SSP’s Competitive House Race Ratings (9/24/08)

It’s time to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. We held out hope for quite a while that Democrat Russ Warner would be able to make a race in this R+4 district — one of the very few plausible targets for Democrats in California — but this contest has never really climbed that far up the heat index. Despite running his campaign for over a year and a half, Warner has only been able to cobble together $651K and ended the second quarter with just $150K in the bank.

Incumbent GOP Rep. David Dreier bucked the nationwide trend in 2006 by spending some serious cash ($2.5 million) and scoring a 57-38 win over his unknown opponent — a significant improvement over his 53-43 margin in 2004. Dreier had $1.9 million on hand at the end of July — well more than he’ll need in order to swamp out Warner’s message this fall. Based on the nationwide dynamics, it’s not hard to imagine Warner climbing to as high as the mid-40s on election day, but it’s pretty tough to imagine him hitting 50% on his budget, barring some fabulous divine intervention.

I’m sorry to say it, but here’s the Swing State Project’s new Mendoza Line of the Swing: If you aren’t even listed on the DCCC’s Races to Watch list alongside the likes of Rob Hubler (IA-05) and Steve O’Donnell (PA-18), what chance do you really have? Many Dems started the cycle with high hopes for Huntington Beach Mayor Debbie Cook. Like they used to say in Brooklyn, wait ’till next year!

There are a lot of words that describe Chris Shays: weenie, flip-flopper, Bush booster, and out-of-touch are a few of my personal favorites. But you can also call him “survivor”. Despite occupying a D+5.4 seat, Shays is the sole remaining House Republican in New England, and he has beaten back fierce challenges from Democrats before. However, many indications point to this year being his most challenging yet.

Shays faces Jim Himes, a progressive businessman who has spent the past several years as an executive at an affordable housing non-profit organization. Himes has been raising some serious dough, has kept pace with Shays in the money race, and has the benefit of a cash-flush DCCC to help tip the scales here. But more than that, we feel pretty confident in predicting that Connecticut’s 4th will not be a McCain-friendly district in November, and we also feel that Barack Obama’s candidacy will help energize the Democratic performance in Bridgeport — a Democratic area with a large black population that typically has seen underperforming voter turnout.

Recent unanswered internal polling for the Himes campaign suggests that this race is tied, and the DCCC has just begun exploiting Shays’ hopelessly deluded comments that “our economy is fundamentally strong” in this new ad. In a district heavily dependent on the financial services sector, Shays is particularly vulnerable in a time of economic turmoil. Hefty expenditures by the National Association of Realtors on his behalf, coupled by his perceived “moderate” image, will keep this race close.

Ric Keller is unloved in the 8th District of Florida. If his surprisingly close 53-47 primary win earlier this month wasn’t proof enough, his Democratic opponent, attorney Alan Grayson, released a poll showing Keller trailing by four points. While we’re not yet convinced that that margin paints an accurate portrait of this race, we do believe that Keller has a lot of reasons to be sweating bullets in this R+3 Orlando-based district.

The biggest? The district’s Democratic voter registration surge. Dems cut the Republican voter registration advantage here from 14,400 in 2006 to 2,100 at the end of July — and things keep getting bluer (and more ethnically diverse) by the week. Grayson was a surprise primary winner here, and he still has a lot to prove in terms of fundraising (he has relied almost exclusively on his own coffers so far), but this match-up looks to be a real race.

Under the rubric we use, a “Safe” rating means that we’re ruling out the possibility of an upset, even a remote one. While Barrow’s incredibly weak performance in 2006 kept this race on our big board for quite some time, it’s hard to imagine how a guy like John Stone, who had all of $8000 on-hand at the end of June, can pull off what Max Burns wasn’t able to do in 2006. Barrow will be aided by an uptick in African-American voters (this district is 45% black) who are energized to vote in the Presidential race for well-discussed reasons. To put an exclamation mark on how safe Barrow is, the National Rifle Association just endorsed him yesterday — something that the group rarely does for federal Dems.

