Democrat Charlie Justice will end a decade-long state legislative career to challenge C.W. Bill Young for Congress. "The decisions made in Washington D.C. more and more impact our daily lives and that's what drew me to public service in the first place," said the 39-year-old state senator from St. Petersburg. "We need people in Washington that understand their decisions have real impact on the families and small businesses here." [...]
Either way, Justice says he's in: "If he decides to retire after 40 years in Washington, we'll thank him for his service and if he decides to run again, we'll have a healthy debate,'' said Justice, an academic adviser at the University of South Florida.
This is another major, major score for the DCCC, who hoped to lure Justice (whose state Senate district is a competitive one which mostly overlaps with Young's 10th CD) into this race last cycle. The 10th District is one of the most evenly-split seats in the nation in terms of its partisan composition; Obama and Gore both won the district under its current lines by four and two points, respectively, while Bush won the district by a 51-49 margin in 2004.
Like Delaware's Mike Castle, Young has routinely won re-election by massive margins, but often against unheralded and unknown challengers. Most recently, Young turned away his latest challenge from Dunedin Mayor Bob Hackworth, whose campaign suffered from being both underfunded and decidedly last-minute, by a 61-39 margin. But also like Castle, Young is getting pretty long in the tooth -- he will turn 80 just weeks after the 2010 elections, and he hasn't had to run a real race in eons. Perhaps the idea of actually needing to run a full-geared campaign will be enough to nudge the old crumb-bum into retirement.
