• MA-Sen: AG Martha Coakley wasted no time in announcing her candidacy for the special election for the Massachusetts Senate seat; unlike the myriad members of the House delegation, she’s not waiting to see if a Kennedy gets in. Meanwhile, people are definitely talking about a candidacy by Curt Schilling, retired from the Boston Red Sox. If Schilling runs, he’s ineligible to do so as a Republican, though; he’s registered as an independent, and he doesn’t have enough time under Massachusetts to change his registration to be able to run as an R. (Schilling himself acknowledges he may not be the best candidate, although he clearly is enjoying the spotlight.)
• NC-Sen: Former state Sen. and Iraq vet Cal Cunningham seems to be acting more like a candidate, and he got a big boost from a recent speech to a Democratic group in Charlotte which has gone viral, as they kids say these days. He lit Burr up with zinger after zinger, effectively summing up the anonymous Burr this way: “In 15 years on Capitol Hill you can’t name one thing that Richard Burr has done to make your life better, and I can’t either.”
• NV-Sen: Feeling confident after seeing several polls giving her an edge over Harry Reid, Nevada GOP chair Sue Lowden is resigning her post, presumably with an eye toward a Senate run. Since there are already announced candidates (former SoS candidate Danny Tarkanian), she’s resigning as of Sep. 30 to avoid a conflict of interest.
• PA-Sen, PA-Gov (pdf): Franklin & Marshall is out with a poll of the Pennsylvania races, although the undecideds are bizarrely large. Case in point, Arlen Specter leads Joe Sestak 37-11 in the Dem primary (with 46% don’t know and 6% other). Specter bests Pat Toomey in the general, 37-29, while Toomey beats Sestak, 26-22. (As an amusing aside, Sestak and Toomey had a Specter-free debate at Muhlenberg College last night and then adjourned to a local pub together for a round of beers and further private trash-talking of Specter.) F&M also polled the GOP gubernatorial primary, where Tom Corbett leads Jim Gerlach 15-6 (with 73% don’t know!). Outgoing Gov. Ed Rendell has quickly plunged from most popular figure in the state to least popular, with a favorable of 32/53.
• MN-Gov: Former Dem state House leader Matt Entenza recently hired Friend of SSP Dana Houle to manage his campaign for governor. Congrats to Dana, and best wishes to Entenza, who made a wise choice. (D)
• NV-Gov: You know your political career is over when other members of your own party are using your name as a cudgel against their opposition. Minor GOP gubernatorial candidate Mike Montandon issued a press release attacking John Ensign over his alleged recruiting of recently-retired federal judge Brian Sandoval into the gubernatorial primary. (Although presumably the intent was to besmirch his opponent Sandoval, by linking him to Ensign.)
• VA-Gov: One more poll to mention in Virginia, not as favorable as the PPP poll from Tuesday. Rasmussen’s latest look at the race gives Bob McDonnell a 51-42 lead over Creigh Deeds with leaners (49-39 without), not much changed from the early August sample of 47-38. The entire one-day sample was on Sep. 1, after news of McDonnell’s anti-fornicator manifesto had broken. Speaking of said master’s thesis, Deeds is already on the air with radio spots (wisely airing only in northern Virginia) attacking McDonnell over the thesis. In another sign of Dems’ renewed confidence in this race, the DNC is pouring a truckload of cash into the race: $5 million.
• CA-50: Dave Roberts, a city councilor and former mayor in Solana Beach, confirmed today that he’ll be a candidate in the 50th against GOP Rep. Brian Bilbray. Roberts, an openly gay veteran, has sounded more conservative notes than the other Dems in the primary, 2006 candidate Francine Busby and attorney Tracy Emblem; he recently changed his registration from Independent to Democratic. (UPDATE: The Roberts camp informs us that he is not a veteran.)
• FL-16: The DCCC sounds happy with its recruit to go against freshman Tom Rooney, 36-year-old St. Lucie County Commissioner Chris Craft. He also has a compelling backstory, as seen in this recent interview.
