Brian Bilbray

==Background==
* Republican from California and member of US Congress (Califoria 50th district) as of 2006
* Won a special election and defeated Francine Busby
==Insights==
Brian Bilbray was a Republican lobbyist and former member of Congress. He is someone about as "inside" as it gets. Even though Busby ran on the culture of corruption line and Cunningham sits in jail with a mere 6% favorability in the CA-50, and, further, even though few voters believed that Bilbray had credibility on standing up to Bush on immigration, she lost. We know this because we polled extensively in the district this summer to find out why an extremely well funded national campaign utterly failed. Given that this was the only Congressional election so far this year between a Republican and a Democrat, we wanted to learn some lessons. This is the only data set on the only Federal partisan election that has happened in 2006 so far. It is very much worth understanding.
==Details==
See the polling memo from MyDD that is harvested and part of this wiki. Democratic_Congressional_Challengers_Strategy_Memo
Bilbray