{"id":1590,"date":"2010-02-10T22:52:00","date_gmt":"2010-02-11T02:52:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2010\/02\/10\/to-retake-house-the-gop-might-need-the-north-country\/"},"modified":"2010-02-10T22:52:00","modified_gmt":"2010-02-11T02:52:00","slug":"to-retake-house-the-gop-might-need-the-north-country","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/2010\/02\/10\/to-retake-house-the-gop-might-need-the-north-country\/","title":{"rendered":"To retake House, the GOP might need the North Country"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The New York Times has <a href=\"http:\/\/elections.nytimes.com\/2010\/house\/\">a cool interactive map<\/a> up that charts the early picture of Congressional races nationwide.<\/p>\n<p>The bottom line is that Democrats still look very strong to hold the House after the November 2010 midterms.<\/p>\n<p>They have 172 solidly Democratic seats, plus another 37 likely holds.  That puts them just 10 seats shy of the number needed to hold their majority.  <\/p>\n<p>Republicans, meanwhile start the season with only 154 solid seats and another 17 likely wins.  <\/p>\n<p>Looking at this map, it&#8217;s clear that Republicans will need to pick off some seats that are outside their comfort zone, pushing back into New York state and the Northeast.<\/p>\n<p>The Times counts the 20th district held by Glens Falls Democrat Scott Murphy as a &#8220;likely&#8221; win for the Dems.  <\/p>\n<p>The 23rd district held by Plattsburgh Democrat Bill Owens is only &#8220;leaning&#8221; his way.<\/p>\n<p>Surely these two &#8212; who won special election victories when President Obama&#8217;s popularity was much higher than it is now &#8212; have to be among the most vulnerable.<\/p>\n<p>But both are working hard to establish themselves as centrists; and they&#8217;re also building big war chests.<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s more, there are signs that Republicans and Conservatives could be divided again in the 23rd district.<\/p>\n<p>The GOP has learned that it can&#8217;t make mistakes in this part of the country, even in a political cycle when the Dems look more vulnerable.  <\/p>\n<p>Republicans will need really strong, well-funded candidates to make a race of it.  And they&#8217;ll need their grassroots to come out strong.<\/p>\n<p>Whether or not they can unify around a couple of big names here in the North Country could be a bellwether for how the tea party movement and the GOP establishment partner up nationwide.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The New York Times has a cool interactive map up that charts the early picture [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[886],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1590"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1590"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1590\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1590"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1590"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/inbox\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1590"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}