Top-Tier Recruit Rates a Rare Dem Challenge for Open Alabama Seat

[brooklynite]

Source: Congessional Quarterly

It has been a very long time since the Democrats have staged a seriously competitive bid to win Alabama’s conservative-leaning 2nd Congressional District. But that has changed this year, the result of seven-term Republican Rep. Terry Everett ’s surprise decision to retire after eight terms and the emergence of Bobby Bright — mayor of the state capital of Montgomery, the 2nd District’s major population center — as the likely Democratic nominee.

These circumstances have prompted CQ Politics to change its rating on the race to Leans Republican, denoting a highly competitive contest, from Safe Republican, a non-competitive category to which the race had been previously assigned.

Even with a well-known candidate, the Democratic takeover bid faces formidable obstacles. The 2nd, located in the southeastern corner of Alabama, was in the vanguard of the traditionally Democratic but strongly conservative districts that shifted toward Republican allegiances beginning in the early 1960s. Republican Bill Dickinson easily unseated Democratic incumbent George S. Grant in 1964 — a year in which Alabama was one of just seven states that favored Republican Barry Goldwater for president over Democratic incumbent Lyndon B. Johnson — and faced competitive contests in only two of his subsequent 13 House elections.

But Everett’s decision to retire, announced last September, coupled with more recent decision by Bright to pursue the Democratic nomination appear to have put the Democrats back in a game that they have essentially sat out for several election cycles.


Read more: http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?docID=news-000002692503

[Skinner]

1. Rock on!

Great news. :thumbsup:

[bluestateguy]

2. I'd rather have Obama on the top of that ballot

He turns out the black voters, and does not inspire the sam elevel of vitriol that Hillary does from conservatives.

[MasonJar]

3. Why did this post suddenly turn into an anti-Hillary post and a pro-

Obama salute? I like Obama, but the more this happens the less I am inclined to support him. I like Hillary too and the Clintons have both been incredibly supportive of black Americans and their needs. To see Hillary constantly pilloried because she is running against a black is very unsettling since anyone else running against her would not receive the black vote. This about race after all!