Archive for July 7th, 2012

The 62 District Strategy for Both Parties [2012]

So as El Som says, we are coming down to it. El Som covers the recent filings this week in his Political Weekly column, the most important of which are for the newly open seats that Speaker Gilligan (the 19th) and Terry Schooley (the 23rd) are vacating. As he mentions, none of the endorsed GOP statewide candidates have filed. And as we will see below, the GOP is lagging far behind the Democrats in finding candidates for the General Assembly.

The filing deadline for individual candidates is July 10. If Jeff Cragg, Sher Valenzuela, Kevin Wade, and Tom Kovach all fail to file their candidacies by then, all hope is not lost for the GOP and it doesn’t mean Governor Markell et al are automatically reelected without opposition. For there is another deadline further out in the distance: September 4, 2012. That is the deadline for Certificates of Nomination from the two major parties to fill ballot lines for offices in which there is not a primary election.

So for a lot of the races below, the real deadline to keep in mind is September 4. So the GOP has about 8 more weeks to scramble to fill all of those empty spaces you will see below in our charts. Still, all of those empty spaces points to a horrible recruiting failure on the part of the State GOP. Especially for a party that once, earlier this year, had designs on recapturing the Senate after many decades.

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