By Bob Benenson, CQ Staff

National Democratic strategists want their party to win an upset victory in the House special election being held Tuesday in Mississippi’s 1st Congressional District, usually a Republican stronghold. Travis Childers, a county administrator who projects a conservative image, is running an unexpectedly strong bid against Republican Greg Davis, the mayor of Southaven, in the contest to fill the seat seven-term Republican Roger Wicker vacated after he was appointed to the Senate seat from which Republican Trent Lott resigned.

But even if the GOP’s Davis is able to hold off Childers’ charge — and he has to be considered at least a slight favorite in a district that gave President Bush 62 percent of its votes in 2004 — the Democrats will still be able to claim a consolation prize. This latest in a series of aggressive takeover bids sponsored by the amply funded Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), in places where the party has not seriously competed in many years, is further draining the treasury of the cash-starved GOP House campaign unit, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC).

CQ Politics reported Thursday that the DCCC had backed Childers’ campaign with $127,000 in independent expenditures — mostly for ads criticizing Davis, who already is bruised from a tough primary runoff battle that on April 1 netted him the Republican nomination for the regular November general election. (He will again face Childers, the winner of a much milder Democratic runoff). The NRCC had responded on Wednesday by dumping in nearly $150,000, bringing its expenditures on behalf of Davis and against Childers to about $233,000.

Those money numbers may have increased in the time it took you to read the previous paragraph.

The Democrats can much better afford this six-figure spending battle than the Republicans. The latest monthly reports, for activity through Feb. 29, showed the DCCC had raised $77.7 million since the election cycle began in January 2007 — the month in which the Democrats claimed the congressional majorities they won in the 2006 midterm elections — to $57.9 million for the NRCC. But even that sizable gap between the parties was dwarfed by the gigantic Democratic advantage in remaining cash on hand as of that date: $38 million for the Democrats to just $5.1 million for the Republicans.

That single digit to the left of the decimal is bad news for the NRCC, which must spread what little money it has among its challengers seeking to win Democratic seats and cut into that party’s majority, or to candidates defending Republican seats against Democrats who are trying to build upon their party’s 30-seat gain in 2006.

Meanwhile, the DCCC’s financial cushion has enabled it to throw some money into what amounts to venture capital. The unusual recent spate of Republican House vacancies has provided the Democrats with an opportunity to extend their successful 2006 strategy of “expanding the playing field” by competing in dozens of districts that they had long effectively ceded to Republican incumbents. The DCCC’s aggressive takeover efforts have in turn placed the NRCC in a bind, forcing the GOP committee to spend money it can’t afford on races in districts that it had long been able to ignore as “safe” for their party.

The Democrats’ strategy has produced one big special election victory that had added symbolic portent. The seat in Illinois’ 14th District that Democrat Bill Foster won in a March 8 special election had been occupied for more than 20 years by Republican J. Dennis Hastert. Hastert had resigned from Congress in November 2007, a year after the elections that cost him his status as the longest-serving Republican House Speaker in the nation’s history.

The investment of just more than $1 million that the DCCC put into the race — all on ads blasting Republican nominee Jim Oberweis — looks like a bargain compared to the nearly $1.3 million that the NRCC poured down the drain on its own independent expenditures, most of that spent on anti-Foster ads.

Yet the DCCC’s decision to play in a special election held last December in Ohio’s strongly Republican 5th District may have been an even cagier maneuver. After all, a foray in Illinois 14, where Bush took a fairly modest 55 percent in the 2004 presidential contest, was more realistic than a takeover effort in Ohio 5, where Bush cruised with 61 percent. But with a relatively small investment of $248,000 backing Robin Weirauch, the longshot Democratic candidate, the DCCC baited the NRCC into spending $412,000 of its own money — on a race in which Republican nominee Bob Latta ended up winning by a comfortable margin to succeed the late GOP Rep. Paul E. Gillmor.

We should know by late Tuesday night, when the votes are counted, whether the Mississippi 1 race will be another feather in the Democrats’ cap — like the Illinois 14 takeover — or another ploy in the DCCC’s effort to coax the NRCC into spending it all.

But it is already clear that the special election chess game isn’t over for the year. The Democrats are making a serious run at the vacant seat in Louisiana’s 6th District after not even fielding a candidate in 2006 against veteran Republican Rep. Richard H. Baker, who resigned his seat in February to take over as head of a financial trade association. The contest to replace Baker is May 3 — and the spending wars there already have begun, with $297,000 in independent expenditures by the DCCC and $110,000 by the NRCC so far.