More Recruitment Troubles

Recruitment is reallt a harbinger for the relative success or failure of a party. If nobody wants to run for your seat, it's probably because they know they'd lose with your party next to their name. Such it is for the trashed brand of the GOP.

Two congressional seats in Colorado that the Democrats captured in recent elections would almost certainly be high up on GOP strategists' target lists for the 2008 House elections -- if the overall political environment were more promising for the Republican Party.

But at a point in the fall of 2007 when the parties have candidates in place for most of the contests expected to be competitive a year from now, the Republicans have yet to recruit candidates to oppose Democratic incumbents John Salazar in Colorado's 3rd District and Ed Perlmutter in the 7th.

The slow start for the challenging party in these districts is noteworthy given that Republicans are statistically competitive in both. The GOP held the 3rd District seat as recently as 2004 and only turned over the 7th to the Democrats last year [...]

Dick Wadhams, the Colorado Republican Party chairman, did not attempt to put on overly optimistic spin on his party's prospects in the 3rd and 7th districts. He said he would like to have candidates already, and does not know what will emerge in either district. He attributed the absence of Republican candidates to the difficulty of facing an incumbent.

What I think is hilarious about that is that Dick Wadhams was George Allen's campaign manager and last year was touted as being the next Karl Rove. Now he can't find any Republican in the whole state of Colorado to run for Congress. How the mighty have fallen...

By contrast, 342 House seats have Democratic challengers as of October 1. So that means there are only 93 to go with months left before the deadline. Last year Democrats contested in 425 seats; they could beat that next year. It's all part of the 50 state strategy.

UPDATE: And now a rumor that Pete Domenici will retire from the Senate. That immediately puts the swing state of New Mexico in play.