Eleven seats. Jake Zimmerman told the West County Dems that that’s the magic number to take back the House in Missouri. Eleven is a lot of seats to take, so Dems will be looking to expand the playing field from the obvious chances.

Of the close-to-thirty Republican-held seats that might possibly be vulnerable next year, it’s easy to identify the top ten. Webster Groves, a St. Louis suburb, is a great example of an obvious chance for us. Last year, Jim Trout, a relatively unknown candidate, didn’t have big bucks but he knocked on a lot of doors and came within 150 votes of toppling a three term incumbent Republican. That’s three terms the Republican had.  So Trout’s opponent is termed out next year, and you’d better believe that we’ll be targeting that race like crazy and so will the Rs.

Jim Trout and Jeanne Kirkton, who made a run for that seat in ’04, are vying for the nomination, so Jake figures that one way or another, we’re going to have a good candidate there. And if the Dems have a good year with high turnout, in a district with that DPI and no incumbent, we ought to win that sucker.

We’ve got a bunch of opportunities like that around the state, for instance several in suburban Kansas City.  Another top spot we’ll be targeting is in south St. Louis County:

Perhaps you’ll remember Jim Lembke, the diabolical, despicable Jim Lembke, who’s now running for the state Senate, and who must be stopped at all costs. But for purposes of the House, the diabolical, despicable Jim Lembke leaves that seat open. And suddenly you don’t have the hard-working creature of Satan, who’s been there for, like, six years, you’ll have some new creature of Satan, who nobody really knows who they are yet. And that’s potentially four or five percentage points of difference with a good Democratic candidate. Thank god we have a good Democratic candidate, whose name is Vicki (Englund), and she’s been working hard and raising money early. I like that district. Republicans’ll probably invest some money there because they’ll try and force us to work for it.  But, you know what, I think the odds are very good we’re going to win it.

Jake could mention other great opportunites like that one, but where it really gets interesting is in the second and third tier opportunities. Those races are what give us a chance to get to that magic number of eleven–and to give Jake a chance to be called Mr. Chairman instead of Hey Dumbo. There are so many Nancy Boyda opportunities. Deb Lavender is just one of a crowd of Boyda-type candidates.

The seat that Judi Parker ran for last time, for example. That seat has the potential to be open because Jim Avery’s been expressing no interest in running again as the incumbent. And there are multiple open seats in St. Charles.  Nobody thinks of St. Charles as a hotbed of Democratic territory:

But make no mistake.  Claire McCaskill is a U.S. senator today because of St. Charles and Springfield. Think about that. You know, lots of people like to pat themselves on the back about how, you know, St. Louis came out great for Claire. But it came out for Claire about the way it’s supposed to come out for any Democratic candidate. Ditto Kansas City and the area of eastern Jackson County.  But St. Chuck! St. Chuck turned out to the tune of 30,000 more than she was supposed to get there, than those old DPI numbers said. Springfield showed up in the neighborhood of about 18,000 votes more than the DPI numbers said Claire was supposed to get there.

Now that tells you a couple of things.  First of all, it tells you that demographics change, that the DPI numbers reflect past elections. And, what it really tells you is that there is a shift going on.

It’s like the shift that’s taken place in St. Louis County.  In the seventies, that was a Republican bastion. Democrats couldn’t dream of winning there.  And most intelligent observers of the process would have said it was going to stay that way.  

But it didn’t stay that way. Part of the change was about white flight to suburbs like St. Charles and part of it was just about political maturation. But whatever the reason, St. Louis County is now overwhelmingly Democratic and elects an African-American County Executive, Charlie Dooley.

St. Charles, too, is facing many of the same pressures that turned St. Louis County Democratic.  It’s no longer just acres on acres of new developments, mixed with a few farmhouses, filled with people who moved out there to get away from people with a different skin color.

