CA-03

Another report on hot political races around the country has bumped the 4th Congressional District race into the "toss-up" category.

The Rothenberg Political Report switched the race to replace retiring U.S. Rep. John Doolittle (R-Roseville) to a toss-up on Sunday morning.

An emergency room colleague of Bill Durston makes the case for the Democratic candidate in a new commercial from Durston's 3rd Congressional District campaign.

Teresa Jones, a nurse who's worked with emergency room doctor Durston for 17 years, describes in the commercial how Durston works diligently to diagnose problems in patients and helps make them better.

Democratic congressional challenger Bill Durston kept up a respectable fundraising pace in relation to his opponent, incumbent U.S. Rep. Dan Lungren (R-Gold River) during the second quarter of 2008.

But Durston, a doctor from Gold River, still faces a large deficit in cash on hand against Lungren in the 3rd Congressional District race.

He may be running unopposed in the 3rd Congressional District's Democratic primary, but Bill Durston still wants to turn out the vote on June 3. The Durston campaign asked supporters to consider phone banking for the Democrats' challenge to Republican Dan Lungren.

"Even though Bill is running unopposed as the Democratic candidate for Congress in the 3rd Congressional District, we want Democratic voters to know that he doesn't take their votes for granted, and we want to encourage ‘decline to state' voters to vote Democratic," read an e-mail to supporters.

Bill Durston hopes his second attempt at knocking off the 3rd Congressional District's Rep. Dan Lungren follows Jerry McNerney's storyline.

In 2006, McNerney - an under-funded, under-estimated Democrat - made a second, and successful, challenge to a sitting Republican Congressman, Richard Pombo.

"If McNerney can do it in the 11th District, which is right next to ours, we can do that here in the third," Durston told PolitickerCA.com Thursday.