This week, Democrats will reach a milestone of real importance: they will break their record for the most House seats challenged since at least 1992. Barry Welsh's Fifty-State strategy page hasn't been updated in a while, but MyDD diarist BENAWU has been picking up the slack (although s/he could stand to drop a few capital letters from his or her titles and tags).

Dating back to 1994, Democrats have lost the last six elections for the House. In each of those six elections, we ran fewer candidates than Republicans. Our best effort was in 2000, when we ran candidates in 403 districts, and Republicans ran candidates in 404 districts. This was both our highest district total, and our smallest deficit to Republicans in the last six elections. Perhaps not surprisingly, we also received our highest share of the national popular vote in 2000, coming in at 47.9%.

Right now, however, we have 402 candidates set, even though just under half of all filing deadlines have passed. Recent deadlines included Missouri, South Carolina, and Arkansas. In all three states, we fielded a full slate of candidates. In fact, to date, there are only five districts where we have failed to field a candidate and the deadline has passed: CA-42, MS-03, PA-09, PA-15, and TX-11 (I'm pretty sure we have a candidate in IA-02). Even then, it appears that we can still field candidates in PA-09 and PA-15, if local candidates and parties can get their acts together.

On Thursday, the filing deadline for Alabama will pass. With five of the remaining thirty-three seats for us to challenge coming in Alabama, Thursday will almost certainly be the day when we break the record. It is just impossible to believe that there will not be at least two or three more Democratic candidates to file in Alabama. While the rest of the nation challenges every Republican, it is hard to imagine that the Alabama Democratic party would let every Republican in their state go unopposed, especially with a potential Gubernatorial pick-p looming in November. We will break the record on Thursday (then again, in an earlier diary, BENAWU argues that we may have already broken the record, and that we now have 406 seats challenged).

Just as importantly, it looks like Republicans will field a surprisingly low number of candidates in 2006. In California alone, Republicans are not challenging seven districts, more than the total number of districts Democrats have so far left unchallenged nationwide. In 2004, Republicans only failed to challenge three seats in California. We are clearly witnessing an upswing in Democratic recruitment, and a downturn in Republican recruitment. Not only will we challenge more seats than we have in any of the six most recent elections, we will almost certainly challenge more seats than Republicans for the first time in at lest seven elections. In fact, with early returns like these, we could challenge far more seats than Republicans.

Not only is this a sign of a Democratic year, this recruiting will become a cause of a democratic year. With fewer Democratic incumbents facing serious challenges, or any challenges at all, they will be able to funnel more money into competitive districts. With more Republicans facing serious challenges, fewer Republican incumbents will be able to funnel money into competitive districts. Research by Project 90 suggests that this could result in a swing of up to $21M in favor of Democrats in swing elections. Our greater number of challenges will stretch Republican defenses to a point they have not been stretched since they took over Congress in 1994.

I do not believe that the netroots did much in the way of actually helping more Democratic candidates run in 2006 than is past years, but I do believe that we at least planted the seeds in the minds of many activists and potential candidates that this was an important step to take in order to regain power. A seed planted by Dr. Dean, and brought into bloom by the netroots and the blogosphere, has resulted in the fifty-state strategy becoming conventional wisdom for Democrats nationwide. In these remarkable, record-breaking recruiting numbers, we can now see the flower of this idea. Come November, it will be time to reap the harvest.