SSP Daily Digest: 8/18

• CO-Sen: Did someone feed Bob Beauprez after midnight? Because more and more Republican Senate contenders seem to be hatching in Colorado lately. The newest potential candidate, former Lt. Governor Jane Norton, who served under GOP Gov. Bill Owens in his second term, is “seriously considering” challenging newbie Democrat Michael Bennet, and will “make a decision in 30 days”.

• CT-04: Republicans may have been dealt a huge blow to their chances of knocking off frosh Democrat Jim Himes when state Senate minority leader John McKinney decided to stay put, but it looks like they’ve rebounded somewhat with the recruitment of state Sen. Dan Debicella. Debicella will be facing primary competition, though, as former state Sen. Bob Russo of Bridgeport also threw his hat into the ring yesterday. Russo doesn’t have a ton of elected experience under his belt, though; he won a special election in early 2008, but was swamped out of his Senate seat by the Obama tide last November after only 10 months in office. Russo seems to be striking a Shays-like tone in his early remarks, while Debicella sounds more like a meat-and-potatoes conservative.

• FL-Gov: The Florida Chamber of Commerce released a poll yesterday showing Republican Bill McCollum leading Dem CFO Alex Sink by a 43-34 margin. No word on which outfit actually conducted the poll, but it wouldn’t be too far out of line with the most recent public polls we’ve seen out of the Sunshine state.

• KS-03: After dispatching highly-touted GOP state Sen. Nick Jordan last year without breaking much of a sweat (dude clearly picked the wrong cycle to run), Democratic Rep. Dennis Moore may face another legitimate opponent in 2010. Terry Goodman, a city councilor from Overland Park (a populous Kansas City suburb), says he’s “taking a look” at a congressional run.

• NE-02: It looks like GOP Rep. Lee Terry may want to spend less time casting lines for Obama-Terry voters and start keeping an eye on his right flank. Terry is facing a primary challenge from businessman and self-described Reagan Republican Matt Sakalosky, much to the discomfort of Douglas County Republicans. Sakalosky, angry at Lee Terry’s TARP vote last fall, has no elected experience, but insists that he’s well-versed for the job because he “watches television news and reads political biographies”. (Don’t laugh; the fact that he actually reads books probably puts him a peg above a few of the ass-scratching mouth-breathers filling out the ranks in the Boehner caucus.)

• NJ-Gov: If Jon Corzine is going to be re-elected, he won’t be doing so with the help of the Sierra Club. The environmental org endorsed independent candidate Chris Daggett yesterday, himself a one-time environmental protection commissioner under former GOP governor Tom Kean.

• NV-Sen, NV-Lt. Gov: Nevada’s GOP Lt. Governor, Brian Krolicki, facing a felony indictment over the mishandling of state funds, has announced that he’ll seek re-election next year. Krolicki, as you may recall, formed an exploratory committee for a race against Harry Reid not long before he was slapped with the indictment. He must be hoping for a dynamite year for the GOP if he thinks he can pull a Don Young.

• NY-Gov: Are we preparing for life after David Paterson already? GOP gubernatorial hopeful Rick Lazio is looking a few chess moves ahead by picking a fight with state AG Andrew Cuomo over his office not following through with an investigation into the hiring of state Pedro G. Espada (son of crumb-bum Sen. Pedro Espada Jr.) for a well-paid job with the state Senate Democrats. Cuomo, who raised the issue of the dubious hire before anyone else, ended the investigation after Pedro G. resigned last week.

• PA-06: It looks like newspaperman Doug “Captain” Pike has effectively sealed the Democratic nomination for the open seat race to replace Jim Gerlach; the 800 pound gorilla in the district, state Sen. Andy Dinniman, announced yesterday that he’s deciding to keep his powder dry, citing the uncertainties of redistricting as his key reason. ’08 Dem nominee Bob Roggio also pulled the plug on a do-over last Friday.

• TN-09: Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton denies that he has a mental problem.

