Quote:
Originally Posted by CharlesCO
He talked to my father for 30 minutes on the phone when he was doing a phone bank. He sounds like an honest guy who really wants to change the way things are done in Washington. He told my father that he's planning on saving all his campaign money until the last week, and when he told me that, I figured that he is absolutely cooked.
I don't care who it is— I just want to see DeGette unseated.
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A candidate who personally has time to talk on the phone for 30 minutes to one random constituent is not what they consider a serious candidate. Trust me I wish they all had time to do that... but every year the number of constituents per district increases, and there are now about 600,000 voters per district. The consequence of limiting the size of the U.S. House of Representatives to 435 is that each rep. becomes farther and farther removed from ordinary people as the national population increases.
But a candidate who doesn't stand a chance will often have fun with it and try to build connections and donors to serve future political ambitions - so yeah, he'll spend 30 minutes on the phone with one voter. He is saving his money until the "last week" because he doesn't have enough money to spend in the mean time - the RCCC will not fund a guaranteed losing candidate and Denver is so liberal he has almost no donor base. He could be saving his money for another election where he plans to run for Senate or live in another district, or just schmoozing to run for mayor or city council or something later on.
DeGette is in the 7th safest Democratic seat in the Western U.S.... fivethirtyeight.com gives her a 99.9% chance of keeping her seat in a generic elction (
http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2010/...ity-index.html ), and in a Republican wave election her chances would be, perhaps, 99.8% - still safe. She's in such a safe seat that she doesn't fundraise for her campaigns (true story) while Markey and her opponent in Colorado's #1 swing district will each raise millions of dollars. She's also in a leadership position in the DCCC which is normally allotted to safe and senior members of a party. She usually runs unopposed.
Re-districting is NOT going to cut Denver's district in half - if it did, Republicans would be up in arms because it would turn two Democratic districts into safe seats instead of one (in which case DeGette would still be safe). Denver is so liberal that any suburban area you combine part of it with is going to be a Democratic seat.
Re-districting is instead going to end up making Denver into an even safer seat because the population increase will cause the tiny suburban portion of CO-1 is going to disappear and become part of Perlmutter or Coffman's district. Or maybe the airport will be chopped off into Perlmutter's district.
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