Tag: Robert Bennett

• CA-Sen: What’s with the California politicians who are too busy to vote? Carly Fiorina has previously conceded that she didn’t vote in all elections, but today her camp is admitting that she didn’t vote at all in the period between 1989 and 1999.

• CT-Sen: After a mediocre fundraising quarter (of course, between prostate cancer and pinch-hitting at the helm of the HELP committee, he may have had better things to do), Chris Dodd is getting some high-level help. Barack Obama will appear on Dodd’s behalf at a fundraiser in Connecticut next week.

• FL-Sen: Two very different pictures of where Charlie Crist’s approval stands, from different pollster. Insider Advantage finds his approval at a puzzlingly low 48/41,and 55/38 among Republicans. (They didn’t poll the primary or general.) On the other hand, a poll by Republican pollster Cherry Communications on behalf of the Florida Chamber of Commerce finds 62/28. Meanwhile, Charlie Crist’s losing streak among the party base continued, as Marco Rubio racked up a big win with the Palm Beach GOP, winning their straw poll 90-17. (While most of the straw polls have happened in rural, teabaggy places, this is moderate, country club terrain, where Crist should play better.) Interestingly, ex-NH Senator Bob Smith, whose existence most people, me included, had forgotten about, pulled in 11 votes.

• NV-Sen: Facing bad poll numbers but armed with gigantic piles of cash, Harry Reid has already started advertising for his re-election. Despite his decades in office, he’s running a TV spot basically intended to introduce himself to Nevada, seeing as how many of the state’s residents have moved in since the last time he was elected in 2004.

• NY-Sen-B: Kirsten Gillibrand reported another large cash haul this quarter, bringing in $1.6 mil and sitting on $4.1 mil CoH. Nevertheless, she still needs to work on introducing herself to her constituents (granted, there’s a lot of them); a Newsday/Siena poll of Long Islanders find that she has a favorable of 23/27, with 50 saying they don’t know.

• OH-Sen: Ex-Rep. Rob Portman doubled up on Lt. Gov. Lee Fisher in the money chase in Ohio, raising $1.3 million to $620K for Fisher. Portman will still need to get past wealthy auto dealer Tom Ganley in the primary, though, who’s pledging to spend up to $7 million of his own money on the race, which could drain Portman nicely before he faces off against a Democrat. No word yet from Fisher’s Dem opponent, SoS Jennifer Brunner, although the fact that she just replaced her campaign finance team can’t be an encouraging sign.

• PA-Sen: This would be a big ‘get’ for Joe Sestak if he were running in Connecticut: Ned Lamont, whose successful primary defeat of Joe Lieberman in 2006 established some precedent for Sestak, gave Sestak his endorsement.

• CT-Gov: Jodi Rell is not looking much like a candidate for re-election, if her fundraising is any indication; she raised just $14K over the last quarter. The Dems in the race (who are running with or without a Rell retirement), Stamford mayor Dan Malloy and SoS Susan Bysiewicz, have each raised over $100K.

• FL-Gov: The poll paid for by the Florida Chamber of Commerce, mentioned above, also took a look at the Florida governor’s race. They see GOP AG Bill McCollum beating Dem state CFO Alex Sink, 42-35.

• NJ-Gov: Rasmussen polls the New Jersey gubernatorial race again, and there’s a pretty important distinction between their results with and without leaners pushed. Their topline numbers are 45 for Chris Christie, 41 for Jon Corzine, and 9 for Chris Daggett, a bit more Christie-favorable than what else we’ve seen this week. However, in Rasmussen’s words, “when voters are asked their initial choice,” it’s a 38-38 tie between Christie and Corzine, with 16 for Daggett. This should superficially cheer Democrats, but it also points to some hope for Christie, in that it shows just how soft a lot of Daggett’s support is. (Rasmussen also finds that 57% of Daggett’s supporters say they could change their minds before Election Day.)

• WY-Gov: Gov. Dave Freudenthal is at least offering some sort of timeline on deciding whether to seek a third term, but we’ll need to wait a long time. He says he’ll let us know after the end of the next legislative session, in March; the end of the filing period is May 28. He also didn’t offer much insight into when he’d set about challenging the state’s term limits law in court (a challenge he’d be expected to win, but one that could be time-consuming) if he did decide to run.

