Campaign and Election News – Covering Key Races Around the Country
Weekly Open Thread: What Races Are You Interested In?
SSP is taking the rest of the year off. Have a Happy New Year!
119 thoughts on “Weekly Open Thread: What Races Are You Interested In?”
Stay safe and don’t drink and drive!
To James, David, and Crisitunity:
Thank you for running such an informative site!
And to everyone who’s added good content here:
Thank you for making last year much more interesting.
May the next decade be much better than 2000-2009, which sucked. Have a happy, healthy, and successful year, everyone!
Hey all,
I was inspired in this question by a post showing how to make a McCain R+19 district out of parts of reliably blue NYC using Staten Island and southern/south-central Brooklyn as components. Duffman showed us this district in the comments section of http://www.swingstateproject.c…
Now, the question…or rather the challenge. If we could be free to draw any district we’d like (only observing contiguity and, of course, population requirements, what’s the most GOP district in the nation possible? We have some McCain 70+% districts in Texas (Conaway and Neugebauer, I think…and I think Bachus and Aderholt may have similarly lopsided districts in AL), but could we do an even more extremely polarized map? I’d ask for the Dem equivalent, but I’m actually not even sure we CAN do better than Serrano’s current chunk of the Bronx.
Jon Corzine was deemed a toxic candidate and lost to Chris Christie because he lost in Southern New Jersey, which normally goes heavily blue.
With out Carole Strayhorn and Kinky Friedman on the ballot, it makes Rick Perry’s path to victory much harder due to the fact the Rick Perry won re-election with 39% of the vote. Whatever the case, I expect next year’s race in Texas to be very close is it does end up being Rick Perry vs. Bill White. I am curious to know the ground game for where Bill White would have to win that normally goes red in Texas in order to unseat Rick Perry and make Texas finally go blue since I have literally zero knowledge on Texas politics.
Well, I think so anyway. Imagine Cuomo gets in and holds NY. Barnes wins in GA. Strickland defeats Kasich and Cherry holds MI. PA also breaks its trend of switching parties every eight years. Then if Jerry Brown, Alex Sink and Bill White all win Dems would hold the gubernatorial seats in the ten most populous states. Or is that all too far fetched?
other than a since of pride
While I do not trust the ARG polls at all I do find some hope for Hodes in them. Independents made up 44% of the vote in New Hampshire last year according to CNN exit polls so they are the most important. Back in September when ARG polled this race Ayotte led Hodes 34% to 17% among independents. In this most recent poll, Ayotte leads Hodes 37% to 33% among independents voters. This means that Ayotte has gone from leading by 17% among independent voters to leading only by 4%. If Ayotte is forced to go too far to the right in the primary in order to get the nomination she will likely loose independents and that would mean Hodes would win.
I know everyone else here wants Schumer so I won’t make the argument for anyone else, but sometimes I wonder if Schumer shouldn’t just be chairman of the DNC instead of his role as a U.S. Senator, the whole Senator thing cuts away from his camera time.
Which I think is dumb. I could understand people wanting to see whats going on in Florida or Connecticutt but Alabama is rediculous. Now we get to see PPP do a poll of the Alabama governor’s race where Artur Davis and Ron Sparks will be trailing Brad Byrne, Kay Ivey, Tim James and Ron Moore by 15 to 20 points. Then we get to read PPP go on one of their rediculous pessimistic rampages on twitter and their blogspot about how this is horrible new for democrats and how democrats are going to do horribly next year and so on and so fourth with their aggrivating jargon. The stupid part of this is that there has not been one post primary poll in Massachusetts and the election for United States senator is two weeks from this tuesday. In addition there is a competitive governor’s race next year. However, instead we have to waste a poll on blood red Alabama where there is a snowball’s chance in hell of a democrat even cracking 40% on election night.
In mid September of 2008, ARG polled Illinois for president. Here are the results
She served one term in the state house from 2007 to 2009. She was swept into office in 2006 by 200 votes, a year where the DFL won 19 state house seats, many by very narrow margins. Her district was centered around Apple Valley, a suburb that like all the other suburbs, were once solidly Republican but since 2004 have been trending our way. What makes her an interesting case was that IIRC, she is the only one of the newly minted DFL suburban legislators to lose in 2008 and her district gave, 37A, gave Obama a 6% margin while Madore was defeated by 5%.
Obviously we would prefer a candidate who hadnt lost and is still a state legislator, but her being the only one kind of gives her a bit more of a gravitas within the DFL activist crowd, most of us know of Madore and her being booted out of office so surprisingly. So while she isnt tier 1, she’s got the name recognition within the DFL core to draw a lot of outside volunteers and support to get her campaign going.
She’s probably the best we can get in MN-2, we’ve already got our tier 1 candidate for MN-6, and MN-3 is quite the work in progress. What would almost work out better for redistricting would be to win MN2 and MN6 and then divide up MN3. It works out to a pretty decent looking map.
Stay safe and don’t drink and drive!
To James, David, and Crisitunity:
Thank you for running such an informative site!
And to everyone who’s added good content here:
Thank you for making last year much more interesting.
May the next decade be much better than 2000-2009, which sucked. Have a happy, healthy, and successful year, everyone!
