POLITICO.com: Erika Lovley
Lost amid the Republican euphoria surrounding Tuesday’s elections is this inconvenient fact: The GOP just got its clock cleaned, again, in another high-stakes House special election.
It shouldn’t have come as a surprise, since Republicans have lost 20 of the past 29 House special elections, dating back to January 2003. And in perhaps the most worrisome aspect of the trend, the GOP lost its fifth consecutive competitive special election in Republican-friendly territory.
In New York’s historically Republican 23rd District, where Democrat Bill Owens prevailed Tuesday, the GOP squandered a 43 percent to 31 percent voter registration advantage over the Democratic Party. In New York’s 20th District, where Scott Murphy — like Owens, another unknown Democrat with no experience in elective office — won a March special election, the GOP blew a 65,000-voter registration edge.
In both of those 2009 New York races, however, the voter registration totals are misleading: Both seats have trended to the left in recent years. And the two contests were tight, decided by 4 percentage points or less.
But the bottom line — and that’s all that really matters — is that Democrats won those closely contested races, continuing a two-year streak of stealing seats right out from under the GOP’s nose. In the month before the election, the DCCC out-raised the NRCC by a 2:1 margin.
“The [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] has really found their groove in these races, and the [National Republican Congressional Committee] hasn’t learned one lesson in the past two years,” said Tom Bowen, who served as campaign manager for Illinois Democrat Bill Foster’s successful 2008 special election campaign.
See the rest of the story at: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1109/29212.html
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