South
• Alabama’s 3rd District (New Rating: Republican Favored. Old Rating: Safe Republican)
The DCCC on Tuesday added Josh Segall, a lawyer who is challenging three-term Republican Rep. Mike Rogers in Alabama’s 3rd District, to the Red to Blue program. After watching Segall’s developing campaign from a distance, Democratic officials were impressed by a fundraising operation that produced $807,000 in receipts through Sept. 30 to $1.3 million for the incumbent.
The 3rd — a conservative-leaning eastern Alabama district that includes part of Montgomery and also takes in smaller cities such as Auburn and Anniston — would have seemed very unlikely not long ago. Rogers won with 59 percent over a little-known and underfunded Democrat in 2006; two years earlier, President Bush received 58 percent of the 3rd District vote.
But Democrats believe they have stronger potential in the district, in large part because a strongly Democratic-voting black constituency makes up nearly a third of the population. And this segment of the district’s electorate is activated as never before by Democrat Barack Obama ’s strong presidential bid that would make him the first African-American to win the White House.
“This year, you’re going to see a different voter universe in District 3, and that means that District 3 could be a sleeper,” said Artur Davis , the three-term representative of Alabama’s 7th District, who is widely regarded as a rising star among black members of Congress. “I believe that race is probably closer today than some people around the country may believe it to be.”
Despite the district’s longstanding Republican leanings, there are other pockets of Democratic support in the 3rd, including around the Auburn University campus.
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