• VA-05: Everyone expects freshly-minted Dem Rep. Tom Perriello to face a tough re-election campaign next year, but we’re still waiting to figure out who the GOP plans to nominate. A couple of new candidates stepped up to the plate this weekend: high school biology teacher Feda Kidd Morton and real estate investor Laurence Verga both say that they’ll join “FairTax advocate” Bradley S. Rees in the Republican primary. GOP bigwigs are likely holding out hope for a candidate with more obvious firepower, such as state Sen. Robert Hurt or Albemarle County Supervisor Ken Boyd, who says that he’s “still considering it very seriously”.

• WI-Gov, WI-01, WI-03: Democratic Lt. Governor Barbara Lawton is officially in the race to replace Jim Doyle, and congressman Ron Kind is also weighing the race heavily. Kind says that he will make a decision “in the weeks to come”. Open seat watchers will be aware that Kind is currently being challenged by Republican state Sen. Dan Kapanke, whose track record of winning over Dem-leaning voters would put this D+3 seat at serious risk should it come open. And in case you were wondering, 1st District GOP Rep. Paul Ryan pre-empted any speculation that he may run by putting out a statement denying his interest.

• 2010: It’s pretty early, but some prognosticators are already making predictions for next year’s mid-terms:

“There’s offense and there’s defense. Right now, you’re going to be spending time on defense,” said Charlie Cook of the nonpartisan Cook Political Report. “Intensity matters a lot. Last time you [Democrats] had it, this time they [Republicans] have it,” Mr. Cook said, adding that he expects about a 20-seat loss in the 2010 mid-term elections.

Poll analyst Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight.com did not agree with Mr. Cook. He expects Democrats to do even worse.

Mr. Silver said Democrats often told him his Obama-friendly polls comforted them last fall. “I don’t think you should feel at all comforted about 2010,” he said to a standing-room-only crowd. He said he expects Democrats will lose from 20 to 50 House seats and up to six Senate seats next year.

What’s your take?

129 thoughts on “SSP Daily Digest: 8/18”

  1. Good coverage from local blogger Waldo Jaquith on the circus that is the 5th District Republican Committee: http://waldo.jaquith.org/blog/… Debunking the claim from the GOP that Perriello isn’t working overtime like he promised in the campaign. Perriello is holding 21 town halls during August. I dare you to find me a Congressman holding more than five.

    And http://waldo.jaquith.org/blog/… profiling the odd cast of characters running against Perriello. While all the articles keep name dropping State Senators that sound impressive (although some don’t even live in the District!), the actual candidates so far are rather underwhelming.

    The very best part of these latest developments is that there are so damned many candidates-the party has so little structure, and the bench is so…well, there is no bench-that they had to hold an informational session for potential candidates, presumably because it was easier to lecture to a crowd than have a series of one-on-one meetings. Where did they hold this session? At the Albemarle County Republican HQ, an abandoned bank-cum-christmas-tree-stand on the fringe of the dying Albemarle Square Shopping Center in Charlottesville. That’s the same Charlottesville that Republicans insist that a challenger to Perriello can ignore and still win the race. If they really believe that, this is a hell of a strange geographic center for them to draw their candidates from.

    The reason this is all such a mess is that the Fifth District Republican Committee basically consists of Virgil Goode and Tucker Watkins. There was no Fifth District Republican Committee to speak of until Goode switched parties. (What would the point have been?) So the party existed around the concept of getting Goode reelected. (Fun fact: When the prior chair of the Fifth District Democratic Committee retired a few years ago, the guest of honor at the retirement party that he threw for himself was…Rep. Virgil Goode, the very guy he claimed to have been working to unseat.) 5CD Republicans have never had to do anything else, and never prepared for the possibility of doing anything else, other than doing whatever Goode said to do. So now that they’re tasked with actually having to run a candidate, they’ve got no structure, no pecking order, no organization that would allow a Republican in the 5CD to determine if they’re a viable candidate or not. The usual rising-through-the-ranks concept doesn’t apply. So any dope can up and declare they’re running for congress. As they are, in spades, with many more coming, apparently.