• FL-10: The retirement speculation surrounding 79-year-old Rep. Bill Young isn’t going to go away with his fundraising haul this quarter: only $4,500, with $419K on hand. He’s also giving away money (to the tune of $10,000) to the NRCC, despite facing a strong challenge next year. Unfortunately, his Dem challenger, state Sen. Charlie Justice, had a second straight lackluster quarter of his own, bringing in $77K for $101K CoH.

• FL-19: A roundup from the newly-merged CQ/Roll Call looks at the quickly developing field in the dark-blue 19th, for a special election to replace the soon-to-resign Robert Wexler. The big question is whether Wexler throws his support behind state Sen. Peter Deutch; Deutch won Wexler’s old state Senate seat (which covers more than half the 19th) in 2006 partly due to Wexler’s endorsement. West Palm Beach mayor Lois Frankel is another possibility; so too are Broward County mayor Stacy Ritter and state Sen. Jeremy Ring, although their Broward County bases don’t overlap as well with the 19th. Broward County Commissioner Ben Graber (who finished 3rd in the 1996 primary that Wexler won) is already in the race.

• LA-02: Um, what? GOP Rep. Joe Cao will be appearing with Barack Obama in New Orleans at several events today. While it’s apparently customary for presidents to invite local lawmakers to appearances in their districts, it’s also customary for members of the opposition party to decline. Cao, however, probably sees hitching his wagon to Obama as at least a faint hope of staving off defeat in this strongly Democratic district. Cao’s fundraising numbers for last quarter were pretty good, with $394K raised, but his burn rate was terrible, churning through nearly all of it ($382K) with high costs for direct mail fundraising.

• NY-01: We could have a real races on our hands in the 1st, where Democratic Rep. Tim Bishop’s Republican challenger Randy Altschuler reported $659K in the third quarter. Of course, $450K of that was from his own pocket, and a grand total of one donor was actually from within the 1st, with the bulk of the rest of the money coming from Manhattan.

• Census: David Vitter, who, with Robert Bennett, is leading the Republican charge to get the Census to ask respondents about their citizenship status, has decided to modify his amendment to this year’s appropriations package after one of the academics who he was relying on said that such a measure would scare off respondents from participating in the census at all. Not that it would matter, since it’s not likely to get an up-or-down vote, and Commerce Sec. Gary Locke already made clear that it’s way too late to make changes to the 2010 forms, which have already been printed and shipped.

• Polling: PPP’s Tom Jensen notes, that generally, Republicans aren’t picking up any new voters; the main problem with the upcoming New Jersey and Virginia elections is that Democrats have disproportionately lost interest. If the 2008 voter universes still applied in NJ and VA, Democrats would be winning both races handily.

For reasons that remain unclear to me, the GOP has rushed to embrace Twitter as the tool that will lead them out of the wilderness. (Maybe it’s because it’s a medium that not only doesn’t require you to have thoughts that take up more than 140 characters, but that doesn’t even allow them.) Nevertheless, over its short lifetime, the GOP’s infatuation with Twitter seems to have produced more petard-hoistings and outright FAILs than it has victories for the GOP’s twits:

• the time errant tweets scuttled a GOP plan to flip a Dem to take control of the Virginia Senate,

• House Intelligence ranking member Pete Hoekstra twittering away his positions in Iraq,

• Wayne Mosely‘s recent hilarious overselling of his campaign,

• Joe Barton‘s hubris over what he perceived as his takedown of Energy Secretary Steven Chu followed by his twittering away with catty remarks like a bored teenager during the SOTU, and

• somebody’s decision to direct the entire #NY20 feed onto Jim Tedisco‘s website, Dem press releases and all.

Well, we have an incident that may beat all of those: Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff accidentally announced his own candidacy for the GOP Senate nomination on his Twitter account, apparently thinking that he was just texting to an acquaintance instead. (His account has been scrubbed, but the memory lives on, hewn in the living rock of screen capture.) According to the Salt Lake Tribune:

“I’m announcing I’m running at 12,” Shurtleff wrote in part of a series of garbled messages, called tweets on the digital networking system.

