2010 Delaware Senate - ODonnell vs. Coons

10/7/10 -- The polls show Coons above 50 percent, and leading O'Donnell by a healthy amount.  O'Donnell seems to be getting voters who voted for John McCain, and not much else.  And it is never a good sign when your first advertisement has to clarify for voters that you are not a wiccan.

Unless the polls are just completely wrong this cycle, she seems on a track to lose.

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In 1631, a group of Dutch traders formed a small village on the eastern shore of the New World. They called it Zwaanendael and intended to use it as a trading outpost. Zwaanendael was short-lived however. The leader of the trading company that founded it visited the village a year after it was founded, only to find that the settlers had been killed and the buildings burned by Native Americans, the result of some unknown and unfortunate incident.

From these inauspicious beginnings arose one of the smallest but most important states in the Union, the state in which many of its major corporations would eventually become located. Straddling the Mason-Dixon line, the state is in many ways a microcosm of the country throughout its history. The southern two counties (Kent and Sussex) are rural Southern in character and politics, and accepted the practice of slavery during the early years of the Republic. The northern county (New Castle), by contrast, is more Northern in character and encompasses a major city (Wilmington) which later came to be dominated by its suburban outskirts. Thus Delaware has typically been an bellweather state in presidential elections; it voted for the winner of the popular vote in every election from 1952 through 2000.

The state was the site of one of the major political upsets this year when a little-known political activist named Christine O'Donnell upset Rep. Mike Castle in the GOP primary. Castle, a moderate Republican, was the favorite to claim the seat previously held by Vice President Joe Biden. O'Donnell is much more conservative than Castle, however, and trails New Castle County Executive Chris Coons significantly in the polls. Still, she's raised around $2 million, so she can't be written off in the general election.