  3. the Democrats will sustain only minimal losses (mostly of annoying blue dogs), assuming the economy beings to recover.

    But if unemployment is still high, and the healthcare bill stalls, we’re going to have a fight.  

  4. Wow, I had no idea someone could be more pessimistic then I am.  20-50 and up to 6 would be a horrible mid terms for us, so hopefully we can start working overtime now to prevent that.

  5. It’s mid-August 2009.

    Corzine is in trouble, and I wrote him off for dead only weeks ago, but now he actually has an outside chance.

    Deeds is in trouble, but he still has a chance to turn it around and recover and have a chance to win.

    Neither of those races is a sure defeat yet, even though we’re clear underdogs in both and have no justification to be pollyanish about it.

    So Nate is off already predicting a NET LOSS OF 6 in the SENATE?  And he thinks a net loss of 20 in the House is optimistic?

    As I said in my subject line, Nate is usually great, his analysis really is spot on, but even the best have the occasional bad day, and he obviously was in irrational panic mode when he spoke.

    A year from now the economy will be better, and “health care reform” of SOME kind will have been enacted unless Obama and our Congressional leadership are far more incompetent than I think they are (and I’m not at all pollyanish about their gaming of the debate so far, which has been poor).  Maybe unemployement still will be too high for people’s tastes, maybe at the personal level voters still will feel too much pain and fear not to view Democrats somewhat unfavorably, and maybe the “health care reform” enacted will fall short of anything people consider a real accomplishment.  But even with all that we’d still be in a less unfavorable political environment than today.  And even today I DON’T think we’d lose as many as, say, 40 House seats, or as many as 6 Senate seats.

    Nate is a stastistical genius who also has a pretty good political analytical instincts, but polling today is unreliabe for November 2010, and it’s guaranteed beyond any doubt that the political debate a year from now will be very different from today.

    Now, it’s very possible NO health care legislation passes at all, and that unemployment tops 10% and stays there all next year, or one or more completely unexpected things happen to hurt us politically.  But Nate isn’t predicting ANY of that.  And absent such predictions, you can’t really say we’re going to lose 6 Senate seats.

  6. the majority of seats that flip parties are going to be Govs, not Congressional, and the mood is obviously anti-incumbent, not anti-party. Dems will probably have slightly bigger net losses simply because they have more seats up, but Reps won’t do terribly well, either. I also see most of the big states especially simply changing party control. (Dems get CA and MN; GOP gets MA, MI, PA and maybe CO; Dems hold IL, MD and NY, assuming no Paterson. Reps hold AZ, GA, and FL. Dems also pick up AL (assuming Sparks), NV and VT, and Chaffee wins in RI. Assuming we lose both 2009 races, that’s a net gain of R +1 (+2 with CO, which I think could go either way.)

    House trends will be entirely regional, as they’ve been in the past, with the worst Dem losses (minus outliers like Minnick) being in the Appalachian Kerry/McCain areas and/or purple Bush/Obama areas that either lean Republican or have a very polarized D activist base that’s mad at Obama and won’t turn out. Same with Senate, only you’ve also got a handful of races in solid D states (CT, maybe IL) where the Democrat is personally compromised. Agree that Silver seems a bit off today. I can see losing CO, CT, NV, maybe IL and IN. WA and ND are also both worth keeping an eye on. Still, it’d be a truly exceptional year of 1994 proportions for the GOP to run the table AND successfully defend NH, MO, and OH, and Silver himself said in another post that 2010 turning into 1994 just isn’t statistically possible with as far as the GOP has fallen.  

  7. because it looks like bullshit.

    nate’s 538 has 6 of the top ten most likely seats to switch as republican and the top 3 are GOP.  i’m no math major, but that doesn’t match at all.

    approval ratings would have to be consistently in the low 40s for those kinds of losses.

    the economy would have to stay bad or get worse.  

    we would have to have no health care bill at all.

    afghanistan would have to explode.

    i’d say we lose 5-10 in the house.  gain 1 or 2 in the senate.

