Conservatives Focusing on FL-19 Special Election

At the rally outside the Capitol on Sunday, Brendan Steinhauser of FreedomWorks told me that he was hearing things about the race in FL-19, the congressional district once held by Robert Wexler, now open for an April 13 special election. Indeed, three weeks out from the election, there’s an uptick of conservative attention on the race. One sign of this was the article and six (!) blog posts that National Review’s influential Jim Geraghty put up about the frontrunner, Democrat Ted Deutsch, just yesterday. One, two, three, four, five, six.

Those posts get at the problem facing Republicans in the district. Geraghty’s first argument was that Deutsch was dodging the issue of Israel — Deutsch had actually released a statement on March 17, it just received little notice. The other four attacks are on liberal votes that Deutsch, a state senator, has cast, and on his rating from the Chamber of Commerce. But there’s no sign at all of that stuff hurting Deutsch in the district — which voted for Barack Obama by a bigger margin than did the state of Massachusetts.