While incumbent Rep. Tom Latham has to be considered favored in his bid for re-election at this point, at a PVI of D+0.4, this district is prime swing territory, and recent polls are showing a rather stark Obama surge in Iowa. Democrat Becky Greenwald’s fundraising could be stronger, but between her recent EMILY’s List endorsement and the state’s blue turn, we feel that there’s an outside chance of something interesting developing here.

See David’s post for our detailed rundown on this change. The bottom line: Bill Sali is the most collossally perfect fuckup the Republicans have on their roster, and Dem Walt Minnick is poised to take advantage of that.

The prospect of Barack Obama’s home state coattails dragging Democrat Jill Morgenthaler kept this race alive on our list of long shots, but we no longer see such a scenario playing out. Peter Roskam held back an extremely well-funded Democratic challenge here in 2006, and Morgenthaler hasn’t been able to scrape together enough chump change to make this one interesting. Her role as apologist-spokesbot for the Army during the Abu Ghraib scandal made Morgenthaler toxic to many liberals from the get-go. And her ties to the hated Gov. Rod Blagojevich remain easily exploitable if Roskam should choose to “go there.”

Republicans fantasized that businessman Steve Greenberg could at least force another opportunity to make Democrat Melissa Bean sweat in this R+5 district. The only problem is that Greenberg hasn’t opened up his own pockets like the NRCC had hoped, and his fundraising has been anemic. It also sounds like Greenberg’s campaign has a few management issues. At the end of the day, Bean is an incumbent whose skills have been tested in the crucible of several close elections — she’s not liable to make a mistake in the final six weeks of the campaign. And with Obama at the top of the ticket, the Presidential headwind will be less of a factor for Bean to deal with. This race moves off the board.

Oof. It pains us to make this change, but we feel that we have little choice. Regular SSP readers know that we love to torment Aaron Schock. Schock’s harebrained rants against Jimmy Carter and Barack Obama, as well as his widely-panned (and eventually retracted) idea to sell nukes to Taiwan leave us with no doubts that he’s little more than a glorified college Republican pissant. But in a conservative R+6 district, you need a solid Democratic campaign in order to win, and we haven’t seen one from Colleen Callahan, who continues to lag badly in both money and polls. Her only hope was to get on the air early and drive up Schock’s negatives to the point of unelectability. The problem is, the reverse seems to have happened. Callahan’s recent foot-in-mouth comments regarding reinstating the draft leave us unimpressed and disappointed in this race.

Multiple polls released over the past several months have shown Democrat David Boswell, a three-decade veteran of Kentucky politics, with a small lead over Republican Brett Guthrie for this R+13 open seat. The only problem is that, up until recently, Boswell hasn’t given much indication that he was willing to do the necessary grunt work of dialing for dollars. Case in point: he ended the month of June with only $45K in the bank. However, the DCCC has grown interested enough in this race to both add Boswell to its Red to Blue program and to reserve $840,000 in ad time for this race. Additionally, Boswell has gathered enough resources to begin airing his own ads. Boswell still has a lot to prove, but the DCCC’s heavy involvement here tells us that he has a fighting chance.

Democrat Frank Kratovil made a crucially huge score when he snagged the endorsement of moderate GOP Rep. Wayne Gilchrest, the district’s incumbent who was unceremoniously defeated in the Republican primary by state Sen. Andy Harris. Kratovil still faces some stiff challenges in this R+10 district, but the most recent poll shows a tied race. Kratovil, a prosecutor from the district’s Eastern Shore, will have to in part make this a race about geography (Travis Childers-style), using Harris’ western base against him in the rest of the district.

In these troubled economic times, are the voters of suburban NYC really gonna turf their freshly-minted Democratic incumbent in favor of some punk wingnut? We don’t think so. Hall’s brief career has been all but flawless, and his fundraising has been exceptional. Lalor has a few coins to rub together, but not enough scrilla to make a difference.

The good news: The latest GOP poll here showed that Bob Roggio doubled his name recognition. The bad news that says it all: He’s now at 10%. If something was going to happen here, we’d already be seeing it. If this election was going to be 1932-sized monster wave, Roggio would be a logical choice to get swept along. But we’re not counting on a miracle here.