Candidates Matter

Niki Tsongas, a Democrat, pulls off a narrow victory over Republican Jim Ogonowski in a heavily Democratic district. NRCC chair Tom Cole is crowing but Marc Ambinder's not so sure:

Well -- this isn't an elite liberal district, as anyone who ever worked for Marty Meehan can tell you. It is insular and provincial and distrusts outsiders; Tsongas lived outside the district before she ran. Though it has stayed in Democratic hands since the 70s, Tsongas still outperformed Gov. Deval Patrick here by two or three points; George H, W. Bush won this congressional district in 1992, as did Mitt Romney in 2002. [. . .] Cole's triumphalism is misplaced. At best -- and this is pretty good -- Ogonowski's run is a blueprint for Republican congressional candidates to run in 2008.

I think this mostly underlines the fact that candidates matter and our House elections aren't like party-list votes in a proportional system. In reality, voters should recognize that party affiliation is by far the most important attribute of a House candidate, but in practice they don't. An energetic candidate with a compelling biography, real local ties, and a veneer of independence from the national party can be competitive anywhere if pitted against someone who's unimpressive.

Comments

Losing by six points. For Republicans, this is what passes for winning now.

Posted by Jose Padilla | October 17, 2007 10:16 AM

One House seat almost never makes the difference regarding who controls Congress. On the other hand, an incompetent U.S. Representative can go a long way in embarrassing a state and a district. So I don't think it's quite so obvious, as you state, that voters should never think about who they're voting for.

Posted by Alex Parker | October 17, 2007 11:11 AM

First of all I'd like to point out that this district only has a Cook Partisan index score of D +9, meaning that a typical Dem would have captured 59% of the vote. Secondly you have to take special elections with a gigantic grain of salt because they are more about exciting your base than winning moderates. The bottom line is that Niki Tsongas isn't going to excite anyone while Ogonowski was a bomb thrower who excited many in the Republican base.

Posted by Charlie | October 17, 2007 3:42 PM

First, as previously said, the district is only mildly Democratic.

Second, as previously said, Niki Tsongas was an uninspiring candidate.

Third, although Ogonowski was doing the no-tax, scary immigrants thing, which I imagine a lot of Republicans will be doing in 2008, he was also proposing an immediate withdrawal from Iraq If the NRCC wants to go with that, they may pick up a few seats.

Posted by matt.wilbert | October 17, 2007 8:21 PM

How the hell do the Mass Dems not come up with a better candidate than an uninspiring 61 year old technocrat. I am always amazed at the sheer averageness of some of the Dem members in the delegations from MA, NY and CA.

Posted by great | October 17, 2007 9:59 PM

Well, it IS the least Democratic House district in the state -- the last one to elect a GOP Congressman so far (in 1972). A town-by-town vote count (courtesy of the Boston Globe) indicates that in 2006, Deval Patrick won it by 11% less than his statewide margin (but still by 10%, contrary to Ambinder), and in 2004 Kerry won it by 9% less than his statewide margin.

I notice, however, from the "Hub Politics" conservative political blogsite that the GOP is going to try to spin this as a public reaction against the "do-nothing Democratic Congress", which confirms my belief that the Democrats should start making it a lot clearer to the public that the only reason they've done nothing is that the Senate Republicans keep filibustering them at a rate three times higher than in any previous Congress in US history. (They certainly can't count on what passes for our political press to point this out.)

Interestingly, that same conservative site explicitly denies that this election was a referendum on the Iraq war -- according to Matt Margolis, if it had been, Tsongas would have won by a much bigger margin.

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | October 18, 2007 12:50 AM