Jim Geraghty called the ‘panic list‘ are mostly races where the Democrats would normally not have any business losing: dumping 7.7 million in them collectively might keep Election Night results down to… catastrophe, instead of Armageddon.
Might. There’s been a lot of bad karma built up by the Democrats over the last eight years, and it’s starting to look like it’s going to come due in November.
Moe Lane