• CO-Sen: Mark Udall endorsed his fellow Senator Michael Bennet yesterday. Superficially, that’s completely unsurprising, but it’s an indicator that we’ve gotten to the point where it seems unlikely anyone else from the Democratic political establishment (former state House speaker Andrew Romanoff, for instance) might challenge the appointed Bennet in the primary.
• FL-Sen: I predicted yesterday that billionaire Tom Golisano’s interest in the Florida senate race wouldn’t last long, and now it doesn’t even seem to have ever existed. He let the Buffalo News know today that he’d never publicly expressed any interest, and that nobody (starting with Politics1, where the rumor started) ever called to ask him about it before launching the story.
• ME-Gov: After months of nothing happening in the Maine governor’s race, now we have two candidates. Democratic State Rep. Dawn Hill, who represents part of York County and owns a dog day care in her spare time, announced she’s in the race. She may be a long shot in the primary against former AG and former state House speaker Steve Rowe, who quietly filed his candidacy papers last week.
• FL-09: Our condolences to the family and friends of Phyllis Busansky, who died unexpectedly last night. She ran a solid race in FL-09 in 2006, and was elected Hillsborough County’s Supervisor of Elections in 2008.
• NC-08: With the NC GOP trying to recover the fumble on their attempts to recruit Carolina Panthers star Mike Minter to go up against freshman Rep. Larry Kissell, a new possibility has emerged: former state Rep. Mia White (who was Mia Morris while in the legislature). She’s been pretty far out of the loop lately, though… she has been living in Singapore, where she’s been American politics commentator for what she called their equivalent of CNN.
• NY-23: One more Republican has declared his interest in the open seat in the 23rd, who wasn’t on anybody’s watch list: veterinarian Gary Cooke. In a dairy-heavy district, Cooke seems primarily focused on farm issues.
• OR-04: Springfield mayor Diamond Joe Quimby Sid Leiken has already run into some trouble in his nascent campaign against Rep. Peter DeFazio: he’s the subject of a campaign finance complaint from Democrats. Leiken paid $2,000 to a company called P&G Marketing and Research for “surveys and polls,” but no such firm exists and the address is the same as his mother’s real estate business. While Leiken didn’t return calls on the matter, Leiken’s campaign manager said that he has receipts for all of the campaign’s expenditures… except for this one.
• PA-03: You know your campaign wasn’t meant to be, when the first mention your campaign gets in the press is your Facebook announcement that you’re dropping out of the campaign. The GOP’s lone challenger against freshman Rep. Kathy Dahlkemper, social studies teacher Brian Lasher, dropped out, leaving the GOP without a candidate, although businessman Steve Fisher is still thinking about it. Hard to fathom the GOP giving up without a fight in such a traditionally swingy district.
• Cal-St. Ass.: Fresno-area Assemblyman Juan Arambula left the Democratic caucus yesterday to become an independent, supposedly over budget issues (although water issues may be a major subtext). This tips the balance to a still comfortable 49-29-1 for the Democrats, but with Arambula gone they’re now five votes short of the 2/3s necessary to do anything useful with the budget. Arambula is term-limited out in 2010, so the fallout is contained.
• Demographics: Nate Silver has, as always, a fascinating graph as part of a piece on changing migration rates in the last few years. Migration from blue states to red states has slowed significantly in recent years, probably because of the economic slowdown. The plus side is that this may salvage a few Democratic House seats in 2010.
was going to be crooked, they’d be crooked to the tune of more than $2000.
It certainly looks like the establishment isn’t going to put a challenger up to Bennet.
But he still looks weak and a lot of Colorado Dems are well to the left. Does Udall have any pull over them sufficient to keep them from supporting a challenger? I know Udall himself has been pretty moderate.
Politico is running a story that Palin more likely than not will decline to run for re-election to focus on a national campaign.
Ethan Berkowitz has all but declared his candidacy, so I guess we’d be looking at Berkowitz for the Dems versus Parnell for the Repubs.
Don Young gets a free pass, this time? Unreal!
Berkowitz should challenge Murkowski for the senate. A lot of people in Alaska dont like her.
Has a weird law that prevents candidates from doing anything until June the year before the election, so this was the earliest candidates could jump in, raise money and officially be a candidate. Expect more folks to go in; Rosa Scarcelli is likely going to announce soon.
I live in Singapore and I don’t have the slightest clue what “their equivalent of CNN” is. Perhaps NewsAsia, but I don’t recall ever seeing anyone named Mia (with any last name) there. Something tells me she won’t be very popular returning to North Carolina from the part of the world where so many of those textile mill jobs have gone to. (Being originally from New Hampshire myself, which is where the South lured those jobs from in the first place, my sympathies are limited in any case…)