  8. to start predicting. I feel like 2010 is gonna hinge a lot on what happens with the health care bill and the economy and we won’t get a good enough feeling of how that went over with the bulk of voters until February 2010. My theory is that we might lose 3 house seats and pick up 5 senate seats.

  9. Certainly in resources. They will cost us dear. I hated those 3 appointments. The stupidest in memory.

    2. We are doing badly in the VA gov election. How about the state senate and the assembly. I am more worried about these two. And Kooch as AG will be a big headache.

    3. Any news about Deval Patrick? Paterson seems to get all the headlines.

    4. Please put up a post about the midday (PST) big news – Christie did not report a loan. Corzine is looking better but not out of the woods yet.

  10. I concur with some of the previous posts to wait at least till Spring 2010 to get a clearer picture. We have a rich enough election history to know that, barring some egregious faux pas, a bad off year summer does not a disastrous fall election make. While both parties had exposures and targets all around the country pre-1994, the GOP today is heavily invested in the South while we really don’t have that many weak White Dems in the south; so the GOP’s reach is very regional. In 1994, we lost 34 incumbents: 12 each in the West and Mid-West; 7 in the South (before 5 party switches) and 3 in the East Coast. The remaining 20 seat GOP pickups were from open seats here and there.

    I don’t expect us to have that many open seats or retirements in 2010. In the West, maybe we are at best less than 10 seats exposed (mostly interior west) and frankly, in a worst case, we lose half of those. In the South, with the exception of the ever-endangered but deft Chet Edwards, the incompetent John Barrow (his district is the mirror image of Sanford Bishop’s, yet he tries to run like he’s Jim Marshall) and a few of the freshmen there, most of the white Dems fit their districts well and even in 1994, our incumbents there held up well. The real problem will be the Industrial Midwest, which pretty much is the swinger in the mix (no pun  intended). So as long as enough $$ are flowing there and Obama at least looks like he is doing something serious about the economy, we should be fine.

    I don’t see any significant loss in the Senate; honestly, I’m saying so with a straight face. With the exception of Burr, all the GOP incumbents are safe, but their open seat exposure is just downright awful. We have the reverse but frankly, I don’t see more than 2-3 seats flipping, which we should easily make up in NH, KY and MO (the GOP nominees are really weak). So all in all, I wouldn’t be a wringer, but in the abundance of caution, I’d wait till Spring 2010 to get a clearer picture.

    One more thing: The health care debacle (which is what it is since Obama, trying to avoid Clinton’s 1993 mistake seems to have walked into the same foreseeable trap) will pass. There are other issues on the table, but there has to be a bill and while it may not be perfect, it has to be good. The GOP doesn’t want a bill b/c the absence of ANY Democratic accomplishment is a more powerful recruiting tool than a non-perfect record. So the sooner we get his shit rolling the better.

  11. After healthcare comes the global warming/cap and trade bill.

    The polls will only get worse from there as that is something extremely tangible to attack because our utility bills WILL go up.  How much they’ll go up by is of course the scare tactic that will be used and people will think it’ll be thousands or something.  Granted, I doubt that bill will be able to overcome a filibuster anyway but nonetheless, another HUGE stain on the Obama’s record to the progressives.

  12. I…just dont see that happening. The Dems only won like 30 in 2006 and the GOP probably wont have that good of a year. They will probably have a good year (and one of the reasons they have a real chance in some blue-leaning open seats for example) but it wont be like 06, IMO.

  13. Normally I’d pissed at Sierra but if it helps Daggett get visability I’m all for it. The better he does the better chance Corzine has.

  14. For the simple reason, that the voters in general are still thoroughly disgusted with the Republican party, and that isn’t going to change by next year. Can you imagine a whole bunch of voters changing their minds and deciding that what this country needs is to have the Republicans in charge again?

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