Progressive Majority Rising

Progressive Majority Rising

Great post at my DD - if we take the house it's not just a Democratic win, it's a PROGRESSIVE win:

One thing few people ever both to point out about the 1994 Republican takeover of the House of Representatives is that "the South" never lost control. Democrats still have a majority of non-southern seats in the House of Representatives, just as we had before the 1994 election. When the south switched to majority Republican control in 1994, Republicans took over Congress. Whatever transfer of power took place between the two parties in 1994, the majority of the south has remained in unbroken control of the House of Representatives since 1955, the year after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision by the Supreme Court.

One of the big factors in the 1994 loss was the retirement of most of the last generation of Dixiecrats, folks like all time House longevity champ Jamie Whitten of Mississippi (1941-1994). Districts that would have flipped a decade or two earlier stayed in nominally Democratic hands longer than they would have. This was on top of another spate of retirements in 1992 spurred by Voting Rights Act driven redistricting; lines in several southern states were radically redrawn to produce black majority districts and some of the old timers called it a day.

MyDD continues:

If Democrats win control of the House of Representatives in this election, there is basically no way that they will control a majority of southern seats. Thus, it would mark the first time in the post-civil rights era that a party has built a majority coalition in the House without a majority of the south.

A Democratic win in the House would thus have the side effect of geographic shift in power in this country away from the South, and toward places often-maligned by conservatives such as San Francisco and Massachusetts. This geographic shift has brought with it an ideological shift in the Democratic Party, as the southern majority has always been a conservative majority. This will be the first post-Dixiecrat, post-Blue Dog, post-DLC, post-triangulation, post-moderation victory for Democrats in a long, long time.

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Cook's Political Report looks at competitive house races in annoying pdf. Dave Loebsack remaines on the edges of the map with Iowa 2 in the Likely GOP category. Selden Spencer is nowhere to be seen, yet he rather than Loebsack seems to be the netroots darling of Iowa. Can anyone explain that?

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Oops:

Ottawa County will pay about $40,000 to correct an embarrassing typo on its Nov. 7 election ballot: The 'L' was left out of 'public.

Oops oops:

KIRKSVILLE - The Republican candidate for prosecuting attorney in the upcoming election failed to pass the Missouri Bar Examination, disqualifying her from the office should she be elected in November...