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WILL BE NO COLUMN NEXT WEEK BECAUSE OF THE HOLIDAYS. SORRY FOR ANY
INCONVENIENCE.
Democrat Christine Cegelis
lost to longtime Republican Congressman Henry Hyde last year 56-44. Since then,
she has argued that the national Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee
(DCCC) ought to back her this time around in an open-seat contest against
Republican Peter Roskam. Hyde retired after his close encounter with Cegelis.
Cegelis has become a cause
clbre among liberal activists throughout the country who contend that the
DCCC is out of touch with the party's base and doesn't know how to win
elections. The activists also believe that national party leaders have wimped
out when it comes to truly opposing President George W. Bush on the war in Iraq
and on domestic issues.
Illinois Congressman Rahm
Emanuel runs the DCCC, and Emanuel hasn't been nearly as impressed with Cegelis
as her legion of hardcore fans. So, Emanuel started looking elsewhere. He
eventually found someone who could turn out to be Illinois' next rock star
politician.
Illinois Army National
Guard Major Tammy Duckworth lost both her legs and the partial use of one of
her arms when a rocket-propelled grenade exploded in the cockpit of the
helicopter she was flying in Iraq. She is a gutsy war hero who demanded that
the Army let her return to combat duty once she had recovered.
US Sen. Dick Durbin was so
impressed with Duckworth that he invited her to be his guest at the president's
State of the Union address. Later, she testified to a Congressional committee
and caught the political bug.
Durbin and Emanuel decided
that Duckworth would be the best candidate in Hyde's old district. Cegelis and
her followers were outraged. The venerable Henry Hyde retired because of
Cegelis' campaign last year, they said. Shouldn't that be worth something?
Well, not really. George
W. Bush defeated John Kerry 53-47 in Hyde's district last year. So Cegelis
underperformed Kerry's result by 3 percentage points.
Cegelis has based much of
her campaign on Congresswoman Melissa Bean's experience. Bean lost the first
time to Republican Phil Crane, then beat him last year. But when Bean lost to
Crane, she outperformed Al Gore's 2000 presidential performance by a point.
It's difficult, to say the
least, to buttress an argument that Cegelis is entitled to another shot when
she underperformed the top of the ticket.
There's more to this,
however. I heard a month or so ago about a poll taken for a prospective
Democratic candidate who decided not to run for the Hyde seat. I finally got my
hands on it, not coincidentally, after Major Duckworth announced her candidacy.
The poll of likely
Democratic primary voters was taken August 8-10 and the results here are a
subset of a general election poll, so the margin of error is pretty high,
+/-6.5 percent. The data was also "weighted by age" by pollsters Bennet,
Petts & Blumenthal "to better reflect the composition of the
electorate." Still, they're the only numbers we have.
* Just 28 percent of
likely Democratic primary voters in her district knew who Christine Cegelis
was. Remember, this is after her high-profile race against Hyde and a strong
effort to keep her campaign going in the months since then. Cegelis has burned
through a bunch of money in the past year to keep her name out there, but just
over a quarter of Democratic primary voters recognized her name in August.
* 48 percent of those same
likely Democratic primary voters knew who Peter O'Malley was, even though he
had never run for office before. O'Malley dropped out of the Democratic primary
race a couple of months after the poll was taken.
* Before he dropped out,
the poll showed that O'Malley was leading Cegelis 26-19 (or 22-16 excluding
"leaners") in the primary. Even with that high margin of error, a
seven-point lead is still pretty solid - about an 86 percent probability that
O'Malley was ahead and the result wasn't due to sampling error.
* Just 15 percent had a
favorable view of Cegelis, while 5 percent had an unfavorable view. That's bad
news for someone who thinks that her last race will propel her to victory in
the next contest.
The poll is flawed because
of its small sample size and weighting, but until someone shows me better
numbers and explains to me why underperforming the top of the ticket last year
was no big deal, I can see why the DCCC decided that Christine Cegelis wasn't the
best Democratic candidate for that district
-30-
Rich Miller also publishes
Capitol Fax, a daily political newsletter. He can be reached at
thecapitolfaxblog.com