Democrat Don Cazayoux beat the far-right Republican Woody Jenkins, 49-46 percent, in Saturday’s special election in a heavily GOP district in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. President Bush carried the district with 59 percent of the vote in 2004; the GOP held this seat for 34 years. Cazayoux is anti-choice, which he says is a matter of faith on his web site. While the victory might be seen as a wash by some in the pro-choice community, it is more evidence that even in the most conservative parts of the country, voters have grown weary of the far-right and their misinformation and manipulations. Cazayoux was painted as "liberal" and tied to Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Democratic Presidential frontrunner Barack Obama in ads, but still picked up a GOP seat, the second gain in two open seat contests for Democrats this cycle. As Jonathan Singer at MyDD points out,
This race was very much put forward by the chattering class as a referendum on Obama's coattails (which proved to be strong in the very Republican-leaning Illinois 14th congressional district earlier this year), and Obama's coattails passed the challenge. Simply put, the Republicans may have thought they had found a silver bullet in Obama and Wright (and Pelosi, too, for that matter), but they didn't.
