The Republican Loss In Mississippi- Doom and Gloom Time Yet?

Well it is not good. However I am not in panic mode yet. The problem with all the chatter I see on the blogs and by the pundits is there is hardly no linking to local news sources. All politics is local as they say!!!

Southern Appeal has a good post and a especially good comment section!! on this race at The special election in Mississippi’s First District: bad omen for the fall

One of the comments said:
I would be careful about reading too much into the results of this race in terms of what it means nationally. It appears that the results in the case have less to do with party labels, ideas, etc. and more to do with the Republican candidate, the negative campaign he ran in the primary and general election and geographics (i.e. which part of the district the 2 candidates are from). It has been said that all politics are local and I think, based on what I am hearing, this was especially true in this instance.

Very true. In fact that was part of the problerm in Louisiana. From a news report from Mississippi( I guess the locals should be consulted)
Davis, a civil engineer, denied he was behind a new campaign ad accusing Childers of not caring for the elderly in his Booneville nursing home."That's not our ad," he said, as audience members groaned with disbelief.

One other comment:
I don’t want to be the one arguing that the GOP’s prospects for the Fall are anything other than grim. Still, it’s worth remembering that special elections are exceptionally weak predictors of subsequent general election results. Without the accompanying unifying themes of a general election, special elections are particularly driven by factors unique to the district and the candidates. Just one example would be the special elections of 2004. Ben Chandler won the special election in Kentucky 6, a seat that opened up because the incumbent, Fletcher, had defeated Chandler in the race for governor. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin also won the special election in South Dakota for the remainder of Bill Janklow’s term, following his traffic-accident related manslaughter conviction. The partisan indexes for these seats are R+7 and R+10, respectively (comparable to the LA and MS seats the GOP just lost). Needless to say, there was not a dem landslide in 2004. In sum, I wouldn’t put too much faith in the predictive value of these elections (although there is plenty of other evidence to trouble the GOP). The real problem is that the winners of these special elections tend to hold the seat (see Herseth Sandlin and Chandler, above), which is reason enough to grieve.

I think that is very true. We might be seeing a snapshot of a type of campaigning that the voters do not like and react too.