As Brian Bilbray heads to Washington to represent the 50th Congressional District, Democrat Francine Busby will regroup and continue her campaign for the election in November, albeit without the national attention or suspense.
Bilbray and Busby both ran to fill out the term of Randy “Duke” Cunningham, who stepped down in a scandal and is currently in prison, where he is serving eight years for taking more than $2.4 million in bribes from defense contractors.
Bilbray won the race June 6, and also won the concurrent Republican primary for the November election, where he will again face Busby, who won the Democrat primary. Winner of the November election will serve a complete term.
Busby concedes that it is a challenge to run in a district where there are approximately 91,000 more Republicans than Democrats, saying it will be an uphill battle to face a Republican incumbent.
“But it’s important that I ran because so many people want to have an active voice that didn’t have one before,” Busby said.
Her political strategy will change depending on how political events roll out, she said.
Busby’s now-famous misstatement, “You don’t need papers to vote,” which she uttered before a largely Latino crowd in Escondido, likely cost her valuable voters on June 6, but she defended her statement as “completely taken out of context and used by the Minutemen and right-wing radio to discredit me and to increase their voter base.”
Busby said that people saw beyond the misstatement and that she plans to move on and do her best.