Eleven! Can I say it too often? That’s how many seats Dems need if they’re going to to take the House. And HD 16 in St. Charles is one of the 17 or 18 chances we have statewide to reach the magic number. So Kristy Manning’s candidacy matters. And it just got stronger, because her primary competition, Tom Fann, has dropped out in order to run for the St. Charles County Council.

Opting for the County Council race was a smart move for Fann. He stands a better chance of winning that contest, and he improves the chances of us getting the state rep seat. Here’s why: Fann, who just lost the special election there on Feb. 5th, wouldn’t, realistically, have been likely to succeed on the second try.

Manning, though, has a credible shot at it, and Fann’s withdrawal strengthens her prospects.

The DPI number (Democratic Performance Index) for that district is somewhere between 46 and 47. It’ll take more than 47 percent, of course, to win that election, but consider these additional factors in Kristy’s favor:

There’s a Democratic groundswell this year. That oughta be worth a point or two. Note that 52 percent of the primary voters in HD16 took Democratic ballots.

Furthermore, conventional wisdom holds that a well organized field campaign is worth somewhere between two and five points. The full name of the only Democrat left in this race is Kristy Organized Hard-working Manning.  

Her opponent, Mark Parkinson, did some field work in his matchup with Fann, though it’s not easy to get a handle on just how much. Because Republicans typically have more cash to spread around, they’re more likely than Dems to throw money at a race. But since Parkinson will only have eight months worth of incumbency under his belt come election day, he might feel vulnerable enough to hit the streets. Count his field game as an unknown factor in the race.

Then there’s Kristy herself: energetic, articulate, attractive. On paper, she and Parkinson start about even. Both are thirty-something and newly married, with little on their resumes beyond having been legislative aides (she for Joan Bray, he for Kit Bond). But Kristy says that when she talks to people at their door, she surprises them by not being easily pigeonholed. I asked if she could give me an example.

Sure, she said. She doesn’t run from the fact that she’s pro-choice, but people tend to assume that that stance implies a whole slew of other beliefs, like being for gun control. Kristy points out that if you’re going to grant that the Constitution protects a woman’s right to choose, perhaps you should also grant that it protects the right of citizens to own guns. She tells people that just as she believes there should be laws to regulate abortions and make them safe, there should also be laws to regulate guns and make their use safer.

She also plans to stress, in talking to people, that she has experience in how state politics works. One important lesson she’s learned is how necessary it is to have conversations with the other side and find the areas where compromise will work.

Manning is a fine candidate, with an odds-on chance of taking that seat.

One curmudgeon at Political Fix expressed doubts when she filed in late March:

Fann will win the primary and lose the general, again. And if by some fluke he doesn’t win the primary, Parkinson’s margin of victory against Manning will be even greater than it would have been against Fann.

No use in waiting 4 months, start crying in your beer now Manning supporters. Let the games begin.

We’ll see if “Jackson” is right, but I don’t think so. Manning is a smart money bet.

I never saw it coming. A Democrat filed against Tom Fann, who just lost to Republican Mark Parkinson in the special election in St. Charles HD16 on primary day. The someone who filed against Fann is Kristy Manning, a young legislative aide to Senator Joan Bray.

I met Manning last fall at a meeting of the Women’s Democratic Club for the Second Congressional District. Kristy was the speaker. She burbled cheerfully–and with undeniable authority–about the chances for the various House races in St. Charles County in ’08. In fact, she was so enthusiastic and knowledgeable that someone asked if she would consider running for office instead of just campaigning for everybody else. Cheryl Hibbeler, who knows as much about Democratic politics in that county as just about anybody, laughed and said that although Kristy’d make an excellent representative, she’d be wasted in elective office, because the Dems in St. Charles couldn’t spare her as a campaigner.  

Looks like they’re going to have to.

