SSP Daily Digest: 10/5 (Morning Edition)

  • AK-Sen: Hello! McFly! You ever heard of the Commerce Clause? Joe Miller evidently got quite a fine education at Yale Law, since he somehow believes that the minimum wage is “not within the scope of the powers that are given to the federal government.” Oh, yeah, “merit scholarship.” Now make like a tree and beat it!

    • P.S. Miller’s personal financial disclosures – which he promised to file last week, after ignoring the law since April – are still “going to take a little while.” Anybody home, McFly?!

  • DE-Sen: By now, you’ve probably all seen Christine O’Donnell’s new ad. If not, drop everything and watch it. It might just blow your mind. But I don’t want this other crucial item to get lost in the shuffle: In a 2006 debate, O’Donnell said that “China was plotting to take over America and claimed to have classified information about the country that she couldn’t divulge.” Reminds me of one of my all-time fave Michele Bachmann quotes.
  • KY-Sen: Rand Paul is no slouch when it comes to slagging the social safety net. At a debate this weekend, he announced that he wanted to cut Social Security benefits by raising the retirement age. And at a meeting with (who else?) the state Chamber of Commerce, he also declared that Medicaid – a program which benefits some 800,000 Kentuckians – has created “intergenerational welfare.”
  • GA-02: Those federal indictments in Alabama regarding bribery-for-bingo charges are having effects across state lines. Jay Walker was “chief strategist” for Republican Scott McKeown, who has been making some serious headway against Rep. Sanford Bishop of late. Walker, unsurprisingly, has resigned his post.
  • MN-08: Republican Chip Cravaack (yep, that’s how you spell it) is touting an internal poll from Public Opinion Strategies (n=300) showing him nipping at longtime Rep. Jim Oberstar’s heels, 45-42. Oberstar’s campaign claims that the survey was a “push poll,” but Cravaack’s campaign denies it (though they won’t release the questionnaire). I’d be surprised if a firm like POS did anything outright shady, though. Anyhow, Cravaack had just $42K on hand as of July 21 and had only raised $100K overall. Oberstar has $1.1 million in the bank.
  • WA-03: This is weird – the Lower Columbia Daily News asked GOPer Jaime Herrera for a list of campaign events she’s done since the August primary, but she refused to provide one, claiming it might be used to attack her. Denny Heck’s campaign, for their part, says they think Herrera’s all but disappeared from the campaign trail. An unofficial list shows that she supposedly did about a dozen events in this timeframe, to some 30-odd by Heck.
  • NY-State Sen: Did you know that Iona College was in the polling biz? I had no idea. Anyhow, it looks like they’ve released a couple of state Senate polls in the last few weeks (but no telling exactly how many, since I can’t seem to find a central hub for them anywhere). I’ve come across two surveys, though: In SD-35 (PDF), Dem Andrea Stewart-Cousins leads Republican Liam McLaughlin 44-37. Meanwhile, in SD-40, GOPer Greg Ball leads Dem Mike Kaplowitz 45-35. (A Siena poll yesterday of the same race had Ball up just 45-44.) The sponsor of these polls is a right-wing business group called the Westchester County Association, which also promises to poll SD-37 and NY-19.

    • Fundraising:

    • ID-01, OH-15: The Hotline has numbers for Walt Minnick and Mary Jo Kilroy
    • NY-20: Scott Murphy, $900K raised
    • NM-01: Martin Heinrich, $575K raised, >$1m on hand
    • WA-02: Rick Larsen, $500K raised

    Independent Expenditures:

    • Ophthalmologists: Those rogues are backing a rare Dem, Glenn Nye (VA-02), and a guy whose name hasn’t come up in well over a year, Erik Paulsen (MN-03), to the tune of about $65K each
    • CT-Sen: The DSCC is spending half a mil on TV for Richard Blumenthal

    SSP TV:

    • CA-Sen: Uh, is it just me, or does this ad seem like a parody of itself?
    • ND-AL: I like seeing this a lot. It’s not the greatest ad of the cycle, but here Earl Pomeroy proudly touts his support of healthcare reform (I think he was the Dem in the reddest district to vote in favor), while attacking Rick Berg for supporting the never-popular insurance companies. If you know they’re going to attack you anyway, you need to just go strong

    163 thoughts on “SSP Daily Digest: 10/5 (Morning Edition)”

    1. I can see that ad working in a LOT of states, including neighboring Nevada where that’s exactly the kind of attack ad that gets aired against Reid.

