Tag: Jim Oberweis

• IL-Sen: The Tom Dart boomlet didn’t seem to go anywhere; the attention-grabbing Cook County Sheriff announced that, contrary to rumors, he wasn’t going to run in the Democratic Senate primary and would instead stand for re-election.

• LA-Sen: David Vitter is wasting no time in trying to define Charlie Melancon with new TV spots, saying “Life sure is swell when you’re a liberal-loving, Obama-endorsing congressman like Charlie Melancon.” The good news is: this means everyone recognizes this is a highly competitive race; conventional wisdom says define your opponent if he’s strong, ignore him if he’s weak so you don’t inadvertently give him free PR.

• MA-Sen: Rep. Stephen Lynch, the most conservative member of the Massachusetts House delegation and a former Ironworker, has been trying to lock down the slot as organized labor’s candidate in the upcoming Senate special election, but he was booed at a health care rally and not even invited to a labor breakfast over the weekend, suggesting that his skepticism over the public option could be hurting him among the potential backers he most needs. Campaign Diairies has a handy compare-and-contrast chart of key votes among the Mass. delegation; interestingly, Lynch was also the only one to vote in favor of the Peru free trade agreement, another potential black mark for labor.

• NV-Sen, NV-Gov: There’s something almost Shakesperean (or Freudian?) about this story: father and son Reid are both looking at each other as dragging down each others’ poltiical fortunes. Rory sees Harry’s presence on the ballot as hampering his potential gubernatorial run, while Harry sees Rory’s run as hurting his senate re-election bid.

• TX-Sen: There’s been increasing chatter about a run for the Democratic Republican Senate nomination in the possibly-upcoming special election by Dallas mayor Tom Leppert. He’d start out at a financial and name rec disadvantage compared with Bill White and John Sharp, though, having just been in office for half a term.

• UT-Sen: Bob Bennett may be in for some tough sledding in the GOP primary in the Utah Senate race, but he can count on the support of his fellow Senator Orrin Hatch, who gave Bennett a full-throated endorsement last week. Buried in the story, though, is something more troubling: Bennett managed to finish in last place at a Utah County GOP straw poll, where AG Mark Shurtleff won with 42% and ultra-right weirdo Cherilyn Eager got 32%. Bennett is also challenging the legality of Shurtleff’s fundraising; Bennett alleges commingling of federal and state accounts at Shurtleff’s Wasatch Shotgun Blast fundraising picnic (Utah has very lax limits on state fundraising).  

• AZ-Gov: A poll for Arizona Capital Times has, buried in the fine print, some very alarming numbers for appointed GOP Gov. Jan Brewer. They don’t poll her on head-to-heads, but she has perilously low re-elects: 18% say they’ll vote for her, 46% say they’ll vote for someone else, and 36% are undecided. More evidence that the anti-governor tide is high on both sides of the aisle. Sensing her vulnerability (following a budget standoff in which the conservative Brewer found herself to the left of her legislature), primary opponents are considering the race, including state Treasurer Dean Martin and polarizing Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

• GA-Gov: There are now seven viable candidates running for the GOP nomination for Georgia Governor, as state Sen. Jack Jeff Chapman, who represents Brunswick on the coast, got in the race. The little-known Chapman has ruffled some feathers fighting overdevelopment along the coast.

• NH-Gov: John DiStaso points to a couple GOP challengers sniffing out the race against Democratic incumbent Gov. John Lynch, one of the few gubernatorial races left in the country that falls in either “Safe” category. Leading the way is behind-the-scenes conservative activist Karen Testerman, founder of Cornerstone Family Research, who apparently feels ready to step in front of the curtain. Another rumored name is state Sen. Chuck Morse. Little-known businessman Jack Kimball is the only confirmed candidate.

• VA-Gov: We’ve had a deluge of polls in Virginia in the last week, some showing some a tightening race, some not. The newest offering from SurveyUSA definitely falls into the “not” column, giving Republican AG Bob McDonnell a 54-42 lead over Democratic state Sen. Creigh Deeds (the same margin as their previous poll). Crosstabs show that Deeds has pulled into the lead in northern Virginia, but is still way behind in the rest of the state.

