Greg gives his look back and look ahead from this year's election. I'm still mostly agnostic about who should run for what statewide office on the Democratic side, but the more I think about it, the more important I think it will be to mount an all-out assault on Congressional, State House, and State Senate races in two years. I've harped on this before, and I fully believe that having strong candidates all across the ticket will help everyone out by ensuring that voters in all parts of the state have a clear and compelling choice to make.

You've already seen my wish list for the 2006 Congressional races, and I've touched on my hope that all of the unelected Congressional Democrats look to the State Senate. Greg wants Nick Lampson or Chris Bell to run for SD17; I'd prefer to have Lampson take on Tommy Williams in SD04 (added benefit: Lampson wouldn't have to move) and leave SD17 for Bell or Richard Morrison if one of them wants it and if Bell declines to take on John Culberson in CD07. Let's add John Mabry to the list as a challenger to whichever of Kip Averitt or Troy Fraser makes geographic sense for him. I'm sure there's more - feel free to leave a suggestion.

As for the State House, the main thing that I can say is that there are eight GOP-held seats in Dallas County, and either 13 or 14 in Harris County, and if every single one of them doesn't have a halfway decent Democratic challenger, then the Democrats in this state officially suck. HD133, home of Moldy Joe Nixon, ought to be a prime target. I just hope that the failure to run a Democrat against him this time won't bite us in the butt two years down the line. It's not too early to think about this, and if you don't like your current representative, it's not crazy to think about making the run for office yourself. Hubert Vo positioned himself to win with $60,000 and a lot of shoe leather. Those are attainable tasks.

UPDATE: Greg has some linkage with further speculation, and I forgot to link to these five Austin Chronicle stories, which are mostly recapitulations but which have some good info in them.