Pedersen's Stealth Campaign Another Bad Sign for Democrats

Once upon a time (before a string of polls showing a 20+ point lead for John Kyl), Democrats listed Arizona among their targets for a pickup in their drive to retake control of the Senate. Jim Pedersen, a multi-millionaire developer and former chairman of the state Democratic Party, was persuaded to run, and has already kicked in over $2,000,000 of his own money.

Now Pedersen has started running his commercials, and they are yet another reason why, despite lousy polling nationwide and the apparent suicidal tendencies of the Republicans, I still think the Dems will fail to gain ground in this November's elections. In fact, I'm still standing by my prediction from two months ago that the Republicans will actually gain seats in the Senate!

Pedersen is running a completely stealth campaign. There is not a single mention of his party affiliation in the ad. Before you dismiss that as a red-state tactic, remember that we have a Democrat governor (who just vetoed both an abortion restriction bill, and a bill cracking down on illegal immigrants) and most of the state level offices are held by Dems. Even more telling than what it leaves out is what the ad says. Pedersen declares his independence: "I don't care if an idea is a Republican idea or a Democrat idea" and ends with the tag line "Nobody's Senator but ours."

In the special election for felon Randy Cunningham's seat in California recently, the Democratic candidate took the same tack. (It didn't work for her either...and if you can't win on the "culture of corruption" in CA-50, where can you?) If candidates are running from the Democrat label, that's not a good sign for their party.

The door of opportunity is wide open. The Republicans are doing everything they can to hack off their own base, from unrestrained pork spending, to failing to confirm more judges, to refusing to take control of the borders. But they aren't running in a vaccuum. And the Democrats aren't going to win without a plan--which they refuse to disclose if they even have. The fact that they have candidates hiding from their party label is bad news for How-Weird Dean and his buddies.