SSP Daily Digest: 3/16 (Afternoon Edition)

CA-Sen, CA-Gov: Lots of pollsters that I’ve never heard of seem to be coming out of the woodwork to poll California lately, and here’s yet another one of them: some firm called ccAdvertising. They polled the Republican primaries, finding, on the Senate side, that Tom Campbell leads at 24, with Carly Fiorina at 12 and Chuck DeVore at 8. On the gubernatorial side, Meg Whitman leads Steve Poizner 40-15.

CO-Sen: Tonight is the first step in the Colorado caucus process, with precinct-level gatherings. The results are non-binding, really more of a straw poll than anything, but are monitored as a sign of candidates’ strength. (Of course, in 2004, neither Ken Salazar nor Pete Coors won the caucuses yet went on to win their primaries.) The bigger hurdle is in May, when candidates must clear 30% at the state assembly to make the primary ballot (although those that don’t can still get on by collecting signatures). With the Governor’s race pretty much locked down, there’s still action aplenty on both the Dem and GOP sides in the Senate. Michael Bennet comes into tonight’s caucuses with a boost: he just got the endorsement from the state’s AFSCME, which may help fight the perception that rival Andrew Romanoff is labor’s one horse in the race.

CT-Sen: Paulist economist Peter Schiff is finally dipping into the spoils from his moneybombs, running ads on Connecticut radio introducing himself to Republican primary voters and touting his having predicted the financial crisis of 2008.

ID-Sen: Democrats are already way ahead of where they were in their last race against Mike Crapo in 2004: they’re actually fielding a candidate. Two, in fact, have filed, although they’re little known: Tom Sullivan and William Bryk.

IL-Sen: Rep. Mark Kirk is up with his first TV spot for the general election campaign, calling himself an “independent-minded Republican.” Having beaten back various teabagger challengers in the primary, he’s now free to label himself as such.

MD-Sen: File this under news of the weird: Bob Ehrlich is confirming he’s interested in running for office this year, but one idea he’s floating is running for Senate against Barbara Mikulski instead of for Governor against Martin O’Malley. That’s a very strange choice, as Mikulski is more popular than O’Malley and generally considered unassailable, but maybe Ehrlich thinks he can goad the 73-year-old Mikulski into retirement.

NC-Sen: Two polls of the Democratic primary in the Senate race show fairly different pictures, with the main difference being how well Cal Cunningham is keeping pace with Elaine Marshall. PPP’s most recent poll of the primary shows Cunningham gaining four points from last month, trailing Marshall 20-16, with 11 for Kenneth Lewis (up from 5). On the GOP side, Richard Burr is at 58%, with his minor rivals all in the low single digits. Marshall, on the other hand, released her own internal yesterday, from Lake Research. The poll’s a little stale (in the field mid-February), so if the PPP poll reflects late movement to Cunningham, Marshall’s poll wouldn’t capture it. At any rate, her internal has her up 31-5 over Cunningham, with Lewis at 4.

NJ-Sen: A weird-ass ruling from a New Jersey appellate court says the Tea Party may proceed with collecting recall petitions to recall Bob Menendez. The court, however, stayed its own decision in order to allow Menendez to appeal, presumably to a federal court which will disabuse the state judges of the notion that one can recall federal officials. (Adam B. points to the crux of the case here and here).

AL-Gov, AR-Gov: Financial filings for gubernatorial candidates in Alabama and Arkansas are both available. In Alabama, Tim James ($2.6 mil) leads the GOPers, while Artur Davis ($2.1 mil) has the most cash among the Dems. In Arkansas, Mike Beebe is sitting on $1.2 million (having raised $313K in February); his opponent, Jim Keet, hasn’t been in long enough to report.

ME-Gov: It looks like there won’t be a Green Party candidate on the ballot this year; Lynne Williams suspended her campaign after failing to gather the 2,000 required signatures. That’s good news for Dems, as this could turn out to be a close race (although with this little information and the fields this cluttered, who the hell knows?) and Greens often poll well in Maine, getting 9% of the vote in the convoluted 2006 gubernatorial election.

PA-Gov (pdf): There was a gubernatorial portion to that poll from Republican pollster Susquehanna released yesterday, too. As with every poll of this race, undecideds are still very heavy, but Republican AG Tom Corbett leads Democratic state Auditor Jack Wagner 37-26, and leads Allegheny Co. Exec Dan Onorato 39-24. Wagner has been dominating in terms of getting the endorsements of county-level party apparatuses, and he picked up one more yesterday, getting the nod from Cambria County (i.e. Johnstown) Democrats.

