In a major recruiting coup for national Republicans, Rep. Mike Castle (R) will enter the open seat Senate race in Delaware later today, according to sources familiar with the decision.
Castle had been weighing a race for the seat being vacated by Vice President Joe Biden for months. Former governor Ruth Ann Minner (D) appointed longtime Biden staffer Ted Kaufman to fill the seat until the 2010 election.
The Republican congressman is widely regarded as the only GOP candidate who can win the seat next November given the decided Democratic lean of the First State. Castle has been a statewide elected official in Delaware since 1980 when he was elected lieutenant governor. Four years later he became governor, staying in that post until 1992. That year Castle was elected to Delaware's at-large House seat where he has stayed for the past 17 years.
Castle is likely to face off against state Attorney General Beau Biden next fall. Biden, the son of the vice president, who recently returned from a year-long deployment in Iraq in Iraq and is expected to make a decision soon about his political future. Castle's presence in the race could complicate that decision although one Democratic source said Tuesday that he still "fully expects Biden to run".
Castle's candidacy is a major recruiting victory for the National Republican Senatorial Committee, which had been aggressively courting the Delaware GOPer for months.
With this news, The Rothenberg Political Report has just changed Deleware's projections from "Currently Safe for Democrats to Lean Takeover for the GOP."
An early March Public Policy Polling (D) survey had Castle leading Biden 44%-36%. Susquehanna Polling & Research (R) showed Castle up 55%-34% in late April. And a Sept. 30 Rasmussen Reports poll had the Republican ahead 47%-42%. The latter survey also showed that both men are very well-liked. Castle was at 61% favorable/34% unfavorable and Biden 60% favorable/32% unfavorable.
We're moving the Delaware Senate seat from Currently Safe for Democrats to Lean Takeover for the GOP. However, even if Beau Biden takes a pass on the contest, the combination of the state’s Democratic bent and Castle’s popularity strongly suggest a very competitive contest.
It has been this type of pattern that has handicappers predicting large losses for Democrats in 2010, mostly in the House, although we now see the GOP has high hopes for gains in the Senate as well.
Via The Hill:
Republican campaign efforts are “far ahead” of where they were the year before the party took back the House in 1994, the leader of the GOP’s midterm campaign efforts said Monday.
Republican campaign efforts are “far ahead” of where they were the year before the party took back the House in 1994, the leader of the GOP’s midterm campaign efforts said Monday.
Rep. Pete Sessions (Texas) said that in such areas as fundraising and candidate recruitment, the House GOP’s 2010 election campaign is ahead of where the party was at the same point in the 1994 cycle. That was the year former Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) led the Republican Revolution during the midterm election following former President Bill Clinton’s first two years in office.
“In terms of candidate recruitment, fundraising and issue development, we are far ahead of where we were at this point in 1993 — and you remember what happened in ’94,” Sessions, the chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), told the conservative website Human Events in an interview posted Monday.
A little farther down in the article shows that political forecasters are weighing in and the numbers seem to be rising, in favor of the GOP:
Independent political analysts in recent weeks have put momentum behind the GOP.
Political forecaster Nate Silver of the website fivethirtyeight.com in August predicted that Democrats could lose as many as 50 House seats. Charlie Cook of The Cook Political Report in August said Democrats could lose more than 20 seats.
Sessions’s comments are among the most confident issued by a Republican leader, though others have also indicated they’re hopeful of a sea change next year.
“I really believe we’ve got a shot at taking back this House, because you see what’s gone on here with the unfettered ability of this administration and Nancy Pelosi to run this Congress,” House Minority Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) told ABC News in an interview.
That optimism grew after an end-of-August poll commissioned by the Republican National Committee (RNC) showed a tied generic congressional race, at 36 percent for Republicans and 36 percent for Democrats. That represented a five-point shift in internal Republican polling between June and August alone.
“It has been a number of years since we’ve seen the generic ballot at parity for us,” Republican pollster Wes Anderson, who conducted the survey, said at the time.
That poll saw Republicans riding high on a wave of opinion against the healthcare reform package in Congress, with Anderson predicting a “good year” in 2010 if any of the current health proposals pass.
Perhaps some on the left will realize now why the moderate Democrats, those known as the Blue Dogs, have been hesitant to put their political careers on the line by going against what their constituents want and voting for Obamacare.
Obamacare could be political suicide for them.
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