• NH-01: Here’s a poll of the hotly contested race in the 1st, courtesy of Populus Research (the same guys who polled NH-Sen a few weeks ago and found no undecideds) on behalf of the conservative site Now Hampshire. Carol Shea-Porter leads GOP mayor of Manchester Frank Guinta, 46.3%-43.4% (I’m not sure what’s up with the extra significant digits when the MoE is still 4%, but who am I to nitpick?). Guinta previously released an NRCC internal poll in April that had him down 43-34.
• NY-23: Assemblywoman Dede Scozzafava seems to have one Achilles heel in the NY-23 open seat special election: her brother Thomas (in the fine tradition of Billy Carter, Roger Clinton, and Neil Bush). Turns out she owns $1 million in preferred stock (and a 3% voting stake) in her brother’s troubled company, Seaway Valley Capital Corporation, a holding company whose subsidiaries owe $192,000 in back taxes. She maintains she’s a mere “passive investor,” although she is COO of an affiliated company, Seaway Capital Partners.
• KY-State Sen.: It looks like Democratic Gov. Steve Beshear is going to continue his stealth plan to dismantle the GOP’s majority in the Kentucky state Senate, one seat at a time. Still riding high off of Democrat Robin Webb’s recent win of a GOP-held state Senate seat, Republican Senate President David Williams is pre-emptively whining in the press about Beshear’s efforts to see that GOP Senate Majority Leader Dan Kelly gets nominated to a vacant circuit judgeship. This move has been rumored for some time, and back in July, the names of two Democrats were floated for a potential special election in Kelly’s seat in central Kentucky’s Bourbon territory: former state Rep. Jodie Haydon of Bardstown or Nicky Rapier, the son of the late House leader Kenny Rapier. (J)
Does anyone know do we have a good candidate in line for Cao’s seat? Things have been a little too quiet for me on that race.
Schilling was already complaining about the media attention and yet he was always more than ready to go in front of the cameras to gripe during his playing days. The man has no true ties to the state either.
Tne NC Senate race intrigues me. This is one of those races where I can’t decide if a competitive primary would be a good thing. I guess common sense says if we field candidates with low name identification a primary makes sense.
Their private lives have generated fodder for right wing attack on democrats for 2 generations. What is the problem of starting with a clean slate?
MA seems to have a Al Sharpton kind of problem.
Sounds like he’s pretty charismatic. That’s big against a guy like Richard Burr.
Bilbray is unlikely to lose. It does not matter who the democratic candidate is.
this year are a disgrace. If the Democratic candidates care more about controversial master’s thesis’ and legal infractions and are making it a campaign of character assassination, then no wonder the Republicans are still ahead in the polls. I thought this was the part of looking ahead and finding solutions for the future, as Obama so eloquently stated last year.
The only saving grace is Deeds is airing his radio ad in Democrat leaning northern Virginia. If the rest of the state heard his little rant about McDonnell’s thesis, either people will just be pissed, or they won’t vote because they’re so turned off by the negativity (I’m talking about Democrats in the latter point).
Just got my first campaign email from Tarryl Clark and she’s already running the strategy that needs to be done for this district, unlike Tink.
“So while Congresswoman Bachmann has been traveling the country, riling up her right-wing base with calls to “slit their wrists,” I’ve been here, talking to Minnesotans about how we can really make a difference in their lives.”
Attack Bachmann as much as possible, showing she doesnt give a shit about the district nor getting any work done in Congress while contrasting that with her own work in MN. Clark’s got this.
That’s a huge get for Entenza. It’ll be him, MAK (Margaret Anderson-Kelliher), and then the two mayors, Rybak and Coleman, who will be the biggies. I heard a really get analogy though to the Entenza campaign, he’s been the 18 wheeler rolling down the campaign trail and MAK getting in will be like a bowling ball dropped off an overpass. Entenza certainly has been trucking along this whole time and has really impressed me, but with MAK in the race, he’s going to have share the stage a bit now.
