SSP Daily Digest: 10/29 (Afternoon Edition)

FL-Sen: File this under half a year too late and a few million dollars too short. Charlie Crist, as quietly as possible through an advisor making a leak to the Wall Street Journal, says he’d caucus with the Democrats if elected. If he’d said that many months ago, he would have probably had a clearer shot consolidating the Democratic vote and turning it into a two-man race. This comes shortly after a day of conflicting reports on whether or not Bill Clinton tried to get Kendrick Meek to drop out of the race, as recently as last week. Clinton and Meek have offered partial rebuttals, but at any rate, it’s kind of a non-story at this point with only a few days left.

LA-Sen: Too bad there isn’t time left in the cycle to turn this into an ad: David Vitter’s verbal gymnastics at the last debate as to direct questions as to whether or not he actually broke the law when he was engaging in “very serious sin,” apparently for pay. The short answer is, of course, yes (assuming that his involvement with a prostitution ring occurred in Washington DC and not Reno).

NV-Sen: Those of you following Jon Ralston’s tweets of the early voting in Nevada with bated breath probably already know this, but thanks to the movement of the mobile voting booths into some Dem-friendly areas, Democrats have actually pulled into the lead (at least by party registration) among early voters, up by 20,000 in Clark County.

CO-Gov: My first question was why Tom Tancredo would even bother running for office if he felt this way, but then I remembered that he’s running for an executive position this time, not a legislative one. Apparently he’s a believer in a strong executive. Very, very, very strong.

There is a sort of an elitist idea that seeps into the head of a lot of people who get elected. And they begin to think of themselves as, really, there for only one purpose and that is to make laws. And why would you make laws?

IL-Gov: Oooops, ad buy fail. A round of Bill Brady ads were pulled from the air on Thursday because the appropriate television stations didn’t get paid first. It appears to have been a “glitch” (their words) rather than a cash flow problem, though, nothing that a Fed-Exed check won’t fix: the ads will resume running tonight.

PA-Gov: Ah, nice to see that a Republican briefly acknowledge that the fewer people vote, the better Republicans do. Tom Corbett, at a Philadelphia appearance, said that he wanted to keep Democratic participation down, saying “we want to make sure that they don’t get 50 percent.”

OH-13: Sensing a pattern here? A second woman is coming forward to accuse Tom Ganley of sexual harassment. She filed a police report stating that in 2005, while in the middle of a car transaction, Ganley groped her and later propositioned her. This race, despite Ganley’s money, is seeming increasingly like one of the House Dems’ lesser worries.

RGA: I’m not sure what you can do with $6.5 million in half a week, but the RGA is determined to find out. They put that much money into four governor’s races in some of the nation’s largest states: Florida, Illinois, Ohio, and (interestingly, since they haven’t sweated this one before) Pennsylvania. (While the other three are for TV ads, in Florida it’s for GOTV… seemingly something that Rick Scott forgot to purchase.)

Election night: This may be the most shocking news of all today, for the obsessive number crunchers among us. This will be the first election where the powers that be (mostly the AP) will be doing away with precinct reporting. Instead of giving specific numbers of precincts in, they’ll be expressing it as “percentage of expected vote.” The change in longstanding tradition has mostly to do with the increasing prevalence of mail-in votes and early votes, best seen with some locales dumping all their early votes all at once and calling it one precinct, messing with people like us who build complicated models ahead of time.

SSP TV:

IL-Sen: Mark Kirk’s last ad calls Alexi Giannoulias “too immature” for the Senate (um, has he actually seen the Senate in action?)

NV-Sen: Obama! Fear! Tyranny! Aaaghh! And apparently the Carmina Burana playing the background! (Sharron Angle’s closing statement, in other words)

WI-Sen: Russ Feingold puts on a plaid shirt and faces the camera, touting his accomplishments and newspaper endorsements

TX-Gov: Bill White also rolls out his newspaper endorsements, as well as lobbing “career politician” at Rick Perry one last time

MN-06: Taryl Clark’s last ad is a look at real people with real problems in the 6th, and the myriad ways Michele Bachmann blew them off

Rasmussen:

CA-Gov: Jerry Brown (D) 49%, Meg Whitman (R) 45%

CO-Gov: John Hickenlooper (D) 47%, Dan Maes (R) 5%, Tom Tancredo (C) 42%

KY-Sen: Jack Conway (D) 41%, Rand Paul (R) 53%

MA-Gov: Deval Patrick (D-inc) 46%, Charlie Baker (R) 44%, Tim Cahill (I) 6%

OR-Sen: Ron Wyden (D-inc) 53%, Jim Huffman (R) 42%

PA-Sen: Joe Sestak (D) 46%, Pat Toomey (R) 50%

YouGov: The English pollster is out with a slew of polls; the numbers seem very plausible, but they’re conducted over the Internet (probably using at least some sort of rigor, but that alone is enough for relegation to the end of the digest)

