In the order of possibility of Democrats getting the seat, here are my ratings of the House elections still undecided:

LA-02:  100%. Easy one.  Will go to a Democrat.  I presume it will be Carter, but wouldn't be stunned if Jefferson is re-elected.

CT-02:  75%.  With all votes in, Courtney leads by 167 votes.  I believe Courtney will prevail.  The race will be recounted.

GA-12:  75%.  889 votes separate the candidates.  Some votes to be counted.  Again, a likely recount.  I trust Georgia less than Connecticut to be accurate, but Barrow has a larger lead.

OH-15:  20%.  There are plenty of provisional ballots that could lift Kilroy over Pryce.  I think it will be less than 1000 votes, but Pryce prevails.

TX-23:  20%.  If Republican fatigue sets in with the voters there, Rodriquez could squeak in.  Bonilla has lost his power since his party lost the House.

NC-08:  15%. Again, there are enough provisional votes to swing an extremely close race.  There will probably be a recount and making up 456 votes is possible in NC.

Lynn Allen at Evergreen Politics had a must-read essay this week called Transformational Candidates.  In that essay, Lynn lays out the five qualities that epitomize what makes a great netroots candidate:

They work for a progressive agenda.

They are incorruptible.

They are willing to kick ass.

They are leaders.

They are supported by the netroots.

Well, Lynn's term transformational candidates itself kicks ass and certainly whups the "node races" term I floated here last week.  Given that, I'd like to take her concept and try to weave it back into a parallel theme that I've been working on: building a netroots wave.

We do a lot of chewing over which House races should get the most money and resource support here. Well, here's an added wrinkle that I started thinking about... which races would do the most to determine whether Democrats or Republicans control a particular state's House delegation?

Why on earth should that matter, you might ask? Partly, there's just the symbolism; Republicans can claim a 30-17 edge with 3 ties the way the House is currently composed, and that just plain looks bad. But a little-known tidbit is that if the Presidential election is thrown into the House, the election within the House isn't conducted with each Representative getting a vote. Instead, each state's delegation gets one vote. So, while neither is likely, suppose the 2008 election winds up with a 269-269 tie, or a vengeful McCain/Lieberman 3rd party ticket means no ticket breaks 270 EVs. Even if the Democrats control the House at that point (the House-brokered election would be based on the new House seated in January 2009), they could still lose the presidency because the Republicans control the majority of state delegations.

While New England was once a bastion of elite Republicans -- think Senator Prescott Bush (R-CT), father to one President and grandfather to another -- today just five lonely self-professed "moderate" Republican Congressmen remain, each of whom is in serious jeopardy of finally losing this year as a result of the general anti-GOP sentiment in the country today. These five House members aren't helping themselves much, either.

This afternoon the House voted on a budget backed by the chamber's conservative Republican leadership, a vote that the GOP narrowly won 218 to 210 -- a surprisingly close margin given the fact that few believe House and Senate leaders will be able to reconcile their to measures, thus making likelihood that victory on such a close vote would result in the enactment of a law close to nil.

Among the renegade Republicans that John Boehner and Roy Blunt were able to whip in to place for the vote was the entire crew of New England "moderates." Without the support of these five House members, the conservative Republican budget would not have passed.

The voting trends of these five districts already augur poorly for these Republicans. George W. Bush carried a single one of these five districts in 2004 -- New Hampshire's 1st district -- and even there he barely hit 51 percent. In a 50-50 year (or more precisely a 51-48 year), these five Republicans -- Rob Simmons (CT-02), Chris Shays (CT-04), Nancy Johnson (CT-05), Jeb Bradley (NH-01) and Charlie Bass (NH-02) -- might not have much to worry about. But given the fact that President Bush is unpopular around the country and radioactive in the Northeast, these five holdovers don't really have the luxury of bucking the will of their constituents by selling out to their party's leadership.

Yet this is exactly what these five did today. It is almost as if Simmons, Shays, Johnson, Bradley and Bass are consciously requesting the pink slip from their constituents while at the same time showing the GOP leadership their fealty in the hope that they will be able to secure plush lobbying positions in January. Let's see if we can't help them in this endeavor -- minus the lobbying gig, of course -- by working to give them the boot in November.

The fourth quarter reports are up on the FEC web page, and they're decent, but far from rosy for our guys.

2nd District
Joe Courtney: $175,293 ($450,893 Cash on Hand)
Rob Simmons: $267,869 ($803,371 CoH)

4th District
Diane Farrell: $269,458 ($451,959 CoH)
Chris Shays: $562,946 ($892,552 CoH)

5th District
Chris Murphy: $167,692 ($382,643 CoH)
Nancy Johnson: $304,714 ($2,183,850 CoH)