the rix mix

WaPo article, GOP Officials Brace for Loss Of Seven to 30 House Seats. A switch of 30, or even enough to retake the House, seems improbable to me. But my perception of national politics is skewed by living in New Jersey, where our statewide contests have their own transparent strategies & congressional districts are gerrymandered to be "safe" for incumbents just like everywhere else in the USA. A Repug cannot win statewide without placating suburban women - the so-called "soccer mom" vote. You carry the entire state only by being prochoice, hitting a clear note on education, & expressing reasonable views on gun control, environment, healthcare, & workplace laws acknowledging the needs of working woman. Do those, then stretch an anti-tax banner across the podium, & you've got the essence of Christine Whitman's first two statewide campaigns, both against incumbents. This is essentially a "populist" strategy to keep the urban Democratic machines at bay. The fantasy of Jersey right wingers that a "real" conservative could win is just that, a fantasy. Dems pray for one of these screwballs to win the Repug primaries for senate & governor.

It doesn't work the other way in Jersey's weirdly-drawn congressional districts. A contest I consider a no-brainer, replacing the callow, far-right Bush zombie Mike Ferguson in the 7th district with the experienced Linda Stender, who started out in politics as a local activist & mayor of a suburban town, is very difficult for Democrats to pull off. Stender might be the most qualified & attractive candidate Dems have up against an incumbent here. To me, it's obvious she's superbly qualified, a great match for that district. On the face of it, she ought to be walking to D.C. just on the sorry performances of the Mad Fergy & George W. Bush, on the Iraq debacle, & on the collapses of FEMA & the EPA. Her battle is one of the most duplicated across the United States - a deserved Democrat struggling to gain traction on an uphill climb across a "safe" district where there's a lot of swing votes to be had if you can figure out how to swing them. But all politics are local, goes the truism. What's local in the 7th depends on where you live in it.

The two states I consider most like Jersey are California & Virginia. CA has wider extremes in everything, but we're in many ways a scaled down mirror image of the west coast giant in our wealth, demographics & to some extent in our geography. They have L.A. & San Fran. We have New York, which is by far our most important city, even though it's in another state. Virginia is generally moderate/right in sum where Jersey is moderate/left, because there the Republican downstate, rural areas & centers of military-oriented economy "frame" the issues, so the pressure's on the Democrats. Virginia's most influential city is Washington D.C. across the river. Well into the 1970s, when you passed Somerville on Route 22 or drove south of the Raritan on Route 9, you were in a land of very old farms, woodland that had been lumbered countless times, conservative churches, & military bases. As much of Virginia still is. Like us, Virginia's politics are being changed by suburban sprawl & the ubiquitous electronic media. Which is why George Allen can't go down to those southwest counties, talk like a redneck & expect nobody else is gonna hear about it. Jersey reached that point a long time ago.
* Denny Crane, Boston Legal