We've been watching Michigan, and the state's seventh congressional district in particular, for a long time given the great opportunity the state affords the Democrats as they try to extend their majority in the United States House. Now, as alluded to up in Breaking Blue, the Democrats have found themselves a candidate more than up to the task for taking advantage of the great opportunity in Michigan's seventh district. The Associate Press has the story, via Walberg Watch.

State Senate Minority Leader Mark Schauer said Thursday he will seek the Democratic nomination to challenge Republican U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg in the 2008 election after declining earlier overtures to enter the race.

The district, which leans about 2 points more Republican than the nation as a whole in presidential elections, looks a little like  this:

The Michigan seat most clearly under the Democrats' gaze this year might be CD 7. Backing up one cycle to the 2004 campaign, the Republican primary went to the somewhat more moderate Joe Schwarz as conservative Republicans, including the son of the retiring incumbent Nick Smith (who Republican leaders attempted to bribe on the House floor with promises to support his literal political heir, but that's a whole other story...), split the field. Once in Congress, Schwarz was almost immediately under conservatives' sites despite proving a fairly reliable vote for his party (he voted with his caucus on party-line votes 84 percent of the time in 2006, for example, according to CQ), and with the backing of the Club for Growth, Tim Walberg was able to unseat Schwarz in the primary.

Yet Walberg was -- and is -- too conservative for his district, which leans about two percentage points more Republican than the nation as a whole. Despite outspending his Democratic challenger by more than a 20-to-1 margin, Walberg was not even able to secure a majority of his district's vote on November 7, clocking in at just 49.9 percent of the vote.

According to Michigan Liberal, DCCC polling out of this race already puts Schauer within the margin of error of Walberg (the incumbent leads by 3 points Schauer is up 3 points), a fact that augurs quite poorly for Republicans hopes of holding this seat (or at least doing so without spending so much money that they have to scrimp elsewhere). Remember, the DCCC already has better than a 10-to-1 cash-on-hand advantage over the NRCC, meaning that either the Democratic spending is going to at least be on par with that of the Republicans, or else the GOP will have to forgo, nearly completely, any attempts to go up against just about any Democratic incumbent. So mark this one down as another win (in a figurative though clearly not yet literal sense) for the Democrats.