The Daily Kos story about Massa's AFL-CIO endorsement contains an interesting fact and some titillating polling gossip.
The fact is that the 29th leans 5.2% Republican according to the Cook Partisan Voting Index. That's still near the middle of the distribution of all congressional districts (full discussion of that graph in the middle of this page). In other words, though the 29th is considered conservative, it is closer to the center than to the edge.
The gossip concerns the Massa poll I wrote about earlier. In the comments, gossipers claim they have talked to Massa or Massa staffers say the following:
It showed Massa and Kuhl as roughly tied even though Massa's name recognition was about 20% and Kuhl's was in the 80s.
In that internal poll, Massa was two points behind Kuhl with a 4% margin of error. [...] And there's more: when a neutral statement was read about each candidate, Massa went up 30 points.
Again, consider the source, but this will have to do until one of the area media outlets ponies up for a poll.
