Special Elections Are Special...
...and this one is no different. A special election is to be held Saturday in Illinois to fill the seat of retired former Speaker of the House Denny Hastert. The two challengers for the vacant seat, Bill Foster (D) and James Oberweis (R), are not only in a somewhat suprisingly competitive race to fill the seat for the remainder of the term but will also face off again in the fall, and this near-immediate rematch I think makes it a lot more fun, which is what Denny Hastert is all about. The article notes that the Democrats not only see this as a potentially symbolic seat to take given Hastert's (former) standing in his own party, but also are attempting to take advantage of Obama's popularity by tying their candidate to him, and are spending much more money in a traditionally Republican district that they otherwise may have.
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3 comments:
You took my blog topic! :-)
I just read about this story this morning at the Journal Sentinel's website and was gonna tie it into something about the "strength of the incumbent" in regards to the largesse they bring home to their district.
D'oh!
Here is the article I was going to post:
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CONGRESS_HASTERTS_SEAT?SITE=WIMIL&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT
A quick question -
If Hastert resigned "late last year," as the AP article states, why is this Special Election just now being held?
Why the delay?
About 3 months for candidates to campaign and the state to organize an additional election - that's pretty quick, I think.
I did some research (by research I mean type stuff into google) about the timeline...he announced it in November and his seat officially became vacant Nov 27 of last year. So IL has to fill it by special election because it's a first-term vacancy, but individual state laws dictate the manner in which that election takes place. In Illinois' case, their law says they have to have a primary first, so they tied the primary to the regularly scheduled primary (Feb 5) and the governor set the special election date for about a month after that.
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