Kristy hasn’t run for office before, so she’s unknown to most voters in the sixteenth. In fact, one commenter at Political Fix said: “An aide to Joan Bray is running in St. Peters? Wow, she ought to get a couple of dozen votes.” That man knows less about St. Charles politics than the commenter who said: “Underestimate Kristy Manning and you do so at your own peril.”

Here’s why. Kristy’s young–late twenties? thirtyish?–but she knows, and is respected by, a large number of those in the know within Democratic politics in the area. Who knows how many thousand doors she’s knocked on for other candidates? Now that she’s up to bat, she can call in a lot of favors–and money.

And that’s just the St. Charles pols. Kristy was involved in Joan Bray’s election campaign, is a founding member of Consumers Council of Missouri, and is active in several women’s groups in the Metro area. She knows a lot of people that she can touch for contributions other than the standard donors to campaigns in past elections in St. Charles County

And those people know what a hard campaigner and superior organizer she is.

Tom Fann, on the other hand, failed to beat Mark Parkinson on Feb. 5th despite having several important factors in his favor. He was targeted by the HDCC–with money and a professional campaign manager. And since it was a special election, the volunteer pool was large; in the upcoming election, though, volunteers will be spread thin working for many different candidates. Since Fann only got 48 percent of the vote, there’s no reason to think he’ll do significantly better next fall, when he won’t have all those advantages he just had.

Still, some political watchers will argue that the Ds ought to go with Fann, who is the known quantity, rather than Manning, who is quite different in her political background and is  progressive in every respect. In the last 20 years most Dem candidates have not been proclaiming  their party affiliation loudly, attempting instead to portray themselves as “Republican lite.”  It hasn’t worked much and most  Dems want to find out if a real Democrat can succeed there.  As another Political Fix commenter said: “At least we know where she stands! Tom Fann couldn’t decide if he was Democrat or Republican.”

Exactly. If she runs as a pure progressive and gets 30 percent of the vote, we’ll have our answer, even if it’s one we don’t like. If she matches Fann’s numbers, the question will remain unanswered. But if she wins? Oh, baby, if she wins, Republicans can kiss their confidence goodbye in a large chunk of St. Charles County.  

The GOP is worried about the Fann race in house district 16, St. Charles County. Or at least Kit Bond is, since Fann’s Republican opponent, Mark Parkinson, is Bond’s protegee, and Bond figures the Republican mayor of St. Peters has been … too kind … to Tom Fann. Parkinson is barely thirty and has only one job on his resume: as an aide to Kit Bond.

So we know why Bond wants Parkinson to win. Let me tell you why I believe Bond is worried about his guy: he bothered to show up in St. Charles within the last few days to ream out Mayor Len Pagano (pictured at left) for apparently endorsing Tom Fann.

Not that Pagano did endorse Fann. Not really. It all started when a Fann campaign worker put together a piece of campaign literature with a picture of Fann and Pagano on the back, with words of praise from Pagano about Tom. Those words were in quotation marks, but weren’t actually quoted. They were only the gist of remarks Pagano had made about Fann. Fann himself, preoccupied at the time with his daughter’s kidney infection, didn’t proofread and approve the literature before it went out on a doorhanger to several thousand homes.

The substance of Bond’s conversation with Pagano was: THREAT–according to a well connected birdie I know. St. Peters is waiting impatiently on FEMA funds needed to complete the Highway 370 project there. Bond said he could make those FEMA funds go away permanently. He also mentioned that there were still a few days left before the filing deadline in the mayoral race and that if Pagano didn’t disavow endorsing Fann, the Republicans would find themselves a primary challenger.

OK, that last was not a very credible threat, but it made Pagano understand that Bond was seriously displeased. And naturally, he did what the senator told him to do; he wrote the local papers to complain that those words on the flyer were not an accurate quotation of anything he had said and that he was not endorsing either candidate.

Not surprisingly, Pagano is not advertising the conversation with Bond to the press, but anyone who cared to check Kit Bond’s travel records would find he was in the metro area at the time.

Pagano, who had been quietly speaking to folks about Fann’s virtues, will certainly shut up about that subject now. Too bad.

