Democrats Pick Up House Seat in Louisiana

A sit up and take note election happened yesterday in Louisiana. I'll let the Votemaster at electoral-vote.com explain the significance:

In LA-06, centered around Baton Rouge, state representative Don Cazayoux (D) defeated former state representative and local newspaper publisher Woody Jenkins (R) in a special election to fill the seat vacated by Richard Baker (R), who resigned from the House to become a lobbyist. Cazayou got 49% of the vote to Jenkins' 46% in a race with major national implications. LA-06 is a heavily Republican district with a PVI of R+7 that has been in Republican hands for 33 years. President Bush got 59% of the vote here in 2004.

Both the DCCC and NRCC advertised heavily here. The NRCC referred to Don Cazayoux (a Cajun name) as "Don Tax You" and claimed he is a "liberal," which is a big insult in rural Lousiana. They also tried to tie him to boogeyman Barack Obama and boogeywoman Nancy Pelosi. The whole nine yards. At this point, the Republicans assume Barack Obama will be the Democratic nominee and LA-06 was a field test of their November strategy to paint him as a big-government, high-tax, arugula-eating, orange-juice-drinking, Ivy League, out-of-touch liberal. Only it didn't work, even in a very conservative area. The next field test is scheduled for May 13, when Travis Childers (D) dukes it out with Greg Davis (R) in a runoff for Sen. Roger Wicker's old seat in MS-01.

By tomorrow every Republican in the House is going to be thinking "There but for the grace of God go I." If a well-known strongly conservative GOP candidate with 28 years experience in the state legislature can't win an open seat in a heavily Republican district that the GOP has held since 1975, what is going to happen in the many open seats and marginal Republican districts in November? To make matters worse for the GOP, the DCCC has $44 million in the bank (of which it spent $1.2 million on this race) to the NRCC's $6 million (of which they spent $500,000 in LA-06).

Obviously, this is a good omen for Darcy Burner against Dave Reichert in WA-08.