SSP Daily Digest: 4/2

  • AR-Sen: Blanche Lincoln says she’s raised over $1 million in Q1 and has over $4 mil on hand. Primary opponent Bill Halter, as we noted yesterday, raked in over $2 mil.
  • AZ-Sen: J.D. Hayworth says he’s raised… some amount in the vicinity of $1 million dollars. Originally he said he had narrowly missed that goal, but then later his campaign claimed they beat the seven-figure mark. Obviously a pretty meaningless distinction. (John McCain, as we noted yesterday, raised over $2 mil.)
  • NH-Sen: Some fundraising numbers for GOP senate hopefuls: $100K for Jim Bender (+$400K self-loan), and $400K for Bill Binnie.
  • NV-Sen: There aren’t many good days anymore for John Ensign. New revelations show that he tried to intervene to save the very same energy company he asked to hire his mistress’s husband. Ensign had been denying that he tried to help this company, P2SA Equity, just days ago.
  • NY-Sen-B: They’ve scraped the bottom of the barrel so hard that they’ve clawed a hole in the damn thing. The NY GOP is now supposedly reduced to seeing if Bill Weld, the failed retread ex-Gov. of Massachusetts, wants to run against Kirsten Gillibrand. Weld, you might recall, was passed over for the privilege of getting steamrolled by Eliot Spitzer in 2006. The Daily News also claims that that state chair Ed Cox has reached out to ex-Rep. Jim Walsh, now a lobbyist. A Cox spokesman denies all of this, so, go figure.
  • AK-AL: Andrew Halcro, who sounded very lukewarm about continuing his challenge to Rep. Don Young in the GOP primary a month ago, has officially bailed. Young still has a Republican challenger, though: businessman Sheldon Fisher.
  • AR-02: Mike Huckabee isn’t joining the Tim Griffin bandwagon. In fact, he just endorsed rival Republican Scott Wallace, a Little Rock restaurateur who is a decided underdog in the GOP primary. In a now-classic trope, Wallace is attacking Griffin for a fundraiser he held the other day headlined by Eric Cantor, portraying the race as yet another DC establishment vs. local dude race. Huckabee seemed to echo those themes a bit in his statement endorsing Wallace.
  • AZ-01: Republican state House Majority Whip Andy Tobin said he was considering entering the race against frosh Dem Ann Kirkpatrick, but then very quickly backtracked. That leaves Rusty “Trombone” Bowers as the GOP’s chief organ-grinder here.
  • AZ-03: Paradise Valley Mayor Vernon Parker, running for fellow Republican John Shadegg’s open seat, says he’s raised $230,000. No word yet from the other GOPers in this race (and there are a lot of them) or Dem John Hulburd.
  • FL-12: Former state Rep. Dennis Ross said he raised $160K in the first quarter in his bid to succeed outgoing fellow Republican Adam Putnam. Dem Lori Edwards hasn’t announced any numbers yet, but her fundraising fell of a cliff in the second half of last year.
  • IN-02: Complaining that GOP bigs have (gasp) taken sides in the Republican primary – and not in his favor – Some Dude Martin Nolan is dropping out of the race. He’s endorsing former pharma exec Jack Jordan over state Rep. “Whacky” Jackie Walorski.
  • NY-29: Assemblyman David Koon is pulling his name out of consideration for the Dem nod to replace ex-Rep. Eric Massa. Since it looks like there won’t be a special election, am I right in assuming that Dems will select a nominee via a primary, rather than by committee?
  • OH-16: GOPer Jim Renacci is airing his first TV ad. It’s just a cable buy (mostly FOX News), so it can’t be costing very much.
  • OK-05: A second Democrat has announced a run for GOP Rep. Mary Fallin’s open seat: attorney and Marine veteran Billy Coyle. He joins legal studies prof Tom Guild in the race on the Dem side in this R+13 district.
  • PA-07: Bryan Lentz wants the feds to investigate the petition signatures of his Republican opponent, Pat Meehan. The case was referred by the local D.A. to the state attorney general, but Meehan’s donated money AG Tom Corbett, his fellow GOPer who is running for governor. Lentz wants this conflict of interest cleared up by having the DOJ handle the case instead.
  • PA-12: Dem Mark Critz, running in the Murtha special election, is up on the air with a positive intro ad. (As is typical for these kinds of announcements – sigh – no word on the size of the buy.) His opponent, GOPer Tim Burns, also just went up.
  • PA-17: The PA AFL-CIO is withholding its endorsement from Rep. Tim Holden in the Democratic primary, due to his vote against healthcare reform. The AFL has usually back Holden with vigor, but this time they are staying neutral in his race against attorney Sheila Dow Ford. Ford hasn’t filed any FEC reports yet, while Holden has about $675K on hand, so this may not amount to much. Moreover, the AFL says they may “reconsider” their position for the general election.
  • VA-11: At long last: The national Spray Polyurethane Foam Alliance might finally get a voice in Congress. That’s because Kurt P. Riesenberg, the president and executive director of the national Spray Polyurethane Foam Alliance, is joining the GOP primary to take on Rep. Gerry Connolly. He joins businessman Keith Fimian and Fairfax County Supervisor Pat Herrity. Long live the national Spray Polyurethane Foam Alliance!
  • DGA/RGA: The Democratic Governors Association said it raised $8m in the first three months of 2010, a quarterly record, and has $22 mil on hand. Their Republican counterpart, the RGA, raised $9 mil and has $31.2 mil on hand.
  • Polling: SSP diarist Spiderdem has done some very good – and very necessary – digging on brand-new pollster “We Ask America.” It looks like they are a subsidiary of a subsidiary of the Illinois Manufacturer’s Association, an anti-labor, anti-tax organization that’s a member of the notorious National Association of Manufacturers. I have no problem with partisan pollsters, but pollsters who aren’t up-front about their affiliations deserve our scorn. (And given that Bill Foster’s camp is charging that WAA’s robopolling made it difficult or impossible to record an answer in favor of healthcare reform, they may deserve more than scorn.)
  • Redistricting: Democrats and Republicans are talking over a plan to split Texas’s expected four-seat gain right down the middle – two seats for them, two for us. On the one hand, it seems like a good bargain for Team Blue, especially if we wind up controlling none of the levers of the redistricting process. On the flipside, since most of the state’s growth has been among the Hispanic population, the Voting Rights Act may very well spot us two seats to begin with, so this may not really be much of a deal for us.
  • Site News: Some time last month, the Swing State Project welcomed its 8 millionth visitor to the land of Some Dudes, ganja breaks, and Panic! at Tedisco. (We crossed the 7 million mark in October of last year.) Help us celebrate: We want to reach 1,500 followers on Twitter and 400 fans on Facebook.

