It won’t be easy for little-known Democrat Doug Applegate, a retired Marine colonel, to defeat Republican incumbent Darrell Issa in this 52-46 Romney seat, but the GOP can’t laugh off the idea anymore. In last week’s top-two primary, Issa outpaced Applegate by a surprisingly modest 51-45 margin in California’s 49th Congressional District, and now the two will meet again in November. Some of Issa’s weakness may have been due to higher Democratic turnout spurred by the greater interest in the Democrats’ presidential primary. However, Republican Rep. Ed Royce, who represents a seat that backed Romney by a similar 51-47 margin, pulled off an easy 62-38 victory, a good sign that Issa’s performance isn’t just the result of heightened Democratic enthusiasm for the now-concluded Clinton/Sanders contest.
If Democrats are going to flip the House in 2016, they need to put light red seats like this in play, and defeating Issa would give Democrats a huge spring in their step. Issa jumpstarted the notorious 2003 recall campaign against Democratic Gov. Gray Davis, and he planned to take down Davis himself and become governor. However, while Arnold Schwarzenegger ended up scaring Issa out of the race, the congressman eventually found a new way to frustrate Democrats in Washington. After the GOP took the House in 2010, Issa became chair of the Oversight Committee, a post he used to launch several partisan “investigations” into Benghazi, the IRS, the Solyndra bankruptcy, and Healthcare.gov. Issa never found the smoking guns he was looking for, but you wouldn’t know that listening to him, so it shouldn’t be difficult for Applegate to appeal to Democratic donors’ decades-long frustration with the congressman.
Issa, however, still holds a number of advantages. The congressman is the wealthiest member of the House, while Applegate had just $14,000 on-hand at the end of May. Most of this seat is located in the San Diego media market, with a quarter of the district in the Los Angeles market, so advertising against Issa will be a very costly endeavor. What’s more, national Democrats haven’t shown much of an interest in investing in Applegate yet, and his surprisingly good performance last week doesn’t guarantee that they will.
Still, while this area is reliably red, it isn’t completely out of reach for Democrats.
Obama carried the district 49-48 in 2008, and Hillary Clinton could take it if Donald Trump turns out to be as toxic in the suburbs as Team Blue hopes he’ll be. And as David Wasserman points out, the GOP’s voter registration advantage has shrunk over the last few years. While the GOP maintains a strong 39-31 edge, that’s down considerably from their 43-28 lead just four years ago.
It’s too soon to say whether Applegate will be capable of running a strong enough campaign to defeat Issa. And while Issa’s meh 51-45 performance has now put Applegate on the map, it also means that the challenger won’t have the element of surprise on his side in November. If Issa spends big in the fall, he could shore up whatever weaknesses he has now. But we can’t discount the possibility of an upset, so Daily Kos Elections is changing our race rating from Safe Republican to Likely Republican.