WY-Gov: To almost no one’s surprise, Republican state House speaker Colin Simpson pulled the trigger, officially entering the gubernatorial race. (If his name sounds familiar, he’s the son of popular ex-Sen. Alan Simpson.) He faces three other high-profile GOPers, while Democrats, sorting out what to do after Dave Freudenthal’s late decision not to seek a third term, are still lining up a candidate.

AK-AL: Rep. Don Young is refusing to get with the program, as far as the GOP’s new self-imposed ban on earmarks goes. Considering that Young seems most valued by his constituents for his ability to bring home the bacon (which may have saved his bacon twice, in both the primary and general in 2008), that may actually be the politically savvy thing for him to do.

HI-01: The first debate was held in the special election in the 1st, and it may be most interesting in that ex-Rep. Ed Case was trying to stake out positions that sound pretty, well, Democratic. Case spoke out in favor of both health care reform and the stimulus package. Moderate Republican Charles Djou tried to differentiate himself by railing against both.

IA-03: I don’t know if this is just one ex-wrestling coach sticking up for another, or if there’s an establishment movement afoot to coronate Jim Gibbons in the 3rd, but ex-Speaker Dennis Hastert is showing up to host a Des Moines fundraiser for Gibbons tomorrow. They’ll be joined by ex-Rep. Greg Ganske.

PA-07: I love the smell of cat fud in the morning. While former local Fox affiliate news anchor Dawn Stensland didn’t file to run in the Republican primary as has been rumored, now she’s not ruling out an independent, teabagger-powered run instead. While she hasn’t begun gathering signatures, she is looking to move into the 7th. Even if she only garners a few percent, that could still tip the balance in what promises to be a very close race between Democrat Bryan Lentz and GOPer Pat Meehan.

House: The Hill has an interesting survey of eight different primaries where the one participant’s vote on TARP could weigh heavily on the results (as it seemed to do in the Texas gubernatorial primary). Most are on the GOP side, but one Dem race to watch is PA-11, where Paul Kanjorski, the chair of the House subcommittee on Capital Markets, was one of TARP’s architects.

NRCC: The NRCC is threatening to go on the air against Dems who change from “no” to “yes” votes on HCR, targeting them with the dread “flip-flop” label that served them so well in 2004. They have 42 Dems in mind to target, although there’s still the little wee matter of the NRCC finding the money to pay for the ads.

NY-St. Sen.: Tonight’s the special election in SD-13 in Queens, where Hiram Monserrate is trying to win back the seat he just got kicked out of after his assault conviction. Monserrate, now an indie, is running against Democratic Assemblyman Jose Peralta. Peralta had a dominant lead in the one poll of the race made public.

Ads: With the Demon Sheep and Boxer Blimp ads having established Carly Fiorina’s campaign as the new gold standard in bizarre advertising, Huffington Post has a nice wrapup of some of the other craziest political ads of the last few years, ranging from the well-known (Mike Gravel skipping rocks, Big John Cornyn) to the “huh?” (Nancy Worley on strangling cats).

TV: Obsessive-compulsive political junkies and opposition researchers alike are dancing a jig right now, as C-Span has announced that it’s releasing its entire archives onto the Web. All 160,000 hours worth. (If you don’t have a calculator handy, that’s 18 years.)

Redistricting: Eager not to get behind the redistricting 8-ball in 2012 like they were ten years ago, the DLCC has launched a $20 million push aimed at keeping control of state legislatures in key states. They point to “swing” chambers in 17 states that have the capacity to affect almost half of all House seats. Dem-held chambers they’re focusing on are the Alabama State Senate, Colorado State Senate, Indiana House, Nevada State Senate, New Hampshire State Senate, New York State Senate, Ohio House, Pennsylvania House, Wisconsin Assembly and the Wisconsin State Senate, while GOP-held chambers are the Michigan State Senate, Missouri House, Oklahoma State Senate, Tennessee House, and the Texas House.

48 thoughts on “SSP Daily Digest: 3/16 (Afternoon Edition)”

  1. What a waste of money. The response is easy. If anything it could backfire since it helps those that do change make themselves look less scary liberal. Obviously voting no after voting yes is another matter entirely.