It’s maturing. Some of the people there have already raised their kids. Local issues are developing as the communities solidify, and land use is becoming an issue. There’s conflict between the Adolphus Busch camp, people who want to protect their duck hunting rights, and the developers. The fights on city councils and the recalls of councilmen over whether to protect land or doom it to strip malls are signs that this community is maturing and that we have a more competitive chance there.

It’s not an accident that Dems have three good opportunities in St. Charles next year.  The first of those chances will come as a special election on primary day, Feb. 5th. Tom Fann is running for the seat that Republican Carl Bearden resigned from. It’s not the closest shot of the three districts, but it’s a real chance. And if any you want to contribute time and shoe leather, you could do a lot of good because in a special election anything can happen. And if Fann wins, whammo, we have the power of incumbency in that district.

So, between now and next November, Jake Zimmerman and Rachel Storch will be huddling behind closed doors, deciding where to put their resources, asking themselves: “Where can we win? Where can’t we win? Where have we got a shot? And where should we get involved on the ground just to make life miserable for the Republicans?  

And, of course–as always–they’re at a competitive disadvantage when it comes to money. They’re sitting on about $200,000 right now, whereas the Republican HDCCC has about $800,000. What’s interesting about the gap is that both sides are getting about the same amounts from institutional sources–from the sort of people who just want to back a winner. They’ve been writing checks in about the same amounts to both sides, which is a pretty good gauge of what those folks think is coming.

The difference in funding is that individual Republicans can put the arm on individual wealthy contributors and get money from sources like the local Chamber of Commerce. Those candidates raise more money than our candidates do and turn a lot of it over to their HDCCC.

One way to put a dent in the funding difference is to urge Democratic legislators in safe districts to contribute to the HDCCC. Any of you who are regular readers of the national blogs will remember that sites like Kos, MyDD, and others put pressure in the last election cycle on Democrats in safe districts to contribute from their campaign war chests so that the DCCC could help out candidates in close districts. That’s a project we need to undertake in Missouri this cycle.

Jake suggested that those of us living in safe Democratic districts make it a project of ours to find out whether our reps have contributed to the HDCCC. If they haven’t, we need to urge them to do so. Let me take it a step further.  As the campaign season progresses, this blog site will collect that sort of data and put pressure on Democratic reps in safe districts to invest some of their money for the good of the party.

But, at the end of the day, how our party does in an election is less about how much money we have and about how Jake and Rachel strategize than it is about having good candidates. It is the job of all activists to keep an eye out for the people who’d make good candidates.  

In Chesterfield, for example, that Republican affluent bastion, with a DPI of 42, the right candidate could pull it off.  Jane Cunningham, the wingnut who’s held that seat, is more interested in censoring people’s crotch activities than in good governance.  But she’s popular. And she’s gone. Okay, not gone. She’s running for the state senate, and as such presents a threat that, like Lembke, must be stopped at all costs. But her House seat is empty, and that means that you can take away five DPI points from the Republican candidate. It means that, with no incumbent to face, the right Democrat might able to take that seat.  

Maybe a strong D candidate wouldn’t win there, but, if not, we’ll win somewhere else, we’ll take some of those second and third tier races. And the more good candidates we field, the more we’ll spread the other side’s resources thin, increasing our chances of taking those eleven magic seats.

When Jake Zimmerman spoke at the last West County Dems meeting, he made a point of the fact that last year, for the first time since 1976, Democrats picked up some seats in the Missouri House. A realignment is underway here and nationwide, and it was a great year for the Ds. You’d expect another one in 2008.  After all, Jake said that this time around we have:

“potentially the same dynamic, potentially people just as angry at Republicans, just as angry at the terrible governance that this country and this state have, just as furious with George Bush.  Last time I checked, George Bush was just as bad a president today as he was two years ago. And last I checked, Matt Blunt was just as bad a governor today as he was two years ago, if not worse.”

So you would think it’s going to be a great year for us, but even supposing there isn’t the same harmonic convergence of voter anger over Republican misrule, Zimmerman is optimistic about the picture for Dems in Missouri.

