MORE REPUBLICAN WOES... IN OHIO AND MARYLAND

A couple weeks ago we mentioned in passing that the Ohio Republican Party was being traumatized by a death match between a garden variety mainstream conservative (Bob Latta) and a drooling neo-Nazi Club For Growth maniac (Steve Buehrer) seeking to replace the recently deceased Congressman Paul Gillmor in northwest Ohio. Turns out the rubber stamp Latta beat the Club For Growth kook in a down to the wire vicious, party-splitting grudge match and he will now face a Democratic Party firmly united behind Robin Weirauch (December 11). Weirauch ran against Gillmor in 2004 and won just 33% of the vote. Last year, however, she made huge headway and wound up with 43% of the vote. It's still a long shot but not out of reach, especially not if Bush's popularity even in rural parts of Ohio like the 5th CD continues to plummet.

Today's Congressional Quarterly reports that "with all precincts reporting, Latta had 43.7 percent of the vote to 40.1 percent for Buehrer... The Latta-Buehrer race was an often unruly affair in which each candidate accused the other of lying about his opponent’s legislative record and stances on taxes and social issues." Basically they were arguing over which was more of an extremist lunatic, each trying to lay claim to that distinction. After having loudly abandoned the electoral center and having inflicted ghastly political wounds on each other, Democrats are hopeful that Weirauch could pull off an upset in this lilly white, deeply red district that gave Bush a 61% win in 2004.

Around the same time we first started looking into the crazy contest between the 2 mudslinging Ohio Republicans, we also took a look at the bizarre situation in Maryland's 6th CD, where far right rubber stamp Roscoe Bartlett has so confounded moderate voters in his district by voting as though he lived in some kind of Texas backwater that he has made himself vulnerable to a challenge from progressive Democrat Andrew Duck. An excellent diary at Daily Kos today quantifies exactly what I was saying. Bartlett's job approval ratings are now in Bush territory, quite fitting when you see how he has voted over the last 7 years. And although MD-06 is even "redder" than OH-05, a poll shows that if the election were held today, Bartlett would be out hunting for honest work tomorrow.