By Cecily Wu, CQ Staff

Tom Reed, the mayor of the small upstate New York city of Corning, announced Wednesday that he is challenging freshman Democratic Rep. Eric Massa for the state’s 29th District seat. Reed’s decision to run gives Republican strategists their preferred candidate for one of their priority races in the 2010 national House campaign.

The GOP is targeting the 29th — which reaches north from the most rural Southern Tier region to suburban Rochester — because it has for the most part been one of the few remaining Republican-leaning districts in the increasingly Democratic-dominated state of New York.

Massa, a Navy veteran and former Pentagon aide, unseated two-term Republican John R. “Randy” Kuhl Jr. in a 2008 rematch of their very close 2006 contest. But Massa will have his hands full defending a district where he won by 2 percentage points after losing to Kuhl by 3 points two years earlier.

And even as Massa was flipping the seat to the Democrats in 2008, Republican John McCain kept the district in the Republican presidential voting column, though his 50 percent to 48 percent edge over Democrat Barack Obama was well down from President George W. Bush ’s 56 percent to 42 percent breeze over Democrat John Kerry four years earlier.

Reed already is positioning himself to remind local voters of their longstanding Republican ties, advocating business-friendly policies while focusing his criticisms on the economic and fiscal measures now being pursued by the Obama administration and the Democratic-controlled Congress of which Massa is a member.

The Republican hierarchy signaled its interest in Reed a few days before his official announcement, in an e-mail fundraising solicitation sent out last weekend by the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC). The message delivered by the campaign arm of the House Republicans — timed to the end of the Federal Election Commission’s candidate reporting period for the year’s second quarter — identified Reed along with three other 2010 Republican challengers from across the nation as “Young Guns” who will help revive the fortunes of the trouble-plagued Republican Party.

But Reed, who is completing his single term as the mayor of Corning, considers himself an “underdog” to Massa, who also lives in that city. “We’re starting this early in the campaign because I’m an outsider and not a politician,” Reed said in an interview with CQ Politics Tuesday. Although he is viewed as a well-respected mayor, Corning — famous for its glass works — has fewer than 11,000 residents. That amounts to roughly 2 percent of the 29th District’s total population.

One of Reed’s immediate chores will be introducing himself to voters in the populous suburban Rochester portion of the district, located about 100 miles north of his hometown.

Massa’s two previous campaigns, both high-profile challenges to Kuhl, give him a major head start over Reed in district-wide name ID. He has sought to boost his name recognition further over the first six months of his freshman term in Congress, making weekly trips to the district and holding town-style meetings, said Jared Smith, the incumbent’s communications director.

Massa has not formally declared his intentions for 2010, but Smith said he “fully intends on running.”

One other problem Reed could face is that Republicans’ early signal of their interest in his campaign has in turn prompted the Democrats to get an early start on their opposition research. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) thus was ready on Tuesday to provide a critical analysis of the $13.7 million budget Reed and the Corning City Council approved for fiscal 2009-10, which included a 2.36 percent tax increase.

“Leave it to the NRCC to tout a candidate who’s best known for raising taxes and fees during his brief tenure as mayor. With recruits like these, it’s no wonder there are only three Republicans left in the entire New York congressional delegation,” said Shripal Shah, a DCCC spokesman, referring to the dominant 26-3 lead Democrats hold over the Republicans in the state’s House seats.