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NRCC thinks big but takes big risks

I recently received my “top secret” mailing from the National Republican Congressional Committee, indicating the 100 (!) seats the committee was targeting for the fall election, with a plan to  pour more than $1 million of national funds into the races. Operating on the assumption that anything I know about can’t be very secret, I feel free to divulge its  contents to my readers. Not that there are many surprises.

The most striking thing was just how optimistic the Republicans are. Not only are they targeting up to a hundred Democratic seats (they only need forty to take control), but no fewer than eight of them are in Pennsylvania and seven in neighboring New York State, which is about to set some kind of record by having two governors resign in sex-related scandals in a single term (if it seems odd to target so many seats in traditionally Blue States, remember that you can only target seats you don’t already have: most districts in the south and southwest are either already Republican or are “majority-minority” districts that they probably can’t win anyway).

The mailing is a bit coy in not naming the specific districts it is targeting, but since the Republicans already hold 7 of 19 districts—and it’s a safe guess they’re not going after Congressmen Chaka Fattah (D-2), Bob Brady (D-1), or Mike Doyle (D-14)—this means that, at least in theory, they think they have a shot at almost every remaining Democrat in the Keystone State.

One can’t blame the GOP for feeling giddy: it hasn’t seen this promising a year in longer than anyone can remember. Yet the aggressive, everyone-to-the-battle approach—like the Democrats’ “fifty-state-strategy” before it—leaves a lot of questions unanswered.

How will the Republicans allocate resources, and what will they do if (inevitably) the Democrats mount a counterattack? If they do win big, will they do so by including a lot of moderates who, like the Blue Dog Democrats before them, come back to haunt the party later on?

These questions may seem carping in the current euphoria, but they seemed that way to Obama two years ago, and look at him now.

March 10, 2010 at 2:00 pm

--Michael Livingston

Tags: NRCC

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