While the best offense may be a good Defense in football, that’s not necessarily the case with the 2010 Congressional Elections. Over the last few weeks, the DCCC has been placing buys across the country for the weeks leading up to the mid-term elections. Approximately $28 million dollars will be spent, fixing the DCCC to around forty markets in the country. Cleveland, Tampa, Miami, Chicago, Columbus, Cincinnati, New York, Buffalo, Burlington, Syracuse, Watertown…..the list goes on. While our earlier blog post showed that it’s hard to tell who exactly is being targeted, we can tell quite a few things from the markets that the DCCC is buying. They are scared. This is evident by the fact that they are investing heavily in swing districts that have a large number of Democratic incumbents. Taking a closer look at these markets we see something pretty interesting. In the New York markets, for example, we see that the Democrats will be buying time in NH-02, NY-23, NY-25, NY-20. As we head south we see this pattern continues. The DCCC has invested over $750k in the Miami broadcast market. While there are a number of districts in this race, we can find only two races that are “in play” according to CQ Politics. These districts include FL-23 with Democrat incumbent Ron Klein who won in 2006 against long term incumbent Clay Shaw. The district is Republican leaning with and Klein is up against a strong Republican Challenger (Adam West). The other race is FL-25, an open seat currently represented by a Republican.

Another market the DCCC has heavily invested in is Cleveland. There is not a single “competitive” Republican district in the Cleveland DMA, there are however, two “competitive” Democrat incumbent districts. There are strong Republican challengers in OH-13 against Betty Sutton (who has less Cash on Hand then her opponent Tom Ganley), as well as OH-16, where Democrat John Boccieri is not the safest of bets.

These are all extremely important as even the DCCC has admitted they can only seriously target four districts. As a result, while the DCCC may be playing a good defense, this will only make the Democrats feel each loss more because there are less opportunities to pick up seats and lessen the certain pain of the 2010 mid-term elections.

Tags: Betty Sutton, DCCC, DCCC spending, Fl-22, Fl-25, NH-02, NY-23, OH-13, Tom Ganley You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.