Meet Kesha Rogers, the winner in Tuesday's Democratic primary in the Texas Twenty-Second Congressional District that covers much of the south-central portion of the Houston MSA (Metropolitan Statistical Area) and includes the upscale suburbs of Sugar Land and Pearland as well as areas of the more downtrodden of both Fort Bend and Galveston counties.

Her platform includes high speed rail, nuclear power, desalination plants, food security, pulling troops out of Iraq and Afghanistan so as to put them into space while leading a war against the British Empire. And oh yes, she wants to impeach the President. She's a Lyndon LaRouche "Democrat" and the upsetting upset winner of the Democratic primary over Doug Blatt, an Army veteran and independent businessman.

From her website:

The victory in the 22nd Congressional District yesterday by LaRouche Democrat Kesha Rogers sent an unmistakable message to the White House, and its British imperial controllers: Your days are numbered. Kesha's campaign hit relentlessly at a single theme, that President Obama must go, that his attacks on this nation – with his dismantling of the manned space program, his efforts to ram through a fascist, killer “health care” policy, his endless bailouts for Wall Street swindlers, while demanding budget cuts which will increase the death rates among the poor, the sick, the elderly and the unemployed – are not acceptable, and will not be tolerated.

Skeptics said that LaRouche's approach is impractical, it won't work, that Democrats will never support someone who is calling for the President's impeachment. Obviously, the voters of the 22nd district disagreed with those skeptics, as Kesha received 53% of the vote against two opponents. As Kesha told the Galveston Daily News last night, when a reporter asked if she expected support from the Democratic Party in the fall election, “I am leading a war against the British Empire. I'm not worried about what Democratic Party hacks say or do.”

The results are a complete and utter embarrassment.

The Texas Twenty-Second Congressional District is Tom Delay's old seat and though Democrat Nick Lampson won the seat in 2006 in the wake of the scandal that forced the number two Republican in House to resign, the GOP won back the seat in 2008 with Pete Olson comfortably ousting Nick Lampson by a seven point margin.

Here's a video made for the primary:

 

Just when the GOP is starting to catch some small breaks in the Senate, the situation in the House is rapidly deteriorating. As many had predicted, a growing number of Republican representatives do not find the prospect of life in the minority appealing and are calling it quits. Unfortunately for Republicans, a large majority of them represent competitive districts. The latest retirement were particularly shocking because they were completely unexpected -- especially Rep. Ferguson's in NJ-07. Democrats have golden opportunities to pick-up all of these seats, especially if the environment continues to favor them. But this also means Republicans will be forced to play defense and will not be able to contest that many Democratic-held seats, no matter how vulnerable they might be.

The full ratings is available here, at Campaign Diaries.

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The full rankings are available on Campaign Diaries.

Plenty of action in House races since our first ratings came out in mid-September. This is recruitment and retirement season in the House, and Ohio has been the center of it all, with three Republicans retiring, two of them in very competitive districts (OH-15 and OH-16). Democrats have had better news on the recruitment front as well (look at AK-AL, FL-24, IL-11 and MN-06), but Republicans reply that they are very satisfied with their newest candidates in NM-01 and OH-07...

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Promoted because Sunday evenings are too quiet around here. Texas Nate
As Rep Nick Lampson continues recovering from his heart surgery, he's making plans for his political future that seem likely to leave a lot of his supporters in the district very unhappy.

The Battle for TX-22 was a hard fought one in 2006. Replacing a wounded Delay (who left the race after the primary in vain hope of allowing the RPT to name a successor) took the combined efforts of a determined candidate, the DCCC and other established Dem powers, and bloggers and other activists sowing blue seeds in a determinedly red district.

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John Zogby has a habit of producing polls that, rather than trying to reveal the current state of public opinion, instead are provocative for the media and tell the person who commissioned the poll what they want to hear. His latest poll out of TX-22 is no different:Write-in tightens race in District 22
Sekula-Gibbs running close to Lampson for the seat DeLay held Really? Gibbs is close? Is that what the poll actually says? Um, not exactly: Thirty-five percent of respondents said they would vote for a write-in candidate, a statistical tie with the 36 percent support for Democrat Nick Lampson, according to the poll of more than 500 likely voters in the 22nd Congressional District. Ah, I see. Write-ins are close. But write-ins are not the same as Gibbs. The poll shows that 79% of write-in voters intend to vote for Gibbs. It also shows that only two-thirds of those voters know how to conduct a write-in. With those two factors taken into account, Lampson is actually doubling up Gibbs 36-19. But hey, Zogby wasn't commissioned to make a boring poll. Remember those Zogby polls showing Chuck Pennachio ready to defeat Bob Casey in the Pennsylvania Senate primary? So do I.

The oddities of this particular race aside, the poll does show long-term problems for Democrats in this district. In a straight trial heat, with Gibbs's name on the ballot, she leads Lampson 53-40. Even if Lampson wins this race due to the odd ballot situation involving DeLay, clearly it will be a difficult seat to hold.

Uber-red districts are fun to attack, but over the long-term we can't count on them. Lampson still looks good to win on November 7th, but those hypothetical general election numbers show that TX-22 will, or at least should, be #1 on the Republican target list in 2008. Our path to a long-term majority is not found in districts like these, even if our path to a majority is at least partially found in not being afraid to challenge Republicans in districts like these. Republicans are expending a lot of resources to try and win a seat where we really shouldn't be this close to winning. That helps us in a lot of swing districts around the nation and, in this case, probably nets us an extra seat for a few years.