      But CA is not joining in the anti-Democratic sentiment to which that kind of ad can appeal.  That means they need something different for a CA-centric appeal.  I have no idea what that would be, though.

      Aside from that, the ad does seem to have poor production values.  Even the music and narration don’t come off as well-done.

    6. Got a kick out of this letter to the editor in today’s Des Moines Register:

      I served on the Urbandale Parks and Recreation Commission during Brad Zaun’s time as mayor.

      He never once attended our meetings or communicated with us in any way. (The only time we had a joint meeting with the City Council, Zaun showed up late, completely unprepared, and confused about the purpose of the meeting.) He frequently put things on the council’s agenda pertaining to recreation without consulting us at all, with negative consequences.

      Under his “leadership” the council set up an ad-hoc citizens’ committee to determine where a potential Urbandale community center should be, despite the fact that the council had decided that issue six months earlier.

      The committee basically duplicated the function of the parks commission, except that it wasted $25,000 of taxpayer money. (The idiotic community center concept they eventually put forward was ultimately crushed by the voters.)

      – Greg Nepstad, Panora

    10. Doug Hoffman announced this morning he’s dropping out.  No link, I saw only a couple tweets on it from political reporters.  Hoffman’s name still on ballot (on Conservative line), but he endorsed Doheny this morning.

    12. From the digest:

      the Lower Columbia Daily News asked GOPer Jaime Herrera for a list of campaign events she’s done since the August primary, but she refused to provide one, claiming it might be used to attack her

      AFAIK, most campaigns include a list of events on their web sites. So I checked Herrera’s site at http://www.jaimeherrera.com/th…

      And see a blank calendar for October. I clicked back, and saw one event she attended in September.

      I clicked back again, and saw a (fairly sparse) bunch of events ending with primary eve. Perhaps the other 11 events were affairs not open to the public.

      It’s almost as if Herrera’s an entrenched incumbent who isn’t taking Heck’s challenge seriously.

      If candidates and campaigns matter, Heck will at least make it close…

    17. http://www.nationaljournal.com…

      Updated every Tuesday

      h/t desmoinesdem

      I’m fearful for everyone in the top 60, think if the election were held today, most of the top 50 would lose (including 3 Rs — with some other Ds losing too), but am hopeful, now that Ds are getting engaged, losses will be mostly limited to those in the top 30s of the list.

      Of course, everyone can pick candidates higher up that they are “confident” will win, e.g. I’m hopeful that #7 (Chet Edwards), #19 (Kagen), #20 (Dahlkemper), #21 (Childers), #28 (Heck) and many more in the #30 and above slots will pull things out, but it’s a reasonable list based on national trends.

    18. Here’s one you can hang your hat on: Buck and Bennet split white voters 46/46! It almost goes without saying, but if Bennet breaks even with white voters, he will win this race.  


    25. according to a new Morning Call/Muhlenberg College released Tuesday.

      Among likely Pennsylvania voters, Republican U.S. Senate candidate Pat Toomey leads by 7 percentage points, 45 percent to 38 percent, over Democrat Joe Sestak. GOP gubernatorial nominee Tom Corbett leads by 11 percentage points, 47 percent to 36 percent, over his Democratic opponent, Dan Onorato.

      http://blogs.mcall.com/penn_av…

      I get Philadelphia stations, and Sestak is being hit by a one-two puch of negative ads by Toomey and Rove’s bullshit “group.”  The latter thanks to teabagger leader Ginny Thomas’s husband.  Often one after the other.  I’m beginning to wonder whether Sestak can make up the ground while under this assault.  Corbett’s ads are just plain grating.

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