The blogosphere has lit up this week with rumors of polling that showed Congressman Raul Grijalva was in a dead heat with little known Republican candidate Ruth McClung.

We haven’t seen any polls, but even Democrats are telling us that Grijalva has a much bigger fight on his hand than he anticipated going into the election season.

Part of it has to do with the national mood, but there’s another big reason: Grijalva called for a boycott of the state in the wake of the passage of SB 1070.

That’s the kind of dumb political move that results from believing that you’re politically untouchable. If Grijalva had been playing it smart, he would have waited for outside groups to announce their boycotts and then pointed out that the Republicans who supported the law had created problems for the state.
Instead, Republicans were able to say that Grijalva was the one responsible for the boycott.

And Grijalva knows it was a stupid thing to do. You’ll notice that he walked back his call for a boycott after a federal judge blocked the implementation of most of the immigration law.

We suspect Grijalva will prevail on Election Day. McClung doesn’t have much in the way of financial resources for the race—her most recent FEC report shows that she’s raised less than $70,000 and had less than $15,000 on hand as of early August.

But Grijalva isn’t exactly made of money, either.

In another example of hubris, he’d raised less than a half-million dollars for his campaign and managed to spend all but $76,000 of that, leaving him cash-poor going into the general election. Way to blow money on the cell-phone bills, Raul.

And any resources that Democrats have to expend on helping Grijalva will siphon money and attention away from vulnerable Democrats such as Gabrielle Giffords, Harry Mitchell and Ann Kirkpatrick.