Much of the conservative commentary on last Tuesday's special election in San Diego has the feel of someone whistling past the graveyard. This article gives a much better sense of what the significance of Bilbray's narrow victory, but I think it bears noting that for the second time in nine months, a special election took place in a heavily Republican district, and the GOP candidate failed to crack 50% against an underfunded Democrat.

As far as the race being a test of the immigration issue, the result should be chastening for any Republican who wants to pursue the nativist bloc. If any district should have been ripe for this issue, it was the 50th; a largely white, upper/upper-middle class suburban community north of San Diego, where the Republicans have an partisan edge, and the Democratic opponent had clumsily gaffed on the issue of documentation in the final week of the campaign. If the best the xenophobes can do in a district like this is win by less than 4 points, the resonance of the issue can be called into question.

In a normal year, or even in a year that was mildly trending Democratic, like 1992 or 1998, this should have been a convincing win. It wasn't; Busby improved by almost ten points over her run in 2004, while Bilbray was down by the same amount from Duke Cunningham's performance, in spite of the large spending edge. The LA Times (and Mickey Kaus) noted that two other candidates siphoned off about 5% of the vote, but those same two parties took 3% of the vote in 2004, and even assuming that every additional voter those candidates received would have voted for Bilbray, an improbable scenario given the psychology of third party voters, it still would have left him with barely 51% of the vote, well behind even the mediocre showing the President received in the district (in a state where he didn't campaign) last time.