Entries for October 2006

History may declare the 2006 congressional elections the "Year of the Pendulum" in American politics. Voters' typically up-down, in-out, fickle nature seems particularly equivocal this election season.

The worldview (in Washington at least) is that the Republicans have already lost the U.S. House and that the Senate could go either way. I heard a contrary view yesterday that I share herewith. A well-connected Republican pollster told me that internal White House polls show the Republicans hanging on to majority control of the House by one seat (translating into a 14-seat loss for the GOP) and maintaining control of the Senate (the latter being much of a surprise).

If nothing else succeeds in prodding single women toward the ballot booth next month, will sex do it? Wouldn't have done it for me when I was young and single. There's something decidedly unsexy about voting (unsexy but incredibly important nonetheless). But I'm willing to bet I'm wrong, wrong, wrong on whether it'll work for single female gen-Xers.

Ohio's 15th Congressional District race should have been an easy slide into an eighth term for moderate Republican Rep. Deborah Pryce. It's been anything but.

Rep. Heather Wilson, a Republican from New Mexico's First Congressional District, is the only female veteran currently in Congress. She's the first Air Force Academy graduate in Congress and a former Rhodes scholar. She's also looking more and more like toast. Democratic challenger and Attorney General Patricia Madrid has run an aggressive campaign and gut-punch attack ads, featuring Wilson morphing into President Bush. Those ads seem to have worked well.

Minnesota's Sixth: The district is home to one of the most interesting (read that: competitive) woman vs. woman congressional races of the year. Democrat Patty Wetterling is ahead of Republican State Sen. Michelle Bachmann by 5 percentage points in a poll released this week. Majority Watch, which conducted the poll, "is a partnership set up by two independent polling firms to look at competitive House races nationwide in an effort to predict which party will win control the House on November 7. A total of 1,024 likely voters in the First District were interviewed in the automated telephone survey. The margin of error was listed at 3.08 percent."

As mentioned in my previous posts, there are 11 U.S. House and Senate races this year in which women are the nominees from each major party. I've compiled some information and musings on each of these 11 races, which will be posted in full by next week: