Last year, Vietnamese businessman Anh "Joseph" Cao pulled off a stunning upset in Louisiana's 2nd Congressional District, a majority-black district home to Rep. William Refrigerator" Jefferson, a veteran Democratic Congressman thought unbeatable by a Republican, especially a largely unknown Asian like Cao. You would think such an incredible accomplishment would have been more noticed in the politigeek world. Sadly, it wasn't the case. Cao's feat may well be answered by a defeat in 2010 as he attempts to retain one of the bluest districts in the country period, in addition to being the bluest district held by a Republican.

Similarly, the makings of a real race are starting to come together in California's 10th Congressional District, a district not meant to be competitive by any means, and similarly few in the punditocracy seem to care. While nowhere near as Democratic as Lousiana's 2nd, the 10th still is not friendly territory to Republicans. Housing a swath of suburbs sandwiched between Oakland and Sacramento, this white collar district is right in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's backyard and for many years was home to parliamentary whiz Ellen Tauscher, who was nominated by President Obama to be Undersecretary for Arms Control. Her subsequent confirmation triggered a special election to fill her now-vacant seat. Like a team of prison laborers after a girl washing a Corvette car in cutoff jeans and a white t-shirt, 14 candidates scrambled to get on the ballot for the special primary election on September 1. Under California law, the top three vote getters for both major parties and of all the third party candidates advanced to the general election to be held next Tuesday.

Going just by the starting numbers and players in the general election, it would look like Republican nominee David Harmer didn't have a snowball's chance in hell of even making the race competitive. Democrats hold an 18% voter registration advantage in CA-10. Obama defeated John McCain by a 2-1 margin in 2008. Undersecretary Tauscher routinely won re-election with more than 65% of the vote. John Garamendi, the state's Lt. Governor and Democratic nominee to fill her seat, has held elective office in the Bay Area and Sacramento for 35 years. Harmer has never held elective office, and at the end of September had a paltry $119,000 cash on hand in a district bound between two major media markets.

But with just six days until Election Day, a whole new set of numbers suggests that there is definitely a lot to be nervous about...if you're John Garamendi. The man who talked up every internal poll he paid for during the primary election now keeps his toplines very close to the vest. That might be because his polls are saying exactly what Harmer's polls are saying: it's a dead heat and the momentum is with Harmer.

According to Harmer, he stands within just two percentage points of Garamendi, well within the margin of error for any poll. And those polls are following the same turnout model as the primary election, where Garamendi competed with two other well-financed Democratic opponents. Even with those three going at it, Republicans still beat Democrats in turnout by five percentage points. With only Garamendi in the field on November 3, will the Republican-Democrat voter interest gap get that much bigger? Big enough to win?

Oh, there are numbers for that too. In the chase to turn in absentee ballots, about 66,000 votes have been cast. Of those, registered Democrats hold less than a 10% edge over Republican ballots returned, barely half the size of their normal voter registration edge in the district. Harmer's campaign is averaging about 4000 phone calls per day to voters in the district. Those are numbers Presidential campaigns dream of, let alone in a special election. The Harmer campaign predicts that they will even be able to complete precinct walks in every single precinct in CA-10, another huge indicator of partisan enthusiasm that's hard to match even under the best of circumstances.

Let's dig a little deeper into the absentee return numbers. Assume 10% of Democratic voters vote for Harmer and 10% of Republican voters vote for Garamendi and 5/8's of Decline to State voters vote for Harmer, all plausible assumptions given the current political environment. Just adding those sums from Republican and Democrat votes, we can estimate that Garamendi has about 31,400 votes to Harmer's 26,600, just a 4800 vote deficit. Add in our assumption of 5/8 of the 8,000 Decline to State ballots cast going to Harmer, and that vote goes to 34,400 votes for Garamendi to 31,600 for Harmer. That goes down to a deficit of around 3,000 votes for Harmer, with five days of absentee voting left plus Election Day voting. While being ahead is always better than being behind, any Republican in the Bay Area would kill to be in such a competitive position right now.

Harmer also observed that there's another factor behind him that would be a boring one were it not so strikingly different from the intra-party bloodbath Americans are witnessing in NY-23. He says there's unity between the various factions of the local party that we aren't seeing in upstate New York. In his words, the classical Reagan coalition of fiscal conservatives, social conservatives and libertarians has been "recreated" in his district, certainly emboldened by the prospect of electing a not explicitly squishy Republican to a Congressional seat in the Bay Area, a region thought only safe for the Tom Campbells and Arnold Schwarzeneggers of the world.

Putting it all together, Harmer says that at the grassroots level and calling on his past experiences as a campaigner and initiative leader, "this is what a winning campaign feels like". And looking at the numbers and looking back to my experience of spending two months working 40 hours a week out of a county Republican Party headquarters in 2008 (a solidly Republican county to boot), it's hard to argue with the data that matches the feelings.

Will Harmer win? I don't know. While the money did start to roll in to his campaign after October 1st and the NRCC is moving operatives out to CA-10 to implement the GOP's vaunted 72 hour get out the vote operation, the original numbers still look imposing. Garamendi has never lost an election in a political career going back to 1974 (for perspective, my parents were in middle school that year). But to this point, it's been a race ignored by Washington and the usual election geek reporter suspects there. Like Anh Cao's race last December, if the momentum and good numbers continue to fall in David Harmer's favor, he could pull off the biggest 2009 elections upset that nobody is talking about.

*To Help David Harmer, visit www.HarmerForCongress.com