• VT-Gov: Here’s someone actually considering switching from the Dems to the GOP: state Auditor Tom Salmon, whose father was Democratic governor in the 1970s and who defeated incumbent GOPer Randy Brock in 2006. Republicans are trying to spin this as a referendum on local Dems being too liberal, but there may be some garden-variety ambition behind this: Salmon says he plans to run for re-election, but may also be considering a run for Governor if Lt. Gov. Brian Dubie doesn’t run, and this seems an easier way to get into the general election than through the already-crowded Dem field.

• AK-AL: Rep. Don Young, who recently drew a strong Democratic challenger in the form of state Rep. Harry Crawford, will also have to run the gauntlet of a strong primary opponent too. Businessman Andrew Halcro, who got nearly 10% of the vote in his independent campaign for governor in 2006 and since then has seen his profile increase via his anti-Sarah Palin blogging efforts, said he’ll run against Young as a GOPer. Crawford gets good notices from local observers, using words like “old-school,” “blue-collar,” “backwoods,” and “gritty” to describe him, which may be a better matchup against the crusty former tugboat captain than the more polished Ethan Berkowitz was last year.

• IL-07: Rep. Danny Davis made it official; he’s out of the House in 2010. He’ll be running for Cook County Board President instead. The 7th is D+35, so spare us the hand-wringing.

• IL-14: This could take us up to five Republicans vying to take back the 14th from Democratic Rep. Bill Foster: state Senator Randy Hultgren is now exploring the race. This could get more than a little inconvenient for crown prince Ethan Hastert, the presumed GOP frontrunner: remember that a bitter primary between dairy magnate Jim Oberweis and st. Sen. Chris Lauzen put a crimp on GOP chances in the 2008 special election here that Foster won.

• LA-02: I don’t know if there was anyone out there fretting that we weren’t going to get a top-tier Democratic candidate to go up against Rep. Joe Cao, but if there was, they can rest easy. State Sen. Cedric Richmond, who didn’t make it into the runoff in the primary against ex-Rep. Bill Jefferson last year, announced he’ll run again in 2010. State Rep. Juan LaFonta and state Sen. Cheryl Gray are also likely Dem candidates in the D+25 seat.

• LA-03: Roll Call takes another look at the many players jostling to take over for Charlie Melancon in the now R+12 3rd. Dept. of Natural Resources head Scott Angelle gets top billing, but nobody is sure whether he’d run as a Democrat or Republican. On the Dem side, state Rep. Damon Baldone, state Rep. Fred Mills, Ascension Parish sheriff Jeff Wiley, and attorney Ravi Sangisetty also get mentions, while other prominent GOPers in the mix are Lafourche Parish sheriff Craig Webre, state Rep. Nickie Monica, former state House speaker Hunt Downer, Plaquemines Parish president Billy Nungesser Jr., and former state Senate candidate Jeff Landry. Complicating the candidates’ decision to run is winning may be a pretty lame prize, seeing that the 3rd may be on the district elimination docket following the 2010 census, with parts of it possibly being subsumed into the nearby 2nd.

• MO-04: Sensing vulnerability or at least a possible retirement, a third Republican has piled on, against 33-year Rep. Ike Skelton. James Scholz, president of a computer security company, has filed to run. Skelton looks like he’s going to stay and fight, though; he has five fundraisers scheduled for the next two months, including one with Steny Hoyer.

• ND-AL: Earl Pomeroy may get a real challenge for once, from Kevin Cramer, the Republican chair of the state’s Public Service Commission (which regulates utilities). Cramer lost two races to Pomeroy in the 1990s, but this time he points to an NRCC-commissioned internal poll that has him within 4 points of Pomeroy, 46-42.

• NC-11: Local physician Daniel Eichenbaum has been in contact with the NRCC about a run against Heath Shuler. His biggest selling point: if he wins, he promises to stay for only one term. (That ought to get the NRCC interested, seeing as how they just love open seats.)

• SC-03: A bit more winnowing of the field in the dark-red 3rd, as businessman and engineer Stuart Carpenter pulled the plug on his campaign and endorsed state Rep. Rex Rice.