Oh, and by the way, part of the reason Bond is so upset about the race is that the Republican internal polls indicate that Fann is winning the race. Bond never had to put any pressure on any St. Charles County pol before now. Until the last year or two, all the Republicans had to do to win there was spend a bajillion dollars and wait for the election results they wanted to see.

But the tide is shifting in St. Chuck. With less than two weeks to go until the election, Fann needs people to knock on doors for him and cinch this victory. If you need some motivation to help out, just imagine Kit Bond on election night turning people and screaming that his guy must have lost because of voter fraud. Couldn’t possibly be because folks are getting fed up with the GOP.

“Ding-dong! The witch is dead.” Okay, technically he’d be a warlock and he isn’t dead, but Carl Bearden isn’t running for re-election in district 16 in St. Charles. If any politician deserves for a tornado to drop a house on him, it’s Bearden. First of all, he’s just flat mean. If he doesn’t agree with your policies, he looks for ways to make your life miserable and to humiliate you in public.

Maybe that’s why, when Chuck Gross resigned his senate seat in St. Charles last May, the Senate leadership gave Tom Dempsey instead of Bearden the nod to run in September’s special election. And when that happened, Bearden looked at his options: He’d be termed out after next November, and he had a good lobbying job offer on the table now–from, in effect, Rex Sinquefield, who will be the number one customer at the new lobbying firm paying Bearden multiple times his former State Representative salary.  

Be glad Bearden’s gone.  He’s not as nutso on crotch issues as Cynthia Davis, but he’s in that direction, not to mention being very fond of handing out public money to developer friends, including Paul McKee.

What Jake Zimmerman recently said about Jim Lembke applies equally well to Bearden and the Republican who’ll run in his place:

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.

Indeed, nobody really knows who the Republican candidate, Mark Parkinson, is yet. He has no community service on his resume and only one job in politics: he worked for Kit Bond.  He’s  thirty-five and recently married–not much of a family man and his only work experience is in politics.   Those kinds of credentials aren’t what voters are looking for in their local state rep. Voters prefer to elect family men with more at stake in their neighborhoods and community.

They’ll get those kinds of credentials in the Democratic candidate. Tom Fann, who has his own business as an Allstate insurance representative and is a family man with three small children, one in elementary school and two in preschool. His wife, Jennifer, works for AT&T and is a union member. Tom himself, when he worked at a Dodge dealership, was also a union member. He has lived in St. Charles County for twenty years.

Those are all pluses on his side. But, like Parkinson, Fann has not held elective office. He ran for an aldermanic seat in St. Peters in 2004 and lost to an incumbent. On the score of previous elective office, then, they’re even.

It was Fann’s failed run for aldermanic office that brought him to mind when the local Dems were casting about for a candidate to run in the special election for Bearden’s seat. He wasn’t the only person they considered, but he was eager to do it when they gave him a shot at it, and he’s been working hard. He’s raised more money so far than any Democratic candidate in that part of the state has raised in several years.

Fann’s campaign literature stresses restoring health care to poor children and seniors, fair funding for schools instead of excessive property taxes, economic policies that will create quality jobs, and penalizing employers who hire individuals illegally.

There’s nary a word about abortion in his literature, but he won’t come out as a pro-choice candidate. His unwillingness to step up on that issue will cost him the support of Pro-Vote, and that could hurt him.

Still, he’s got a real shot at winning. He’s been provided with a full time campaign manager and received lots of support and manpower from Democratic reps and from the state party. The campaign’s been up against the weather and the busyness of the holiday season, but the for the next 5 1/2 weeks, they will be hitting the streets in the 16th to excite the voters and to send a message that Democrats CAN win in St. Charles County.

Jake Zimmerman recently pointed out: “And if Fann wins, whammo, we have the power of incumbency in that district.” That would be good news. If you live anywhere near St. Charles and you’re willing to pound the pavement to get our guys elected, you could get warmed up for the year by helping out Tom Fann.