• CO-Sen: It looks like the Michael Bennet camp, and his Beltway backers, are taking the recent polling surge by Andrew Romanoff in the Dem Senate primary, very seriously. Barack Obama just did a remote appearance on behalf of Bennet, for five minutes at a Bennet town hall.
• KY-Sen: Well, he finally got around to it. It was buried in the fifth and final paragraph of a press release. Nevertheless, Dan Mongiardo finally endorsed Dem primary victor Jack Conway. Despite previous rumors that he was holding out on his endorsement to get his $77K campaign debt paid off, a Mongiardo spokesperson says he didn’t receive anything in exchange for the nod.
• PA-Sen: Bill Clinton will be in Scranton to campaign for Joe Sestak next Tuesday. Frankly, that’s a really good fit of candidate, backer, and locale. I wonder if Paul Kanjorski will be allowed to tag along, though? Seems like he could use some Clinton love, too. (No, not that kind of Clinton love.) On the GOP side, Pat Toomey got some campaign fundraising help in Philly from moderate Maine GOP Senator Susan “Comrade of the Month” Collins, who seems to have forgiven or conveniently forgotten all those Club for Growth attempts to knife her in the back.
• WA-Sen: Patty Murray seems to be taking a page from the John Hickenlooper campaign in Colorado, dropping a huge amount of money right now on advertising reservations, all the way through November, while they’re still cheap. She spent $3.4 million, nearly half her CoH, on ad buys in July. She can count on her coffers being replenished, though, as Barack Obama will be hosting a fundraiser for her later this month.
• WI-Sen: Dueling ads in Wisconsin. Russ Feingold is out with a sobering ad rattling his saber at Wall Street, while Ron Johnson levels accusations of being a “career politician” at Feingold. Double NWOTSOTB.
• CO-Gov: Is there blood here in the water, or what? Colorado Ethics Watch just filed a complaint with the state bar, which could lead to disciplinary action against Scott McInnis’s license to practice law in Colorado, over his plagiarism scandal. McInnis’s former campaign manager (until last December, so he was out long before the scandal) also just asked McInnis for a refund of all the contributions he’s given him. The DGA is also starting to pour money into this race, striking while the iron is hot; they’ve plowed $100K into a new third-party group airing a new anti-McInnis attack ad. And if you were thinking that Dan Maes might turn out to be a reasonable alternative to McInnis, guess again. He ventured not just into Michele Bachmann territory (about how we’ll all have to live in tenements and take mass transit to work) but clear into UN-black-helicopters-are-fluoridating-my-water territory. And what’s the nerve center of the one-world-government’s scurrilous plot against Coloradan sovereignty? Denver’s program for public bike shares and more showers for bike-riding commuters!!!!1!
“At first, I thought, ‘Gosh, public transportation, what’s wrong with that, and what’s wrong with people parking their cars and riding their bikes? And what’s wrong with incentives for green cars?’ But if you do your homework and research, you realize ICLEI is part of a greater strategy to rein in American cities under a United Nations treaty.”
• GA-Gov: This seems like a big Deal for Nathan: the third-place finisher in the gubernatorial primary, state Sen. Eric Johnson, is backing ex-Rep. Nathan Deal in the runoff. (Oddly, Johnson hasn’t said anything about it himself, but Rep. Jack Kingston, another Johnson backer-turned-Deal backer, made the announcement.) Johnson’s support should help Deal in the Savannah area, where Johnson seems to have a strong base.
• MD-Gov: I wonder if Sarah Palin is playing three-dimensional chess here, in some sort of strange gambit to help Bob Ehrlich in the general election… or just playing tic-tac-toe, and losing badly at it. At any rate, she endorsed Ehrlich’s barely-registering primary rival, businessman Brian Murphy, in the GOP gubernatorial primary. (Which, if you think about it, doesn’t jibe at all with her endorsement of centrist and likely victor Terry Branstad in Iowa instead of wingnut Bob Vander Plaats… but then, Maryland’s not an early presidential state.) Ehrlich is now publicly doing the happy dance over her endorsement of his rival, saying that it just confirms his moderate credentials for the general, where he has a shot at knocking off incumbent Dem Martin O’Malley.
• AZ-01: Rogue dentist Paul Gosar has a lead in the Republican primary in AZ-01 for the right to take on freshman Rep. Ann Kirkpatrick, if his own internal is to be believed. The poll from Moore Info puts him at 30, with ’08 candidate Sydney Hay at 10, Some Dude Bradley Beauchamp at 7, and, surprisingly, former state Sen. majority leader Rusty Bowers back at 6. Gosar seems to have consolidated many big-name movement conservatives behind him, ranging from Sarah Palin to Joe Arpaio. My main question, though, is: Sydney Hay is running again?!? Why weren’t we informed? (You may remember her legacy of fail from her 2008 run.)
