It’s all over now, baby blue:
Democratic St. Lucie County Commissioner Chris Craft is dropping his bid for Congress against freshman U.S. Rep. Tom Rooney, R-Tequesta, a Craft confidant says.
“I’m depressed,” said local AFL-CIO President and Democratic activist Pat Emmert, a Craft backer who said Craft informed her of his decision this afternoon.
Efforts to reach Craft today have been unsuccessful.
In all honestly, this doesn’t come as a surprise. Craft’s candidacy received an initial flurry of buzz from the DCCC, but he mostly fell off the radar ever since. He also had some pretty significant fundraising difficulties, only raking in $42K in the fourth quarter of 2009. At this point, it’s hard to blame Craft for preferring to keep his powder dry, as this wasn’t shaping up to be much of a horserace.
RaceTracker Wiki: FL-16
a moment I thought it said “Charlie Crist drops out”. It wouldn’t surprise me much. What bench do we have there? I know we wouldn’t have picked up the seat anyway but we should still field a good candidate.
Anyway, who wants the FL-16 seat anyway? It’s cursed like the frogurt.
This isn’t a district we realistically have a shot at contesting anyway. It only flipped in 2006 because Foley was still on the ballot, and probably would’ve flipped back even if Mahoney hadn’t turned out to be a first-class scumbag.
Kinda like NY-29 this cycle, though at least Massa made a positive contribution before his meltdown – he got Shotgun Randy Kuhl out of Congress.
Rooney is pretty hardcore conservative, and it’s best to knock these types out early before they entrench. Hopefully we can make a decent shot at it in 2012, but we already dropped the ball back in ’08 here, so I’m not too confident.
…For a headline along the lines of “Chris Craft Jumps, Jumps Out of Race”
Even if FL-16 is a losing proposition in ’10, anyone who does half-well in ’10 will be in an excellent position to take out Rooney in ’12 with President Obama on top of the ticket.