CA: Jerry Brown (D) 50%, Meg Whitman (R) 41%; Barbara Boxer (D-inc) 49%, Carly Fiorina (R) 45%

FL: Alex Sink (D) 44%, Rick Scott (R) 41%; Kendrick Meek (D) 18%, Marco Rubio (R) 42%, Charlie Crist (I) 31%

NY: Andrew Cuomo (D) 57%, Carl Paladino (R) 27%; Kirsten Gillibrand (D-inc) 57%, Joe DioGuardi (R) 33%; Charles Schumer (D-inc) 59%, Jay Townsend (R) 35%

OH: Ted Strickland (D-inc) 45%, John Kasich (R) 48%; Lee Fisher (D) 40%, Rob Portman (R) 53%

PA: Dan Onorato (D) 41%, Tom Corbett (R) 50%; Joe Sestak (D) 44%, Pat Toomey (R) 50%

167 thoughts on “SSP Daily Digest: 10/29 (Afternoon Edition)”

  1. http://thinkprogress.org/2010/

    Along with their paychecks there was a letter saying that if they liked their jobs they should vote Republican, because Democrat policies will hurt their business.

    Of course this is illegal – but when it comes to the law, Republicans think it doesn’t apply to them.  

  2. in YouGov’s polling is the strong support for marriage equality in the California poll. Perhaps that’s a reflection of selection bias?

    Otherwise, the numbers in the crosstabs look right. Worryingly, the CA congressional ballot numbers are a bit tight. On the other hand, the current map should alleviate most concerns about that (except for in the 11th district).

    YouGov has a pretty good track record. I think, given the cell phone effect, that this is the way to go in the future. However, I wonder how well it scales down to Congressional districts?  

  3. to look reasonable and balanced, even if skewed one way.  His stuff isn’t fluctuating as bad as some other pundits and he has his narrative and is sticking to it in most cases but not showing himself to be clinically insane or erratic like nearly everyone else.

    Kind of sad really when you think about it.

  4. Have been meaning to post, but the NRCC made its first expenditures against Minnick in ID-01 on Thursday.  A pretty modest $50K.  Also made its first expenditures against Tim Bishop in NY-01, but it was very little.

    More importantly, DCCC just put another $1MM into IL-SEN, on top of the $1MM+ they’ve already put in this week.

  5. Biggest surprise in our final round of polling so far: Ted Strickland. He really might pull this out.

    Everything else I’ve seen gives Kasich a small lead, so it’s nice to see some surprise good news for a change.

  6. I dont even get what her clips of Obama are about, so he mentions Nevada?  I get the message, but who is she paying for this?

    The MN-6 Tarryl Clark ad is fantastic.  I really do think it could be one of the shockers as MN DFLers only have two races to focus on, the gubernatorial which has been a total snooze the past month and then MN-6 where you’ve got one of the star DFLers of the state versus the most odious Congresscritter today.  And one of Clark’s main target GOTV areas are two suburbs that are about 1/6th of the population, who HATE Bachmann, and are within 15-20 minutes from most points in Minneapolis/St. Paul down the freeway.  I would assume the MN DFL Coordinated Campaign is hitting these two suburbs (Blaine and Woodbury) extremely hard as they’d hate Emmer as if they hate Bachmann, they’d hate Emmer even more.  (Only more because his statewide effect will be much more dictating than nationwide effects.)  There is one competitive race for county Sheriff for St. Paul but I’d assume all Minneapolis activists are driving up 35W for Clark and Dayton.

  7. Terrorists – they hate us for our freedom…to hear talking heads on TV giving us info and commentary about elections between 5-8 on weeknights.  I’m very glad no one was hurt and it’s petty on the face of it, but this is just one more reason to hate them.  CNN has ditched their political shows to talk only about this.  The next time one gets blown to smithereens by a drone, I will say, that was for taking over The Situation Room 5 days before the election, b*tches!

  8. the odious group that ran ads saying you can go to jail for not having health insurance spending big.

    http://query.nictusa.com/cgi-b

    in terms of media time:

    MA-10: $790K

    PA-07: $644K

    IL-10: $600K

    some crushing buys that effectively cancel out DCCC spending in the districts.

    also:

    AR-01: $75K

    interesting this was their fourth choice to spend money in.  race remains closer than CW, I guess.

Comments are closed.