With the National Republican Congressional Committee investing substantial funds into a diffuse group of districts, pouring hundreds of thousands of dollars into races from Washington-5 to Florida-13, it shouldn't come as a surprise that the committee is now "prepared to deficit finance", according to Marc Ambinder of The Hotline. Seeing the NRCC considering going into the red to try to defend the party's majority in the House, will the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee move off the fence over whether it too will borrow in an attempt to build a new Democratic majority?

The success of the Use It Or Lose It campaign spearheaded by Chris Bowers has been remarkable, with close to two dozen safe Democrats making contributions to the DCCC in the past week and more expected to do so soon. And yet, even as more money is coming into the committee allowing it to expand the number of campaigns it is investing in and add more seats to its Red to Blue program (here and here), it still seems that the committee is reluctant to enter the types emerging races that the NRCC is dumping hundreds of thousands of dollars in (such as Idaho-1, Wyoming-AL or Indiana-03, for example).

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think that the DCCC needs to pull out of costly, competitive races in the Northeast to be able to put money into more longshot races in areas of the country traditionally less hospitable to the Democratic Party. But looking through the day-by-day independent expenditure reports it becomes clear that the DCCC is maintaining a rather conservative stance towards the races it is spending in, limiting the number to well below three dozen districts. This troubles me greatly.

So if the DCCC believes that its current pace of investment in top-tier races is sufficient and that there are no funds remaining to take chances -- even perhaps relatively high-probability chancess -- on second- or third-tier races, then I'm still with Charlied Cook, who wrote two weeks ago, "If I were them, I'd [borrow] $10 million and put $500,000 each of these 20 districts."