In another he said he would have “all of the legislative conservative causcus (sic) and other senators and representatives there endorsing me. Time to rock and roll!”

Shurtleff later amended his statement to say that he was still deciding, and would make a formal announcement regarding his plans on May 20.

So, all’s well that ends well… uh, wait, what? There’s a competitive Senate race in Utah? Don’t they already have Bob Bennett? It’s true: with Shurtleff’s, um, entry into the race, it’s a major primary challenge to Utah’s long-serving (since 1992) junior senator. No one would mistake the uncontroversial Bennett for a moderate, but there’s enough rabid conservatism in Utah that Bennett’s vote for the bailout bill last year (and his unforgivable willingess to occasionally engage his Democratic colleagues in productive conversation) are apparently justification enough for a challenge from the very right.

Utah is also enough of a one-party state that primary challenges within the GOP are the only way for ambitious, restive younger members to climb the ladder. That was what happened last year in UT-03, where young movement-conservative Jason Chaffetz picked off longtime establishment Rep. Chris Cannon.

There’s at least an outside shot of that same thing happening here, and that’s partially due to Utah’s weird nominating system. GOP candidates go through a May 2010 nominating convention, where ballots are taken repeatedly with the lowest-scoring candidate removed after each round, until two men remain, both of whom advance to the primary… but if any candidate gets more than 60% of the vote at any point, he not only wins the nomination but there isn’t even a primary election. When Chaffetz won the nominating convention in 2008 (although not clearing the 60% bar), that was a clear indicator that he was the man to beat going into the UT-03 primary.

If Shurtleff is correct about having locked down the support of the conservative wing among the state legislators, he may have a shot at winning it outright at the state convention. At any rate, the convention looks like it’ll be hotly contested, and one wonders whether Bennett can survive the primary even if he makes it through the convention; I wonder if the same thing happened in Utah last year (where Obama dramatically improved on Kerry’s numbers, albeit still losing badly) as in Pennsylvania, where a share of the moderates (who Bennett would need to win the primary) threw up their hands and became Dems, leaving behind a more purely distilled primary base.

It gets even more complicated than that, as two other Republican candidates are sniffing around the race: Tom Bridgewater, a former top McCain aide, also announced on Tuesday (by Twitter, natch), that he was going to drop his candidacy for state GOP chair and instead form an exploratory committee to run against Bennett. (Bridgewater failed in 2006 and 2008 to win the GOP primary for the right to lose to Jim Matheseon in UT-02; he’s also an investment partner of… get this… Neil Bush, the Bush brother who’s too corrupt to be a viable candidate for office.) Then there’s also David Leavitt, the former Juab County Attorney (and brother of former governor Mike Leavitt) who was talking up his candidacy for many months but hasn’t been heard from recently. (As first reported by Senate Guru, Dems have a viable, or at least well-known, candidate in the race, Sam Granato, the chair of the Utah Liquor Control Commission and owner of a deli chain.)

So, with the FL-Sen, MO-Sen, and KS-Sen 2010 primaries turning into establishment vs. movement conservative free-for-alls (and with the plug having been pulled on that same battle in PA-Sen), it looks like UT-Sen is turning into one more presto log on the hellfire as the GOP finally has its long-promised battle of Armageddon for the party’s heart and soul.

{First, a cheap plug for my blog Senate Guru.}

Well, this is interesting.  It looks like Democrats will have an at-least-somewhat-prominent candidate for Senate in 2010:

Popular deli chain owner Sam Granato will run for Sen. Bob Bennett’s seat in 2010.

Granato, who owns several Granato’s delis throughout the Salt Lake Valley, also is chairman of the Utah Liquor Control Commission. He confirmed to me Thursday that he is in the race for sure as a Democrat, and he has secured early support from several Democratic insiders and officials. He will make the formal announcement June 1. …

Meanwhile, Attorney General Mark Shurtleff told me Thursday he has made the decision personally to challenge Bennett for the Republican nomination, but he has given his wife one more week to talk him out of it.

Sure, Utah’s Utah.  Ruby red.  I get it.  But if Shurtleff v. Bennett does turn nasty and expensive, a prominent figure like Granato could take advantage.  We’ll see if lightning strikes.