The Democratic candidate in IL-13, Scott Harper, has been endorsed by the Naperville Sun, which serves the largest community in the district.
The remainder of this sure-to-be-ignored diary goes into why an unimportant paper's endorsement of an unimportant candidate in an unimportant race is important.
This is my third and last diary in support of my candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives, Democrat Scott Harper. As I mentioned before, this is a race no one is following nationally, because IL-13 is considered a "Safe Republican" district. End of story. Nothing to see here. Go home. Don't even bother to vote in this district. It's Safe Republican, get it? Don't you know what "Safe" means?
In my first diary, I talked about why districts owned by Safe Republicans still need good Democrats like Scott to run against them. In my second diary, I talked about why Judy Biggert doesn't appear to feel as safe as she should. However, the Naperville Sun, a little suburban biweekly that people read to find out about garage sales, has spoken far more eloquently than I can about why Scott Harper and lots of others like him should be sent to Congress:
The 13th, which includes Naperville, is very much still a reliably Republican district, and Biggert is certainly a reliable Republican. Her voting record for the most part parallels the Republican party line, and her vow to vote to repeal the health care bill, while offering no alternative, is GOP orthodoxy through-and-through.
. . .
One of the things that this election is supposed to be about is not continuing with business as usual in Washington.
On the national level, Republicans, especially long-serving ones, represent business as usual as much as do Democrats. And should they regain a majority in Congress, their pledges to essentially move backward are not going to solve the nation’s problems.
The irony is that someone as extreme as Michele Bachmann or Joe "You Lie!" Wilson probably could not be elected here in this white, middle-class, educated, and moderate district (Obama carried it in '08). But people like Biggert are just proxies for them, nice, pleasant, neighborly types who don't remind their constituents of the hideousness they enable.
Such districts should never be safe for them.