• WA-09: Better-than-usual GOP prospects started eyeing Adam Smith’s seat early this year, speculating that a special election might be in the offing if Smith (an early Obama endorser) got an administration job. That never happened, and now one of them, moderate state Rep. Tom Campbell (not to be confused with the moderate GOPer running for California governor), pulled out of his bid last week, sensing a complete lack of interest from the NRCC. Nevertheless, Pierce County Councilor Dick Muri remains in the race.

• Redistricting: Remember the new independent redistricting commission that was created to take responsibility for California’s legislative districts? Now there’s an initiative afoot to add jurisdiction for congressional districts to the panel as well. The initiative also includes some vague language about preserving “communities of interest,” which, depending on how it’s interpreted, could result in some smoothing-out of California’s remarkably convoluted boundaries and thus some more competitive districts.

A longtime backer of dairy magnate and frequently unsuccessful candidate Jim Oberweis makes an, erm, uncomfortable comparison:

“If elected, it is my belief that Jim would be a terrific congressman,” said Robert Bonifas, the CEO of Alarm Detection Systems in Aurora and a longtime Oberweis friend and political donor. “Whether he is capable of providing a mental enema to the electorate to flush out the old Jim and instill the new Jim, I don’t know.”

Yikes. Brace yourselves, gentle citizens of Illinois’ 14th CD.

(H/T: Progress Illinois)

first of all, congratulations to bill foster, our newest member of congress.  it will be kind of weird calling him congressman.  and congratulations to his staff and all the volunteers who helped elect foster.  what a tremendous achievement!

foster’s election is vindication of all those who believed that a serious democratic candidate with a great campaign organization could turn il-14 blue.  and now we have!  it is also vindication for the plan that bill and tom put together, and especially the networking they did to create a solid pool of campaign workers who went out and delivered the vote for foster.  this should serve as both proof of what a good campaign can do and an example for the local democratic parties and their future candidates.

it’s probably too early to really dissect how bill foster won denny hastert’s open seat but we can put some things into context.

there’s no way to overstate the level of preparation that bill foster did before running for this seat.  while there have been some who sought to minimize foster’s work with patrick murphy, foster set for himself the goal of understanding how congressional campaigns work, what a good congressional campaign looks and feels like, and how it unfolds.  it should be clear by now that bill foster returned to illinois with the firmest grasp of how to run for congress by any democrat in the il-14.  make no mistake, this level of preparation was a huge advantage for foster — he knew what it would take, he was willing to make the sacrifices necessary to win, and he stuck with it.  foster now gets to enjoy the fruits (or, more appropriately, the responsibilities) of his sacrifices.

let’s go back, though, to the framework i’ve used before.  winners of elections are the one who put together the best effort in this five areas:

1. candidate.  all the major candidates in this race have had flaws.  but the one thing that foster did, which gave him an advantage — if ever so slight — was to try to minimize those flaws.  as carl pointed out, foster “needs to improve his communication skills.”  unable to take advantage of the long tail of a presidential campaign (this criticism has been made of barack obama, as well, about his debating skills), the foster campaign choose to place him sparingly in large group functions where he didn’t perform as well, and focus on his appeal one on one (and through the use of surrogates), where he performed better.

foster’s luck has been to run against other seriously flawed candidates.  it didn’t hurt at all to be seen as a practical candidate amongst other candidates viewed as extreme, or wouldn’t raise money, or had loose ties to the area.  foster benefited from not running against a “perfect candidate.”  in this context, it didn’t matter that he was flawed, because of the flaws of those he ran against.  what did matter is that his campaign didn’t deny or ignore his flaws, but sought to minimize them.  this gave him a slight advantage here.

2. money.  bill foster lost the money race ($2,121,908 to $2,884,492).  independent expenditures appear to have been a wash.  but what foster and the democrats spent was sufficient to raise his name recognition AND his favorability ratings.  about the only thing we can say here to foster’s advantage is that at least he had $2.1M.  the alternatives would have resulted in democrats being significantly out-spent, probably at least by 10 to one, and perhaps even greater.  there is simply no question that foster alone was prepared to compete at this level.  the proof here is that foster raised $805,908 from other individuals while oberweis only raised $604,492 from other individuals.

