Well candidate filing has closed in both Illinois and Ohio, the first two states to do so for the 2012 election cycle.
How did both parties fare?
Below the fold for the state of play and please go and take a look at the 2012 Race Tracker Wiki.
Candidate filing closed first, in Illinois, on December 27th. Candidate Filings in Illinois are easy to find courtesy of the Secretary Of State. This compares VERY favourably to Ohio (but more about that later).
Illinois has 18 Congressional Districts as follows:
IL-01, IL-02, IL-03, IL-04, IL-05, IL-06, IL-07, IL-08, IL-09, IL-10, IL-11, IL-12, IL-13, IL-14, IL-15, IL-16, IL-17, IL-18,
So how did both parties go?
Well as it turns out both parties filed in 17/18 Districts.
Team Blue missed out in IL-16 the home of the Monster Primary between GOP Incumbents Donald Manzullo and Adam Kinzinger.
The GOP missed out in IL-07, Danny Davis's District.
According to Kossack Madigoon, however, both parties can file after filing has closed if they don't have a candidate on the ballot. Both parties opted not to do that in 2010 or 2008 FWIW.
So off to Ohio where candidate filing closed on December 30th. Ohio has 16 Congressional Districts as follows:
OH-01, OH-02, OH-03, OH-04, OH-05, OH-06, OH-07, OH-08, OH-09, OH-10, OH-11, OH-12, OH-13, OH-14, OH-15, OH-16,
Candidate filing in Ohio is done at the county level so the SOS doesn't keep a list of filed congressional candidates until well after filing has closed - epic stupidity. So having trawled through every counties' Elections Board website, and through the judicious use of Google and the FEC website my best estimate is that we missed out in OH-08, yep Speaker Boehners' District. Meanwhile the GOP missed out in OH-11, giving Marcia Fudge a free pass come election time now that State Senator Nina Turner has ended her Primary Challenge.
So in summary two states filing has closed and each party has two unfilled races. At least in Illinois either party can apparently nominate candidates in districts where filing closed without a parties' candidate on the ballot.
Your thoughts, corrections, questions, gossip, brickbats?