Weekly Open Thread: What Races Are You Interested In?

Apart from the biggies (NJ-Gov, VA-Gov, NY-23, NYC-Mayor, and the Maine gay marriage ballot measure), what other races are coming up on November 3rd?

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157 thoughts on “Weekly Open Thread: What Races Are You Interested In?”

  1. but pretty much the only ones watching John Garamendi officially become the next Congressman from California are the Cal political dorks like myself, so I can enter the data into the California Race Tracker. And of course there is the discussion about who Arnold will pick to replace Garamendi as LG. My money is on Bruce McPherson, since he does not hold elected office right now and he did run unsuccessfully for LG in 2002.

  2. And, if I’m not mistaken, the partisan balance of the court is at stake. That matters for all sorts of things, not least of which redistricting.  

  3. to remind people like Kos that a blue dog is better than a Republican.  

    Other than that, I’m thinking about IL-10.  I saw that Ramos (D) raised 545K.  Looks solid.  I wonder what the Repub and Seals numbers will be from there.  

  6. Monserrate and Polanski.

    The women have said that it was all in a good cause – or something similar.

    Let’s see what happens.

    The Holywood left is supporting Polanski. No word about their position on Monserrate yet.

  7. If passed this will uphold the State Legislature’s “gay marriage in everything but name” domestic partnership bill. Polling shows it passing narrowly but Washington voters can be weird sometimes, and odd-year electorates are typically older and more conservative, so we need to be on our toes.

  8. Don’t know if it’s been done before, but if they existed, I would would buy one and wear it. Maybe we can have some kind of contest to design/think of a shirt and then produce it. James, David, and Crisitunity, do you guys think we could go for that?

  9. Marilyn Brown’s departure from a race she knows is important, she knows she can win, and she knows will be difficult to win without her seems to me to mean only thing.  Particularly given the timing, right after the end of the fundraising quarter — Brunner’s decided to bail on the Senate race and is running for reelection.

    At least I hope that’s what’s going on, because if not, we’re going to lose that Sec. of State position.

  10. I went jogging, I passed at least 100 houses. I saw 4 “Corzine for Governor” yard signs and 0 “Christie for Governor” yard signs. I live in a town where Obama beat McCain 66-34, so it’s about 8 points better than statewide average. Read whatever you want into that.

  11. a couple times in the digest, I’ll still say King County Executive. Polls are still showing this as a tight race (it’s ostensibly nonpartisan, but it’s Democratic county councilor Dow Constantine — a really good guy, still pretty young, definitely a good bet for Governor in 2020 if he wins here — vs. Republican former local anchorwoman Susan Hutchison. The local GOP certainly knew what it was doing when it passed that initiative turning KCE into a nonpartisan position, as Hutchison at this point has to be winning over some moderate suburban Democrats to still be in the race, and she’s staying mum on her social conservatism.

    (Also there’s Seattle mayor. Two no-experience enviros facing off; both ideologically good but neither one seems very promising from a competence standpoint.)

  12. It’s a “nonpartisan” election, but everyone knows who the Democrats and the Republican are (it’s a three-way race between incumbent mayor Martin Chavez; Democrat Richard Romero, whose claim to fame is that he ran against Heather Wilson in 2002 and 2004; and Republican Richard Berry).

    Chavez is probably favored to win, but if no candidate breaks 40%, then the race goes to a runoff with the two biggest vote-getters.

  13. Incumbent Luke Ravenstahl seems likely to win his first full term (he previously won a special election in 2007 after assuming the mayoralty in 2006). His two reform-minded primary opponents were both somewhat credible, but they split the opposition and Ravenstahl took a majority, anyway. Ravenstahl also won the Republican nomination as a write-in candidate as no Republican filed to run.

    Two independents are challenging him in the general: F. “Dok” Harris, son of Pittsburgh Steelers legend (and 2008 Democratic presidential elector) Franco Harris is running as an independent, and Kevin Acklin, a “Harvard-educated attorney” (per a local news station) who I had not heard of until just now, when I did a quick search to see if he had other opponents.

