Record Number of Candidates Possible in 2010

This midterm election is set to have a bumper crop of candidates, according to figures from the Federal Election Commission. Excerpts of the AP article below:

About 2,300 running for Congress, most in decades

Discontent with incumbents and anti-Washington anger are adding up to a potentially record-breaking crowd of congressional challengers this election year.

More than 2,300 people are running for 471 House and Senate seats in the midterms. It's the highest number of candidates in at least 35 years, according to data provided to The Associated Press by the Federal Election Commission, which began tracking candidates in 1975.

Frustration, particularly on the right, with President Barack Obama and his Democratic agenda appears to have contributed to the surge. The field is heavily Republican, with almost twice as many GOP candidates as Democrats, and several hundred independent and third-party challengers.

2,341 people [have] filed statements of candidacy with the FEC for the 2010 House and Senate elections, compared with 1,717 in 2008 and 1,588 in 2006.

The tally is still climbing, with more than a dozen states still allowing candidates to file, and the true number of candidates is probably higher, since some ignore requirements to file with the FEC. Close to 40 states still haven't held their primaries, including nine with primaries in September. The general election is Nov. 2.

The field is significantly larger than in 1976, two years after the Watergate scandal took down President Richard Nixon, and 1994, the year the GOP took control of Congress for the first time in four decades.

The next-largest field - of 2,159 candidates - was in 1992, when Bill Clinton, George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot battled for the White House.

Read more here.

Obama: The Difference Between '94 and Now is Me

From Jake Tapper at ABC News:

Rep. Marion Berry, D-Ark., fears that these midterm elections are going to go the way of the 1994 midterms, when Democrats lost control of the House after a failed health care reform effort.

But, Berry told the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, the White House does not share his concerns.

“They just don’t seem to give it any credibility at all,” Berry said. “They just kept telling us how good it was going to be. The president himself, when that was brought up in one group, said, ‘Well, the big difference here and in ’94 was you’ve got me.’ We’re going to see how much difference that makes now.”

Asked today by ABC News’ Yunji de Nies if the president said that, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs pleaded ignorance.

“I have not talked to the president about that,” Gibbs said, employing one of his favorite dodges.

Gibbs seemed to suggest that he shared that view, whether or not President Obama said it.

“I hope it's not newsworthy to think that the president hopes and expects to be an effective campaigner in the midterm elections,” Gibbs said.

Berry told the newspaper that he “began to preach last January that we had already seen this movie and we didn’t want to see it again because we know how it comes out…I just began to have flashbacks to 1993 and ’94. No one that was here in ’94, or at the day after the election felt like. It certainly wasn’t a good feeling.”

- Jake Tapper and Yunji de Nies

If this conversation took place after Scott Brown's stunning victory in Massachusetts, Obama is clueless about the tidal wave preparing to hit him.

Gibbs said that the President "expects to be an effective campaigner" this coming election cycle. As Mike McCarville so aptly noted, he has been exactly that - for the Republicans.