We have a special House election in three weeks - our own Bill Owens in a 3-way race against DeDe Scozzafava (R) and Doug Hoffman (C).
I believe Markos made a mistake a while back by endorsing Scozzafava. Soon after, DeDe said the following at a Teabagger forum on health care
Scozzafava said several times that while rising health-care costs need to be contained, she does not see the need to totally revamp the system.
"I don't see what the rush is," she said.
In addition, RCCC chair Pete Sessions has assured his colleagues that Scozzafava will be voting with the Republican Conference 95 percent or more of the time.
With a hat tip to conspiracy's diary at Swing State Project, today, Politico says that GOP's Dede Scozzafava faces cash crunch
According to the Politico article, Michael Steele's RNC (or is that Rush Limbaugh's RNC?) has contributed a total of $0 to Scozzafova's campaign.
President Obama is fully behind our candidate, Bill Owens. He's speaking at a fundraiser on his behalf next week, OBAMA TO STUMP FOR OWENS AT NYC FUNDRAISER. Taking the numbers from the Watertown Times article, it'll be 250k.
Yup, that sounds like chump change, but NY-23 is a pretty small media market - with some bits from Syracuse, but most of the district is covered by Watertown and Burlington (VT) TV stations.
And to that end, the Politico article details candidate TV spending on the race so far
Scozzafava appears to have spent only $26,000 so far on television advertising, and she pulled down her television buy last week in the vote-rich Syracuse media market, where she's hardly known. She's currently up with only a small $7,965 television buy in her home base of Watertown.
By contrast, Owens has spent $303,000 on television ads, and Hoffman has spent $124,000 on TV advertising alone, according to the media buy database.
In other words, on TV, Owens is outspending Scozzafava 12:1. Even the Club For Growth's candidate Hoffman is outspending the R 5:1.
And finally, here's this bit of "intelligence" (if that's possible from wingnuts) from RedState
The GOP polled NY-23 last week and found: Owens in first by double digits and DeDe in 2nd with Hoffman coming up from behind and closing. Obviously, they have not released this poll.
This seems implicitly confirmed by Stu Rothenberg - who has moved up his rating to"Toss-up/Tilt Democratic" - even though the latest published poll from Siena(PDF)had Owens down by 7.
While Red State raises money for Hoffman, we can contribute to making NY almost all blue, courtesy of Act Blue.
And when Owens wins, we will all be putting a stake into the heart of R hopes for a rebound in 2010.