    • 45 thoughts on “SSP Daily Digest: 4/2”

    1. And unfortunately, that is probably my downfall.  But right now, there is no chance in hell that I can support Blanche Lincoln.  I’m not happy with her recent behavior in the Senate, and just as important, I don’t see there is a realistic chance she can be elected to the Senate.  As a result, I plan to support Halter in his bid to oust Lincoln.  Halter’s campaign should resonate well within Arkansas.  If Halter wins the primary, and right now I think he has a good shot, I would say this race would be somewhere between Tossup and Lean R.  If Lincoln wins the primary, it probably Likely R, and even that may be overly optimistic of Lincoln’s prospects.

    3. I can’t see how they can justify not holding a primary if there’s no special.  At this point, it’s just a regular election in November.  From the frantic search for a NY-Sen challenger, I take it that the filing deadline hasn’t passed, so again, I cannot see how they’d get away with not holding a primary.

    4. Martin Heinrich in a fundraising e-mail – “We’re still crunching the numbers but one thing is clear:  we just had one of our best fundraising quarters!” He sounds so excited, doesn’t he? I’m curious to see if it’s accurate.

      Anybody see a post-HCR bump in Dem contributions. I know I opened my wallet a little more but I don’t see anything yet showing it was widespread.

    11. Tobin might be a slight upgrade over Bowers for the GOP — he’s actually a sitting elected official (unlike Bowers, who’s been out of office for 18 years) and can probably raise some real money.  However, he’s EXTREMELY conservative, much more than the district will support, plus he lives in Phoenix, which is a no-go for this proudly rural district.  (Bowers has the same problem.)

      I’m not surprised Tobin decided to sit this one out.  If he wants to run for Congress, his best bet is to wait for 2012, when redistricting will probably scramble the AZ political map to make a lot more competitive races, plus add a fairly conservative new Phoenix district that would be tailor-made for Tobin.

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