MD-06: Bartlett has never been a target ... until now.

One of the bigger political stories of the week, hard as it might be to imagine, took place far away from South Carolina. Midweek, in Washington, the DCCC (the campaign wing for House Democrats) laid down their first markers of the 2012 election cycle with the release of their extensive "Red-to-Blue" program and its assortment of related targeting programs.

The program, as our own David Nir catalogued earlier, identifies the districts (in this case, numbering more than 50) where they have identified either promising candidates, or districts that may be amenable to Democratic candidates, during this cycle.

In a typical election cycle, the target list for a political party is going to consist almost exclusively of districts that fall into two categories: open seats created by retirements or attempted promotions (to either the Senate or the governor's mansion), and freshmen members of the other party.

The logic there is rather obvious: open seats lack an incumbent member of Congress, and thus neither party necessarily has a built-in resource edge. And, with freshmen members of Congress, they are less likely to have entrenched themselves in their seats. Furthermore, legitimate opponents are less likely to be reluctant to challenge a freshman member, as opposed to a multi-term Congressman who has sailed to multiple victories in the past.

That impulse to challenge a freshman is even more magnified when, as is the case right now, we are coming off of a wave election. Wave elections, as they always do, push some weaker candidates across the line. The following cycle, on more neutral turf, they have the tendency to hit the skids.

Thus, predictably, the Red-to-Blue list, along with the other varied DCCC designations (emerging races, majority makers, etc.), reflect this strategy to some extent.

There were 57 races in total that were targeted. Eight of them are open seats in Democratic-held districts (which does make you wonder why they're on a list called "Red-to-Blue", but whatever). Five of them represent the newly-created districts in expanding states: Arizona, Florida, Nevada, South Carolina, and Washington.

That leaves a grand total of 44 districts currently held by Republicans that are being scoped out by the DCCC. Here is how they break down, by contest:

First-Term members of Congress: 54.5% (24 of 44)

Multi-Term members of Congress: 31.8% (14 of 44)

GOP-held open seats: 13.6% (6 of 44)



A caveat on those "freshmen": it is worth noting that a pair of them (PA-08's Mike Fitzpatrick and NH-02's Charlie Bass) are technically "multi-term" members of the House, given their previous tenure in the House before 2010.

It is also worth noting that with over 60 freshmen in the class of 2010 (man, did that election night suck), relatively few of them are on the target list right now. This is not as unusual as one might think. Two consecutive Democratic waves created some incredible opportunity districts for the GOP (hard to believe now, but there were more than a half-dozen districts where Barack Obama won less than 39% of the vote, and yet the Democrats controlled the House seat). Absent a ridiculously well-funded challenger, or a suddenly fatally flawed GOP incumbent, it seems unlikely we will see Democrats serving the constituents of some of those redder districts in places like Tennessee, Alabama, and Mississippi.

Despite that, the tsunami election of 2010 does create a target rich environment for Democrats this time around. Therefore, it is not surprising that the majority of R2B targets are freshmen Republicans.

However, it is also telling that a third of the targeted seats for 2012 are held by members that have served in the House for anywhere between two and sixteen terms. What's more: a number of the incumbents whose Democratic challengers landed on the first round of the target lists have quite pointedly not been targeted by the Democratic party in many moons. You'd have to have quite a sense of electoral history to remember a time when Democrats incorporated GOP incumbents like Judy Biggert (Illinois), Steve King (Iowa), and Roscoe Bartlett (Maryland) in any coordinated target list.

So ... what gives? The simple, and correct, answer is: redistricting.

It is no accident that half of the multi-term GOP incumbents on the various DCCC lists hail from just three states: California, Illinois, and Maryland. Democrats controlled the Illinois and Maryland processes, and an independent commission really shook up the Etch-a-Sketch in California, where a few normally safe Democratic incumbents are now vulnerable (names like Garamendi and Capps immediately come to mind), as well.

Some of these incumbents have been comfortably ensconced in safe districts for over a decade, but will run for re-election in dramatically different territory. A cursory glance at the changes in the districts shows some stark examples of this phenomenon. Judy Biggert will run for re-election in a newly-renumbered IL-11. Her old district went 54-45 for Barack Obama: not an awful result, given that Obama swept to victory in his home state by over 20 points. Her new district? 61-37 for Barack Obama in 2008. That fifteen-point swing could well be the difference between victory and defeat.

But it is small potatoes compared to the alterations made to the district of veteran Congressman Roscoe Bartlett. Bartlett, who was first elected to the House in 1992 at the age of 66, has historically held one of two reliably Republican seats in Maryland. Now, in his mid 80s, Bartlett must wrestle with a district that will be scarcely recognizable to him. In 2010, Bartlett was rather easily re-elected in a district that went 58-40 for John McCain. In 2012, Bartlett will try to seek his 11th term in a district that went 56-42 for Barack Obama. That is a 32 point shift, and it makes Bartlett, in all probability, a narrow underdog in November.

In fact, one could make a great argument that some of these multi-term incumbents should be the most compelling targets in 2012. After all, the freshmen have just come out of, in most cases, a competitive race to win election. Therefore, their campaign apparatus, and their own personal campaign skills, should still be fairly sharp. A Republican like Tim Johnson of Illinois, meanwhile, has won 60 percent or more of the vote in four of his five bids for re-election. One has to wonder if Johnson's campaign skills have to be a bit atrophied, since he has not been held under 55 percent of the vote since his first bid for the House in 2000.

It is reasonable to argue that if the Democrats pick up the 25 seats they need to pick up the House, the roadmap will include a lot of low-hanging fruit from the class of 2010, in addition to some key open seat wins. That has been the recipe for electoral majorities before, and it will be so in the future. But, if there is a takeaway from this first round of candidate and district recognition from the DCCC, it is that veteran Republican members of the House will not be parlaying their tenure in the House into a free ride, and that the defeat of at least some of them could be the key in giving us back Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.