This race pits national internet favorite John Laesch against Jotham Stein and likely winner and scientist Bill Foster.
Laesch is the favorite of the national netroots, but surprisingly not terribly popular with the local netroots. Despite his supporters screams of how well he did last time, Laesch cannot raise money and it’s pretty unclear that he has any sort of effective organbzation with his loudest supporters resembling Scientologists more than activists. (that’ll get me some commments from both groups). He has run an unabashadly progressive campaign, but seems to have a poor grasp of the issues. When discussing the AMT he wanted to completely eliminate it instead of fixing it which would allow the extremely wealthy to avoid paying a minimum income tax. The only hope Laesch has is that his name ID is high enough to pull him through, though early polls demonstrated his name ID was pretty low for a returning challenger.
Stein is also running an unabashedly progressive campaign, but really doesn’t seem to have caught on and has little money. It’s hard to imagine that his name ID is high enough to get him anywhere near victory.
Foster has run a campaign that is strong and professional. He is a bit boring, but he’s also a good candidate overall and is right on big issues like the war and FISA. He’s a bit more centrist on economics, but not a Melissa Bean even.
More than that, not only has he put his own money in the District, he has raised more than the other candidates and run a professional campaign. It would be a shock if Foster doesn’t pull this out with a decent margin.
On the Republican side, loons everywhere. Chris Lauzen is a thin skinned whiner who loses his temper if anyone dares challenge his holiness. The weird thing, he’s a State Senator and he has that high of an opinion of himself. Promoting him would only make it worse. He also has greater wingnuttia behind him with Jack Roeser and the Family Taxpayer Network supporting him (not like those are different entities). This means even if he were to win the primary, he’d lose the general.
He’s running against serial candidate Jim Oberweis who even though he’s a serial candidate appears to be the favorite. That’s how bad this field is. He’s tried buying elections, he’s tried immigrant bashing, joining with wingnuttia and fighting against wingnuttia and nothing works. He does have Denny Hastert behind him, but the general sense is that this a choice that should only be labeled:
AND REMEMBER DEATH IS NOT AN OPTION!
It’s hard to imagine two more worthless candidates and the winner is likely to have lots of hard feelings by supporters of the other camp. I’m going out on a limb here and I think Lauzen pulls it off in the end. Oberweis just has the stink of loser over the Lauzen’s stink of looniness.
This also has the special feature of being a primary with both a special primary election and a general primary election all on the same day. This might affect the Republican race as some Republican leaners take Democratic ballots for Obama and depending on how things shake out, if we get really lucky, the Republican will have a split decision.
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