It looks like the GOP will hold on to California's 50th congressional district after after Democrat Francine Busby failed to get the 50 percent plus 1 vote needed to avoid a runoff. Unless there is a wild swing in yet-uncounted absentee and provisional ballots, Busby will face former Congressman Brian Bilbray in June.

In a best-case scenario for Busby, come June she will garner her 43.9 percent plus fellow democrat Chris Young's 1.3 percent and maybe some of liberal Republican Richard Earnest's 2.1 percent. Bilbray, certainly not a conservative Republican in the disgraced Randy "Duke" Cunningham mold, will pick up all of the heavily fragmented GOP votes -- and then some.

Liberal grassroots organizers -- specifically the denizens of DailyKos -- had been doing serious get-out-the-vote efforts in the hopes of putting Busby over the top in a special election when voter turnout is generally smaller. They failed, and the runoff election will coincide with the normal, June primary. In this Republican-gerrymandered district, that makes a Busby victory dependent on some incredible crash-and-burn on Bilbray's part.

Which isn't to say that that possibility doesn't exist. Bilbray has worked in recent years as a Washington lobbyist and is a moderate-left Republican. State GOP leaders send out several fliers in recent weeks denouncing Bilbray and urging Republican voters to choose anyone but him. Of the candidates on the ballot yesterday, only former Del Mar Mayor Richard Earnest could be said to be to Bilbray's left among the GOP candidates. So, while many GOP voters may not be enthusiastic about Bilbray's candidacy, it's unlikely that they will stay home in numbers great enough to hand the seat over to the Democrats.

All of which bodes ill for Democratic efforts to run the 2006 midterm elections on the GOP's "culture of corruption" and force national issues to supercede local ones. California's 50th was perhaps the closest thing to a "perfect storm" with Dirty Duke's conviction and Busby being relatively attractive as a candiddate, yet in this most vulnerable of House seats the Democrats couldn't muster the votes to capture it.