A couple more items to add to our discussion of the “Hillary drag” on Democrats in the South and West (key arguments found here and here), courtesy the Influence Peddler. First, an article in the Los Angeles Times looking at Hillary’s effect on Mountain state Democrats:

The New York senator and Democratic front-runner was by a wide margin the most unpopular of 13 potential presidential candidates in Montana, according to a June survey by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research for the Billings Gazette; 61% said they would not consider voting for her, compared with 49% who would not vote for former North Carolina Sen. John Edwards and 45% who would not vote for Illinois Sen. Barack Obama. The most unpopular Republican candidate, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, was rejected by 51%.Recent polls in Colorado, Nevada and Arizona have found similar distaste for Clinton.
“She’s carrying huge negatives out here,” said Floyd Ciruli, an independent Colorado pollster who said Democratic congressional candidates would have to highlight their differences with the national party to be successful next year. “It’s that liberal East Coast image that is so hard to sell in the West.”

One key advisor to a prominent Democratic congressional candidate tells the Times, “It’s a disaster for Western Democrats… It keeps me up at night.”

The article notes that a third of independents in Arizona said they could never vote for Hillary Clinton.

Finally, CQ did a seat-by-seat rundown of House races in the South and concluded:

…any Democratic ambitions for bigger Southern gains are tempered by the fact that they will have to play serious defense in a few of their own districts. These include at least three held by Democratic incumbents who took over Republican-held seats under highly unusual circumstances in 2006: Tim Mahoney, who captured Florida’s 16th District seat after long-entrenched Republican Rep. Mark Foley’s career collapsed in scandal; Nick Lampson, who won the strongly Republican-leaning 22nd District of Texas after its once-powerful Republican representative, Tom DeLay, resigned under an ethics cloud; and Ciro D. Rodriguez, who narrowly ousted Republican Rep. Henry Bonilla in Texas’ 23rd District after a court-ordered redistricting made it more favorable to the Democrats.
Democrats also will again have to go all out to protect two of their incumbents from neighboring districts in Georgia, Jim Marshall of the 8th District and John Barrow of the 12th, who won by the smallest margins among all Democratic House incumbents seeking re-election across the nation in 2006.

With Hillary steamrolling her way to the nomination, Republicans may be thankful that Democratic primary voters are hell-bent on nominating the one leading candidate who couldn’t put much of this territory in play.