Barth gaining on Capito?

AP had a story today on the race between incumbent Republican Shelley Moore Capito and Democratic candidate Anne Barth for W.Va.'s 2nd District U.S. House seat.

As the campaign continues, the race is being seen as more and more competitive. The Democrats have listed it as one of their "Red to Blue" targets and national leaders are helping Barth with fund raising.

The Gazette reported last week that Capito is outraising Barth, but as today's AP story shows, political observers like Charles Cook have to keep changing their rankings of the race as Barth closes in.

AP (via the H-D):
Noted national political analyst Charles Cook, for instance, upgraded the race from "Safely Republican" to “Likely Republican” after West Virginia’s May primary and then to “Lean Republican” earlier this month.

Capito has never really faced a serious challenge in her time in office. She won election to the seat vacated by Bob Wise in 2000, largely due to the the fact that Democrats had a lousy and unpopular candidate in James Humphreys.

She beat Humphreys again in 2002 and, in 2004 and 2006, she faced an underfunded candidate and then a challenger with no serious backing from the national party.

Though she won both times, the numbers hardly indicated she was invincible for future races.

Now she's facing Barth, who ran Sen. Robert C. Byrd's office for nearly twenty years and has the national party's backing and support.

And it's a hostile political climate for Congressional Republicans this year.

The way things are going, we may see this win in the "toss-up" category very, very soon.

Capito repeated the Cuba/China drilling story

Carnacki at WVaBlue tells us how W.Va. Rep. Capito got in on the Cheney/Hannity bit about Cuba and China drilling for oil off Florida's coast:

CHARLESTON, W.VA. - In an effort to promote industrializing the pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Rep. Shelley Moore Capito (R-WV-02) claimed in a newspaper op-ed column published and distributed to newspapers in West Virginia by her congressional office this week that the Chinese are "drilling for oil 30 miles from our coastline..." in Florida.

The stuff I wrote on the original myth and it's debunking is here.