"There's no safe Republican district. You can run, but you cannot hide,"

Clearly, "the war is not what it was six months ago, or 12 months ago" in terms of being an automatic advantage for Republicans. Based on Hackett's tally in a district that gave Bush 64% in 2004, the Democratic House campaign committee chair Rahm Emanuel declares, "no district is safe."

With all precincts reporting, Jean Schmidt had 52 percent, or 57,974 votes, compared with Democrat Paul Hackett's 48 percent, or 54,401 votes. Schmidt's margin of victory amounted to about 3,500 votes out of more than 112,000 cast.

Paul Hackett harshly attacked President Bush's conduct of the Iraq war, and voters in this historically conservative, GOP-leaning district didn't appear to penalize him for it, as Schmidt and Republicans urged them to do. Instead, they came closer to electing Hackett than they have come to electing any Democrat to Congress in decades.