Hey all,
I was inspired in this question by a post showing how to make a McCain R+19 district out of parts of reliably blue NYC using Staten Island and southern/south-central Brooklyn as components. Duffman showed us this district in the comments section of http://www.swingstateproject.c…
Now, the question…or rather the challenge. If we could be free to draw any district we’d like (only observing contiguity and, of course, population requirements, what’s the most GOP district in the nation possible? We have some McCain 70+% districts in Texas (Conaway and Neugebauer, I think…and I think Bachus and Aderholt may have similarly lopsided districts in AL), but could we do an even more extremely polarized map? I’d ask for the Dem equivalent, but I’m actually not even sure we CAN do better than Serrano’s current chunk of the Bronx.
Jon Corzine was deemed a toxic candidate and lost to Chris Christie because he lost in Southern New Jersey, which normally goes heavily blue.
With out Carole Strayhorn and Kinky Friedman on the ballot, it makes Rick Perry’s path to victory much harder due to the fact the Rick Perry won re-election with 39% of the vote. Whatever the case, I expect next year’s race in Texas to be very close is it does end up being Rick Perry vs. Bill White. I am curious to know the ground game for where Bill White would have to win that normally goes red in Texas in order to unseat Rick Perry and make Texas finally go blue since I have literally zero knowledge on Texas politics.
Well, I think so anyway. Imagine Cuomo gets in and holds NY. Barnes wins in GA. Strickland defeats Kasich and Cherry holds MI. PA also breaks its trend of switching parties every eight years. Then if Jerry Brown, Alex Sink and Bill White all win Dems would hold the gubernatorial seats in the ten most populous states. Or is that all too far fetched?
other than a since of pride
While I do not trust the ARG polls at all I do find some hope for Hodes in them. Independents made up 44% of the vote in New Hampshire last year according to CNN exit polls so they are the most important. Back in September when ARG polled this race Ayotte led Hodes 34% to 17% among independents. In this most recent poll, Ayotte leads Hodes 37% to 33% among independents voters. This means that Ayotte has gone from leading by 17% among independent voters to leading only by 4%. If Ayotte is forced to go too far to the right in the primary in order to get the nomination she will likely loose independents and that would mean Hodes would win.
I know everyone else here wants Schumer so I won’t make the argument for anyone else, but sometimes I wonder if Schumer shouldn’t just be chairman of the DNC instead of his role as a U.S. Senator, the whole Senator thing cuts away from his camera time.
Which I think is dumb. I could understand people wanting to see whats going on in Florida or Connecticutt but Alabama is rediculous. Now we get to see PPP do a poll of the Alabama governor’s race where Artur Davis and Ron Sparks will be trailing Brad Byrne, Kay Ivey, Tim James and Ron Moore by 15 to 20 points. Then we get to read PPP go on one of their rediculous pessimistic rampages on twitter and their blogspot about how this is horrible new for democrats and how democrats are going to do horribly next year and so on and so fourth with their aggrivating jargon. The stupid part of this is that there has not been one post primary poll in Massachusetts and the election for United States senator is two weeks from this tuesday. In addition there is a competitive governor’s race next year. However, instead we have to waste a poll on blood red Alabama where there is a snowball’s chance in hell of a democrat even cracking 40% on election night.
In mid September of 2008, ARG polled Illinois for president. Here are the results
51% Obama
45% McCain
http://www.pollster.com/polls/…
More evidence that Paul Hodes is probably much stronger than the polls make him out to be.
http://www.rifuture.org/myblog…
I guess this is what you call political masochism.
MN-2 got a great challenger to Rep. Kline with former state Rep. Shelley Madore. (http://www.minnpost.com/politicalagenda/2009/12/10/14178/former_dfl_rep_shelley_madore_will_challenge_kline_in_2nd_district)
She served one term in the state house from 2007 to 2009. She was swept into office in 2006 by 200 votes, a year where the DFL won 19 state house seats, many by very narrow margins. Her district was centered around Apple Valley, a suburb that like all the other suburbs, were once solidly Republican but since 2004 have been trending our way. What makes her an interesting case was that IIRC, she is the only one of the newly minted DFL suburban legislators to lose in 2008 and her district gave, 37A, gave Obama a 6% margin while Madore was defeated by 5%.
Obviously we would prefer a candidate who hadnt lost and is still a state legislator, but her being the only one kind of gives her a bit more of a gravitas within the DFL activist crowd, most of us know of Madore and her being booted out of office so surprisingly. So while she isnt tier 1, she’s got the name recognition within the DFL core to draw a lot of outside volunteers and support to get her campaign going.
She’s probably the best we can get in MN-2, we’ve already got our tier 1 candidate for MN-6, and MN-3 is quite the work in progress. What would almost work out better for redistricting would be to win MN2 and MN6 and then divide up MN3. It works out to a pretty decent looking map.
SSP gets mentioned in graf 3:
http://www.politico.com/news/s…
While I think “toss-up” is self explanatory
what do the following terms mean?
Lean
Likely
Solid
RTW (race to watch)
Safe
I presume that’s the generally accepted hierarchy of terms, though I’d group “Solid” and RTW as the same category.