3. political environment.  the dominant environmental aspects for this special election were the fact that it was a special election held in the last year of george bush’s administration with the retiring of the former speaker of the house.  bush looked to be unpopular while hastert remained popular in his old district.

special elections are all about turnout.  pushing turnout requires organization, which is the fifth factor.  but foster was able to unite democrats around his candidacy (89% of self-identified democrats polled said they had or would vote for him while only 76% of self-identified republicans said the same for oberweis) AND he had much broader appeal among independents (47%-25%).  foster himself made every effort to reach out to the supporters of his former democratic opponents.

but special elections always have national significance — especially for republicans.  cqpolitics says:

First: the district carries great symbolic significance because it was the bailiwick of Republican J. Dennis Hastert, the Speaker of the U.S. House for most of the dozen years that Republicans were in the majority from 1995 through 2006. Hastert’s resignation last November prompted this unusual Saturday balloting.

Second: The race is a close one. Party strategists and political analysts will be closely monitoring the returns for what the outcome might portend for November elections that are less than eight months away. Democratic scientist Bill Foster and Republican businessman Jim Oberweis appear neck-and-neck in the 14th, which takes in suburbs and rural territory west of Chicago.

Special elections always provide grist for the national party committees – in particular the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), which is the political arm of the majority Democrats in the U.S. House, and its partisan counterpart, the National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC).

dccc chair chris van hollen said “Bill Foster’s victory in the seat that was held by Speaker Hastert sends a political shock wave across America this election year,” “a rebuke of the bush administration” and john mccain (who raised money for oberweis).  bloomberg notes, “Analysts said the election is a sign that Republican losses are likely to continue this year, after the party lost control of the House and Senate in 2006. ‘I don’t think it means the end of the Republican party like some might say, but it means the worst is not over,’ said Nathan Gonzales, political editor of the Rothenberg Political Report in Washington.”

otoh, it was a clear victory for barack obama, who’s coattails proved effective in a red district.  he also gained a superdelegate for his presidential nomination.

4. local climate.  what we found in 2006 and now, in 2008, is that the electorate in il-14 was highly disposed towards electing a democrat.  the generic ballot poll in 2006 showed a one point difference between the generic democrat and republican, and that result held through this special election.  instead of the 11 point spread between the presidential candidates that national punditry focused on, local observers recognized that barack obama won this district in 2004, and the generic ballot test demonstrated that voters were more than willing to consider voting for a democrat.  but they needed to know who they were and at least something about them.

the chicago tribune noted, “That Foster is even in contention in the 14th Congressional District is further proof of the changing suburban political landscape. The heart of the district is made up of fast-growing communities in Kane and Kendall Counties, where farmland has given way to subdivisions and new residents don’t necessarily have a lot of familiarity with local politics. The territory is just the latest suburban Chicago district that’s gone from reliably Republican to a potential toss-up.”

the willingness of voters to vote for a democrat in what has been considered the reddest congressional district in the state seems to stem from three dominant factors: the economy, iraq and the issues surrounding the immigration debate.  this wasn’t a single issue election, and they couldn’t be tied together with some broad, dramatic theme.  foster dealt with them singularly with pragmatic proposals that placed him squarely in the moderate range inside il-14.  his opponent hurled dramatic accusations at him instead of offering substantial plans for the future.  while these accusations did find their way into the minds of some voters, others dismissed them as desperate campaign tactics.  in the words of another candidate, they attacked him because he was winning.