• AZ-03: This is at least the second time a childless GOP candidate has gotten busted for playing up his “family man” credentials by romping with children in advertising (the first time was Kevin Yoder in KS-03). At least Yoder was able to claim the kids were his nieces and nephews… Ben Quayle apparently had to borrow some of his aides’ kids for his photo shoot.
• IL-17: After seemingly no one found their internal poll from last week credible (which gave the previously-unheralded, if not unknown, Bobby Schilling a lead over Democratic Rep. Phil Hare), there’s another Republican poll out that seems to at least be on the same temporal plane as reality, in this swing district where the GOP hasn’t competed hard in a while. POS (on behalf of a state party committee… Magellan did the Schilling internal) gives Hare a 33-31 lead over the political novice and pizza restauranteur. The poll also gives 7% support to the Green Party candidate, which somehow doesn’t seem likely to hold.
• WV-01: As heartburn-inducing Mike Oliverio will probably be in terms of his voting record, here’s some confirmation that we at least got an electoral upgrade here from the guy he defeated in the Dem primary, Rep. Alan Mollohan, who had ethical clouds following him and seemed to be phoning in his campaign. Oliverio is out with a new internal from Hamilton Campaigns that gives him a 52-36 lead over GOP opponent David McKinley. With Joe Manchin at the top of the ticket in a November special election, now, too, here’s one Tossup seat where our odds seem to be getting noticeably better. (As a bonus, they find Manchin leading John Raese 62-30 in the district, which is West Virginia’s reddest.)
• DCCC: CQ looks at the DCCC’s attempts to enforce dues-payment this cycle. While their “Frontline” members (the ones in the trickiest races) are exempt from paying dues, they’re winding up giving de facto passes to a number of other vulnerable incumbents, not having had any luck at stopping them from hoarding their own cash in preparation for tough races. 88 House Dems haven’t paid any dues at all this cycle, while many others are in arrears. There’s also, buried in the article, a statement that the DCCC doesn’t plan to further extend its Frontline program, even as the number of potentially vulnerable Dems seems to keep increasing.
• California: For people who just can’t get enough campaign finance reports, the Sacramento Bee has a helpful table of filings for all the candidates for the downballot statewide races. Dems have a cash on hand lead in most races, except for two (Secretary of State and Insurance Commissioner). It’s particularly pronounced in the Lt. Governor race, where Gavin Newsom leads GOP incumbent Abel Maldonado $495K to $91K. In the very tight AG’s race (also the downballot race that’s seen by far the most expenditures), Dem Kamala Harris leads GOPer Steve Cooley $186K to $121K (and Cooley also has $170K in debt).
• Redistricting: Ohio, unfortunately, won’t be having a referendum on a constitutional amendment on the ballot in November, that would limit parties’ ability to gerrymander by requiring bipartisan support for new maps. The problem? The parties in the state legislature couldn’t agree on the exact framework for the plan. At least there’s good news on the better-districts front in New York, where the state Senate just passed legislation that will make sure that incarcerated persons are counted in their home communities, when legislative lines are redrawn next year.
• Rasmussen:
• FL-Gov: Alex Sink (D) 31%, Bill McCollum (R) 27%, Bud Chiles (I) 20%
• FL-Gov: Alex Sink (D) 31%, Rick Scott (R) 35%, Bud Chiles (I) 16%
• OH-Sen: Lee Fisher (D) 40%, Rob Portman (R) 44%
Rasmussen has Sink beating McCollum, and Bud Chiles at 20%?!
That seems mighty odd that Chiles is soaking up so many votes
And Lee Fisher down only 4% to mega Fundraiser Rob Portman?!?!
have to pay off his outstanding campaign debt?
And from that article it seems the Democratic Party Chairman as well as a bunch of other people practically had to pry this “endorsement” out of Mongiardo.
This is less than stellar behavior from him. But I guess no surprise.
Okay, a few things about this one.
Is it just me, or is this guy plastered while shooting this ad? He keeps swaying from side to side.
The guy’s going to write in blood because he wants to swear in blood he won’t take campaign contributions. Okay…..
How DO you make a flag fly right?
Anyway, enjoy this one. I’m still ROFL over it.