Even if it’s just an okay year instead of a great one for our side, he’s convinced we’ll pick up seats. And that’s because of “the MAP”. “The map” is better for us this year.  To understand what Jake means by “the map”, first you have to know that, in politics, demographics is destiny.  

Eighty percent of voters have made up their minds, in any given year, about whom they’ll vote for. Basically, forty percent of voters are Republicans and forty percent are Democrats.  Oh sure, lots of that eighty percent claim to be independents, claim to look at the candidate rather than the party. But the fact is that after they look at the individual candidates, they somehow almost always seem to pull the lever for one team or the other.  

Since that eighty percent is pretty much settled before the first campaign speeches are even dreamed up, two groups tend to decide elections.  One of those groups, obviously, is the twenty percent of voters who really are undecided. And the other group is the voters who know which party they prefer, but who don’t know for sure whether they’re actually going to take the time to vote. Elections are on workdays, and single parents or people working two jobs to pay for their health care may not find it easy to get to the polls.

What follows from these demographics is that some elections are much more winnable for our side than others are. If you live in a rural district in southern Missouri populated by people who are 70 percent solidly in the Republican camp, then it doesn’t much matter whether Dems are having a great year or whether they put up an excellent candidate. It doesn’t even matter if Republican turnout is depressed or whether the swing voters like you.  Under those conditions, the Republican will still win, just by, maybe, 55 percent instead of 70.  

The districts where we have real pickup chances hover within a certain range, and that range is quantified by what’s called the DPI, or Democratic Performance Index. It’s a number that is based on past turnout in presidential races and other demographic factors. This is a cold and calculating exercise in numbers crunching first invented by the First Lady of warm Democratic values, Eleanor Roosevelt.

And those DPI numbers give us a statistic, a number that describes Democratic turnout in a given district.  So, in Deb Lavender’s district in Kirkwood (district 94), the DPI is 47.  What a DPI of 47 means is that in a generic year, if everybody votes the way they usually do and the swing voters split evenly, the Republican will get 53 percent of the vote and the Democrat will get 47 percent.

But of course, that figure doesn’t tell the whole story.  It doesn’t tell us, for example, what kind of campaign Deb is going to run.  If she has a good field operation, that can move the vote in her favor by somewhere between 2 percent and 4 or 5 percent.

What follows from that is that when you look at a district with a DPI somewhere between 45 and 55, “you ought to see a hyper-competitive district, a district where, all else being equal, anybody can win.” And when you look at a district with a DPI of, say, 40 percent, you’re looking at a much tougher race to win, but one where it can still be done.

So Jake loves “the map” because the two things it tells him are where the open seats are and what those DPI numbers are–and to some degree who our incumbents are that might be vulnerable.

“And across this state, right now, there are somewhere in the neighborhood of the high twenties of House districts that fit within that margin; they fit within that competitive range that I was telling you about before. And of those, a substantial number are open seats.

It’s exciting to have substantial numbers of open seats in those competitive districts because incumbency matters.  Now that Jake is a representative, he isn’t just some goofy red headed kid who shows up anywhere they’ll let him have a microphone. He’s a goofy, red headed kid who gets to use state resources to send out three mailings a year on the important issues of the day. He gets to help constituents solve problems, and if he does that, those constituents and their friends form a good opinion of him. And if nothing else, they at least recognize the name. Constituency is worth a few DPI points.

So when you look at a district within that 40-55 DPI competitive range and you see an empty seat, what you ought to think is, “Game on.”

Dems in Missouri have close to thirty competitive seats that are currently occupied by a Republican, and eleven or so of those are open seats. That situation would look good even in a generic year. But we’re hoping for a better than generic year in 2008.  If voters are still ranging between disgruntled and furious with Republican governance, then more of those seats are likely to tip in our direction.

We’ve got close to thirty chances, and we need to take eleven.  ELEVEN SEATS.  That’s how many Democrats need to take away from Republicans next November to take control of the House.

My next posting, the last in this series, will describe a few specific races and will cover some of the other factors that can swing those 40-55 DPI races our way.