    I don’t know of any polling that has been done, but Pittsburgh hasn’t elected an Republican mayor since 1929 and has only elected independent mayors when they were prominent local Democrats. I’m skeptical that Harris (despite his father’s name, which is gold in these parts) is a “prominent local Democrat,” but I suppose there is always hope. It really is an embarrassment for Pittsburgh to have such a nitwit at the helm as it tries to enact much-needed reforms.

    I previously gave my thoughts on Ravenstahl here. For more insight, here is the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s 2007 endorsement of Ravenstahl’s Republican challenger. Ravenstahl got around 63% of the vote last time; I’m at least hoping that he doesn’t match that total this year. I have yet to find a city resident who likes the guy; his saving grace seems to be local union support and straight-ticket voting.

  14. I know that upon the event of a vacancy in the House, the governor of the state that vacancy resides in calls the special election. But, I also know that upon such a vacancy that there’s a number of days that the governor has to call that election. What is that number? Is it something like within 30 days the governor has to call that election?

  17. I’m not so sure the economy will have turned around by election time next year. At least when it comes to employment which is what most average voters care about. There seems to be a consensus among the economists I’ve seen and read that double digit unemployment could last well into 2010. That will definitely hurt the democrats as they are the governing party. Also, I don’t think just passing any health care bill is automatically a positive. Do most people, not the conservative repubs, believe the bill will help them? If so that’s great for the dems but if not it could really bite them in the rear. All the doom and gloom scenarios seem off base right now. Despite the democrats problems, this republican party has gotten so conservative & turned off a lot of swing voters. But I could also see senators like Reid, Dodd, and Lincoln go down next year. So the dems need to bring their A game from the Pres on down.  

  18. My little corner of the world, Iowa’s only inner-ring suburb Windsor Heights has city council elections scheduled for November 3. For once I will be voting for a Republican. Only two of the six, or possibly seven, City Council candidates support putting sidewalks on streets with significant pedestrian traffic (near an elementary school and to the “town center” shopping mall). So, I’m only voting for those two. The top three vote-getters win seats on the council, and in recent years the margin between third place and fourth place was two votes one year and seven votes another year.

  19. Read this Op-Ed in the New York Times; it’s interesting:

    All the President’s Meddling

    Some illustrative quotes:

    In 1938, in the middle of his second term, Franklin D. Roosevelt found himself stuck. Two years earlier, every state in the union – except Maine and Vermont – had joined in a collective vote of confidence in Roosevelt and the New Deal. But that overwhelming mandate proved to be anything but shatterproof.

    Even though Democrats held staggering majorities in both chambers of Congress, that huge Democratic majority was deceptive. Conservative Democrats – senators like Millard Tydings of Maryland, Walter George of Georgia and Ellison Smith of South Carolina – allied themselves with Republicans to obstruct and vote down key New Deal bills.

    But in Maryland as in other states in which the president spoke out against the incumbents, the purge failed. It succeeded in only one race, against John O’Connor, a New Yorker who was the reactionary chairman of the powerful House Rules Committee.

    In the end, the purge was one of the few glaring political missteps in Roosevelt’s long career, and afterward he had to struggle to make amends and repair relations with the men he had tried to oust. As it turned out, many of the Democratic conservatives – especially those from the South – whom Roosevelt had sought to banish were staunch internationalists who would soon become his loyal allies as he battled isolationists over America’s role in World War II.

     

    1. To be honest, I’m a bit disappointed in Brunner for trying to get promoted so quickly when she knows how important her current job is and how tenuous a hold her own party has on it. Running for higher office this soon after 2006 makes her look more like a Mike Johanns than someone who actually cares about serving the public.

      Fisher strikes me as a distinctly ‘meh’ candidate, but he can still beat a corrupt Bush-era caricature like Portman with one hand tied behind his back. I understand the generational impetus behind Brunner’s run, but this just isn’t the right time. If a Republican gets OH-SoS now, it’ll just backslide into the disenfranchising train wreck that was Ken Blackwell and everything positive that Brunner has put into the office since then will cease to be at a very critical time.  

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