The House GOP snapped their special election losing streak by winning the heavily Democratic Honolulu-area district.
With 39.4 percent of the vote.
Needless to say, the GOP is renting this district for a few months. The Dems will take it back in November, with the added bonus of counting as a pickup offsetting expected Democratic losses elsewhere.
Colleen Hanabusa, backed by her state's two Senators, got 30.8 percent of the vote. The odious Lieberdem Ed Case, darling of the DCCC, got 27.6 percent.
Indeed, the DCCC's successes in beating Republicans is only matched by its ineptitude in picking Democrats in contested races. While Case lead Hanabusa narrowly in pre-election polling, Hawaii political experts consistently noted that Hanabusa's base -- Asian women -- were loathe to talk to pollsters and would skew results against her. Still, the DCCC was singularly obsessed with its polling, ignoring the district's cultural trends, its ideological makeup (Case was a carpetbagger grossly out-of-step with this liberal district), and the knowledge of local power brokers.
As if that wasn't bad enough, the DCCC then engaged in a clumsy public effort to get Hanabusa out of the race, circulating anti-Hanabusa opposition research as eagerly as if she were the GOP candidate in the race:
[T]he DCCC is providing under-the-radar organizational support to former Rep. Ed Case against Democratic state Sen. Colleen Hanabusa, including assistance from DCCC Western Regional Political Director Adam Sullivan.
Those efforts have coincided with the circulation of opposition research within Washington advancing the notion that Hanabusa is a longtime insider who received significant legislative pay raises at a time when the state has suffered through economic hard times — an emerging storyline that led Hanabusa to pull down her first campaign ad touting a vote to cut state legislative salaries and concede that the spot was misleading.
After trashing Hanabusa and supporting Case, turns out that Sens. Daniel Inouye and Daniel Akaka knew better than the DCCC what the voters of the district wanted. And picking the wrong horse in the contest undoubtedly aided Djou's plurality victory.
For his part, Djou is already showing the kind of teabagger thinking that is getting his whole party in electoral trouble:
"I think we sent a clear message to Washington, D.C., that we are spending too much money and that we need more fiscal responsibility, and I look forward to going to Washington, D.C., and Congress to do exactly that."
Clear signal? He got 39.4 percent. The only thing that's clear is that Djou got the wrong message.
Hanabusa will make short work of Case in their mid-September primary, and she'll be representing the district in January 2011.