By Rachel Kapochunas, CQ Staff

Democrat Travis W. Childers won the House special election runoff Tuesday in Mississippi’s 1st District, defeating Republican Greg Davis by a sound 54 percent to 46 percent with all precincts reporting. His takeover win in a district that for years has been a Republican stronghold in elections for major offices provided his surging party something of a political trifecta.

The victory gave the Democrats their third special election takeover victory in recent weeks, all in districts that usually are strongly Republican. President Bush was favored by 62 percent of 1st District voters in 2004, and Republican Roger Wicker — who in January vacated the seat to accept a U.S. Senate appointment — won a seventh and final House victory with 66 percent in 2006. Childers’ win followed victories by Democrats Bill Foster , who on March 8 won the Illinois 14th District seat long held by resigned former House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert, and Don Cazayoux , who on May 3 captured the Louisiana 6th District seat from which 11-term Republican Rep. Richard H. Baker resigned to take a lobbying position.

The win by Childers (CHILL-ders) also boosted the Democrats to a 236-seat majority to 199 Republicans. And it dealt another stinging psychological as well as tangible blow to the Republican Party, which poured well more than $1 million into its unsuccessful effort to salvage the seat and now looks far more likely to suffer further losses in the November general elections than to score the 19-seat net gain it needs to reclaim the majority.

The outcome will require a serious post mortem by Republican strategists. It was the second consecutive special election in the South in which the GOP lost after staging a high-volume effort to tie a Democratic House candidate — running as a conservative — to more liberal national party figures, including Illinois Sen. Barack Obama , the likely Democratic presidential nominee.

The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC), the party’s House campaign arm, and other Republican-allied organizations had previously tested the strategy against Cazayoux, who nonetheless won the Louisiana special election. The national GOP went even further to try to save the Mississippi seat, with Vice President Dick Cheney shuttling in for an election-eve rally for GOP nominee Davis in a futile effort to pump up turnout among the district’s typically dominant Republican base.

The strategy’s lack of success in these contests was reflected in comments by Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole , who chairs the NRCC, in a press release Tuesday night in which he said, “We are disappointed in tonight’s election results.”

“Republicans must be prepared to campaign against Democrat challengers who are running as conservatives, even as they try to join a liberal Democrat majority,” Cole said. “Though the Democrats’ task will be more difficult in a November election, the fact is they have pulled off two special election victories with this strategy, and it should be a concern to all Republicans.”

The Republican Party continues to be plagued by problems carried over from the 2006 elections, such as Bush’s poor approval ratings, public qualms about the Iraq War and a series of corruption scandals affecting some GOP members. The downturn in the nation’s economy has dealt another blow to the party’s hopes of regaining its footing in this year’s congressional contests, something Cole tacitly conceded in an unusually frank post-election assessment.

He said “the political environment is such that voters remain pessimistic about the direction of the country and the Republican Party in general,” adding, “Therefore, Republicans must undertake bold efforts to define a forward looking agenda that offers the kind of positive change voters are looking for.”

Democrats, meanwhile, crowed that Childers overcame negative campaign tactics aimed by Republicans. “Republicans and their outside groups pulled out all the stops in an attempt to nationalize a congressional race and distract voters away from their own candidates’ failure to stand up for middle class families,” said Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) Chairman Chris Van Hollen , a representative from Maryland.

But the Democrats stirred some controversy of their own. A flyer distributed by the DCCC — and targeted largely at the heavily Democratic African-American constituency that makes up more than a quarter of the district’s population — claimed that Davis, the mayor of the city of Southaven, wanted to honor the founder of the racist Ku Klux Klan organization with a statue. Republicans railed that this was a gross distortion, stating that Davis had only said he’d be willing to provide a home for a statue of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Civil War-era Confederate States of America. The GOP said Greg Davis was not associated with a statue to KKK founder Nathan Bedford Forrest, a former Confederate general.

The DCCC’s $2 million in independent expenditures aimed at capturing the 1st District seat actually were much greater than the NRCC’s spending, but the Democratic committee is much better funded and could better afford the spending spree. The Republican committee’s wasted seven-figure expenditures on its three special election defeats have left it with little remaining cash to put into bids to take over Democratic seats in this fall’s election and to play defense against other strong Democratic takeover bids.

Despite the often nasty tone of the campaign, Childers’ win was in large part a matter of political geography trumping partisan leanings. A nursing home owner who has a variety of administrative responsibilities as chancery clerk, he comes from the largely rural eastern part of the district — where many voters looked askance at Davis’ roots in the northwestern part of the district that has been absorbed into metropolitan Memphis. In fact, the election would have been a Childers rout had Davis not racked up 75 percent of the vote and a 10,000-vote margin in his home base of DeSoto County. Childers, who took 85 percent in his less populous Prentiss County base, ran ahead in 20 of the district’s 24 counties and topped Davis by roughly 18,000 votes outside DeSoto.