Ronnie Shows -- and he got trounced pretty badly in 2002.  He was, however, less conservative than Gene Taylor.  If there's ever a chance for us in this district, it would be if Pickering resigns and there's a special election.  That was how Taylor originally won his seat.

Methinks Pickering had some inside info that Trent would be resigning his seat when he decided to "retire" from Congress.

How much of a shot would we have at taking Pickering's House seat in a special election?

Not sure why it's looking so bad here (well, outside the fact that we already have a majority of the House seats.)  Three of the districts are fallow ground for Dems, but I'm not sure why nobody's ever really challenged Zach Wamp.  In light of 2006, an R+8 district is winnable for a good Democratic candidate.

Talk about scaring off the competition.  I wouldn't be surprised if potential Republican candidates look at that number and decide that running against her just isn't worth it.

Yeah, there are a lot of people out there who are still convinced that Rudy is a moderate or even a liberal.

Problem with Richardson is that he's running for President.  Even though he probably won't win, he probably won't exit the race any time before Iowa, either.

What's more, I think it would be viewed negatively if Richardson exits the Presidential race in, say, January and then decides to run for the Senate seat.  Richardson would have to step on quite a few toes to do so, and if we get a serious, non-Richardson candidate between now and February, will that person be willing to step aside?  Imagine if Udall announces for the seat next week.  He'll start raising money for a Senate race immediately.  If you've been raising money and traveling around the state in preparation for a Senate race for four months, and suddenly Richardson decides that he's not going to win the Presidency and instead wants to be a Senator, how are you going to react?

My point is that while I think Richardson would be a great candidate, I don't think he's a realistic possibility.

Yeah, but we also saw where going with "electability" got us in 2004.

You kind of have to wonder, with Corker winning in 2006, what the rest of the state thinks about both of the state's Senators being from East Tennessee.  I think McWherter, with his family name, will play very well in West Tennessee, which is a traditionally Democratic area, and he won't have the baggage of being a black Democrat from Memphis as Harold Ford Jr. did in 2006.  This race will be closer than a lot of people expect.

Honestly, everyone over here in middle Tennessee is too busy fellating native son Fred Thompson and his Presidential run for anyone to be paying too much attention to this race.  Read: nobody is paying attention to this race until Fred's Presidential campaign flops.  And if Fred is the GOP nominee for President, we don't really have that big of a chance.  Fred will carry the state easily and Lamar will just hitch his bandwagon to Fred's.

Alexander was a two-term governor.  He was first elected in 1978 and reelected in 1982.  McWherter came in when Alexander was term-limited in 1986.

We are talking about a man who retired from coaching basketball ten years ago.  He's almost as old now as Jesse Helms was when he retired.

Of course... he is not that much older than Dole.

"NE will be difficult for Democrats win. It is too much of a red State. Republican Nominee will need to be nutcase- another Bill Sali for Kerrey to win."

Okay... have to disagree here.  I don't remember the Republican nominees against Ben Nelson in 2000 and 2006 being nutcases, but Nelson still won twice.  Nelson did lose to Hagel in 1996, but Hagel turned out to be a strong candidate.  IIRC, Hagel is the only Republican to win a Senate seat in Nebraska since the 1980s despite it being a strong red state at the Presidential level.  In a sense, Nebraska functions much more like the Dakotas than it does, say, Utah/Idaho/Wyoming (monolithically Republican states where voters seem to vote for Republicans based on their party ID alone), as Nebraska will send Democrats to Congress even though it votes heavily GOP for President.

Yeah, but when a popular incumbent retires, you know the nutjobs in the GOP are going to try to take the chance to nominate one of them, who probably won't win in this district.  Many Republican primary voters are more committed to maintaining ideological purity than they are to winning elections, and I could see some far-right extremist coming out of the GOP primary there.

I think that the GOP's constant pandering to the South is working against it in the rest of the country.  All this talk about "faith" is a Southern-driven thing; I'm not saying that everybody in the rest of the country is an atheist, but they certainly don't seem to openly discuss religion the way people in the South do.  Much of the Democratic wave in 2006 occurred outside of the South as well; aside from a couple of big screwups by the GOP (FL-16, TX-22) and a couple of pickups in essentially non-Southern areas (FL-22), we really didn't make big gains in the South in 2006.  It was everywhere else, where voters were turned off by the Iraq debacle, as well as the GOP's strong social conservative bent.  Even in Kansas, traditionally Republican but socially moderate, we made gains.  That's not to say that Democrats should abandon the South, but as much as some Southern politicians would like us to believe otherwise, we don't need to win in the South to put together an electoral majority.

Is it just me, or does anybody else read that post over on Redstate and feel like it was written by a pre-2006 Democrat?  How funny is it that now Republicans are the ones writing off one of their incumbents and an open-seat race fourteen months before the ballots are cast?