  2. KS Gov. Mark Parkinson just appointed one of the two Democrats running for the Secretary of State seat–state securities commissioner Chris Biggs.

    http://primebuzz.kcstar.com/?q

    Biggs is known as a good guy and competent public servant, but thus far has been a terrible fundraiser and mediocre campaigner….despite having one of the best mustaches in politics.

    This means Democrats now control every single statewide post in Kansas (SoS, AG, LG, Gov., Treas.), all via appointments, except for insurance commissioner. Interestingly, before Sebelius was elected Governor, Dems controlled only one of the six–insurance commissioner (in the form of Sebelius herself).

    Which means we have a slate of competent, credible candidates in all the major statewide races. And some Democrats complain that Sebelius didn’t have local coattails…

  3. Photobucket

    The race is tightening and folks are starting to warm to Cunningham’s smart, compelling policy proposals and his “Voices of North Carolina” series.

    I think the electorate is starting to feel that Elaine, though nice, passionate and running a good race, is simply not electable in November. Voters that are still on the Obama wave are floating towards Ken Lewis, but most of the folks you see discussing this race in message boards and on blogs across the spectrum get the sense, whether they like it or not (I, for one, do like it) that Cunningham is the real deal and the best chance to beat Burr.

    Does that mean Cal will prevail in May? Hardly. But, it means the folks who are paying close attention are starting to believe, if this graph is anywhere close to accurate, that Cunningham may be the Democrats’ leading contender in the only likely R-Incumbent takedown of the cycle.

    Now, it’s time for the TV ads to start rolling!

  4. Ouch. Sue Lowden is cold makin’ stuff up…and a 5-PAGE-LONG article in the Reno Gazette-Journal explores how and why exactly she’s just making stuff up, and points out at least once on every page that what she’s saying is just factually incorrect.

    http://www.rgj.com/article/201

    And they don’t bury the lede:

    To hear former state Sen. Sue Lowden tell it, she was the lone vote that stood in the way of the state’s powerful labor unions’ attempt to overturn Nevada’s voter-approved right-to-work status in a tense legislative battle in 1995.

    The only problem? There never was such a bill, and there never was such a vote, which Lowden acknowledged later when pressed for specifics.

    This is why I think Harry Reid can pull it out in the end. His opponent is going to be totally incompetent, a nutjob, or both. And he’ll have the money to remind everyone in Nevada of that fact…. because you don’t have to like Harry Reid, you just have to hate him less than the other person in the race.  

  5. While the smell of cat fud in the morning is indeed exhilarating, it should be noted that this woman is running against Meehan not because of her love of tea party principles, but because he convicted her husband. That probably limits her upside in the general, even in a close race.  

  6. Case knows he has a certain constituency behind him already, he’s trying to cut into Hanabusa’s advantage among Democrats.  He’s looking ahead to the Democratic primary, in which Djou will obviously not be participating and Case actually stands a chance of consolidating all the right-leaning and centrist voters in HI-01 into voting for him.  Of course, that’s not enough to actually win in Hawaii, thus Case’s recent strategy of “Hey I’m a Democrat too!”  Hanabusa should easily win the special election no matter what anyone does but when it comes to the Democratic primary, Case is betting that a move to the left will not alienate Djou voters who will have no other option than voting for him in the Dem primary.

    Hawaii has open primaries so it is expected that Republicans and independents will participate in the Democratic primary to select the nominee for the 2 year term (the special election with all three candidates only covers until January).

  7. time for lots of Dornan special order speeches and Traficant speeches to show up.

    1996, what a time.

  8. They have not only all the floor procedings of the last 20 years, but also thousands of interviews, press conferences, debates, speeches, political events, campaign commercials, and documentaries. If you’ve ever wanted to hear what a member of Congress who was in office before YouTube sounds like, or look back at what members looked like earlier in their careers, then you will really enjoy this.

    Here is an interesting interview with first-term Rep. Chet Edwards in 1991 on the subject of gun control. He had recently changed his mind on the topic of banning automatic weapons and gives a pretty good explanation of his views. It shows how pragmatic he is and why he has been reelected in pretty conservative districts so many times: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/pro

    They also have the 1998 U.S. Senate debate in South Carolina between Fritz Hollings and Bob Inglis, it’s pretty entertaining because of how quick-witted and funny Hollings is. A funny moment is when they show a pro-Inglis ad and Hollings’ response at 45:20: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/pro

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