Democrats picked up a northern Mississippi House seat in one of the most conservative-minded districts in the country Tuesday night -- an upset that will reverberate darkly through a House Republican caucus already reeling from losses in special elections in Illinois and Louisiana.
With 434 of 462 precincts reporting, the Democratic nominee, Prentiss County Chancery Clerk Travis Childers, leads Republican Greg Davis, 53 to 47 percent. The Associated Press has called the race for Childers.
The victory marks the Democrats’ third straight special election pickup in three months. It will be a serious blow to the Republican Party’s already-flagging morale and will surely prompt a new round of finger-pointing among the already fractured GOP caucus.
"This loss is going to prompt serious introspection by our conference to figure out what went wrong and how to fix it," said a GOP leadership aide. "We have time to do that, and we will if we learn our lessons leading into November. But the next couple of days are not going to be pretty."
The special election was held to fill the seat of former Rep. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), who was appointed to serve out the remainder of Sen. Trent Lott’s term last December. Wicker had never faced a competitive race since first elected in 1994, and the district gave President Bush 62 percent of the vote in 2004.
This upset win for the Democrats is even bigger than Hillary Clinton's win in West Virginia. Mississippi is about as red of a red state can be, with the Mississippi 1st Congressional District being the former seat of Senator Trent Lott. This should have been an easy seat for the Republicans to win, considering the nearly $2 million that GOP groups poured into the state, along with a pre-election stop by Vice President Dick Cheney, and President Bush, Senator John McCain, and First Lady Laura Bush making automated calls to voters urging them to support Davis. The Republican strategy was to make this race a national referendum by tying Childers to both Senator Barack Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) had spent almost $1.27 million in the district race--nearly 20 percent of the committee's entire cash on hand. All that money spent by the NRCC went down the drain in a huge loss to the Democrats. What is more, the Republicans have lost three congressional seats to special elections in seemingly safe Republican districts. This is such a shock that one GOP House leadership aid told Politico that "if we don't win in Mississippi, I think you are going to see a lot of people running around here looking for windows to jump out of."
The problem for the Republican Party is that the GOP elephant tied an albatross named George W. Bush around its neck, and then took a flying leap off a cliff, hoping to fly. The Party has tied itself completely to the Bush administration's failures in economic policy, domestic policy, and the war in Iraq. When you have 8 out of 10 Americans saying that the country is on the wrong track and almost 70 percent of Americans disapprove of President Bush's job performance, that is a huge hole the Republican Party has dug itself into. American voters are waking up and realizing just what a disaster this Bush administration has been for the country. And they are registering their disapproval of this disaster, and the direction both President Bush and the Republican Party has taken this country, to the polls by voting against the GOP candidates in supposedly safe Republican districts. In a sense, the Republicans are right that these three special election races were a national referendum.
It is just that the referendum was against the Republican Party, and President Bush.
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