Monday, November 06, 2006

Are The Republicans Panicking

They seem to be in a full scale panic, given their latest tactics. The NRCC is currently sending out deceptive robo calls to at least 25 districts (Chris Bowers says it is 53, but I only have evidence of these 25). These calls call up voters pretending to be from the Democrat, then when you hang up, it immediately calls you back until it has done so eight or so times or you listen to the entire message.

The effect is to try to piss off voters to stop them from voting for Democratic candidates, or get them to listen to what eventually is an attack ad against those same Democratic candidates.

What I find interesting though is what districts they are calling. If you use Chuck Todd's competitive House rankings over at the National Journal, the twenty five seats listed here as getting the calls has an average competitiveness of 38.28. (Note: three of these races were not even in the top 60 races so I used 60 for this computation).

If this is where the republicans have decided to make their stand using all of their dirtiest tricks it is not a harbinger of good things to come for their party. It appears to me that they are preparing for at least a 25-30 seat loss in the House, and firewalling against a possible 35-40 seat loss much as they have in the Senate.

I still stand by my prediction of us picking up 31 seats in the House, but I'm starting to look at a few that I didn't have us winning with a little more intrigue.

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