Damn it’s going to be a good race!!! All 4 are really great candidates and all have their own pluses and minuses. (Yes, i am totally discounting everyone else, including Dayton. Several have the potential to make it a race, but its quite unlikely.)
I think you have to remember a couple things about 2010 PA-Sen voter preferences.
First, the poll question wording itself greatly affects the answer. There’s the issue of whether leaners are pushed explicitly, and secondarily whether they’re pushed implicitly by question wording. If a question is worded in a way that a respondent with any doubt at all is inclined to say “undecided,” then a lot of strong leaners won’t show up having preferences.
Second, there likely are an unusually large number of TRUE undecideds in what right now, for average voters who don’t care about politics (and that’s all but a few of the total) is a confusing race very far away. They’re not all that happy with Specter, but they have no idea what to make of Toomey or Sestak. Toomey hasn’t been on a general election ballot in 7 years, and even then only for one of the state’s 19 U.S. House seats, and he served only 2 or 3 terms there. Sestak is a 2-term Congressman who never previously served in elected or appointed office. When you have an incumbent squeezed from 2 sides in a purple state LOOOOOONG before either the primary or the general, that’s a recipe for high undecideds. Indeed, I buy into this poll more than polls that show PA-Sen with FEW undecideds.
New Kos Poll:
Tarkanian 45%
Reid 40%
Lowden 44%
Reid 41%
http://www.dailykos.com/statep…
Why is Rendell so unpopular now?
And can’t Republicans in circuit judgeships do harm? On the face of it, it strikes me as quite unwise to “hide” Republicans on the bench.
Most of the retiring judges are probably republican… at least that is what my thoughts are. So if a repub is replacing a repub but we get a dem out of the deal, that’d be fine with me.
OK nobody in their right mind thinks this race will be competitive but Jim Obestar (D) has an opponent.
http://www.startribune.com/pol…
It doesn’t really seem like there’s been much going on in this race. Are the candidates waiting for John McHugh to be confirmed as Army secretary to really start campaigning?
Looking over this race, I think Dede Scozzafava has a lot of negatives that might help us win this race. Other than the tax problems, her stance on social issues is so out of step with the GOP that I can’t see the conservatives in the district turning out to large numbers to vote for her. The presence of a Conservative Party candidate on the ballot only makes it harder for her to win.
I hate that the Democratic candidate is far more conservative on abortion and gay marriage than the Republican, but I still would really love for us to win the seat.
If we were able to hold Gillibrand’s seat in a district with much better registration numbers for Republicans, I don’t see why we shouldn’t be able to be competitive in this seat.
Picking up swing districts like this that have a GOP past but are shifting blue and voted for Obama in 2008 is a much better strategy than trying to hold on to people like Bobby Bright, Parker Griffith and Frank Kratovil.
State Senator Jeff Chapman, whose five-county district (the 3rd) includes a large portion of southeast Georgia and the Georgia coast, including Brunswick, St. Simons Island, St. Marys, and Folkston, has announced he’s running for governor.
The profiles of him make him sound much like your prototypical right-winger (anti-choice, gun nut, pro-vouchers, anti-tax, etc.), with the exception of his opposition to developing St. Simon’s Island. Whether his conservation is more NIMBYness or indicates a larger preference toward conservation remains to be seen. I would guess he and Austin Scott would probably be the most palpable Republicans currently in the race.
http://chronicle.augusta.com/s…
http://savannahnow.com/node/77…
http://www.jeffchapman.us/issu…
The downballot effects are probably minimal. SD-03 is 22% black, according to the demographics on DRA. We have no bench at the state house level. If State Rep. Jerry Keen wants a promotion (which I doubt considering he’s in the house leadership and has already turned down statewide runs), we may can poach his district. All of the other house districts within SD-03 look either safe even in the event of an open seat and/or have an incumbent living outside SD-03 who would therefore be ineligible to run in SD-03.
Between Toomey and Sestak makes me think that maybe down in Florida, Kendrick Meek and Marco Rubio should hold a debate without Crist and have a little ‘beer summit’ of their own. I wonder how that would turn out?