Except for Sid Leiken, Rusty Bowers has been the worst NRCC recruit of the cycle. His entire fundraising for the cycle is less than $100,000, and he doesn’t seem to be mounting any sort of credible campaign. Many voters here in AZ-01 don’t even know he’s in the race. Instead of actually, y’know, working for the nomination, Bowers has replaced the homepage of his website with a defensive statement attacking his opponents for not having records in government (though Bowers’ own record ended 18 years ago). The quarterly reports from the previous cycle were even worse: Bowers has less than $20k on hand and was outraised last cycle not only by Gosar but by Bradley Beauchamp and Steve Mehta. Plus Bowers has no name rec in the district, since his congressional district was in Phoenix (where he still lives, just barely inside the rural district’s borders). At the recent Fourth of July parade in Flagstaff, a required campaign stop in the district’s largest city, Bowers was nowhere to be seen, even though Kirkpatrick, Gosar, Beauchamp, and Mehta all showed up (it’s a two-hour drive for Mehta and a four-hour one for Beauchamp).
Meanwhile, Gosar has raised over $400,000, though his latest fundraising quarter was not quite so impressive, and has waged a very active campaign. Instead of backing Gosar and admitting they screwed up with Bowers, the NRCC has seemingly decided to just cede the seat to Kirkpatrick — a baffling call given that the 2012 redistricting will probably make her seat safe if no Republican takes it this year. Epic fail on the part of the NRCC.
As for Sydney Hay — well, let’s listen to her reasons for running again:
Her claim about “anemic fundraising” is disingenuous on two counts, first because she’d seen Gosar’s impressive Q1 haul before deciding to run, and second because she hasn’t raised any money this time. She seems to have put her name on the ballot in the hopes that name rec alone would pull her over the line. Gosar’s poll tells us exactly what that name rec will do for her: 10% of the vote.
Lt Gov Maldonado may have $91K COH but also has $262K debt; under water just like Cooley with lots more debt than COH.
The CA top line race will be a nail-biter with eMeg’s zillions, but down ballot looks OK (though someone may need to wake up SoS Debra Bowen).
tell Zach Wamp that the concept of “Separation of Church and State” still exists. Fucking bible thumper…
The Senate voted today to and now the House may return back from recess to vote on the bill.
Yes, yes yes, do it, tons of free, excellent press, you can say you came back from your summer vacation to save teacher’s jobs. The Sherrod thing kind of screwed up the press momentum of all the recent bills to help the economy and this will get us back on track with the press.
If we’re lucky maybe some GOPer’s wont bother to show-up and that in itself can be another story about how the GOP isnt even showing up to voice their opinion on the economy and are instead lounging at home enjoying the weather.
I definitely think the Democrats have a much better 3 month-out plan than the GOP and it’s things like this that’ll save us a seat.
Bill Clinton > Susan Collins
Though I’m guessing the Collins appearance is more about appearing moderate than raising big money or getting her name linked with his. I can’t imagine she is that well know in PA.
I expect we’ll see a lot of Bill CLinton in PA this October…
Most intriguing primary since Arkansas.
This one will be interesting to watch. Bennet must be the favorite today, but it will be interesting to see the geographic breakdown of each candidates supporters throughout the state. The same will be true of the Republican primary.
I can’t wait to hear form Unknown on how this will impact the runoff.
I remember being in GA on the night of the primary, and thinking if Johnson endorsed Deal and could actually deliver, how close the runoff would get. Johnson’s best performances seemed to be in Handel’s strongest places, so if Dela can somehow take Johnson’s support in these areas and not let it leak to Handel, this race could be very close.
If there’s one thing this primary season has shown, it’s that longshot candidates can catch up with the incumbent very quickly.
The only thing that boggles my mind about the Bennet v. Romanoff race is that there’s really very little daylight between them on the issues. Halter ran to Lincoln’s left while Sestak was successfully able to portray Specter as a craven opportunist with no convictions.
What’s Romanoff’s angle for attacking Bennet? Being a Washington insider? Besides the fact that Bennet is an (appointed) incumbent, Romanoff is the true insider in this race considering his years in the state house. He got passed over for the Senate appointment by the hated Bill Ritter and saw an opening to challenge Bennet.
I worry that Bennet got caught off guard by Romanoff and is firing back too late to hold him off.
Don’t add to the Frontline. Don’t give Republicans any additional information to the other side. I heard from one Democratic op here that they think one advantage they have is that the GOP is barking up the wrong trees in terms of vulnerable seats.
may at least briefly highlight social issues in CA. On the one hand I fear that that could help the detestable Andy Pugno since I’m fairly sure the assembly district he is running for supported Prop 8. On the other hand if people have mistaken beliefs that Whitman or Fiorina are social moderates, maybe this could be a good chance to expose them (especially Whitman, I think she contributed to Yes on 8).
And now this: http://www.lasvegassun.com/blo…
And no this is not satire, she really said that.
look good in Washington in 2012. They did not poll Inslee though, and I thought he was the most likely candidate.
http://www.publicpolicypolling…
http://www.politico.com/news/s…
I now see why everyone rallied to Causey during tue runoff.