Since we last reported on this race, CQ Politics has changed their evaluation from "No clear favorite" to "Leans Democratic." Greg Giroux reports:
The Texas Republican Party establishment has rallied around a single candidate, Houston City Councilwoman Shelley Sekula-Gibbs, in their unusual write-in campaign to salvage the 22nd Congressional District seat vacated in June by Tom DeLay, the former House majority leader.
But the extreme rarity of successful write-in campaigns for Congress and the presence of a solid Democratic nominee on the ballot in former Rep. Nick Lampson has prompted CQPolitics.com to change its rating on the 22nd District race to Leans Democratic from No Clear Favorite.The GOP faces a world of trouble in this race because of a serious miscalculation on the part of DeLay and his party colleagues.
Read the whole story at link above. Sekula-Gibbs has "a long way to go and a short time to get there" to be successful. Several sources have claimed the national party has committed $3 million to keeping the seat. If so, she will need every penny, as Democratic former Rep. Nick Lampson has already raised more than that.
Not only are victorious write-in candidacies for federal office rare, those which are almost always have some extra drama involved. My own state witnessed the very first successful write-in campaign for a seat in Congress when Senator Burnet Rhett Maybank died in 1954 after being renominated in the Democratic Primary (which in those days in SC amounted to being elected).
Speaker of the State House Edgar Brown was an obvious and well-qualified replacement candidate, but Democratic Party leaders met secretly and selected him only hours after Maybank's funeral. This caused a public backlash, and engendered a write-in campaign by former Governor Strom Thurmond, who won by nearly 2 to 1 in the general election. He served for several further terms, as you may have heard.
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Commentary, Congressional Races, Texas
