Imagine you’re running for Congress.

The election is four weeks away.

Your name isn’t on the ballot.

The only way anyone can vote for you is to pull the lever for a candidate who resigned and went into rehab after it was revealed that he engaged in instant-message sex with underage boys.

You don’t need a high-priced political consultant to tell you that you’re facing, well, a challenge.

So let’s stipulate right now that Joe Negron has his work cut out for him.

Negron is a state representative in Florida, born and raised in the 16th District — what was, until last week, Mark Foley’s district.

After Foley self-destructed — he had been a sure bet to be reelected — Florida politicos picked Negron to run in his place.

All the experts believe Negron is doomed.

This week, House Majority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), appearing on Sean Hannity’s radio program, was asked about Negron’s chances and the fact that, to vote for Negron, people will have to vote for Mark Foley.

“How many people are going to hold their nose to do that?” Boehner asked.

The way he said it answered his own question: Not many.

Tom Slade, a former head of the Florida state Republican Party, agreed. “The only way you win is [voters] have got to vote for Mark Foley,” he told the Associated Press this week. “That doesn’t appear to me to be very attractive.”

Negron knows what the experts think, but he’s putting on the brave face.

“I don’t think it’s going to be difficult to overcome that, because people are a lot smarter and a lot more sophisticated than the pundits are giving them credit for,” Negron told Fox News on Monday.

“Mark Foley has resigned from Congress. He has withdrawn from the race. His name is merely a placeholder for the Republican nominee, so it’s going to be up to the citizens of this community. Do they want to elect someone like me, who’s a conservative Republican with a six-year track record in the legislature, or do they want to elect someone [Democratic candidate Tim Mahoney] who has Nancy Pelosi on the way, had John Kerry here over the weekend? That doesn’t fit this community. I was born here, brought up here.”

That’s brave talk for a guy everybody is counting out.

But maybe Negron isn’t so crazy. Maybe he remembers the 2000 Senate race in Missouri, when the Democratic candidate, Mel Carnahan, was killed in a plane crash on Oct. 16 — just three weeks before the Nov. 7 election.

It was too late to put another candidate’s name on the ballot. So the state’s Democratic governor promised that if the dead Mel Carnahan won the election, he — the governor — would appoint Carnahan’s widow, Jean, to be the senator from Missouri.

As it turned out, the deceased Mr. Carnahan won, defeating incumbent John Ashcroft, and Jean Carnahan headed to Washington.

Now, it should be said that she had the advantages of her husband’s name and a big sympathy vote. (She later lost her bid to be elected on her own.)

But the fact remains that voters in Missouri elected a dead man to the Senate.

Does that mean the voters in Florida’s 16th District might elect a politically dead man to the House?

If you’re a Republican, in this year, it’s worth a shot.

The first thing Negron has to do is get to work.

“If the election were held today in that district, we would just get crushed,” says Republican pollster David Winston.

“What the candidate has to do is to walk around the district and explain, ‘You’re not voting for Foley, you’re voting for me.’”

“People aren’t stupid; in a month, it’s not an impossible outcome.”

Winston adds that two months would make the job significantly less impossible — but Republicans don’t have two months.

In any event, precisely how the GOP will actually make it work is still to be announced.

“I don’t know that it’s going to be possible, but our job is to get voters to look beyond the name,” St. Lucie County GOP head Bill Lents told the Los Angeles Times. “One idea being kicked around is, ‘wrong name, right party.’ That’s a message we have to get across, and it’s not going to be easy, but that’s our job.”

Florida Republicans could use all the help they can get from Washington, but it’s not clear whether that help will be on the way.

Immediately after the Foley scandal broke, a lot of Republicans added his race to the contests for Tom DeLay’s old seat in Texas and Jim Kolbe’s seat in Arizona — sure losers.

Negron and his supporters are jumping up and down, screaming, “No! No! No! We’ve got to try to win!”

After all, in 2004, in the heavily Republican 16th District, Mark Foley beat his Democratic opponent 68 percent to 32 percent.

Who’s to say he — or at least his name — can’t win again?

York is a White House correspondent for National Review. His column appears in The Hill each week.
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