Democrats plan to win, with or without Obama

Mahoney, who faces Republican Tom Rooney, has not endorsed Obama.

“While he supports Sen. Obama, he believes a formal endorsement would limit his independence and his ability to work with either an Obama administration or a McCain administration,” said Mahoney campaign spokesman Marc Goldberg.

The common factors in the places where Democratic candidates are putting some distance between themselves and Obama? They're predominantly rural and were won by Bush in 2004.

“There’s no doubt Democrats are running from Obama, particularly in Republican-leaning districts,” said Ken Spain, a spokesman for the National Republican Congressional Committee.

He cited as examples Mahoney and Rep. Chris Carney of Pennsylvania, who also has not endorsed Obama.

Carney's GOP opponent, Chris Hackett, is running a television ad against Carney alleging that his voting record is “more liberal than Obama’s.”

African-American voter surge?
“I believe Obama’s candidacy is of great benefit to me because my district is 33 percent African American (in voter registration), the third largest African-American population for any Republican-held seat in the country,” said Democrat Josh Segall, who is trying to unseat Republican incumbent Rep. Mike Rogers in Alabama’s Third Congressional District.

“We think there could be 20,000 more African-American votes because of that and people are pretty excited about it.”

Rogers “has not tried to link me to Obama,” Segall said. “He’s just tried to call me a liberal, which is the same sort of thing as trying to link me to Obama. My opponent claims that half my (campaign) money comes from New York and Hollywood. That’s not true, but that’s just a way of saying ‘this person is an arrogant liberal who believes he can enforce his values and ideas on you even though he’s not from around here’.”

(Segall notes that he was born and raised in the district.)

“This year, that sort of argument is not going to carry as much sway. People want to know who has a plan to fix the economy,” Segall said. He said he’d get federal money to build bridges, roads and other infrastructure so the district could grow economically.

But he added, “I wouldn’t link myself with Obama in terms of what I think we need to do to fix the economy. I think the biggest problem is that we have a country that has abandoned rural economies.”

“People tend to look for specific solutions if they can get them, and one of the criticisms you hear of Obama is that people don’t feel like his solutions are that clear to them,” Segall said. “But we try to be as clear as possible about what I would do to make the economy strong again — and I think people appreciate that specificity.”

As in Segall’s race, in Democrat Rob Miller’s race against Republican Rep. Joe Wilson in South Carolina, increased African-American turnout might benefit the challenger.

But the NRCC’s Spain said “these are steep uphill climbs for Democrats, particularly in Wilson’s district.”

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