I'm a Believer Now (House Election Preview 2006)

For a long time, I doubted that we could win back the House and while publicly I touted my belief that Democrats would win a majority this year in the House of Representatives even though secretly I thought we would fall just short. But I have realized now that not only will we take over the House, I truly believe that we will win in a landslide and pick up more than 30 seats. This might seem like quite the optimistic prediction. But what I have realized over the last few weeks is that we have some amazing candidates running for the House of Representatives, and the Republicans are asleep at the wheel. First of all, Democrats have now broken the record for most contested congressional election. So far, there are 424 districts where Democrats are running for Congress and we have a chance to fill seven more to reach 431 contested districts. In recent years, we have not run more than 400 Democrats and in 1994, Republicans set the record for most districts contested by running candidates in 419 districts. Now some say this is a waste of time because most of these people in hard red districts won't get more than 25% of the vote against their extremely entrenched Republican foes. However, what this does is it forces Republican incumbents to stay at home and campaign and spend money in their home district as opposed to spreading their money and time around the country to help their fellow Republicans. As well, in a year that is favorable to Democrats, the more candidates we have running, the greater the chance that we will win more upsets in a number of conservative Republicans districts, beefing up our majority.

Just look up some of our great challengers like Larry King, Eric Massa, Herb Paine, Paul Aronsohn, John Courage, and Colleen Rowley. The GOP will probably keep control of the Senate, but by a reduced margin. But we will win back the House, mark my words.