5. organization.  organization was where the foster campaign reigned supreme.  despite the fact that republicans unleashed their vaunted 72-hour project, foster’s campaign was ably prepared to compete in the special election environment.  tom bowen, foster’s campaign manager, spoke about his preparations for the special after the live blogging event held for foster.  by networking extensively, the foster campaign built up the best campaign organization that democrats have ever seen in this congressional district.  foster’s appeal brought in democratic activists from pennsylvania and dc, from chicago, the northshore, from dan seals’ campaign, melissa bean’s campaign, jan schakowsky’s campaign and scott harper’s campaign (who brought in 120 volunteers to help out on election day).  the effectiveness of foster’s campaign organization promises future success in a congressional district that — like melissa bean’s — will be competitive for years, perhaps even decades (depending on redistricting).

the influence of money in this race and the profound effectiveness of foster’s campaign organization may be depressing to some progressives inside and outside the il-14.  to those who feel this way inside the district i repeat what i’ve said all along: talk to bill foster.  i may not know the man that well, but i understand perfectly his approach, and he will listen to all points of view from a respectful, perhaps even probing, perspective.  do not expect other people to represent your point of view before him.  and if he doesn’t hear it, he probably won’t consider it.

some local progressives have been mobilized by the quixotic appeal of john laesch.  but the reality is, bill foster is your new DEMOCRATIC congressman.  it’s very unlikely that another democratic congressman (or woman) will emerge in the near future.  he’s it.  foster’s election offers democrats the unique opportunity to build and strengthen the local democratic party where you live.  it’s always easier to organize with someone from the party in power.  foster’s election should fulfill a dream we all share.  but personal feelings can sometimes interfer in what should be our self-interests…

The IL House primaries were held in conjunction with the state’s Presidential primary.  It was a very busy night with 15 contests in the regular phase plus two more to find candidates to fill the balance of Denny Hastert’s term in 2008.  Overall, it was a great night for the favorites.

Hastert’s IL-14 open seat saw the closest contest of the night.  Millionaire scientist Bill Foster scraped by winning by 323 votes in the election for the nomination for the full-term over carpenter (and 2006 candidate) John Laesch.  The final tally was Foster 31,910; Laesch 31,587; Joe Serra 5,947; and Jotham Stein 5,757.  In the “special” election Foster had more breathing room prevailing by 3,000 votes with 31,792 to Laesch’s 28,053 and 4,949 for Jotham Stein.  The hard fought Republican contest saw millionaire dairy owner Jim Oberweis finally win after losing three shots at statewide office.  Oberweis took 56% in the special to Chris Lauzen’s 44% (overall about 8,000 more votes were cast in the Republican primary for the special).  The general was not quite as close with Oberweis pulling in 56% (again), Lauzen at 41%, and Michael Dilger getting the balance.  

The battle between Bush Dog Dan Lipinski and Mark Pera in IL-3 was not as close as predicted.  Lipinski got a clear majority with 53% while beating his main opponent Pera by 2-1 (Pera had 26%).  Jim Capparelli (12%) and Jerry Bennett (9%) rounded out the field.  Even the Chicago Tribune called Lipinski a Democrat in name only in its coverage.  Grr.

Elsewhere in the state, Bobby Rush wallopped William Walls in IL-1 taking 88% of the vote.  Michael Hawkins won the Republican nod to face Lipinski in IL-3 with 67% of the vote.  Democrats in the district cast 105,000 votes to 18,000 on the Republican side.  “GI Jill” Morgenthaler won with an impressive 79% in IL-6 for the right to take on Peter Roskam in the fall.  This has been regarded as a throw away unlike the race last cycle when its an empty seat.  We’ll find out.  Incumbents Danny Davis (91% in IL-70), Melissa Bean (83% in IL-8) and Jan Schakowsky (88% in IL-9) sailed to easy renomination on the Democratic side.  Bean will face Steve Greenberg (57% in the GOP primary) in the fall.

Further results give easy renomination to Judy Biggert in IL-13 (77%).  Timothy Balderman took the Republican nomination in the 11th CD with 67% in a three way race.  In IL-18, 26 year old state senator and gaffe machine Aaron Schock cruised to an easy win with 71% of the Republican vote.  Democrats will name his opponent as Dick Versace withdrew after qualifying.  Daniel Davis won the Democratic nod in IL-19 with a solid 60-40 victory over Joe McMenamin.  He’ll take on Shimkus in the fall.

Schock is an immatre 26.  Maybe we have a chance there.  If not he could become a perennial target or the next incarnation of Patrick McHenry.