In the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the central characters have created a finite improbability machine — a device for doing things that could occur naturally but only on rare occasions.  By definition, the finitely improbable do sometimes occur — e.g., a number 16 seed winning in the first round of the NCAA basketball — because, however the deck may be stacked against the event happening, there is series of events that can come together to make the improbable happen.

In politics, the first of the events needed for a party to win an election is for it to have a candidate file to run.  This past week, the Democratic Party narrowly won (subject to a canvass that should not change the results and the Republicans in the House simply opting to ignore the results) a special election in Pennsylvania’s Eighteenth District.  While, given the change in conditions since 2014 and 2016, it is unlikely that a Democratic candidate would have won in those two elections, the Democrats did not have any chance because no Democrat filed.

In most states, the filing period for offices occurs in the spring of an election year.   (Green Papers has a good list of the filing deadline and the primary dates for most states.)  At this point, the filing deadline (at least for the established parties) has passed in about half of the states.  So far, the Democrats are doing a good job at finding candidates to run for Congress.  In the states in which the filing deadline has passed, Democrats have filed for every seat other than North Carolina’s Third District.  While it is harder to tell for sure in states in which filing has opened (as candidates can still withdraw), it appears that Democrats have candidates for most if not all congressional seats in those states — the only district that does not have an announced Democratic candidate is Pennsylvania’s Thirteenth District.  (Some of the upcoming states require nominating petitions.  While it looks like there are Democrats circulating petitions, it is impossible to tell if we will have a candidate until the petition is filed which may occur just before the deadline.  There is also the complicating issue in Pennsylvania of the new Congressional district lines.  The Republicans have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the implementation of the new lines.  However, the U.S. Supreme Court has had the stay application for over two weeks — and pleadings closed on March 6.  It becomes less likely — and it was already unlikely — that the U.S. Supreme Court will grant the stay once filing closes on Tuesday as such a change would disrupt the primary schedule.)

It is a little more difficult to tell what is happening at the next level down — state legislative seats.  And these races do matter, this cycle more than in the past two.   Redistricting is a mere three years away, and — in most states — the state legislatures draw the district lines although this may be about to change in some states.  Similarly, in most states, state senators elected in 2018 will serve through 2022 and will, therefore, still be in office at  that time.  To use my own state’s numbers (with one week left in filing), there is at least one democrat running for at least two-thirds of the seats — both in the state House and in the state senate.  However, we have three races for state senator in which only one candidate (two Republicans and one Democrat) is running.  Similarly, we have fifty-one races (just under one-third of the races) for state representative in which only one candidate is running (thirty-three Republicans, and eighteen Democrats).   Regardless of your political preferences, there is something profoundly undemocratic when policies are made by officials who are elected by default without voters having any choice — either in the primary or in the general.

And the failure to have any candidates file also means that there is nobody there to pick up the pieces when something happens to the Republican candidate.  Just this week, in Maine, we had another example of how a seemingly unwinnable race can become winning.  In a state house race, the Republican candidate personally attacked some of the students from Parkland, Florida who had been rather vocal after last months shooting.  As these comments occurred before filing had closed, we went in forty-eight hours from an unopposed Republican candidate to that Republican having both a primary and a general election opponent to that Republican being out of the race.  We have had plenty of examples over the past several cycles of the Republicans either opting to pick the most extreme candidate running in the primary or the Republican nominee saying outrageous things during the general election campaign.   With the lunatic-in-chief saying or doing something almost every week to give voters a reason to vote for the Democratic candidate in November, there are very few seats that are completely unwinnable.

But, in the end, as at the start of this post, you can’t win if you don’t run (or find somebody to run).  If filing has not yet closed in your state and there is no apparent Democratic candidate in your district — be it congressional, state senate, or state house — find somebody.  Once that first condition is met, then you can work on getting the other conditions to fall in line so that a Democrat — like Congressman-elect Connor Lamb — can win a district that should be a sure thing for the Republicans.